Philip Massinger

A New Way to Pay Old Debts. a Comedy. As It is Now Acting at the Theatre-royal, in Drury-lane. by Philip Massinger, Gent.

Publisher Marketing: The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The eighteenth-century fascination with Greek and Roman antiquity followed the systematic excavation of the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum in southern Italy; and after 1750 a neoclassical style dominated all artistic fields. The titles here trace developments in mostly English-language works on painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, and other disciplines. Instructional works on musical instruments, catalogs of art objects, comic operas, and more are also included. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++Bodleian Library (Oxford)T181926Dublin: printed by S. Powell, for G. and A. Ewing, and G. Faulkner, 1748. 79, [5]p.; 12 Contributor Bio:  Massinger, Philip Philip Massinger was born in Salisbury in 1583, the son of a Wiltshire family (the surname is often spelled Messenger). His father was employed in the household of Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, at Wilton, his office being that of house-steward and agent to the Earl. Massinger was educated probably first at Salisbury grammar school, and afterwards at Oxford, which he left without a degree for reasons unknown. By 1613 he was writing plays for the theatre-manager Henslowe, to whom he applied for money when imprisoned with two fellow-dramatists Daborne and Field for debt. It is estimated that in some thirty years Massinger either wrote or had a hand in some 53 plays. His earliest collaborations and original plays were written for the King's Men, the company of which Shakespeare had been a member and a writer, playing at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. John Fletcher had succeeded Shakespeare as the King's Men's principal dramatist, and it was Fletcher with whom Massinger chiefly collaborated, Fletcher from whom he learnt much of his dramatic art, and Fletcher whom he succeeded in 1626 (after a short period of writing for the Queen's Men, playing at the Cockpit, or, as it was called when rebuilt after a fire, the Phoenix). He died in 1640 and was buried in Fletcher's grave in Southwark Cathedral. Massinger's works include the romances "The Duke of Milan" (1620), "The Great Duke of Florence "(1627), and "The Roman Actor" (1626), the comedies "The City Madam "(1632) and "The Guardian" (1633), and the tragicomedies "The Bondman" (1623) and "The Renegado" (1624). He also collaborated on 11 plays with John Fletcher, and may possibly have had a hand in Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Henry VIII" and" The Two Noble Kinsmen".