Novall Jun. Oh, fie upon him, how he wears his clothes!
As if he had come this Xmas. from S. Omer's
To see his friends, and return'd 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 purchas'd 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 chain'd 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 [pg 010] granted. When Malefort senior vows vengeance on Montreville, he cries out:
The Turkish Empire offer'd 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. Massinger does not often refer to the Puritans;[39] there is nothing so amusing in his plays as the passage in Fletcher's 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 Massinger's plays is an England which loves expense,[41] amusements, Greek [pg 011] 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 passage.” 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 [pg 012] 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 Massinger's 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 [pg 013] clear from a passage in The Guardian.[52] The beautiful description in the same play of the amusements 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 Massinger's 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 one's 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 Massinger does not spare the female sex of England. To judge by the passage in The Renegado,[57] the women of his day loved expense and luxury, and were very independent in their attitude 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 Massinger's favourite effects.[59] Donusa's speech in her own [pg 014] 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 playwright's 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 mass of the audience must have liked excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody 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.