The Adverse Body: John Marston

Abstract

My favourite line in Marston is from The Dutch Courtesan: ‘Every man’s turd smells well in’s own nose’ (3.3.45). Marston didn’t invent this image; he found it in Florio’s translation of Montaigne, a book he read with keen interest soon after its publication in 1603, where it appears as a bathetically unheroic couplet: ‘Ev’ry mans ordure well, To his owne sense doth smell’.¹ Florio of course found it in the text he was translating, not in Montaigne’s racy French, but in a Latin epigram, ‘Stercus cuisque suum bene olet’,² which Montaigne was quoting inaccurately by memory from the Adages of Erasmus.³ Marston’s most striking images will often turn out to have intertextual pedigrees that say more for his bookishness than his originality. But in this instance as elsewhere, if he didn’t invent something new, he certainly gave it an idiomatic English crudeness that nobody else did. Vulgarity, in fact, was the gift for which he became notorious and for which he was lampooned by the students of St John’s College, Cambridge, in The Return from Parnassus, Part 2: ‘What, Monsier Kinsayder, lifting up your legge and pissing against the world? Put up man, put up for shame’ (1.2.267-8). I wish I could claim that Marston’s vulgarity was a sign of uninhibited personal warmth or communal glee, but no such happy interpretation could survive much absorption in his writing.⁴