Eastward Ho!

by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, Michael Neill (Editor)

Overview

This collaborative masterpiece of hilarious city comedy was performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars playhouse in 1605. The story is of an allegorical simplicity that lends itself to satire of civic mores and traditions as well as to parody of the sentimental,
idealising London comedy presented at the amphitheatres in the suburbs:
Goldsmith Touchstone, an upright London citizen, has one modest and one ambitious daughter, one righteous and one disreputable apprentice;
virtue is rewarded, ruthlessness comes to grief - and receives a drenching in the muddy Thames. The introduction to this edition discusses various methods of establishing authorship and highlights the irony of the collaborators' comic vision of contemporary London life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780713639834
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/25/1995
Series:	New Mermaids
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was an English dramatist and poet, whose reputation amongst playwrights of the period is only second only to Shakespeare's. Although Jonson found little success as an actor, his reputation as a dramatist was firmly established in 1598 with Every Man in his Humour. This sucess was followed by Every Man out of his Humour and the classically influenced satire Cynthia's Revels. Jonson wrote all of the major comedies upon which his reputation is now based during the period 1605 to 1614.

George Chapman (1560-1634) was an English poet and dramatist, also noted for his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (which inspired Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'). Chapman, who is thought to have served as a soldier in his youth, began to write plays for the Admiral's Men in the 1590s; his earlier works include the comedy An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597), which influenced Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598). Most of Chapman's surviving plays date from the first decade of the 17th century, the tragedy Bussy D'Ambois (1604) and its sequel The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610) being usually considered his best work. In 1605, in collaboration with Ben Jonson and John Marston, Chapman wrote Eastward Ho!, a play that King James I found so offensive to his fellow Scots that he had Chapman and Marston imprisoned for their part in it. Nonetheless, it has proved to be Chapman's most frequently revived work.

John Marston (c. 1575-1634) was an English playwright who wrote thirteen plays between 1599 and 1609, his two finest being the tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) and the comedy The Dutch Courtesan (1605). He is noted for his violent imagery and his preoccupation with mankind's failure to uphold Christian virtues. Other plays include the tragedies Antonio's Revenge and Antonio and Mellida (both 1599) and the comedy What You Will (1601). At the turn of the century Marston became involved in the so-called war of the theatres, a prolonged feud with his rival Ben Jonson. Jonson repeatedly satirized him in such plays as Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) and The Poetaster (1601), while Marston replied in Satiromastix (with Thomas Dekker; 1601). Their squabble ended in time for the two to collaborate with George Chapman on the ill-fated Eastward Ho! (1605), which resulted in all three authors being briefly imprisoned. Marston was later imprisoned for offending James I with his tragedy The Insatiate Countess (1610). After his release he took holy orders and wrote no more plays.

Michael Neillis Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Issues of Death(1997) and Putting History to the Question (2000). He has edited Anthony and Cleopatra (1994) and Othello (2006) for the Oxford Shakespeare, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (2006) for New Mermaids, Massinger's The Renegado (2010) for Arden Early Modern Drama, and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (2013) for Norton Critical editions. He is currently preparing Webster's The Duchess of Malfi for Norton, and co-editing The Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy (with David Schalkwyk).