Was John Marston the First ‘Playwright’?

Ben Jonson probably coined the word 'playwright' around the turn of the seventeenth century, and although the term is now commonly used to describe even great dramatists such as Shakespeare, it was formulated as an expression of unqualified contempt. The Oxford English Dictionary lists its first plural usage in print as occurring in a commendatory poem by 'Cygnus' to Sejanus (1605), but it is likely that Jonson himself originated this neologism sometime between 1599 and 1601. Jonson's 'playwright' was a variation on compound nouns such as 'shipwright' or 'cartwright'. He used it as a slur to stigmatize any dramatist to whom it was applied, and it retained this negative connotation well into the eighteenth century. It signified that one was not a true 'poet' but a mere craftsman.