Under date 28th September 1599 Henslowe records in his _Diary_ (p. 156, ed. Collier) that he lent "unto Mr. Maxton, the new poete (Mr. Mastone), the sum of forty shillings" in earnest of an unnamed play. The name "Mastone" is interlined in a different hand as a correction for "Maxton;" but there can be no doubt that the "new poete," whose name the illiterate manager misspelled, was John Marston. There is no other mention of him in the _Diary_. In 1602 were published Marston's _First Part of Antonio and Mellida_ and _Antonio's Revenge_, which had been entered in the Stationers' Registers on 24th October 1601, and had been ridiculed in that year by Ben Jonson in _The Poetaster_. Considered as a work of art the two parts of _Antonio and Mellida_ cannot be rated highly. The plot is clumsy and grotesque, and the characters, from the prodigious nature of their sins and sorrows, fail to excite in us any real interest. Marston was possessed of high tragic power, but he has not done himself justice. The magnificent prologue to _Antonio's Revenge_ prepares us to expect an impressive tale of tragic woe, but the promise is not worthily redeemed. He could conceive a fine situation, and he had at his command abundance of striking imagery. But we are never sure of him: from tragic solemnity he passes to noisy rhodomontade; at one moment he gives us a passage Æschylean in its subtle picturesqueness, at another he feebly reproduces the flaccid verbosity of Seneca's tragedies. Lamb quoted in his _Specimens_ the finest scene of _Antonio and Mellida_,--the scene where the old Andrugio on the Venice marsh, overthrown by the chance of war and banished from his kingdom, gives tongue to the conflicting passions that shake his breast. That scene deserves the eloquent praise that it received from the hands of Lamb; and if Marston had been able to keep the rest of the play at that level the _First Part of Antonio and Mellida_ would rank with the masterpieces of Webster. But what is to be said of a writer who, in describing a shipwreck, gives us such lines as the following?-- "Lo! the sea grew mad, His bowels rumbling with wind-passion; Straight swarthy darkness popp'd out Phoebus' eye, And blurr'd the jocund face of bright-cheek'd day; Whilst crudled fogs mask'd even darkness' brow: Heaven bad 's good night, and the rocks groan'd At the intestine uproar of the main. Now gusty flaws strook up the very heels Of our mainmast, whilst the keen lightning shot Through the black bowels of the quaking air; Straight chops a wave, and in his sliftred paunch Down falls our ship, and there he breaks his neck; Which in an instant up was belkt again."