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Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman appealed to a number of very different audiences, from King Charles I, to republicans resisting Charles II’s return to England, to spectators after the Restoration. This chapter argues that the play proved so versatile because it placed priority on the preservation of the state over any particular form of sovereignty. This political orientation derives in part from The Bondman’s debt to Senecan stoicism. Stoicism shapes the play’s approach to mercy as well. Rather than relying on a sovereign pardon, the play emphasizes a kind of rule based on equity as well as a variety of clemency derived from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Clementia. Clemency as presented by the play entails preservation of the body politic through enlargement of the sovereign’s compass of concern.

This chapter argues that the physical presence of stage props in Renaissance playhouses encouraged a different way of thinking about economic circulation than did mercantile treatises. Specifically, the chapter reads attempts to frame royal finance in mercantile treatises against the staging of court economics in Philip Massinger's The Emperor of the East. Massinger's play works through questions about royal finance similar to those of treatises by Thomas Milles, Gerard Malynes, Thomas Mun, and Edward Misselden. Rather than championing one particular model of royal finance, however, The Emperor of the East continually draws attention to activities that are not accounted for in a succession of models. In the first three acts, characters voice competing descriptions of the transactions that take place in the court. The limits of each of these models are revealed in the last two acts with the introduction of an apple that circulates among the play's main characters, with each one understanding it according to a different frame. The tension between the materiality of the prop apple in the playhouse and the narratives by which it is described onstage suggests the reciprocal relationship between discourse and systems of exchange -- between ‘economics’ and ‘economies.’

In contrast to the previous chapter, Chapter 4 examines Lucan’s use chiefly in English political drama, ranging from The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), an entertainment devised by lawyers for Elizabeth I, to The Tragedy of Nero (1624). It begins with a discussion of Ben Jonson’s complex use and appraisal of Lucan in his Roman tragedies and ends with the way he draws on Lucan The Masque of Queens (1609); Philip Massinger and John Fletcher’s The False One (ca. 1620) also receives extended discussion. The chapter argues that Lucan’s often stark moral and political oppositions were appropriated by dramatists concerned with governance, and especially with the pernicious effects of royal favouritism, court corruption, and the doctrines of legal absolutism and reason of state.

This concluding chapter asks what the ‘mercantile dramaturgy’ outlined in the book can tell us about the performativity of economic discourse itself, about the degree to which economic models actively shape the world they represent. For a twenty-first-century audience or readership, mercantile dramaturgy can be most beneficial in pointing towards a performative understanding of the reciprocal creation of ‘economics’ and ‘the economy’. The chapter argues that the mercantile dramaturgy of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II and Philip Massinger's The Picture returns an awareness of mediation to the idealised models of mercantile treatises. Both plays engage with the problems of knowing about and intervening in events that occur at great distances via ‘the factor’, who serves as a figure of mediating agency, whose work is effaced when mercantile treatises promise an unmediated view of economic systems. These plays present economic models as the products of work which are themselves able to perform work. They show us not only that, in the phrase of Gaston Bachelard popularised by Bruno Latour, les faits sont faits (facts are manufactured), but also that facts are factors -- mediators that exert their own agency.

This chapter investigates the repercussions of continual tension in two plays that directly address the issue of idolatry: Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy, and Philip Massinger's The Duke of Milan. Both plays are implicated importantly in the core concern of Protestant iconoclasm: the question of what ‘dead’ means in relation to materiality. It would seem that the ideological confusions of The Second Maiden's Tragedy foreclosed the possibility of doctrinal orthodoxy despite the play's ostensible condemnation of idolatry. The Duke of Milan renders with compelling immediacy the sensory temptations of anthropomorphic imaging, and isolates the female body as the site of violence, or more precisely, as the bridge between sexuality and the bloody waste of war. The Middleton and Massinger plays are useful in anatomizing the difficulties of staging the corpse and the slippages that inevitably proceed from any efforts to do so.

This chapter explores how, with growing royal demands for the expeditious provision of financial and military support, time increasingly became an index of power in Caroline England. It begins with how in 1625 and 1626 disputes over royal finances became increasingly subsumed into a structural conflict between king and the Commons over deliberative prerogatives. This political conflict is modeled in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, which uses disputes over the temporal dimensions of political intellection to detail the limits of both theatrical efficacy and royal authority in Caroline England. The result is a play that rejects the immediacy of tyrannical authority in favor of a conceptualization of both theatrical and political power whose emphasis on delay yields a dynamic that is fundamentally collaborative rather than imperial.

Since early modern debate about the legitimacy of theatre concerns the question of the author’s authority in relation to that of the licensing authorities, and their informers, the fear of misinterpretation generates a self-conscious metadrama which expresses the ambiguity of authority in dramatic structures that aim to manipulate audiences’ responses. But, moreover, this metadrama often also acknowledges theatre’s own potential for complicity in social control, and is often concerned with the interchangeability of authority figures, informers and author-actors. In Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, these tensions and interconnections are embodied in the metadramatic representations of the dramatic productions in the tyrannous court of Domitian Caesar which conflate the act of acting with the murderous nature of authority and finally reflect on the nascent and often theatrical court of Charles I itself.

Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The frequency with which Jewish, Turkish, and Moorish women convert to Christianity in English drama more generally responds to the convergence of theological and medical discourses that highlighted the role of male seed in creating a child’s identity, and reflects as well Reformation theology’s linkage of spiritual and sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, anxieties about what an infidel mother might pass on to her children, even when she is married to a Christian man, prompt Fletcher’s and Massinger’s plays to employ the discourse of martyrdom in order to verify the women’s acquisitions of true Christian faith.

Reading Jonson with the Fabliau, Boccaccio and Chaucer, this chapter, with the help of Lacan’s theory, rereads Volpone Act 3 scene 7, explaining why Volpone ‘delays’ his ‘rape’ of Celia. While Volpone is commonly known for his love of theatrical performance and transformation, the chapter suggests that this cannot be thought without the concept of his being ‘castrated’. Although ‘castration’ is usually regarded as a censoring force, Volpone is empowered and thrives on it. Moreover, this chapter compares the scene in Volpone with another similar one in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, discussing how the subject of castration is used in early modern comedy and tragicomedy.

This chapter considers religious difference as it is enacted in the later Jacobean play Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Here, Dutch Calvinist powers put to death an Arminian for largely political reasons that are nonetheless framed by accusations of religious heresy. The tragedy of religious violence comes back to the fore as a conclusion to this book as a means to demonstrate the vicissitudes of toleration and intoleration over the course of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean years. But Barnavelt has enough cracks on its façade of anti-Arminianism that the play also helpfully demonstrates the refusal of so much drama of this period to adhere to clear binaries when it comes to matters of religious difference.

This chapter attempts to define the Conway Papers archive, which is damaged, depleted and dispersed. The Conway Papers can be identified by a distinctive stamp which was applied by John Wilson Croker when he sorted through the collection in the nineteenth century, but it is not a clear-cut method of identification. The Conway Papers are dispersed through several collections, with many surviving manuscripts physically damaged; establishing their provenance is frequently problematic, especially since several people seem to have taken items for their own use. This chapter examines evidence held at the British Library, the National Archives, and in other repositories, and identifies for the first time a number of texts that appear to have been separated from the main body of the collection.