Philip Massinger Part 1

Philip Ma.s.singer.

by A. H. Cruickshank.

PREFACE

In confessing that the war made me write a book I do not stand alone.

Sensible as I am of its defects, I trust it will help to spread the knowledge of Ma.s.singers works, and will invite others to deal on similar lines with the other dramatists of the great age. The design widened as it went on, and was then contracted. In the end I thought it wiser to confine myself to digesting the knowledge which I had of Ma.s.singers text.

The Clarendon Press undertook to publish this book, but as, owing to war-work, they could fix no date, I asked them to release me. There would be no occasion to mention this fact were it not that it was owing to the original arrangement that I received much valuable help and advice from Mr. Percy Simpson. Many other scholars and friends have kindly aided me in various matters, among whom I should like to mention: Mr. J. C. Bailey, Mr. P. James Bayfield (photographer to Dulwich College), Dr. A. C.

Bradley, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. A. H. Bullen, Mr. A. K. Cook, Professor W. Macneile Dixon, Mr. H. H. E. Gaster, the Dean of Gloucester, Mr. E.

Gosse, Sir W. H. Hadow, Archdeacon Hobhouse, Sir Sidney Lee, Mr. C.

Leudesdorf, Dr. Falconer Madan, Mr. A. W. Pollard, Dr. P. G. Smyly, the Master of University College, Durham, Sir A. Ward, and Sir George F.

Warner. Last, but not least, I thank my wife for her skilful and ready help with the proofs.

A. H. Cruickshank.

PHILIP Ma.s.sINGER

It is interesting to revise the literary judgments of youth; it is pleasant to find them confirmed by a more mature judgment. This train of thought has led me to read Ma.s.singer once more; and as I read, the desire arose to treat his works, to the best of my ability, with the attention to detail which modern scholarship requires. A great amount of valuable work has been done in the last fifty years on the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages; but no one, perhaps with the exception of Boyle, has applied to Ma.s.singer the care which Shakspere, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, to name no others, have secured. There is no reason why any of our great dramatists should be treated with less respect than those of Greece and Rome, of France and Germany.

The first thing to be done was to facilitate references by numbering the lines of Ma.s.singers plays;(1) the next was to investigate once more the facts of his life, and to correlate them with the period in which he lived; the third was to read typical plays of the period, so as to arrive at a just estimate of our author.

His life will not detain us long. We know far less of him than we do of Shakspere. None of his sayings have been preserved to us; hardly any incidents of his career. His father was house-steward to two of the Earls of Pembroke, first to Henry Herbert, then to William Herbert,(2) Shaksperes friend. The elder Ma.s.singer was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and for several years a Member of Parliament. Philip Ma.s.singer, the dramatist, was born at Salisbury in 1584. In 1602 he went up to St.

Albans Hall, Oxford, where his father had been an undergraduate. We are told by A. Wood that he went at Lord Pembrokes expense, but that he did not work hard at the University, and took no degree.(3) In or after the year 1606 he seems to have gone to London, and to have speedily engaged in the work of writing plays.(4) The wide reading which his plays presuppose probably began at Oxford.

It was the custom in those days, as in the time of Plautus at Rome,(5) for playwrights to revise old plays; and still more was it usual for them to collaborate.(6) We find Ma.s.singer at work in this way with Field,(7) Daborne,(8) Dekker, Tourneur, and above all, with Fletcher. With the latter he worked from 1613 to 1623. In that year, for some unknown reason, he seceded from the service of the leading company of actors of the day, who went by the name of the Kings men, and wrote unaided three plays for the Queens men, _The Parliament of Love_, _The Bondman_, and _The Renegado_. After Fletchers death, in 1625, Ma.s.singer rejoined the Kings men, and wrote for them until his death in 1640.

It has been surmised from the vivid colouring of _The Virgin Martyr_(9) and the plot of _The Renegado_,(10) where a Jesuit plays a leading part and is portrayed in a pleasing light, that Ma.s.singer turned Roman Catholic. The evidence for this theory is quite inadequate. Indeed, we might as well argue from Gazets language that the author followed the Anglican _via media_.(11) Plots derived from French, Spanish, and Italian sources would naturally contain Roman Catholic machinery. We might as well infer that Shakspere was a Roman Catholic because Silvia goes to Friar Patricks cell,(12) or because Friar Laurence is prominent in _Romeo and Juliet_.(13)

We know that Ma.s.singer lived a life of comparative poverty; on one occasion we find him, with two other dramatic authors, asking for a loan of 5.(14)

The person who thus obliged the three writers was Philip Henslowe, a dyer, theatrical lessee, and speculator, who acted as a kind of broker between actors and authors, buying from the one and selling to the other; we still possess his diary, containing information as to the prices which he gave for plays.(15) The prologue of _The Guardian_ shows us that for two years before 1633 Ma.s.singer had been under a cloud, and had abstained from writing. Two of his plays had failed in 1631_The Emperor of the East_(16) and _Believe as You List_(17)so he appears to have put forth his full strength in _The Guardian_.

[Henslow doc.u.ment at Dulwich.]

The dedications of Ma.s.singers plays which have been preserved show that he was often dependent for support on the leaders of what he once or twice calls the n.o.bility.(18)

The connexion of the poet with the family of which his father was the loyal and trusted servant has been exaggerated by some;(19) in the dedication of _The Bondman_, written in 1623, to Philip, Earl of Montgomery,(20) the poet distinctly states that though the Earl had helped the play at its first performance by his liberal suffrages yet he was personally unknown to him.(21) Amongst others to whom we find dedications is George Harding, Baron Berkeley, to whom Webster inscribed _The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_. It is pleasant to read in the dedication of _The Picture_ to my honoured and selected friends of the n.o.ble Society of the Inner Temple that Ma.s.singer received frequent bounties from them.

The plays give us no clear evidence that Ma.s.singer ever travelled abroad,(22) though such a pa.s.sage as _The Great __ Duke of Florence_, II., 2, 5-21, rather suggests a visit to Italy. Nor have we any ground for supposing that he was, like Shakspere, an actor, unless indeed an obscure reference in the Dublin poem to the Earl of Pembroke be so interpreted.(23) In London he lived on the Bankside, Southwark. The story of his death is told us by our gossiping old friend Anthony Wood, in his _Athenae Oxonienses_.(24) Ma.s.singer went to bed one night well, and was found dead the next morning. He was buried at St. Saviours on March 18th, 1639/40.(25) The funeral was accompanied by comedians, a phrase which seems to show that his professional friends did him honour at the last; he is described in the monthly accounts of St. Saviours as a strangerthat is to say, a non-parishioner. His intimate friend Sir Aston c.o.kaine tells us that he shared the grave of his friend John Fletcher;(26) and in 1896 a window in the south aisle of the nave of Southwark Cathedral was unveiled in his honour by Sir Walter Besant.(27)

What was the atmosphere in which Ma.s.singer lived? The days of James I. and Charles I. were less heroic than those of Elizabeth. In foreign politics England intervened once or twice in an ineffective way, and a good deal of sympathy was shown, much of it in a practical fashion, for the cause of the Protestant King of Bohemia. Gardiner(28) has pointed out that Charles I. gave permission to the Marquis of Hamilton to carry over volunteers in aid of Gustavus Adolphus just as James I. had allowed Vere to carry over volunteers to the Palatinate. Hamilton sailed in July, 1631, and _The Maid of Honour_ was printed in 1632. The whole plot of this play recalls the relations of England to the Protestant cause on the Continent. Thus, William. Lord Craven, to whom Fords _Broken Heart_ is dedicated, and who was knighted at the age of seventeen, after his valiant adventures in the Netherlands under Henry, Prince of Orange, went to the a.s.sistance of Gustavus Adolphus in 1631, when only twenty-two years old.

Wars in the Low Countries are vaguely referred to in various pa.s.sages, as, _e.g._, in _The Fatal Dowry_:(29)

NOVALL JUN. Oh, fie upon him, how he wears his clothes!

As if he had come this Xmas. from S. Omers To see his friends, and returnd after Twelfth-tide.

The date of the play is uncertain, but it must have been written some considerable time before being printed in 1632.(30) In _The New Way to pay Old Debts_ Lord Lovell has purchasd a fair name in the wars.(31) In _The Fatal Dowry_, _The Picture_, and _The Unnatural Combat_, we have the familiar type of the brave soldier who is disregarded in time of peace, and has come down to poverty and old clothes.

In the wider world of Europe the Turk and the Algerine pirate are still grim realities enough to form an effective scenic background.(32) Indeed, it was not so very long since the Battle of Lepanto. We find constant references to galley-slaves,(33) to the slave market,(34) and to apostates to Islam.(35) In the opening scene of _The Picture_ the soldier husband parts from his wife on the frontier of Bohemia not distant from the Turkish camp above five leagues. One of the objections urged against the new custom of fighting duels is that thereby lives are lost which might have done service against the Turk.(36) The age of chivalry has its faint reflection in schemes to redeem Christian slaves chaind in the Turkish servitude by force of arms, and in the prowess of the Knights of Malta.(37) The wealth and power of Turkey are taken for granted. When Malefort senior vows vengeance on Montreville, he cries out:

The Turkish Empire offerd for his ransom Should not redeem his life.(38)

At home we find the vices of a prolonged peace lending opportunity for some easy satire. On the whole, we may say that we do not learn very much about our country from the poet which we could not find in the other playwrights of the day. Let us rapidly put together some of his references. There were two Englands at this time, drifting inevitably apart, only to clash in fratricidal war under Charles I. The drama was becoming less and less national, more and more an affair of aristocratic patronage. Ma.s.singer does not often refer to the Puritans;(39) there is nothing so amusing in his plays as the pa.s.sage in Fletchers _Fair Maid of the Inn_, where the Pedant solicits the advice of Forobosco the quack about erecting four new sects of religion at Amsterdam.(40) The fashionable love of astrology is satirized in _The City Madam_. The England of Ma.s.singers plays is an England which loves expense,(41) amus.e.m.e.nts, Greek wines,(42) masques,(43) new clothes,(44) and foreign fashions.(45) London is a great port, with trade to the Indies and aspirations after the North pa.s.sage. The jealousy of the City and the Court, the ostentations of the one and the refinement of the other, point the moral of _The City Madam_.(46) The high-spirited prentices of the City of London take the law into their own hands in days when there are no police,(47) and their vices are satirized after the manner of Ben Jonson in the same play. Horse-play, such as tossing in a blanket, is considered a great joke.(48) The balladmonger so often referred to in Shakspere is much in evidence,(49) though indeed it was an age in which everyone wrote poetry.(50) In rural England we find the possibility of an unscrupulous local tyrant, such as is depicted to us in Ma.s.singers masterpiece, Sir Giles Overreach, aided by his jackal, Mr. Justice Greedy.(51) That our poet had a keen eye for social evils, for the man who sells food at famine prices, the encloser of commons, the usurer, the worker of iron, the cheating tradesman, is clear from a pa.s.sage in _The Guardian_.(52) The beautiful description in the same play of the amus.e.m.e.nts of country life, the hunting and the hawking, with which Durazzo seeks to console his love-sick ward Caldoro,(53) probably takes one back to Ma.s.singers own boyhood in Wiltshire. As we should expect, there is a good deal of riding in the country scenes.(54) The characters of Sir John Frugal, the successful merchant, and Mr. Plenty, the country gentleman,(55) show us that the John Bull type of Englishman existed in those days.

The temptation to give a back-hand blow to ones own country in the course of a plot laid abroad is obvious and irresistible; where Shakspere had set the example others were sure to follow,(56) and Ma.s.singer does not spare the female s.e.x of England. To judge by the pa.s.sage in _The Renegado_,(57) the women of his day loved expense and luxury, and were very independent in their att.i.tude to their husbands.(58) The humiliation of Lady Frugal and her two daughters after their extravagant ambitions is the point of _The City Madam_. The contrast between a uxorious husband and an imperious wife is one of Ma.s.singers favourite effects.(59) Donusas speech in her own defence in _The Renegado_ might have been written by a suffragette of our own day.(60)

We do not get much direct evidence as to the characteristics of the playwrights audiences; Dr. Bradley has some good remarks on this subject.(61) Nor is it credible that an appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless loved what we should despise; but appears also to have admired what we admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach; the ma.s.s of the audience must have liked excitement, the open exhibition of violent and b.l.o.o.d.y deeds, and the intermixture of seriousness and mirth. Dr. Bradley points out elsewhere(62) that the Elizabethan actor probably spoke more rapidly than our modern actors. This would make soliloquies less tedious.

To turn to the politics of the age; the rift between the dynasty and the nation grew wider as the century advanced. Though Ma.s.singer died before the days of the Long Parliament, we can imagine that he would have been one of those who eventually fought under protest for the King. We find evidence in his plays for supposing that he belonged to the Conservative Opposition, like his patron Philip, the fourth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. He was a lover of liberty, and there are one or two indications that his plays offended the strict ideas of Charles I.s censorship.

Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, refused on January 11th, 1630/31, to license one of his plays(63) because it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian King of Portugal by Philip II., and there being a peace sworn twixt the Kings of England and Spain.(64) The same worthy records that King Charles I. himself read another of his plays,(65) while staying at Newmarket, and wrote against one pa.s.sage, This is too insolent, and to be changed. The pa.s.sage, which is put into the mouth of a King of Spain, runs as follows:

Monies! well raise supplies what way we please And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which Well mulct you, as we think fit. The Caesars In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws But what their swords did ratify; the wives And daughters of the senators bowing to Their will as deities.(66)

These lines clearly reflect on the autocratic methods which prevailed in England from 1629 to 1640.

There is much in Timoleons speeches in the senate(67) which seems to contain covert references to the England of the day, and notably in lines 203-213, where the unprepared state of the army and navy is referred to.

It has been thought with much probability that the Duke of Buckingham is satirized in the slight sketch of Gisco in _The Bondman_,(68) and in the more fully drawn character of Fulgentio in _The Maid of Honour_:(69)

ADORNI. Pray you, sir, what is he?

ASTUTIO. A gentleman, yet no lord. He hath some drops Of the kings blood running in his reins, derived Some ten degrees off. His revenue lies In a narrow compa.s.s, the kings ear; and yields him Every hour a fruitful harvest. Men may talk Of three crops in a year in the Fortunate Islands, Or profit made by wool; but, while there are suitors, His sheepshearing, nay, shaving to the quick Is in every quarter of the moon, and constant.

In the time of trussing a point, he can undo Or make a man; his play or recreation Is to raise this up, or pull down that, and though He never yet took orders, makes more bishops In Sicily than the Pope himself.

The grumbling of the professional soldier against the royal favourite inspires a pa.s.sage in _The Duke of Milan_.(70) A similar freedom of speech is found in _The Maid of Honour_; for instance, in the following pa.s.sages:

GASPARO. When you know what tis, You will think otherwise; no less will do it Than fifty thousand crowns.

CAMIOLA. A pretty sum, The price weighed with the purchase; fifty thousand!