“As it was Played in the Blackfriars”: Jonson, Marston, and the Business of Playmaking

Abstract

This essay places Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! at the center of a set of textual, theatrical, and financial negotiations that are revealed by a hitherto overlooked lawsuit in the Court of Chancery. It reveals for the first time that Jonson—like Marston—had a financial stake in the Blackfriars playhouse where Eastward Ho! was performed, and it argues that the play both epitomizes and scrutinizes a set of social and literary transactions surrounding the playhouse. In doing so, it reappraises three important contexts for the production of Eastward Ho! First, it revises our understanding of the Blackfriars enterprise and its investors. Second, it reassesses the careers of Jonson and Marston in the years 1604–1606—revisiting their collaboration with Chapman, their interpersonal relationships, and the revision of Jonson’s The Case is Altered and Every Man in his Humor—and offers a new picture of Jonson as a company man. Third, it offers fresh insights into city comedy’s engagements with London during a crucial period of its development. A coda turns to Jonson’s The Alchemist, suggesting that this play glances back at Jonson’s own contractual and emotional involvement with the Blackfriars venture and its entangled financial structures. [L.M.]