Philip Massinger (1583-1640):

Massinger was born near Wilton, the estate of the Earl of Pembroke, in whose service his father was employed. Massinger was educated at St. Alban’s Hall, Oxford but he had to leave it in 1606, the year of his father’s death. It is very likely that it was then that he entered the theatre-world of London, first as an actor and, after 1613, as a playwright as well. In his early career he collaborated with Nathan Field (earlier a boy-actor) on The Fatal Dowry (1616-19?), with Thomas Dekker on The Virgin Martyr (1620), and with John Fletcher between 1616 and 1625 on roughly 13 plays (some of them still listed in the Beaumont-Fletcher canon; the most famous among these is Sir John Van Olden Barnvelt, a tragedy; the play is also noted for a copy in which the prompter’s and the censor’s notes can still be found). With the death of Fletcher in 1625, Massinger became the chief dramatist of the King’s Men, a position he held until his death. He wrote, or had a hand in, as a collaborator or as a reviser, in roughly 60 plays.

Massinger, in the early phase of his career, shows an ardent interest in Catholicism; later he switches over to plays topically related to important political issues and personalities of his day. For example in a play called The Bondman (1623), dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, he presents a sharp satire of the Duke of Buckingham, a powerful enemy of the earl. In his Believe as You List (1637) he went a bit too far and the play was not licensed in its own day because it contained “dangerous matter” relating to political developments in Portugal. Massinger’s best tragedy is The Roman Actor (1627?), and The Duke of Milan (1621-22?), the latter reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Othello. Yet Massinger was great at comedy, too, for example The City Madam (1632) is a forerunner of the Restoration comedy of manners, using motifs from Shakespeare’s

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Measure for Measure but advocating middle-class values, yet his best-known play is A New Way To Pay Old Debts, which at the same time is one of the most popular comedies in the history of the English Theatre. Massinger often lacks the passion and great poetry of other dramas in his age but he had real talent for effective dramaturgy and plot-construction.

A New Way To Pay Old Debts (1625?) is based on Thomas Middleton’s A Trick To Catch the Old One (1608) and – at least on the surface – it is a typical comedy of intrigue. The central figure is Sir Giles Overreach, a misery and greedy knight, who tries to control the destinies of both his daughter and his nephew. He is thwarted in both of these attempts by the young people in league with a benevolent lady, Lady Allworth. The interest of the play – also explaining its popularity – is that Sir Giles is reduced to a raging madman in the end, which makes the role very attractive and provides some tragic features, against the backdrop of which comedy is more effective, yet is also undermined (see below). In his own times, it only added to the popularity of the play that the character of Sir Giles was based on Sir Giles Mompesson, a notorious and widely known scoundrel, who had to flee England in order to avoid a trial for extortion. There is a Quarto-edition of the play from 1633.

The genre-question is interesting because – in spite of the obvious moralising intent at the end of the play – the drama dares to raise doubts about its own status as a comedy; and it hazards it precisely on the level of ethics. There are two plot-lines, one featuring Wellborn, nephew to Sir Giles Overreach, the other Margaret, Overreach’s daughter, and her lover, Allworth. The plot involves partly money, because Wellborn was tricked out of his inheritance by Overreach and partly love because of course Overreach wishes to marry his daughter to Lord Lovell, Allworth’s master. Overreach is surrounded by corrupt servants, Marrall, a dishonest lawyer, and Greedy, an always-hungry Justice of Peace, responsible for the burlesque side of the play, always talking about fat capons, turkeys and other foods. The first problem is that the play’s universe is sharply divided into the world of the evil ones and the world of the virtuous, and the bad ones are very bad and the good ones are very good. Th second problem is that when it comes to trick Overreach out of his possessions and even sanity, the good ones resort to deception and intrigue as well; the first step is that Lady Allworth, Allworth’s step-mother gives up her sad widowhood and starts to entertain Wellborn and Marrall, which makes Overreach – who would like to marry Lady Allworth for her money himself – think that she is in love with Allworth. Thus Overreach gives Allworth a thousand pounds to pay back his debts and Allworth’s “new way to pay old debts” is that he gives even more to his creditors than they actually demand. Yet, on Lady Allworth’s part there is great amount of deception and pretence as well. Similarly, Lord Lovell, a relatively old man, quickly abandons the original idea of marrying Margaret when he learns that she is in love with his page, Allworth, yet he goes on wooing Margaret not to make Overreach suspicious and to trick a letter of consent out of him concerning the marriage of Margaret, a letter where the name is not filled yet and which is used by Allworth to marry Margaret and drive Overreach mad. It is true that Overreach is violent, aggressive and greedy, yet he is Margaret’s father still and Margaret is not too much moved when his father, foaming and biting the carpet is carried away to Bedlam (the lunatic asylum). Nobody is moved by Overreach’s great speech in madness beginning “Why, is not the whole world / Included in myself?” Great poetry is given to Overreach, which still indicates a kind of human dignity but – unlike in Shakespeare, for example – this is ignored by precisely the virtuous characters in the play and thus the play is running the risk of betraying the value of poetry itself. So Lady Allworth, Lord Lovell, Allworth and Wellborn all resort to deception, the latter even kicking and dismissing Marrall at the end of the play, though Marrall eventually helped Wellborn reveal the forged documents which tricked him out of his inheritance.

Our moral sense is disturbed and it seems that the “good” characters are not very much better than the evil ones, or we should say that we can only laugh at this play if we disregard such family-ties as, for example, the father-daughter relationship. There is little consolation in Lord Lovell and Lady Allworth falling in love, too with a prospect of marriage; there is a bitter tone to the whole play, in which greed and appetite – represented physically in the figure if Greed – seems to be much stronger than love or duty. This world is much closer to the world of Thomas Hobbes

already, where everyone would gladly kill and eat everybody else, had the “Commonwealth”, the institution and authority preventing this, not been established. Thus, Massinger’s play, in my reading, is anything but a carefree comedy where the evil ones are punished and the virtuous and nice people are rewarded.

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Chapter 10

Drama in the 17^th Century