The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger: The Duke of Milan, The Roman Actor, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam

by Colin Gibson (Editor)

This volume provides a selection of four plays by Philip Massinger who, from 1625 to 1640, replaced John Fletcher as principal dramatist for the King's Men, the chief London theatre company for more than forty years. The selection consists of two of Massinger's finest comedies, A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City Madam, and his two best known tragedies, The Duke of Milan and The Roman Actor. These plays have interested readers, scholars and critics for hundreds of years, and although the tragedies have seldom been performed since the seventeenth century, the comedies have a long stage tradition. A New Way to Pay Old Debts has been performed more often than any other play by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and together with The City Madam continues to delight modern audiences.

Genres: Drama

404 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 1978

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure I had even heard of Massinger before I started my course on Early Modern plays, but he is really good: I have yet to read a bad one.

A New Way to Pay Old Debts is immense fun: I don't think it'll win many prizes for sophistication (It has characters called Greedy, Overreach and Wellborn - like a seventeenth century Mr Men) but as a fun play about a bad moneylender being done for being bad, it's a total barrel of laughs.

The City Madam is immense fun, and really NASTY. At points it kept reminding me of different things: Patriots by Peter Morgan (Luke as Putin), Wall Street by Oliver Stone (Luke as Gordon Gekko), The Merchant of Venice (Luke as a non-Jewish Shylock), Tartuffe by Moliere (Luke as Tartuffe), etc....

If you enjoy any of those, you'll enjoy this. And unfortunately it means that human nastiness is pretty universal....

I would really like to see this performed live (there are some great parts, and some fab scenes), though the blacked-up fake "Indians" would need something done to them so they weren't offensive (what, I am not sure; possibly they need to be rewritten entirely).

I have been very impressed with Massinger, having not even heard of him eight months ago.