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Celebrating the 400th anniversary of John Marston's debut as a professional playwright, this collection of critical essays on his work by leading scholars in the early modern field discovers, in the de-centred, hilarious, but unsettling work of this idiosyncratic Renaissance dramatist, an uncannily post-modern voice. Always at odds with his contemporaries, the censor and sometimes his own audience, Marston is shown to be a deeply conflicted figure but the qualities which estranged him from previous critical eras are precisely those that are now instantly accessible. This volume's essays, the themes of which coincide both in contemporary currents in literary theory and criticism and in the plays of John Marston, reveal at every turn the full extent of his ambiguity towards politics, gender and the very medium he wrote for and in.