“A Magazine of all perfection”: Mathematics in the Early Modern Satire Histrio-Mastix – Scholarly Analyses of Histrio-Mastix

Histrio-Mastix is believed by many scholars to have been Marston’s first play, written and performed in 1598–1599, when he was approximately 23 years old. His contemporaries would have known that he was seeking to specialize in harshly critical satires, but the drama has been more difficult for historians to analyse because it was not printed until 1610 and then was only published anonymously [Marston 1610; Farley-Hills 1988, pp. 44–77]. It was not identified as one of Marston’s works until the late 19th century, although some academics still argue that the play is the product of a collaboration or revision [Kernan 1958; Knutson 2001].

The title of the play—Histrio-Mastix—suggests some of the plot: The term ‘histrio’ is a (later deprecating) synonym for an actor or stage performer, and the suffix ‘mastix’ refers to a violently hostile reaction to an idea or a person [OED 2023a, 2023b]. The combined term was first used in the late 16th century, but it became most famous as the title of a 1000-page polemic against the supposed immorality of the theatre by the Puritan William Prynne (1600–1669), Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedy (1632) [Tait 2024, pp. 22–23]. Thus, from the outset, Marston’s drama seems to fit into an ongoing tradition of serious and satirical rallying against actors and plays, and by extension against (some) playwrights.

Indeed, literary scholars have often interpreted Histrio-Mastix as Marston’s opening salvo in the so-called War of the Theatres (1599–1601), in which he and Jonson feuded for artistic superiority through satirical characters onstage during a time when the censorship known as the Bishop’s Ban had effectively prohibited satire in other forms of writing. In these academic analyses, consideration of the role of Marston’s play in this controversy has focused on its character Chrisoganus, whose identity as a poet-playwright-philosopher seeking advancement through patronage and commercial drama has been seen as a stand-in for Jonson [Bednarz 2002]. Jonson, in turn, added two characters to his Every Man Out of His Humour to ridicule the stilted dialogue of Marston and his colleague, Thomas Dekker (ca 1572–1632) [Carter 2021, pp. 89–90].

Figure 3. Portrait of Ben Jonson from the title page of his play, Execration against Vulcan (1640).
Marston’s play, Histrio-Mastix, is supposed to have started the War of the Theatres
between the two playwrights. Internet Archive.

Other interpretations and perspectives on Histrio-Mastix and Chrisoganus are possible. For example, George Geckle [1972] argued that the main narrative of the play is about the deterioration of a society (such as England), presented in six phases. In our reading, which focuses on parts of the text where knowledge and truth are discussed, Chrisoganus transcends the combativeness of the War of the Theatres to emerge as a more general, yet still satirical, stereotype of a mathematical scholar who is consulted for his expertise in the mathematical sciences.

We can summarise our approach as two-fold: We study the representations of the mathematician and of mathematics as a field in the play. And we do so in order to analyse Marston’s implicit assumptions about his audience that permitted the satire to work in its contemporary culture. This approach to reading a satirical play as historians of mathematics seeks to ‘get behind the scenes’ to assess the images of mathematics presented to an audience and is analogous to recent efforts to ‘read’ illustrations on title pages as legitimisations of Early Modern sciences. During the 17th century, such frontispieces “frequently [became] rich in allegorical references and emblems” [Remmert 2011, chapter 1].  Thus, it makes sense to view attributes (visual and stereotypical) as exhibiting underlying intentions and to expect the ‘intended receiver’ to be familiar with what is being represented. Yet, whereas the context for pictures can be read hundreds of years after their production, reading a play in its written form obviously cannot fully reproduce the experience of a live stage production. Furthermore, contrary to the legitimizing uses of engravings that conveyed serious, literal messages even when the figures were metaphorical, historians of mathematics considering plays in genres such as Marston’s have to integrate a satirical twist into our analyses.