John, a dramatist and satiric poet of the Elizabethan age, is supposed to have been born about 1575. The facts of his biography are very few and very uncertain. Anthony Wood supposes, but for no satisfactory reasons, that he was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As early as 1601 he was of sufficient importance as a writer to be satirized, under the name of Demetrius, in Ben Jonson's Poetaster. This enmity between the two authors seems to have afterwards subsided, for in 1603 Marston dedicated to Jonson, with expressions of affection and esteem, The Malcontent, a play which he had altered from Webster. In the same year also he was assisted by Jonson and Chapman in the composition of Eastward Hoe. For some reflections against the Scots in this comedy the authors were thrown into prison by the king, and were only released after they had lain for some time in the horrifying expectation of having their ears cut off and their noses slit. Shortly after this the intimacy between Marston and Jonson appears to have been once more interrupted. The former, in his preface to his Sophonisba, published in 1606, hints at the plagiarisms from Roman authors that are found in the Catiline and Sejanus of the latter; while Jonson, during his sojourn in 1619 with Drummond of Hawthornden, refers to an enmity between him and Marston that had subsisted for a considerable time. The life of Marston can be traced as far down as 1633. With little of the imitative and inventive genius of the dramatist, Marston had much of the spirited vigour and pungent wit of the satirist. In the Scourge of Villainy, the best of his satires, he is lofty and intrepid in his censure of vice, but is often carried by his vehemence invecive to the very verge of coarseness and indecency. In addition to those already mentioned, his other works are—The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion, a satire, 16mo, London, 1598; Antonio and Mellida, a tragedy, 4to, 1602; Antonio's Revenge, a tragedy, 4to, 1602; The Dutch Countess, a comedy, 4to, 1605; Parasitaster, a comedy, 4to, 1606; What You Will, a comedy, 4to, 1607; The Insatiate Countess, a tragedy, 4to, 1613. Marston's miscellaneous poems were edited by Mr Bowle, 12mo, London, 1764.