But what their swords did ratify, the wives
And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their wills as deities,” etc.
Sir Henry then adds, “This is a piece taken out of Philip Massinger’s play called ‘The King and the Subject,’ and entered here forever to be remembered by my son and those that cast their eyes upon it, in honor of King Charles, my master, who, reading the play over at Newmarket, set his mark upon the place with his own hand and in these words: ‘This is too insolent, and to be changed.’ Note that the poet makes it the speech of Don Pedro, King of Spain, and spoken to his subjects.” Coleridge rather hastily calls Massinger a democrat. But I find no evidence of it in his plays. He certainly was no advocate of the slavish doctrine of passive obedience, or of what Pope calls the right divine of kings to govern wrong, as Beaumont and Fletcher often were, but he could not have been a democrat without being an anachronism, and that no man can be.
The license of the stage at that time went much farther than this; nay, it was as great as it ever was at Athens. From a letter of the Privy Council to certain justices of the peace of the County of Middlesex in 1601, we learn that “certain players who use to recite their plays at the Curtain in Moorfields do represent upon the stage in their interludes the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality, that are yet alive, under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby.” And again it appears that in 1605 the Corporation of the City of London memorialized the Privy Council, informing them that “Kemp Armyn and other players at the Black Friars have again not forborne to bring upon their stage one or more of the Worshipful Company of Aldermen, to their great scandal and the lessening of their authority,” and praying that “order may be taken to remedy the abuse, either by putting down or removing the said Theatre.” Aristophanes brought Socrates and Euripides upon the stage,—but neither of these was an Alderman.
Massinger committed no offences of this kind, unless Sir Giles Overreach be meant for some special usurer whom he wished to make hateful, of which there is no evidence. He does indeed express his own opinions, his likes and dislikes, very freely. Nor were these such as he need be ashamed to avow. It may be inferred, on the strength of some of the sentiments put by him into the mouths of his characters, that he would have sympathized rather with Hampden and Pym than with Charles I. But nothing more than this can be conjectured as to his probable politics. He disliked cruel creditors, grinders of the poor, enclosers of commons, and forestallers, as they were called; for corners in wheat and other commodities were not unknown to our ancestors, nor did they think better of the men that made them than we. There is a curious passage in his play of “The Guardian” which shows that his way of thinking on some points was not unlike Mr. Ruskin’s. Severino, who has been outlawed, draws up a code of laws for the banditti of whom he has become captain, defining who might be properly plundered and who not. Among those belonging to the former class he places the
“Builders of iron-mills that grub up forests
With timber trees for shipping;”
and in the latter, scholars, soldiers, rack-rented farmers, needy market folks, sweaty laborers, carriers, and women. All that we can fairly say is that he was a man of large and humane sympathies.
But though Massinger did not, so far as we know, indulge in as great licenses of scenic satire as some of his contemporaries, there is in his “Roman Actor” so spirited a defence of the freedom of the stage and of its usefulness as a guardian and reformer of morals that I will quote it:—