Disgusting John Marston: Sensationalism and the Limits of a Post-Modern Marston

Abstract

Georgia Brown’s article takes issue with the idea, argued by postmodern criticism, that Marston’s dramatic texts are primarily or exclusively loci of parody, playfulness and self-reflexivity. Instead, Brown suggests, we must search for the dynamic of Marston’s plays in the dialogues they establish—“between relativism and morality, form and content, waywardness and order, plurality and identity, hedonism and obligation, nature and culture, context and artefact.” The theoretical consequence of Brown’s position is a more rigorously historicising approach that locates the issue of disgust right at the centre of Marston’s dialogic engagement.