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

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'

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.

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.

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 coul

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 witne

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

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.

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

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