Dissertation: R. A. Small, The Authorship and Date of the Insatiate Countess in Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, v (Child Memorial Volume), 277. It is generally supposed that Marston began the play and that Barksted (q.v.) finished it. Two lines (V. ii. 244-5) appear verbatim in Barksted's Mirrha (1607). Small traces several other clear parallels with both Mirrha and Hiren, as well as stylistic qualities pointing to Barksted rather than to Marston, and concludes that the play is Barksted's on a plot drafted by Marston. It may be conjectured that Marston left the fragment when he got into trouble for the second time in 1608, and that the revision was more probably for the Queen's Revels at Whitefriars in 1609-11 than for the conjoint Queen's Revels and Lady Elizabeth's in 1613. Hardly any of the suggestions on the play in Fleay, ii. 80, bear analysis.
Lost Plays On The King of Scots, vide supra. Rogers and Ley's list of 1656 (Greg, Masques, lxxii) ascribes to Marston a Guise, which other publishers' lists transfer to Webster (q.v.). Collier, Memoirs of Alleyn, 154, assigns to Marston a Columbus, on the basis of a forgery.
Doubtful Plays Marston doubtless had a hand in revising the anonymous Histriomastix and in Jack Drum's Entertainment, and attempts have been made to find him in An Alarum for London, Charlemagne, London Prodigal, Puritan (cf. ch. xxiv), and as a collaborator in Dekker's Satiromastix.
MASKS Ashby Entertainment. Aug. 1607
[MSS.] (a) Bridgewater House, with title, 'The honorable Lorde & Lady of Huntingdons Entertainment of their right Noble Mother Alice: Countesse Dowager of Darby the first night of her honors arrivall att the house of Ashby'. [Verses to Lady Derby signed 'John Marston'; includes a mask of Cynthia and Ariadne.]
(b) B.M. Sloane 848, f. 9. [Speech of Enchantress only, with date Aug. 1607.]
Extracts in H. J. Todd, Works of Milton, v. 149 (1801), and Nichols, James, ii. 145 (1828).
On arrival, in the park, at an 'antique gate' with complimentary inscriptions, were speeches by Merimna an enchantress, and Saturn; at the top of the stairs to the great chamber another speech by Merimna and a gift of a waistcoat.
Later in the great chamber was a mask by four knights and four gentlemen, in carnation and white, and vizards like stars, representing sons of Mercury, with pages in blue, and Cynthia and Ariadne as presenters. A traverse 'slided away', and disclosed the presenters on clouds. Later a second traverse 'sank down', and the maskers appeared throned at the top of a wood. They danced 'a new measure',
