“Of things as yet unborne”: The Poetics of Fantasy in John Marston's What You Will

Abstract

The Romantic period has been identified as the paradigmatic moment of transformation in western culture when the mimetic and didactic theories of literature typically favored by classical and Renaissance theoreticians were decisively challenged for preeminence by emotive and expressive models of creativity. But as M.H. Abrams observes in The Mirror and the Lamp, this intellectual revolution, through which psychology displaced rhetoric as the predominant mode of critical evaluation was not unprecedented. This essay examines an early modern example of this phenomenon in John Marston's What You Will, a play, probably written in 1601 for the Children of Paul's, which represents a kind of Renaissance romanticism insofar as it displaces what Marston calls the “rules of Art” with an extra-rational source of human creativity, the psychological faculty of “fantasy” or “imagination.” Here, Marston proposes an explicitly physiological framework for understanding the psychology of creativity that rejects the principal tenets of conventional humanist theory advocated by Ben Jonson in Cynthia's Revels. In What You Will, at the height of the Poets' War, in a radical shift of perspective, Marston unexpectedly extols the pleasure of imagination's spontaneous generative power. This is, in a parallel previously unnoticed by scholars, the same power of “Phantasie” that he invokes in supplementing the “metaphysical” wit of William Shakespeare's mysterious elegy “The Phoenix and Turtle” in the contemporaneous Diverse Poetical Essays of Love's Martyr.