Everything about Shackerley Marmion totally explained
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'd pass his debts on to his son.
After
Lord Williams's 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 didn't 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. 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's 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.
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