Philip Massinger
His plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.
[1] William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, who would come to oversee the London Stage and the royal company as King James's Lord Chamberlain, succeeded to the title in 1601.
On leaving the university he went to London to make his living as a dramatist, but his name cannot be definitely affixed to any play until fifteen years later, when The Virgin Martyr (registered with the Stationers Company, 7 December 1621) appeared as the work of Massinger and Thomas Dekker.
Sir Aston Cockayne, Massinger's constant friend and patron, refers in explicit terms to this collaboration in a sonnet addressed to Humphrey Moseley on the publication of his folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658), and in an epitaph on the two poets he says: "Plays they did write together, were great friends, And now one grave includes them in their ends.
Between 1623 and 1626 Massinger produced unaided for the Lady Elizabeth's Men, then playing at the Cockpit Theatre, three pieces, The Parliament of Love, The Bondman and The Renegado.
"[1] The prologue to The Guardian (licensed 1633) refers to two unsuccessful plays and two years of silence, when the author feared he had lost the popular favour.
In 1631, Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, refused to license an unnamed play by Massinger because of "dangerous matter as the deposing of Sebastian, King of Portugal", calculated presumably to endanger good relations between England and Spain.
In the prologue, Massinger ironically apologises for his ignorance of history, and professes that his accuracy is at fault if his picture comes near "a late and sad example."
In another play by Massinger, not extant, Charles I is reported to have himself struck out a passage put into the mouth of Don Pedro, king of Spain, as "too insolent."
The poet seems to have adhered closely to the politics of his patron, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, who had leanings to democracy and was a personal enemy of the Duke of Buckingham.
Next to these is a plaque commemorating Edmund Shakespeare (William's younger brother) who is buried in the cathedral, although the exact location of his grave is unknown.
The Virgin Martyr, in which Dekker probably had a large share, is really a miracle play, dealing with the martyrdom of Dorothea in the time of Diocletian, and the supernatural element is freely used.
As noted above, Massinger placed moral and religious concerns over political considerations, in ways that offended the interests of king and state in his generation.
While not a "democrat" in any modern sense (no one in his society was), Massinger's political sympathies, insofar as we can determine them from his works, might have placed him in a predicament similar to that of the head of the house he revered, the Earl of Pembroke—who found that he could not support King Charles in the English Civil War, and became one of the few noblemen to back the Parliamentary side.
Sir Giles Overreach, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, is a sort of commercial Richard III, a compound of the lion and the fox, and the part provides many opportunities for a great actor.
