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Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger
The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.
Contents: Introduction; 'What do wee acte to day?': plays within the play: The Roman Actor; 'For your sport / You shall see a masterpiece': masques-within in The Picture, The Guardian and The City Madam; 'Speculations / On cheating pictures': visual art as dramatic inset: The Picture; Conclusion: 'Make your howse the stage on which weel act / Our comick sceane': trials and paradramatic scenes; Bibliography; Index.
Joanne Rochester, Assistant Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
eBook
The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
When Cleopatra expresses a desire to die 'after the high Roman fashion', acting in accordance with 'what's brave, what's noble', Shakespeare is suggesting that there are certain values that are characteristically Roman. The use of the terms 'Rome' and 'Roman' in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra or Jonson's Sejanus often carry the implication that most people fail to live up to this ideal of conduct, that very few Romans are worthy of the name. In this book Chernaik demonstrates how, in these plays, Roman values are held up to critical scrutiny. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger and Chapman often present a much darker image of Rome, as exemplifying barbarism rather than civility. Through a comparative analysis of the Roman plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and including detailed discussion of the classical historians Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch, this study examines the uses of Roman history - 'the myth of Rome' - in Shakespeare's age.
eBook
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This article demonstrates how dramatic censorship in London's public theatres necessitated a kind of collaborative playwriting with extra-authorial labourers. In the playbook manuscript of Sir John van Olden Barnauelt , the Master of the Revels, Sir George Buc, and the playhouse scribe, Ralph Crane, engaged in a collaborative process that resulted in the most censored extant dramatic document of the early modern English theatres. The censorship is revealing of how political drama was interpreted by its first readers – it was Buc's exegetical interpretation of Barnauelt as anti-monarchical that led to his collaborative revisions and the play's restructuring. This style of censorship also has wider implications. If almost every play was read and revised by the Master of the Revels and perhaps edited by a scribe, then most early modern drama was collaboratively written.
Journal Article
Massinger’s Strange Pirates
This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat , a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots.
Journal Article
\Remembrance of things past\: Classical and Renaissance echoes in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor
This essay discusses Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) as an example of the profoundly composite nature of early modern dramatic texts. Massinger placed borrowings and echoes from several classical and early modern texts in a new context, arguably counting on audiences’ pleasure of recognition. Focusing on sources which have not received enough critical attention, this essay investigates the influence of classical authors like Tacitus and Statius, and the impact of other Massingerian plays to shed light on the way the playwright appropriated and refashioned some sources to suit his tragedy’s political agenda.
Journal Article
'The Tempest' Transformed: John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's 'The Sea Voyage'
This article examines John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's 1622 comedy, The Sea Voyage, as an offshoot of Shakespeare's Tempest. It traces Fletcher and Massinger's reimagination of Shakespeare's plot and characters in ways that reflect the differences between England's aspirations for the Virginia Colony in 1610 and the realities on the ground in 1621-2. Key transformations include the Fletcher-Massinger emphasis on the role of women in plantation economies as well as the hardships endured in the early days of the colony.
Journal Article
Literature and political intellection in early Stuart England
Drawing upon myriad literary and political texts, this book charts how some of the Stuart period’s major challenges to governance—the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one’s civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament—evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, the book investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the ways in which early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, the book examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with close readings of religious and political affairs that return our attention to how early Stuart writers understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how—or even if—one can freely think.
eBook
The Self and the Other in Philip Massinger’s “The Renegado, the Gentleman of Venice”: A Structural View
Renaissance England (1500-1660) is the most flourishing era of English history which testified the emergence of classical humanistic arts. Of course, drama is a literary genre that prospered, then, to entertain the interests of the Royal ruling families, especially Queen Elizabeth 1 (1558-1603) and her successor King James 1 (1603-25), as theatres were built in London along with dramatic performances held in the courts like masquerades. This study aims at showing the distortion of Islam in Philip Massinger’s “The Renegado or The Gentleman of Venice”, via tackling the theme of “the self and the other” and analyzing the structure of the play. Why not, and English Renaissance citizens love to watch the non-Christians, the misbelievers, humiliated and undermined. Massinger, among other Elizabethan dramatists like William Shakespeare, uses the art of tragicomedy to show the Western hatred, which is “the self”, of the Oriental Islam that is in turn “the other”.
Journal Article
Slippery Pirates: Generic Conventions and Discursive Instability in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Pirate Plays
The term piracy marks a slippery category in early modern England: as a legal denomination, it describes the feats of armed robbery at sea for which pirates were prosecuted but their state-sanctioned counterparts, privateers, were not; in a seaman’s professional life, being a pirate was often a phase rather than a stable marker of self-identification. Like their real-life models, literary pirates are contradictory creatures—they shed their pirate identity as quickly as they have adopted it, are used for veiled socio-political commentary, or trimmed to size in order to fit generic constraints. The slipperiness of the pirate has made him (and sometimes her) an attractive figure for early modern playwrights. I argue that John Fletcher and Philip Massinger appropriate the discursive instability of piratical individuals for their pirate plays. Rather than looking at the ideological and political implications of piracy, I analyze the pirate figures in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Double Marriage (1621) and The Sea Voyage (1622) as well as in Massinger’s The Renegado (1623–1624) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–1625) as literary creations. Alternating between the heroic and the villainous, their pirates are convenient plot devices that are attuned to the evolving generic conventions of the early Stuart stage in general and early Stuart tragicomedy in particular.
Journal Article