A New Way to Pay Old Debts

by Philip Massinger, T.W. Cruik

Play script, including biographical notes, textual details, and information about the staging of the play.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Classics, 17th Century, Theatre, British Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1625

About the author

Philip Massinger (born 1583) was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A New Way to Pay Old Debts was a disappointment to me. Traditional criticism has dubbed it Massinger's best play. In fact, it is one of only six non-Shakespearean dramas included in the "Harvard Classics," AKA "Dr. Eliot's Five-foot Shelf" (you will find it in Vol. 47, Part 5). It seems to me I read it forty odd years ago, and liked it then more then than I like it now, but perhaps it is only my vivid memory of George Clint's painting--the one which shows Edmund Keane raging during the mad scene--that makes me think I actually read the play.

This is of course is the real reason why "Debts" is remembered: Kean in 1816, chewing up the scenery as mad Sir Giles, his intensity making actress Mary Glover faint and scaring Lord Byron half to death. (John Philip Kemble is the actor-manager who successfully returned Sir Giles Overreach to the stage, but the memory of his performance was soon reduced to ashes, blasted by the lightning of Keane.) The villain Overreach eventually became a fixture of the 19th century stage in both England and America--America's great actor Edwin Booth (presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth's brother) also excelled in the part--and A New Way to Pay Old Debts began to be considered something very close to a classic.

Unfortunately, without Kean or Booth, the lightning does not strike. The mad scene is good but not great, since it offers no real insight into madness, but relies on rhetoric and extreme language instead. More important, the four acts that lead to Giles' breakdown leave much to be desired and little to be remembered. Most of the characters except for Overreach are insignificant and disagreeable creatures: the well-born are wastrels who feel entitled, and their servants are so one-dimensional that their names are designed to reveal their entire characters (Order, Amble, Watchall, Willdo, etc.).

Still, Sir Giles himself lingers in the memory. He is a middle-class money-man from "the City" who has acquired a vast fortune by exploiting the weaknesses of the landed gentry, and his consuming ambition is to become one of them by marrying his daughter into a "good family." He is an atheist, believing in nothing or nobody but the power which wealth can bring; in fact, he makes it clear that he is willing to sacrifice his daughter's honor to achieve such power, and--in a particularly repellent scene--he solicits her cooperation in the project. In addition, his atheism may very well be the reason why Overreach becomes unhinged: once his schemes collapse, he has no inner resources, no overarching values, to rely on for comfort or strength.

It's not a bad play, really (although I think "The Roman Actor" and "The Maid of Honor" are better). If you like old drama, give it a try. But don't make the mistake I did, and expect to see revived the thunderbolts of Keane.

[BJ Lillis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed watching this ca. 1625 play’s intricate plot unfold, but although it is easy to follow and superficially satisfying, the whole thing has shockingly little depth of feeling or character. Compared to the richness, the strange deep humanity, the dazzling poetry of not just Shakespeare, but so many English Renaissance playwrights, it’s a rather thin brew—which means that there’s not much here to complicate or enrich the play’s slavish reinforcement of 17th-century social and gender norms.

[Alex T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit sanctimonious at the end but has some very fun character-goes-absolutely-berserk-with-rage moments and also one of the sickest titles of any early modern play

[Yorgos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's Cruickshank in "Philip Massinger", 1920:

What has Massinger added to Middleton? He has made the plot more probably, refining the characters, and raising the whole thing from prose to poetry. We laugh less [...]

Clearly this is meant as praise but it's a pretty good summary of everything I didn't like about this one. Let's take it point by point (Warning: unstructured & pretty quote-heavy):

1. The plot is indeed more probable than that of A Trick to Catch the Old One. Craik, who edited my '64 New Mermaids edition, keeps praising Massinger for his (IMO simply passable) dramaturgy in the end-notes, which at a certain point feels a little patronizing to poor Massinger (at least it's better than Eliot who pretty mercilessly writes stuff like "Had Massinger been a greater man..." or "The defect is precisely a defect of personality." (Yowch!)) Unfortunately I think Eliot is onto something when he castigates Massinger for uncritically inheriting the morals and expectations of his age "without either criticizing or informing them from his own experience." In this play this is embodied in a general sense of over-determinedness. Eliot rightly points out that "when Massinger's ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo any important emotion; they merely know what is expected of them." And later, "Massinger [assumes] a certain social level, certain distinctions of class, as a postulate of his comedy." The word postulate is particularly apt I think; this play is founded on the reality of the aristocrat/non-aristocrat distinction. Where Middleton seems to superficially prop it up while deeply challenging it, Massinger superficially challenges it while fundamentally supporting it. Case and point, Witgood is a genuine noble scoundrel who superficially reforms, while Wellborn is a true blue noble even though his once having caught venereal disease is played for laughs. Cruickshank counts this as a point for Massinger ("Wellborn does nothing in the play that misbecomes a gentleman [...] His prototype, Witgood, [...] is merely an amusing adventurer") but frankly this kind of thinking is very crusty musty dusty. Minor points: Cruickshank also thinks A Trick has a "lame and hurried conclusion"; on the other hand c.f. Craik: "The whole business of the obliterated deed [the thing on which the conclusion hinges] is an awkward contrivance." I don't want to be too much of a Craik partisan though, since he calls the opening of Act V "a weak and undramatic dialogue," "the best that can be said for [which] is that it adequately fills the gap." In my opinion this is the only piece of good and moving verse in the entire play. It's two mature people in a play full of childish characters just talking. Honestly it's touching. Certainly it's not at all like the stuffy stuffy musty CRUSTY verse Cruickshank likes (incredibly, he seems to enjoy it when Allworth is speaking! ADDENDUM: added after this was written, going through my edition, I wrote "bad" next to the EXACT lines Cruickshank is praising. LOL).

2. Refinement of characters: There is actually only one character, and it's Sir Giles, the middle class Machiavel. I decided I don't care enough to take the train to Birmingham to borrow the standard book on the stage history of this character, nor enough to pay $16 for it neither, so this might be a little incomplete. Eliot, very sharply, argues Giles not at his best when he's not talking about himself. I think it's an easier case to make that he simply is doing a different thing. Alone or with Marrall he sounds like a Marlow character (I came to this conclusion myself; turns out Elliot beat me to it by oh, a little under 100 years. I'll quote the lines that made me think if it anyhow):

I will have her [my daughter] well attended; there are ladies / Of arrant knights decay'd and brought so low that for cast [rough] clothes and meat will gladly serve her. / And 'tis my glory, though I come from the city, / To have their issue, whom I have undone, / To kneel to mine, as bond-slaves.

Giles is also interesting in a fucked up Freudian way in that he really tries to sexually dominate his daughter. He uses some of the most blunt sexual language I've ever seen used in an Early modern drama--scary in its directness; it's not that crude. He also has that great piece of dialogue when his incredulous daughter asks "You'll have me, sir, preserve the distance that / Confines a virgin"--i.e. "you want me to be modest, right?"--to which he responds with the hilarious "Virgin me no virgins," (!! ha!), followed by the less funny "I must have you lose that name, or you lose me." One of the great actor's rolls in the late 19th apparently. Minor points: Every other character is either fine or a straight downgrade from A Trick: Compare that Famous Infamous Trampler of Time, Harry Dampit, with the soulless term-driver Marrall. Even his name is worse.

3. Poetry: I'm tired of writing this so I'll be brief. It's a nice easy read. I found the original punctuation to be quite good actually. There's no pretty poetry here but you're obviously pretty lost if you're looking for that here. There's some forceful verse-speaking though; declamable/10.

New Mermaids strikes again with a pretty good edition. I spent about 20 minutes going through and marking in the text where the end-notes corresponded to; definitely worth it. Craik is a bit too strong an advocate for this play, but I'd rather he be over-enthusiastic than overcritical. His notes were good, his editing was light but probably not up to modern standards of collation. On the whole good edition. Good job Craik (RIP).

[Stephen Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s difficult, in 2011, to rate a play like Philip Massinger’s A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS. From an aesthetic standpoint, the play is quite remarkable. The language may lack poetry and art, but the plot is tightly constructed and believable with nary a tedious moment, and, more impressively, all of the major and minor characters have unique faces and voices, a feat which even Shakespeare rarely pulled off. Massinger depicts servants, rogues, and aristocrats with equal precision, presenting a lifelike portrait of Nottingham in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The play is invaluable also as a snapshot of customs, behaviors, and convictions in that time period.

And yet in that final virtue also lies the most troublesome aspect of the play: how can one enjoy this play and rate it highly when its moral and political message is so irksome and offensive? In the world of A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS, people are to be respected for their inherited titles only, and all cleverness, morality, mistakes, and shortcomings are overlooked in a commitment to maintain a rigid, ancient social hierarchy.

The first scene introduces a scoundrel named “Wellborn,” who follows his respectable, wealthy, wise, and now deceased father only in name. Wellborn, who has never had to work in his life, has quickly drank and whored away his father’s fortune and foolishly allowed all his property to be taken by the villainous Sir Giles Overreach. Now, plastered and penniless at dawn, Wellborn is being tossed onto the curb by a tavern keeper and his wife, who take advantage of the deliciously ridiculous situation by pointing out their own rise up the social and financial ladder through hard work and ingenuity in contrast to the drastic fall that Wellborn’s laziness and ignorance have caused. Their bragging may be uncouth, but it’s deserved and, in a changing social world where people can’t expect to ride on the good or bad fortunes of their ancestors, it may be just the wake-up call that Wellborn needs. In the opening lines it’s hard for a reader in 2011 not to side with the bartender against the foolish Wellborn.

Massinger, however, has different intentions, for Wellborn is well-born and, as a result, we must always remember his natural genetic superiority over the industry and intelligence of the lowly drink pourer. Wellborn responds with a bout of intemperate violence, kicking his creditor and his wife off the stage in a scene we are supposed to find comical and proper. In subsequent scenes, Wellborn rises back to his former, undeserved glory by invoking the memory of his much better father. While pleading with the wealthy widow Lady Allworth, who has understandably sworn off contact with him due to his bad behavior, Wellborn insists that she must help him because in the distant past his father helped her husband in a similar situation. This “appeal to ancestry” seems farfetched, especially against a woman as strong willed and dignified as the Lady Allworth is initially portrayed. One would imagine her gleefully rejecting his attempt to regain his family’s stature in today’s world, yet in Massinger’s world she surprisingly consents to his petition, perhaps because she realizes that her complicit approval of his name and history serves to protect the same ridiculous hierarchy from which her own power and prestige derives. Denying the incorruptibility of his name now may unlock an unstable future in which her good name and all the servants who blindly attend to it may just as easily fall apart.

With Lady Allworth’s unexpectedly enthusiastic assistance, Wellborn is able to regain his reputation. His creditors, who are not aristocrats, come crawling back to him with praise and fawning, greatly thankful that he has finally repaid his long outstanding debts and in no way expectant of any interest or additional thanks. In Massinger’s feudalistic worldview, capitalism is the true villain, an unscrupulous and unpredictable system that can turn any man into a lord or a beast. Sir Giles Overreach, a man of no history but with a host of deceptive capitalist schemes up his sleeve, is the embodiment of this evil system. He acquires Wellborn’s property (his “real” estate, and thereby his main claim to citizenship and worth), and only by reclaiming this property can Wellborn truly recapture his true glory. Wellborn achieves this restoration through a completely amoral bit of tricky--a contract written in disappearing ink--but Massinger doesn’t expect us to be critical of this device. In Massinger’s view, capitalism itself is an amoral magic show, and since the property belonged to Wellborn’s family in past generations, then it never truly ceased to be his, despite his prodigality and foolishness. Wellborn is restored to his greatness, and all of his idiocy is washed from the registrars.

Meanwhile, the servant who executes the trick that saves the day, Marall, is literally kicked off the stage by the play’s “heroes and heroines.” Marall is damned for both doing and don’ting. As the servant to the play’s villain, Overreach, Marall is painted as equally treacherous, a conscienceless henchman who follows his master’s orders without regard to their evil intent. Through the course of the play, however, Marall secretly shifts his alliances away from his master and toward the play’s supposedly respectable figures, and this, ironically, frustratingly, is what undoes him. Marall is spat at, cursed, and kicked off the stage by Wellborn for being unfaithful to his master, an evil man. Wellborn offers no thanks to the lowly man who essentially saves his life. In Massinger’s conservative world, the restoration of values at the end of Act V wholly washes away the unsettled, topsy turvy world that preceded it. The play ends as though Wellborn has never swilled away his fortune, has never sank to the filth in the gutters, has never had to rely on the cunningness of lowborn waiters to restore his name. As the curtain closes, the characters with good names (“Wellborn,” “Allworth,” “Lovell”) are at the top and the characters with bad names (“Greedy,” “Overreach,” “Mar-all”) are at the bottom and any chaotic glimpses of alternate realities can successfully be forgotten. Wellborn has learned nothing from his descent and subsequent restoration. He has gained no empathy for beggars, no understanding of people who must rise from poverty by their own means, no appreciation for a society that requires mutual support for each other’s wellbeing. For Wellborn, his name is the beginning and the end of his values.

A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS is a vivid, intriguing, and entertaining depiction of a seventeenth-century mindset. That mindset, however, is completely noxious to my twenty-first-century sensibilities. What’s important to keep in mind, though, is that Massinger, like most of the playwrights of the English renaissance, was not a member of the nobility but the son of a steward to the Earl of Pembroke. That may explain his ease at depicting servants as lively individuals, however deferential they may be, and it also makes it difficult to dismiss his play as a propagandistic, selfish attempt to maintain the status quo. Massinger had nothing to gain from keeping the aristocrats in power except a genuine comfort in and need for the established order. Massinger’s play is both fascinating and disgusting, so between those two extremes I’ll rate it a “three.”

[Esdaile · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had been a contemporary and friend of Philip Massinger, I would have told him that he was too influenced by Shakespeare in his plays. "Phil" I would have said, "go easy on all this Shakespeare plagiarism. WS does it better and somehow the personalised philsophical emotion of the origional does not suit your Christian moralising style." Who was it that said that Shakespeare was a "fatal" writer to try to imitate? It is true I think. Milton is the only writer definitely writing to some extent in Shakespeare's shadow to arguably improve by what he learned from WS. One probably reason why A New Way to Pay Old Debts is generally considered (rightly I believe) to be Massinger's most successful extant play, is that the Shakespeare influence, while still there, is not so strong as in many of his other works. Another writer influenced Massinger more strongly here and the influence is better suited to Massinger's skill and intention: I mean Ben Jonson. A New Way to Pay old Debts takes off with a rollicking dialogue:

No booze? Nor no tobacco?
Not a suck sir,
Nor the remainder of a single can
Left by a drunken porter, all night pall'd too

The horrible and horribly fascinating villain of this piece, one Sir Giles Overreach, is a cousin of Volpone or Sir Epicure Mammon, not Macbeth, Shylock or Iago. The characters are incarnate vices. The play is an implausible fast moving farce, the condemnation of vice by means of theatrical entertainment. The play abounds with moral warnings and saws and Machiavellian (Sir Giles, in a direct reference to Machiavelli, is called "both a lion and a fox in his proceedings") precepts of villainy:
"He that bribes his belly, Is certain to command his soul" comments Sir Giles on the JP in his pay.
"We worldly men, when we see friends, and kinsmen,/Past hope sunk in their fortunes, lend no hand/To lift 'em up, but rather set our feet/Upon their heads, to press 'em to the bottom".
Some lines are monstrously witty:
"Spare for no cost, let my dressers crack with the weight/Of curious viands."
Many of the standard figures and themes of Renaissance drama are here: the malcontent heir, down on his luck ("vomited out of an alehouse") the father pandering his daughter in marriage to increase his own wealth, the treacherous factotum, virtue besieged, the triumph of virtue, the corruption of the city, the plot to entrap vice, hoisted with its own petard. For me, this play looks back to The Alchemist and Volpone and looks forward to Pilgrim's Progress. The characters are larger than life, virtue perhaps too passive-Massinger does not succeed in enthusing virtue with the energy with which vice is inspired -but this is a fast moving enjoyable drama. I would be very glad to see it staged.

[David Loveland · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting play which has recieved an unfairly low score on Goodreads. I think Sir Giles Overreach is a brilliantly disgusting character, and he alone is worthy of 4 out of 5 stars.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This blank verse play, a comedy-drama, dating from the mid-1620s, was apparently one of the more popular non-Shakespearean Jacobean efforts up into the early 20th century, primarily because the main villain, Sir Giles Overreach, is kind of a second-class Richard III, and actors like Edmund Kean could really go to town with it. Overreach is a "City" man who hates the gentry and uses every legal means to take their property, but he wants his daughter married to one, to improve his social position. He can be a patient villain--at one point he plans to intimidate a property owner into suing him, knowing that the lawsuit will bankrupt the other man, who will then sell his land below cost.

The verse is clear and understandable, the plotlines tie up nicely. It's "easier" than Shakespeare; at the same time, you can't understand just how good Shakespeare is unless you read some of "the other guys."

Shakespeare, for instance, never had characters named "Overreach" or "Judge Greedy" or "Frank Wellborn" or a hot-tempered servant named "Furnace," etc. Shakespeare also wrote a generation before Massinger, where, apparently, social mobility in England wasn't quite seen as some Satanic undermining of the Great Chain of Being. In the first scene of ANWTPOD, Wellborn, a well-born man who's ruined his life with drink and debt, is mocked for this by a tavern-keeper and his wife. He then beats them up with a cudgel, to the point where they literally crawl off the stage; Wellborn is the hero, folks! He gradually redeems himself but it's quite clear that lippy tapsters and their ugly wives deserve to be beaten by their betters. The heroine is the basis of the stock swooning heroine of 250 years of later melodramas, but, with all that, charming and smart. But an aristocratic character (heart of gold, heroic, not a stain on him) makes a long speech saying that, were she a million times as great as she is, he wouldn't marry her, because he's gentry and she's not. Now, the perfect young heroine is in love with a perfect young hero from her class, and the aristocrat is a little old for her anyway and there's an aristocratic widow who marries him, so everything works out brilliantly--but that makes the long "she is SO far below me" speech even more egregious. A critical note on the play says that social attitudes in England hardened under Charles I and this was one of the contributing factors leading up to the English Civil War.

Lots of Google Image searches will turn up a portrait of Kean, in the 1820s, as Sir Giles.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massinger, in this play, seeks to create a class drama, interspersed with a little humor, that features a villain as a man character. Without the poetic language of Shakespeare, this Stuart-era drama does feature a plot that is intricately woven. Social immovability features strongly and bears witness to this era. I’ve never been a fan of characters being named for certain characteristics, a technique which Massinger employs here. All in all, this is a classic of English drama and as such deserves to be read. Unfortunately, the language is too close to Shakespeare for modern ears not to draw the comparison, and it is a comparison in which Massinger understandably falls short.

See my other reviews here!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is immense fun: I don't think it'll win many prizes for sophistication (It has characters called Greedy, Overreach and Wellborn - like a seventeenth century Mr Men) but as a fun play about a bad moneylender being done for being bad, it's a total barrel of laughs.

[Chris Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit slow, but one can definitely see the significance of Sir Giles Overreach as the archetypical psychopathic bad guy. Not as fun as Middleton, but one can still clearly see Middleton's influence.

[Ahmed rabah]

Arabic edition

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting late Renaissance comedy. The plotline is pretty conventional for a comedy--basically revolving around the quest to bring down a callous userer, run through a couple of interrelated plot lines. Like Shylock, this play's central "villain," Overreach, is a clear early capitalist figure (interestingly, of the type that might be the theatrical hero by the early 1700s) who is devoted almost exclusively to making money and securing his daughter's future. However, unlike Shylock there is no larger background that can (at least for a modern audience) justify his righteous anger, and so Overreach is a less potentially sympathetic villain.

[Jennifer Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it was lovely wording, and a clever plot. I can see why it would be a fun play to watch acted out. However, I read the version in the Harvard Classics, and call me thick skulled if you must, but I'm not sure it deserves to be enshrined in those hallowed "five feet" of classic literature. If I were Harvard I might have chosen a different play instead. More cute than anything.

[Tinquerbelle]

Dunn, Esther Cloudman
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays

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