Shackerley Marmion

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Shackerley Marmion (January 1603 – 1639) — also Shakerley, Shakerly, Schackerley, Marmyon, Marmyun, or Mermion — was an early 17th-century dramatist, often classed among the Sons of Ben, the followers of Ben Jonson who continued his style of comedy. He was also a friend and perhaps a protege of Thomas Heywood.

The Marmion family had been historically prominent in the northern counties of Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire for generations; Marmion, the poem by Sir Walter Scott, concerns an ancestor of the same family. The playwright's father, Shackerley Marmion, held the manor at Aynho in Northamptonshire but was habitually in debt; in time he would pass his debts on to his son.

After the Free School at Thame in Oxfordshire, Marmion graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, with an M.A. in July 1624. (During his years at Oxford, his father Shackerley Marmion was forced to sell his estate an Aynho to pay his debts.) Details of his life after university are unclear, though there are intimations of legal troubles, disorderly affairs, dodging creditors. He fought in the Low Countries during this period, apparently under Sir Sigismund Alexander according to Anthony a Wood, and in 1629 was indicted for assaulting one Edward Moore with his sword and wounding the man's head. He was arrested and released on bail, but did not surrender at the next session; further records of the incident have not been found.

Marmion's first known play was Holland's Leaguer, produced in 1631 at the Salisbury Court theatre and acted six days in succession, "one of the longest known [runs] in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Caroline theatre," G.E. Bentley says, though he suspects that may have been due more to the Prince Charles's Men's meagre repertory than to the play's unusual popularity.^[1] Marmion's second play, A Fine Companion, was staged in 1632 or 1633 and published in the latter year, after being performed by the Prince Charles's Men at Salisbury Court. The Antiquary (c. 1634-36), his third and last play, was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit, and published in 1641. All comedies, his plays show the influence of Ben Jonson, and Marmion is the author of an elegy on Jonson published in 1638 that was titled "A Funeral Sacrifice, to the Sacred Memory of his Thrice-Honored Father, Ben Jonson." In his plays, Marmion adapted Jonsonian comedy to his own preoccupation with Platonic love. And while he is often classified by critics as a limited talent and a figure of at best secondary importance, his knack with satire has been frequently praised.

Besides comedies, Marmion also wrote a verse epic, Cupid and Psyche (1637), a 2000-line translation and expansion of Apuleius's The Golden Ass into heroic couplets, as well as various minor poems. Commendatory verses that he wrote for others or that others wrote for him associate Marmion with Thomas Nabbes, Richard Brome, Thomas Heywood, and the actor Joseph Taylor.

In 1638 Marmion joined Sir John Suckling's privately-organized military incursion against the Scottish Covenanters; but he fell out along the route due to illness and returned in London, where he died the following year.

[edit] References

James Maidment and William Hugh Logan, eds., The Dramatic Works of Shakerley Marmion, with Prefatory Memoir, Introductions, and Notes, Edinburgh, William Paterson, 1875.

G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 4 (1956).

This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.