The Insatiate Countess

The Insatiate Countess is an early Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy first published in 1613. The play is a problematic element in John Marston's dramatic canon.

The Insatiate Countess was first printed in 1613, in a quarto issued by the bookseller Thomas Archer. The title page attributes the play's authorship to Marston. A second quarto appeared, in 1613 or 1614, without Marston's name, perhaps to avoid legal difficulties. (Marston left dramatic authorship after 1608, and apparently tried to minimise public acknowledgement of his earlier playwriting phase; his name was removed even from the 1633 collected edition of his plays.) A third quarto was published by bookseller Hugh Perrie in 1631; one surviving copy of this third quarto assigned authorship not to Marston but to actor and poet William Barkstead. One copy of the 1613 first quarto has a cancelled title page that links Lewis Machin's name with Barkstead's.

The title page of the 1613 quarto states that the drama was performed at the Whitefriars Theatre — which indicates the Children of the Queen's Revels as the company that staged it. The date of first production is uncertain, and is generally assigned to the period c. 1610.

A Restoration adaptation of The Insatiate Countess, titled God's Revenge Against the Abominable Sin of Adultery, was staged in 1679.

Modern scholarship generally regards the play as a composite work. The play's text shows a range of commonalities with Barkstead's two non-dramatic narrative poems, Myrrha (published 1607) and Hiren (1611). Critics have not agreed on the nature of Marston's connection. Some have argued that Marston started the play, but left it unfinished when he encountered his second bout of legal troubles in 1607 and 1608, and that Barkstead and Machin later completed the script. Others have suggested that Marston's contribution is concentrated in the comic subplot.

Little is known of Barkstead, and even less of Machin. Barkstead (or Barksted, Barksteed, Backstead, etc.) was an actor with several companies, including the Lady Elizabeth's Men and Prince Charles's Men, in the 1607–16 period, as well as a poet. Machin collaborated with Gervase Markham on The Dumb Knight (1608), and probably was the "L. M." who contributed eclogues to Barkstead's Myrrha.

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