SOURCE: Neill, Michael. “Massinger's Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 10 (1979): 185-213.

[In the following essay, Neill views A New Way to Pay Old Debts as a conservative work that seeks to maintain aristocratic values in the face of the demands of the rising middle class.]

An Houshold is as it were a little Commonwealth, by the good government whereof, Gods glorie may be advantced, and the commonwealth which standeth of severall families benefited.

John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government¹

Strangely, since it is one of Massinger's few acknowledged successes and the most frequently performed of his plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, has received scant critical attention. The play's continuing popularity evidently depends on the powerful characterization of Sir Giles Overreach; but the scale of this villain-hero and the violence of his end have led to uneasiness about the “melodramatic” quality of the action, and about the moralization which accompanies it.² Moreover the tendency to read the play simply as Jonsonian satire of an extortionate arriviste—an outsize burlesque of Sir Giles Mompesson³—can make the love plot of Margaret Overreach and Alworth seem an irrelevant exercise in Fletcherian pathos, and the graver courtship of Lord Lovell and Lady Alworth a concession to the courtly preciosity of the Phoenix audience.⁴ Seen like this, A New Way may appear not only structurally confused but morally objectionable—especially in its vindication of Welborne, whose only obvious “right” to restoration of the fortune he has wantonly squandered is that indicated by his name: the birthright he shares with the idealized “true gentry” of the play. Coolly regarded, then, Welborne's “new way” is no more than a usurpation of the Machiavellian stratagems of the new man, Overreach, himself; and it is justifiable only by a kind of indulgent snobbery little better than the time-serving deference of characters like Marrall and Tapwell:

When he was rogue Welborne, no man would believe him,
And then his information could not hurt us.
But now he is right worshipful again,
Who dares but doubt his testimony?
          …
                                        [He] has found out such a new way
To pay his old debts, as 'tis very likely
He shall be chronicl'd for it.

(IV.ii.13-29)

The lines are those of Tapwell, who respects no other chronicle than his alehouse register “in chalk” (I.i.25-26); but there can be no doubt that from Massinger's point of view the Welborne who offers his service to “king, and country” at the end of the play, is already reenrolled in the chronicles of honor. “True gentry,” it would seem, for all its fine rhetoric of “honor,” report,” and “chronicle,” can survive only through the unscrupulous improvisation of the entrepreneur. To be “worshipful,” to be “worthy” in this world is to be “worth” enough to pay your debts—to be a “good man” in Shylock's sense of the term.⁵ And if that is truly the case, then the whole elaborately created world of manners, of polite decorum and nice social discriminations, by which the dramatist sets so much store, becomes a dishonest decoration on the surface of reality.

However, it appears to me that A New Way is at once more coherent in its dramatic structure and most consistent in its social vision than this reading would imply—even if there remain lurking contradictions that Massinger's comic catastrophe never satisfactorily resolves. Like The Merchant of Venice, with which it is often compared, A New Way is about the pangs of transition to a capitalistic, cash-nexus society; and like Shakespeare, Massinger takes a fundamentally conservative attitude toward that process, asserting the primacy of communal bonds over legal bondage, of social obligation over commercial debt, of love over the law.⁶The Merchant, however, founds its critique of bourgeois values upon a familiar Christian mythos—the opposition of the Old Law and the New—and in a reassuring comic paradox neutralizes its new man, the Machiavellian capitalist, by making him a representative of the Old Law, rendered obsolete by the sacrifice of Christ. The Jew-Devil Shylock “stands for” Law, Portia for Sacrifice.⁷ Though Sir Giles Overreach is sometimes made to appear like yet another diabolic incarnation from the Moralities,⁸ and though Massinger invokes scriptural analogues for his judgment of prodigal Welborne and the false servant Marrall, A New Way has no such thorough mythic foundation. Instead it appeals to a whole set of normative social assumptions which, although they were customarily justified by the Scriptures, are in fact peculiar to Massinger's own epoch.⁹ Because they belong, in Peter Laslett's phrase, to “the world we have lost,”¹⁰ they can make A New Way seem a less universal comedy than its predecessor; but they also make it considerably more vivid as a document of historical attitudes. Massinger brings alive, as perhaps none of his contemporaries can, the ingrained social beliefs that were to make Sir Robert Filmer's writings the handbook of a generation of Royalist gentry.

In the last big speech of the play, Welborne reminds us of the double nature of the “debts” that must be paid before the social order can be reestablished:

                    there is something else
Beside the repossession of my land,
And payment of my debts, that I must practise.
I had a reputation, but 'twas lost
In my loose courses; and till I redeem it
Some noble way, I am but half made up.

(V.i.390-395)

The “making up” of his “worshipful” self is dependent on the “making up” of a moral obligation more powerful than any merely financial debt. The method of redemption he proposes is that of “service”—service to his king, fittingly discharged through his immediate social superior, Lord Lovell (ll. 396-400). The idea of service is a crucial one in the play: and one which is pointedly taken up in the epilogue, where Massinger playfully sees himself as the servant of the audience, seeking his freedom by the “manumission” of their applause (ll. 403-404). He elaborates the conceit in his dedicatory epistle, by way of graceful compliment to the Earl of Caernarvon, whose protection he seeks to earn “in my service,” recalling that “I was born a devoted servant, to the thrice noble family of your incomparable Lady,” and hopefully subscribing himself “Your Honour's true servant.” Massinger, though he came of minor gentry, was born into service in the sense that his father was steward to the household of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the dedication invites us to read A New Way as a tribute to the ideals he imbibed at Wilton—as itself a new way to pay a personal debt of honor.¹¹

Even the element of topical satire in the play can be seen to accord with this complimentary purpose, since, as Patricia Thomson has pointed out, Mompesson, as Buckingham's protégé, was a natural enemy of the Herberts. But Overreach's villainy, of course, touches only tangentially on Mompesson's malpractice. Mompesson is important to the dramatist's imagination less as a venal monopolist than as the hideous type of an alarming social tendency. A contemporary comment on Mompesson, cited by L. C. Knights, may help to make this point clearer:

Sir Giles Mompesson had fortune enough in the country to make him happy, if that sphere could have contained him, but the vulgar and universal error of satiety with present enjoyments, made him too big for a rustical condition, and when he came at court he was too little for that, so that some novelty must be taken up to set him in aequilibrio to the place he was in, no matter what it was, let it be never so pestilent and mischievous to others, he cared not, so he found benefit by it.¹²

Mompesson's crime amounted to a double violation of that principle of service on which the order of society was founded: he had betrayed the obligations of that office in which the king had placed him, and he had attempted to rise above that position in society to which God had called him. Overreach is an incarnation of that anarchic impulse which seemed to fuel Mompesson's corrupt ambition. In his brutal assault on the bonds of a society felt to subsist on an intricate hierarchical network of communal service and mutual obligation, he is the nightmare projection of emergent capitalism, the monstrous herald of that new social order whose perfection Marx was to describe:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash-payment. …

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to. … It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money-relation.¹³

Overreach's household includes Marrall, Will-do, and Greedy—lawyer, priest, and justice—among its paid wage-laborers; and “family” for him—as his relations with his nephew, and ultimately with his daughter too, illustrate—simply denotes a nexus of money relationships: when Welborne has lost his money they are no longer kin.

In contrast to the vast and ruthlessly impersonal machine conceived by Marx, the social order imagined by most of Massinger's contemporaries was that of a large family ruled by a father-sovereign: each family was itself a commonwealth (a paternal monarchy) and the state a family of such petty commonwealths. The relationship was not merely one of analogy: for it was from the first family that the state itself had grown.¹⁴ The hierarchic order of society was thus a natural part of the divinely ordained scheme of things. Whatever the philosophic limitations of such patriarchalist thought, it took immense strength, as Gordon Schochet has shown, from its close correspondence to the practical socialization of the vast majority of seventeenth-century Englishmen for whom the family, or household, was the focus of most activity: “some form of paternal authority was the only kind of status relationship with which most of these people were familiar. … childhood was not something which was eventually outgrown; rather, it was enlarged to include the whole of one's life.”¹⁵

Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, written in the 1640s, is only the best known of a series of works which adumbrated a patriarchal model of society. With his Observations upon Aristotle's Politiques (1652) it constitutes the latest and most systematic attempt to work out a set of ideas which were already among the commonplaces of social thought in Massinger's time. When King James wrote in Basilikon Doron that a prince should act toward his people “as their naturall father and kindly Master,” he appealed implicitly to a whole context of commentary which made of the Fifth Commandment a scriptural justification for all authority.¹⁶ Prominent contributions to this pious tradition include Bartholomew Batty's The Christian mans Closet, translated by William Lowth in 1581, and two immensely popular books by John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government (1598) and A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandements (1604).¹⁷ Society, from the perspective of these patriarchalists, consists of a community of priestlike fathers and their families, natural autocracies modified only by a carefully ordained set of mutual duties and obligations. “Parentes are Gods vicars in earth,” writes Batty in laying out “The Duetie of Children towardes their Parentes,” and “All are understoode by the name Parents, under whose government wee live,” including “Magistrates, Elders, Preachers, Maisters, Teachers, Tutors and such like.”¹⁸ Dod and Cleaver similarly warn children “that whatsoever they doe to their fathers and mothers … they doe it to God,” and in the word Father “are contained all superiors in what place soever set above us.” Thus the servant, too, is to remember that his master “stands in the place of Christ unto thee, being of his familie.”¹⁹ The principal duty of the paterfamilias is to ensure the fit ordering of his household, to enforce the proprieties of place: “there are two sorts in every perfect familie: 1. The Governors. 2. Those that must be ruled.” If this sounds like a formula for domestic tyranny, Dod and Cleaver insist that “these two sorts have speciall duties belonging to them, the one towards the other,” and that fathers must not act “as tyrants” but treat children and servants alike “lovingly and Christianly.”²⁰ In laying out this “Godly Forme of Houshold Government” Dod and Cleaver are not simply elaborating a metaphor, for in their estimation “it is impossible for a man to understand how to governe the common-wealth, that doth not rule his owne house.”²¹ The connection must have seemed a natural one in a society where, as Schochet emphasizes, political identity was effectively itself a function of familial headship.²²

For the lesser members of the domestic commonwealth “social identity was altogether vicarious. The family was represented to the larger community by its head … and those whom he commanded were ‘subsumed’ in his social life.”²³ Constrictive as such a family looks from our point of view, it provided its members with a sense of secure identity, and gave to society at large a comfortably human scale whose threatened loss was understandably painful.²⁴ Massinger's play is in some sense about this threat: and the horror it evokes in the dramatist helps to explain the titanic stature of Overreach. If Sir Giles's colossal ambition seems somehow too large for the world of social comedy that is because, in Massinger's imagination, he representes those forces whose insurgence menaces the very possibility of such a world, of an order that is in any familiar sense “social” at all.²⁵ In the imagery of religious outrage with which this usurper is condemned, Massinger is appealing, like Dod and Cleaver before him, to the hallowed sanctions of patriarchalist ideology.

The very popularity of such treatises as Dod and Cleaver's in a period when traditional organic models of political organization were subject to an increasingly critical scrutiny is a testimony to the social insecurities that Massinger's play attempts to soothe. But patriarchalist writing itself reflects the pressures of Puritan dissent and the contractual theories with which such dissent was frequently associated. Michael Walzer has argued that the domestic commonwealth imagined by the Puritans Dod and Cleaver already has many features in common with the conjugal family that was to replace the traditional patriarchy. Their conception of the father's role is to some extent a legalistic one which emphasizes “office” and “duties” at the expense of the natural bonds of affection. Thus it tends to downgrade the historical bonding of kinship, and for the mutual obligations of parent and child, master and servant, to substitute the absolute authority of a father confirmed in office by a divinely ordained contract.²⁶ In this autocratic commonwealth the nice distinctions of hierarchy which are native to the true patriarchal family are at a discount: where a household can be so simply divided into “The Governors” and “Those that must be ruled,” even the basic distinction between children and servants is blurred.²⁷ Overreach's autocratic tyranny, in which daughter and servants alike are treated as legally contracted agents of the master's will, and where the bonds of legal debt take the place of kinship as the principal links in the social chain, is as much an embodiment of a familial as of a commercial “new way.” Though the connection may be one that the dramatist himself has not fully grasped, A New Way to Pay Old Debts is in some sense a play about religion and the rise of capitalism; and it is a reflection of Massinger's bitter conservatism that an atheistic iconoclast should come to epitomize the Puritan Household Governor.

In accord with his social menace, Sir Giles Overreach is presented as no common, petty miser—which even Shylock finally is—but a figure of heroic stature. He is a commercial and domestic Tamburlaine, whose virtù invites the admiration of Lady Alworth's servants even as they denounce him for his griping extortion:

Furnace:          To have a usurer that starves himself,
And wears a cloak of one-and-twenty years
On a suit of fourteen groats, bought of the hangman,
To grow rich, and then purchase, is too common:
But this Sir Giles feeds high, keeps many servants,
Who must at his command do any outrage;
Rich in his habit; vast in his expenses;
Yet he to admiration still increases
In wealth, and lordships.

(II.ii.106-114)

The glamor of his conspicuous consumption links him with Jonsonian anti-heroes like Volpone, whose energetic delight in stratagem he explicitly echoes:

                    I enjoy more true delight
In my arrival to my wealth, these dark
And crooked ways, than you shall e'er take pleasure
In spending what my industry hath compass'd.

(IV.i.135-138)²⁸

But he is something larger and more terrifying than Jonson's vulpine magnifico: both “a lion, and a fox” (V.i.25), as Lady Alworth sees him—a figure who embodies the martial aspect of the Machiavellian tyrant as well as his politic cunning. It is in heroic terms that we are repeatedly asked to see his diabolic prowess—by Order, for instance:

He frights men out of their estates,
And breaks through all law-nets, made to curb ill men,
As they were cobwebs. No man dares reprove him.
Such a spirit to dare, and power to do, were never
Lodg'd so unluckily.

(II.ii.114-118)

—by Lord Lovell:

                    I, that have liv'd a soldier,
And stood the enemy's violent charge undaunted
To hear this blasphemous beast am bath'd all over
In a cold sweat: yet like a mountain he,
Confirm'd in atheistical assertions,
Is no more shaken, than Olympus is
When angry Boreas loads his double head
With sudden drifts of snow.

(IV.i.150-157)

—and not least in his own vaunting hyperbole:

Lovell: Are you not frighted with the imprecations,
And curses, of whole families made wretched
By your sinister practices?
Overreach:          Yes, as rocks are
When foamy billows split themselves against
Their flinty ribs; or as the moon is mov'd,
When wolves with hunger pin'd, howl at her brightness.
I am of a solid temper, and like these
Steer on a constant course: with mine own sword
If call'd into the field, I can make that right,
Which fearful enemies murmur'd at as wrong.
          …
Nay, when my ears are pierc'd with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold;
I only think what ‘tis to have my daughter
Right honourable.

(IV.i.111-129)

“To have my daughter / Right honourable”: the reiterated phrase becomes a kind of transformed bathos, like Tamburlaine's “sweet fruition of an earthly crown,” Overreach's equivalent of riding in triumph through Persepolis. While at one extreme such language may link him with the mock-heroic bombast of Greedy, that “monarch … of the boil'd, the roast, the bak'd” (III.ii.20-21) and pillager of Furnace's pastry fortifications (I.ii.25-47), at the other it invites comparison with Lovell's heroic enterprise in the Low Countries; and the power struggle in which Sir Giles is engaged is, the play suggests, of equal moment to that undertaken by his noble adversary. For Overreach is a “blasphemous beast” not merely by virtue of those “atheistical assertions” which horrify Lovell, but through his titanic struggle to subvert an order of society decreed by God himself.

Massinger builds his social argument on the contrasted arrangement of four households or families. Temporarily excluded from this society is the déclassé Welborne, once a “lord of acres,” who has prodigally squandered his estates and thus forfeited those titles (“Master Welborne,” “your worship”) which defined his proper place in the social order. The principal intrigue in the play is devoted to the restoration of this outcast to the power and privileges which belong to his gentlemanly rank and more specifically to his position as master of a great household. To fully understand the parameters of his situation and to sympathize with the melancholy rage which it inspires in Welborne, one must be sensitive to the nuances of social address by which the play sets so much store. Peter Laslett emphasizes the critical importance of the terminology of rank in this society:

The term gentleman marked the exact point at which the traditional social system divided up the population into two extremely unequal sections. About a twenty-fifth … belonged to the gentry and to those above them in the social hierarchy. This tiny minority owned most of the wealth, wielded the power and made all the decisions. … If you were not a gentleman, if you were not ordinarily called “Master” by the commoner folk, or “Your Worship”; if you, like nearly all the rest, had a Christian and a surname and nothing more; then you counted for little in the world outside your own household. … the labourers and husbandmen, the tailors, millers, drovers, watermen, masons, could become constables, parish clerks, churchwardens, ale-conners, even overseers of the poor … [But] they brought no personal weight to the modest offices which they could hold. As individuals they had no instituted, recognised power over other individuals, always excepting … those subsumed within their families. Directly they acquired such power, whether by the making of the inheriting of wealth, or by the painful acquisition of a little learning, then they became worshipful by that very fact. … To exercise power, then, to be free of the society of England, to count at all as an active agent in the record we call historical, you had to be a gentleman. … you had to hold one of those exceptional names in a parish register which bore a prefix or a suffix. … The commonest addition to a name … is Mr, for the word “Master,” and Mrs, for the word “Mistress”. … Gent. and Esq. are rare … as is the word Dame. … and Knight and Baronet are, of course, much rarer still. The reader with the whole population in his mind … will, of course, occasionally come across the titles Lord or Lady, and the ceremonious phrase ‘The right Honourable the …’ which was often used to introduce them.²⁹

Plain Timothy Tapwell and Froth, his wife, belong to that overwhelming majority who are not “free of the society of England,” who have no natural powers beyond the compass of their own household. From Welborne's point of view, Tapwell, as his former under-butler, is still a “slave,” a “drudge,” a servant still bound to his master by the patronage Welborne has given him (I.i.17-28). Tapwell, on the other hand, sees himself very differently. Having acquired “a little stock” and “a small cottage” through frugal opportunism, he has duly “humbled” himself to marry Froth, and set up as an alehouse keeper, his own man (I.i.59-61). From this base he has risen to the point where he is “thought worthy to be scavenger;” and from the humble post of parish rubbish-collector he confidently expects to climb to even more exalted office:

                    to be overseer of the poor;
Which if I do, on your petition Welborne,
I may allow you thirteen pence a quarter,
And you shall thank my worship.

(I.i.68-71; italics added)

Tapwell, in fact, is a kind of low-life Overreach, his desire to become “worshipful” echoing Sir Giles's passion to have his daughter made “right honourable.” He will have Welborne his petitioner as Sir Giles will have Margaret attended by whole trains of “errant knights” and Lady Downefalnes. For both men “office” denotes not the large Ciceronian concept but a narrow, functionally determined accession of personal power and prestige. Like Sir Giles, too, Tapwell professes a view of society which denies all traditional sanctions: it acknowledges no past, only a pragmatically organized present and a future of untrammeled aspiration.³⁰ Welborne's appeals to ancient right and to the debts imposed by past generosity are equally vacuous to a man like Tapwell—there is no chronicle of honor or register of benefits in his commonwealth:

Welborne: Is not thy house, and all thou hast my gift?
Tapwell: I find it not in chalk, and Timothy Tapwell
Does keep no other register.
          …
What I was sir, it skills not;
What you are is apparent.

(I.i.24-30; italics added)

His chalk register of debt is the equivalent of Sir Giles's parchment deeds; and both are presented, like Shylock's bond, as the emblems of a social vision which seeks to make the narrow scruple of commercial law the sole principle of human organization. For Tapwell, his fellow office-man, the constable, is the great Prince of this legalistic realm:

There dwells, and within call, if it please your worship,
A potent monarch, call'd the constable,
That does command a citadel, call'd the stocks;
Whose guards are certain files of rusty billmen.

(I.i.12-15)

This sarcastic degradation of heroic language anticipates, in its heavy way, the cynical wit of the pun with which Sir Giles will deflate the pretensions of “errant” knighthood (II.i.79).

Tapwell can detail the story of that “man of worship, / Old Sir John Welborne, justice of peace, and quorum” and even recall the magnanimity of his housekeeping, but the whole report is swept away in a single contemptuous phrase: “but he dying” (I.i.30-37). Sir Giles (who has the current J.P., a jumped-up tailor's son, in his pocket) roundly confesses to Lovell, “I do contemn report myself, / As a mere sound” (IV.i.91-92). He is equally contemptuous of the obligations of friendship and the duties of office:

                    'tis enough I keep
Greedy at my devotion: so he serve
My purposes, let him hang, or damn, I care not.
Friendship is but a word.

(II.i.19-22)

And “Words,” he insists, “are no substances” (III.ii.128)—they are empty ceremonious “forms” which disguise the fact that society is merely an arrangement of services rendered for cash. Given Overreach's philosophy, his desire to “Have all men sellers, / And I the only purchaser” (II.i.32-33) is nothing less than the longing for absolute tyranny. Dod and Cleaver's prescription for wise domestic government includes a warning against borrowing and usury: “Salomon saith, The borrower is servant to the lender: that is, beholding to him, and in his danger.”³¹ The chain of debt created by Overreach's lending is one which seeks to override the traditional obligations of society, and to replace the patriarchal hierarchy with a vicious commercial autarchy, governed by himself, the unfettered master of an anti-family of slaves. His own household, where officers of church and state are already thrown together in indiscriminate bondage with children and servants, is the model for this new tyranny, where the issue of his inveterate opponents, the “true gentry,” will be forced “To kneel to mine, as bond-slaves” (II.i.81-89).³²

Set against the conspicuous consumption and cash-nexus relationships of Sir Giles's household is the ideal of liberal housekeeping embodied in the households of Welborne's dead father, of Lord Lovell, and most immediately of Lady Alworth. If the anarchic individualism and all-engrossing ambition of Sir Giles are emblematized in the names of Marrall and Greedy, the values of traditional society are suggested by those of the Alworth servants, Order and Watchall. Order, in particular, seldom misses an opportunity for sententious observation on the morality of true service and the hierarchical decorum for which he stands:³³

                    Sir, it is her will,
Which we that are her servants ought to serve it,
And not dispute.

(I.iii.4-6)

Set all things right, or as my name is Order,
And by this staff of office that commands you;
This chain, and double ruff, symbols of power;
Whoever misses in his function,
For one whole week makes forfeiture of his breakfast,
And privilege in the wine-cellar.

(I.ii.1-6)

The sturdy sense of place which informs Order's humor in this last speech contrasts with the ludicrously exaggerated deference of Marrall who addresses even Lady Alworth's waiting-man as “your worship” (II.ii.132), and whose groveling before the reborn prodigal shows Massinger's gift for satiric farce at its best:

Marrall: Then in my judgement sir, my simple judgement,
(Still with your worship's favour) I could wish you
A better habit, for this cannot be
But much distasteful to the noble lady
(I say no more) that loves you, for this morning
To me (and I am but a swine to her)
Before th' assurance of her wealth perfum'd you,
You savour'd not of amber.
Welborne: I do now then?
Marrall: This your batoon hath got a touch of it.
[Kisses the end of his cudgel]

(II.iii.20-28)

The caricature of courtly style with its self-deprecating parentheses and tactful circumlocutions culminates in a perfect frenzy of servility. Marrall explicitly seeks a “place” in return for his vassalage, “the lease of glebe land [fittingly] called Knave's-Acre.” But for him service is merely enslavement, place merely hire and salary. Like Greedy, devastated by the prospect of losing “my dumpling … And butter'd toasts, and woodcocks” (III.ii.307-308), Marrall finds his “worship” only too readily dispensable.

True service on the other hand, because of its function in a scheme of mutual obligation, implies self-respect, a solid conviction of one's own worth. Spelled out in this way the opposition may seem too pat; but it is given dramatic life in the easy condescension and unforced kindness that characterizes relationships in the Alworth household—in the indulgence with which the mistress treats the choleric outbursts of her cook, Furnace, the dignity of his office wounded by her failure to eat (I.ii); and in the comically touching affection between the servants and “Our late young master” (I.ii and II.ii). The language in which young Alworth acknowledges their “service”—

Your courtesies overwhelm me; I much grieve
To part from such true friends, and yet find comfort.

(II.ii.27-28)

—gracefully echoes the terms of his conversation with his own master, Lord Lovell, and with his stepmother, and so places the relations of the domestic “family” in living continuum with the more intimate connections of kinship.³⁴

If Alworth is “young master” to his family servants, he himself owes “service” to Lady Alworth and to Lord Lovell—to his stepmother as the explicit incarnation of his father's patriarchal authority (I.ii.85-94), and to Lovell as both ruler of his household and as a benevolent patriarch who has been “more like a father to me than a master” (III.i.30). To Lovell is given the crucial speech which defines the difference between the generous housekeeping of “true gentry” and the domestic tyranny of the ambitious arriviste:

Nor am I of that harsh, and rugged temper
As some great men are tax'd with, who imagine
They part from the respect due to their honours,
If they use not all such as follow 'em,
Without distinction of their births, like slaves.
I am not so condition'd; I can make
A fitting difference between my foot-boy,
And a gentleman, by want compell'd to serve me.

(III.i.21-28)

Though Alworth is technically a “stipendiary,” in the language of Welborne's prickly vanity (I.i.173), his relations with Lovell are governed by a firm sense of mutual obligation—so that if Alworth's duty as a servant requires that he yield his rights in Margaret to his master (III.i), Lovell in turn must prove his paternal care by contriving their elopement from the tyranny of Sir Giles.

Overreach, by contrast, governs by treating even his own family as stipendiary slaves.³⁵ Since the only bonds he acknowledges are those of financial debt, he contemptuously denies his bankrupt nephew's kinship—“Thou art no blood of mine. Avaunt thou beggar!” (I.iii.40). By the same token once he recognizes new prospects of indebtedness he seeks Welborne's friendship with disarming candor, hailing him as “nephew” once again:

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,
And I must yield, with you I practis'd it.
But now I see you in a way to rise,
I can and will assist you.

(III.iii.50-56)

He proposes to redeem Welborne's debts and send him “a freeman to the wealthy lady” (ll. 64-68; italics added): but the manumission is one which, as Welborne notes with urbane irony, only “Binds me still your servant” (l. 70). The courtesies of speech are those of the traditional society, their meanings wantonly perverted:

                    My deeds nephew
Shall speak my love, what men report, I weigh not.

(III.iii.75-76)

For honorable “deeds,” the conventional subject of “report,” Sir Giles in fact proposes to substitute the parchment deeds that will encompass the final downfall of true gentry. Significantly, this exchange is immediately juxtaposed with a genuine manumission—Lovell's “discharge” of Alworth “from further service” (IV.i.1-3)—which ends in the acknowledgment of a very different kind of debt, one which admits the primacy of honorable report:

Let after-times report, and to you honour,
How much I stand engag'd, for I want language
To speak my debt.

(IV.i.5-7)

It is the opposition we have met before, between Timothy Tapwell's register of chalk and the chronicles of ancient right and historic obligation—between the new morality of contract and the traditional morality of “benefits.”

Sir Giles's relation with his daughter, significantly called to account as “The blest child of my industry, and wealth” (III.ii.53), is not qualitatively different from that with his nephew. For it is once again conceived in master/slave terms: Margaret owes him an absolute and peremptory duty (even to the point of prostituting herself to Lovell) and he owes her nothing in return except the promise of those honorable titles which serve to cocker up his own vanity. Shylock's wish to have his revolted daughter dead at his feet can still be read as the outrage of a distorted love; Overreach's attempt to kill Margaret is merely the calling-in of a debt—“thus I take the life / Which wretched I gave to thee” (V.i.292-293).³⁶ Shylock at least can suffer the pain of lost affection through the ring “I had … of Leah when I was a bachelor” (Merchant of Venice, III.i.111); Sir Giles's ring bonds him to no one, but becomes the instrument of his daughter's loss to Alworth. His corruption of family relationship to bond slavery includes his courtship of Lady Alworth—as it must have included the courtship of Mistress Welborne, Margaret's mother. It is finally a matter of indifference whether the Lady marries Welborne or himself: either match will put her fortune in his power. Set against the business contract of the two marriages which Overreach attempts to contrive, is the “solemn contract” (V.i.66) undertaken by the ideal couples of the play—a contract hedged about by nicely balanced mutual obligations of “honour,” “service,” and “duty” (IV.i and III, V.i).

The ending of the play vindicates, as it is bound to do, the traditional bonds of service, housekeeping, and the patriarchal family. Marriage unites the ideal households of the true gentry and establishes young Alworth as master of his own; while Welborne, his financial and moral debts discharged, sets out to redeem his honor under Lord Lovell in “service” to the supreme patriarchy, “my king, and country” (V.i.398-399). The subverters of patriarchal order, on the other hand, are made to feel the hopeless isolation of their position. Marrall, the epitome of perverted service and false friendship, is somewhat smugly dismissed by Welborne to take his own place, stripped of office, among the masterless outcasts of this society:

You are a rascal, he that dares be false
To a master, though unjust, will ne'er be true
To any other: look not for reward,
Or favour from me,
          …
                              I will take order
Your practice shall be silenc'd.

(V.i.338-344)

If “This is the haven / False servants still arrive at” (ll. 349-350), the fate of false masters is even more desperate. Overreach, who hurls from the stage seeking “servants / And friends to second me” (ll. 312-313), finds only revolted slaves. Forced to confront the ironic truth of his own aphorism, “Friendship is but a word,” he is left to the maniacal self-assertion of despair:

                    Why, is not the whole world
Included in my self? to what use then
Are friends, and servants? say there were a squadron
Of pikes, lin'd through with shot, when I am mounted,
Upon my injuries, shall I fear to charge 'em?
          …
                    no, spite of fate,
I will be forc'd to hell like to myself.

(V.i.355-371)

If this speech seems to recall Richard III, the echo is fitting and perhaps deliberate, since Overreach has come to embody that same anarchic principle of self-love that Shakespeare incarnates in Richard of Gloucester. The forms and bonds of communal society, which for Overreach were vacuous nothings, prove immutably solid, while his own omnipotent bond becomes literally “nothing,” “void” (ll. 289, 323), showing (through Marrall's ingenuity) “neither wax, nor words” (l. 186).³⁷ By the same token the chronicles of honor, which in Overreach's eyes were so much historical dust, prove indestructible, while his own “deed” turns to dust before his eyes:

What prodigy is this, what subtle devil
Hath raz'd out the inscription, the wax
Turn'd into dust! the rest of my deeds whole,
As when they were deliver'd! and this only
Made nothing.

(V.i.190-194)

Like Shylock, Sir Giles appeals to law, threatening the power of “statute” and “a hempen circle”—but the whole episode is like a parable of Dod and Cleaver's “justice” that “vertue, that yeeldeth to every man his owne”:

the riches gotten by ill meanes, have a heavie destinie uttered against them: The gathering of riches by a deceitfull tongue is vanity, tossed to and fro of them that seeke death.

And Sir Giles's fate is an ample illustration of the doom reserved for the merciless man:

He that stoppeth his eare at the crying of the poore, he shall also cry, and not be heard.³⁸

Overreach's repudiation of society leaves him to the punishment of his own consuming egotism, “myself alone,” without servants, friends, or even kin—a man without a family.³⁹

The last irony of his situation, of course, is that he has been a man trying to make a family, a dynasty of “right honourable” descendants. For all his bitter scorn for the “forms” of the hereditary order, for the hollowness of “word,” “name,” and “title,” Sir Giles is nevertheless mesmerized by these same forms. The obsession renders him incapable of living consistently by his ruthlessly economic analysis of society. The unrecognized paradox of his desire to have his daughter made “right honourable” is what finally blinds him to Lovell's stratagem and lures him into a pit of his own digging. He is ultimately destroyed by the same monstrous fury of self-contradiction which drives him to threaten honorable revenge against the man he hopes his daughter will seduce:

Do I wear a sword for fashion? or is this arm
Shrunk up? or wither'd? does there live a man
Of that large list I have encounter'd with,
Can truly say I e'er gave inch of ground,
Not purchas'd with his blood, that did oppose me?
Forsake thee when the thing is done? he dares not.
Give me but proof, he has enjoy'd thy person,
Though all his captains, echoes to his will,
Stood arm'd by his side to justify the wrong,
And he himself in the head of his bold troop,
Spite of his lordship, and his colonelship,
Or the judge's favour, I will make him render
A bloody and a strict accompt, and force him
By marrying thee, to cure thy wounded honour.

(III.ii.140-153)

Marrall's intervention ‘(“Sir, the man of honour's come,” l. 154) points up the absurd irony: the gestures, the rhetoric are those of the code he is seeking to subvert; they acknowledge debts and accounts of a kind he professes not to countenance; and they are echoed with savage pathos in the berserk frenzy of his final speech:

I'll through the battalia, and that routed,
I'll fall to execution.
[Flourishing his sword unsheathed]
                    Ha! A am feeble:
Some undone widow sits upon mine arm,
And takes away the use of 't; and my sword
Glu'd to my scabbard, with wrong'd orphans' tears,
Will not be drawn.

(V.i.360-365)

The disproportion between the ranting heroics of Overreach's defiance and the domestic ordinariness of the situations which provoke it is not an arbitrary comic device: it is the expression of that fatal confusion of purpose on which his life is wrecked. Sir Giles is an instinctive revolutionary whose vision is fatally constricted by the values of the society against which he is in revolt.⁴⁰

But the confusion is not his alone: it also infects his maker. For all the consistency with which Massinger attempts to construct his patriarchal arguments, ambiguities remain in his own stance. Some of these appear in the characterization of his villain: the sense of unbalance which has worried critics of the play has much to do with the overplus of energy and dramatic life in Sir Giles—as though a part of Massinger identified with his violent iconoclasm. And something of the same subversive impulse may be felt in the treatment of Marrall. The psychological penetration with which Massinger uncovers the source of his peculiarly vicious symbiosis of envy and subservience surely springs from the dramatist's own early experience among the upper servants of a great household. The hysterical fury with which Marrall announces his own revolt reveals a sense of deep violation that helps to account for the other revolutionary currents in the play:

Overreach:          Mine own varlet
Rebel against me?
Marrall:                    Yes, and uncase you too.
The idiot; the patch; the slave; the booby;
The property fit only to be beaten
For your morning exercise; your football, or
Th' unprofitable lump of flesh; your drudge
Can now anatomize you, and lay open
All your black plots; and level with the earth
Your hill of pride; and with these gabions guarded,
Unload my great artillery, and shake,
Nay pulverize the walls you think defend you.

(V.i.213-223)⁴¹

Yet the levelers of the play can make no common cause: Marrall's revolt is merely against Sir Giles, and both are simply individualist anarchs. It was not until Congreve brought the two together in the character of the Double-Dealer, Maskwell, who combines something of Overreach's iconoclastic energy with Marrall's humiliated bitterness, that the English stage could produce a genuinely revolutionary comedy. Congreve, significantly, came from a social background very similar to Massinger's; but he wrote with two revolutions behind him—and even Maskwell had to be destroyed in the end.

A further uneasy ambiguity involves the problem of Overreach's own patriarchal authority; and this may be partly a function of Massinger's attempt to combine Jonsonian satire with a romantic comedy more immediately appealing to the Phoenix audience. The conventions of satire require that Marrall be thoroughly punished for his revolt; the conventions of comic romance require that Margaret be rewarded for hers. Massinger the conservative satirist is forced to argue that even the worst masters deserve to be obeyed, even while Massinger the romancer is vindicating the overthrow of tyrannical fathers. A sincere patriarchalist can hardly have it both ways, since the authority of fathers and masters is one and indivisible. But both ways are the way Massinger likes to have it: in The Roman Actor, for instance, a similar dilemma is resolved by a pious, but fundamentally evasive, appeal to legitimacy. The First Tribune acknowledges that Domitian was a tyrant who deserved his end, but warns his assassins that

                                        he was our prince,
However wicked; and, in you, 'tis murder,
Which whosoe'er succeeds him will revenge.

(Roman Actor, V.ii.77-79)

Moralists like Dod and Cleaver had insisted on the limits to patriarchal authority, especially in the matter of forced marriages:

This is a most unnaturall and cruell part, for parents to sell their children for gaine and lucre, and to marrie them when they list, without the good liking of their children, and so bring them into bondage … especially in this matter of greatest moment and value of all other worldly things whatsoever, let them … beware they turn not their fatherly jurisdiction and government, into a tyrannicall sourenesse and waywardnesse, letting their will go for a law. … the rule of parents over their children, ought to resemble the government of good Princes toward their subjects: that is to say, it must bee milde, gentle, and easie to be borne.⁴²

But children are granted no right of revolt against such bondage—“whatsoever they doe to their fathers and mothers … they doe it to God”—and those who marry without their parents' consent incur “the curse of God.”⁴³ Batty similarly insists that even foolish and crabbed parents must be obeyed, and inveighs against the impiety of “private spousages and secret contractes … enterprised and taken in hand without the consent of Parentes.”⁴⁴ Most patriarchal writing, however, admits an escape clause, and it is one which Massinger gratefully seizes upon. The child's final duty, after all, is to his Father in Heaven; and thus resistance becomes possible to parents or magistrates who command “wicked and ungodly things.” “Wee must obey God rather than man,” says Batty: “Honour thou thy father, so that he doth not separate thee from thy true father.”⁴⁵ From the moment Sir Giles orders Margaret to prostitute herself to Lovell, and she identifies the projected match as founded on “devilish doctrine” (III.ii.122), from the moment too at which Lovell, in confirmation, castigates the blasphemer's “atheistical assertions” (IV.i.154), we are meant to see that Overreach's government undermines the very foundations of patriarchal authority. No longer to be regarded as a natural father, he has become simply what Alworth called him, “Mammon in Sir Giles Overreach” (III.i.83).

The invocation of this Morality abstraction exactly anticipates the device by which Massinger seeks to bolster the uncertain ordering of his conclusion. That stroke of divine vengeance which suddenly paralyzes Overreach's sword arm—reminiscent of the astonishing coup by which D'Amville is made to dash out his own brains in the denouement of The Atheist's Tragedy—invites us to review the whole action in theological terms:

Here is a precedent to teach wicked men
That when they leave religion, and turn atheists
Their own abilities leave them.

(V.i.379-381)

In the light of this comfortable moralization a quasi-allegorical scheme begins to emerge by which the whole conclusion is seen to hang on three familiar parables. Most obviously Welborne's redemption from his life of prodigal abandon recalls the forgiveness accorded to another repentant prodigal in Christ's parable. Hungry and in rags in the opening scene, Welborne is the very image of the starving prodigal in Luke; Lady Alworth kills the fatted calf in the feasting which marks his readmission to the patriarchal society, while Sir Giles, that “scourge of prodigals” is ironically cozened into sharing the biblical father's role:

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.

(Luke 15:22)

Overreach similarly commands Marrall

                    go to my nephew;
See all his debts discharg'd, and help his worship
To fit on his rich suit.

(IV.i.33-35)

“This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (Luke 15:24); and Overreach, however hypocritically, acknowledges a similar resurrection of the nephew whose kinship he has once denied. At the same time the envy and astonishment of the elder brother at the restoration of his wastrel sibling is echoed in the baffled indignation of both Marrall and Overreach at Welborne's sudden elevation. Finally, Welborne's offer of “service” to Lovell and his king at the end of the play is a transposition of the prodigal's penitence:

I will arise and go to my father, and say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

(Luke 15:18-19)

The identification of “Mammon in Sir Giles Overreach” links the fable in turn to the parable which immediately follows the Prodigal Son in Luke—the Unjust Steward, a parable about the payment of debts and the morality of true service, which precisely anticipates the play's judgment of Marrall:

If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?

And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own?

No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

(Luke 16:11-13)

“I must grant /” Lady Alworth has reflected, as though with this passage in mind, “Riches well got to be a useful servant, / But a bad master” (IV.i.187-189). Sir Giles's own fate more loosely paraphrases the last of the parables in this series, that of Dives and Lazarus. The Overreach described by Furnace who “feeds high, keeps many servants … [is] rich in his habit; vast in his expenses” (II.ii.110-112) recalls that “rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19), spurning the beggar Welborne as Dives spurns the beggar Lazarus; and his desperate fate at the end of the play is equally suggestive. As Sir Giles is carried off to “some dark room” in Bedlam, his daughter reaches out to him—“O my dear father!” (V.i.378)—but between them, as between Dives and Lazarus, “there is a great gulf fixed:” Overreach, tormented by “furies, with steel whips / To scourge my ulcerous soul” (ll. 368-369) is already in hell.

In the end this invocation of a theological scheme is a kind of cheat designed to silence the awkward questions the play has raised. Who, finally, are the innovators in this social upheaval: the old gentry who contrive a deceitful “new ways” to pay their “old debts,” or Overreach, the proponent of contract and statute law? In The Merchant of Venice such questions are preempted by the triumphant appeal from Old Law to New which is implicit in the play's whole mythic structure: the Jonsonian realism of Massinger's satire forbids so nearly consistent a solution. Furthermore, the play's very conservatism has a revolutionary potential: Overreach, in many ways, is less a usurper than a legitimate patriarch who has tyrannically abused his powers and who accordingly is deposed. In the light of this we may remember that Coleridge thought Massinger “a decided whig,”⁴⁶ and that some dozen years after A New Way the dramatist's views on Charles's personal rule were to attract the indignation and censorship of the king himself.⁴⁷ Overreach's deposition, though carried out in the name of the old hierarchic order, has awkward contractual implications—implications of a kind which would be spelled out in the trial and execution of the royal patriarch, Charles I.

Outwardly, however, the social vision of the play remains impeccably conservative: once again the rigid and indiscriminate operation of law—the new way—is mitigated by the equity of communal obligation—the old debts. The patriarchal hierarchy is conceived not simply as a ladder of authority, but also as a family circle—a circle bound by Seneca's decorum of giving, receiving, and returning.⁴⁸ The symbol for that bonding, here as in The Merchant, is the ring. The ring with which Overreach unwittingly secures his daughter's marriage to young Alworth completes with benign irony a Senecan circle of obligation, by returning to Alworth the lands unjustly taken from his father. Another such circle, broken by the ingratitude of Tapwell and the unkindness of Overreach, is knit up in the restoration of Welborne—a restoration brought about through Lady Alworth's acknowledgment of obligations and determination to “redeem” what's past (I.iii.118-119). In the last analysis the play's “new way” (for all its witty duplicity) is an old way, the way of a vanishing society—new only by virtue of its unsatisfactory appeal to New Testament values against the Old (ironically epitomized in the “new man” Overreach). However harmonious the circles contrived in this old new way, they cannot, even in comic fantasy, contain those turbulent spirits whose rise would break the circle forever. Whatever was restored in 1660, it did not include an intact patriarchal ideology. The literature of the Restoration from Aureng-Zebe to Abasalom and Achitophel, from Venice Preserved to Love for Love, is full of failing patriarchs, enfeebled, corrupt, and ridiculous by turns. It contemplates a world where, in Otway's words, “the foundation's lost of common good” and that “dissolves all former bonds of service.”⁴⁹

Notes

1. A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (London, 1638), sig. A7.

2. Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ed. T. W. Craik, The New Mermaid ed. (London, 1964), pp. xii-xiii. All citations from A New Way are to this edition, referred to henceforth as “Craik.”

3. See L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1962), pp. 228-229. Cf. also Patricia Thomson, “The Old Way and the New Way in Dekker and Massinger,” MLR, LI (1956), 168-178.

4. See Craik, p. xiii, and Thomson, pp. 177-178.

5. Merchant of Venice, I.iii.11-15.

6. Cf. Knights, p. 233; and Thomson, p. 170.

7. Merchant, III.ii.57; IV.i.103, 142.

8. See for instance III.i.83, III.ii.120-122, IV.i. 149-157. He is not only Mammon, but in effect the true “spirit of lies” who has entered Marrall (III.ii.248). Cf. Knights, p. 232: “I do not think it is too much to say that he represents Avarice—one of the Seven Deadly Sins.”

9. For detailed accounts of seventeenth-century patriarchal thinking, see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975), and “Patriarchalism, Politics and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England,” Hist. Journ., XII (1969), 413-441.

10. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965).

11. Thomson, pp. 172-176.

12. Knights, p. 229 n.

13. The Communist Manifesto, quoted in Laslett, pp. 16-17.

14. Schochet, Patriarchalism, pp. 1, 55, 92-96. A classic statement of this position can be found in Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I.x.4.

15. Patriarchalism, p. 15; cf. also p. 64, and “Patriarchalism … and Mass Attitudes,” pp. 413-415, and W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics (London, 1964), pp. 88-89.

16. Patriarchalism, pp. 73 ff.

17. The Exposition went through eighteen printings by 1632, Houshold Government at least seven by 1630.

18. Bartholomew Batty, The Christian mans Closet, trans. William Lowth (London, 1581), Q3^v-R1^v.

19. Houshold Government, Y4; A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandements (London, 1618), p. 185.

20. Houshold Government, A8, V5-6, Z5-6.

21. Houshold Government, A8^v. Cf. also Bodin's description of the family as “the true image of a Commonweale,” cited in Greenleaf, p. 128.

22. Patriarchalism, p. 66.

23. Ibid., p. 26.

24. Laslett, p. 21. “One Out of Many,” the second section of V. S. Naipaul's novel, In A Free State (London, 1973), p. 37, gives an illuminating account of the trauma suffered by a man suddenly transferred from the anonymity of a communal culture to a contemporary individualist society. Santosh, the displaced Indian servant, recalls his master as “the man who adventured in the world for me … I experienced the world through him … I was content to be a small part of his presence.”

25. Compare Cicero, De officiis 3.6-7:

    for a man to take something from his neighbour and to profit by his neighbour's loss is more contrary to Nature than … anything else that can affect either our person or our property. For, in the first place, injustice is fatal to social life and fellowship between man and man. For, if we are so disposed that each, to gain some personal profit, will defraud or injure his neighbour, then those bonds of human society, which are most in accord with Nature's laws, must of necessity be broken … that is an absurd position which is taken by some people, who say that they will not rob a parent or a brother … but that their relation to the rest of their fellow-citizens is quite another thing. Such people contend in essence that they are bound to their fellow-citizens by no mutual obligations, social ties, or common interests. This attitude demolishes the whole structure of civil society.

    Quoted from the Loeb edition, trans. Walter Miller (London, 1961), pp. 289-295.

26. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 186.

27. See Walzer, p. 190.

28. Cf. Volpone, I.i.30-33:

                                                                                              I glory
    More in the cunning purchase of my wealth,
    Than in the glad possession, since I gain
    No common way.

29. Laslett, pp. 26-27.

30. In effect Overreach and Tapwell propound a secularized version of that Puritan attitude to the past so pithily expressed by Rev. John Stockwood in a Paul's Cross sermon in 1578, when he urged men with “earnest minds” not to be “blinded with those vain shadows of fathers, times and customs” (quoted in Walzer, p. 187). The families to which they are committed are significantly narrow, conjugal families of the type whose emergence Walzer connects with Puritan mores: where a child of the true patriarchal family was tied to the past by the bonds of “the old kinship system, [and] committed in advance to the family allies and followers” (p. 189), the members of the conjugal family are bound by no such absolute allegiances.

31. Houshold Government, F2, quoting Proverbs, 22:7.

32. Compare the autocratic leveling of the God imagined by Puritan “covenant theology”: “Through the covenant men became the ‘bondsmen’ of God—not the children—and the image implied the voluntary recognition of an existing debt, a legal or commercial obligation. God was the creditor of all men” (Walzer, p. 168; italics mine). Overreach once again resembles a secular caricature of Puritan doctrine, the legal bonds by which he attempts to build a society of creditors constituting a kind of blasphemous social covenant.

33. Cf. Exposition, p. 218: “The master therefore (that the house may be well ordered) must let everyone know his place and calling. … The house might be enriched, every thing might be done in good order, and would fall out in their just and due compasse, where every one were diligent in his place.”

34. Cf. Dekker's injunction in The Seven Deadly Sins of London: “Remember, O you rich men, that your servants are your adopted children; they are naturalized into your blood, and if you hurt theirs, you are guilty of letting your own” (quoted in Walzer, p. 189).

35. Once again the contrast recalls the Puritan attack on traditional political thought: Overreach's tyranny with its indifference to “fitting difference” resembles the leveling despotism of the Calvinist God (Walzer, pp. 151-152), while Lovell asserts the Anglican doctrine of hierarchy, in which “men of different degrees in the body politic related to one another in terms not of command and obedience, but rather of authority and reverence. Hierarchy depended on mutual recognition of personal place” (Walzer, p. 159). General slavery is also the condition to which Luke, the pious “hypocrite” of The City Madam seeks to reduce his enemies, while the virtuous Lord Lacy and Sir John Frugal combine to restore a sense of fitting “distance 'twixt the city and the court” (V.iii.156), and to reinstate the proper ordering of Frugal's patriarchal family. Both orders have been undermined by the tyrannic ambition of Lady Frugal and her daughters.

36. In his claim to the power of life and death over his child Overreach has the authority not only of Puritan divines like Perkins but of the Anglican convocation of 1606 (Walzer, pp. 185-191). Margaret, on the other hand, might appeal to the more liberal ethic of Seneca's De beneficiis 2.29 ff. which sharply contests the view that mere begetting is a benefit which no child can ever adequately repay.

37. Compare the conclusion to which Luke is ironically brought in The City Madam: “I care not where I go; what's done with words / Cannot be undone” (V.iii.147-148).

38. Houshold Government, E3-E3^v, quoting Proverbs 21:6 and 13.

39. Here once again Overreach's individualism turns him into a kind of monstrous inversion of the alienated Puritan saint as Walzer describes him—the wanderer, cut off from family and kin, a self-chosen “masterless man” turning his back on the cries of his wife and children in his remorseless quest for salvation.

40. Ironically, he makes the same foolish confusion as is fostered by Lady Frugal: Milliscent flatters her mistress's pride with the hope

                        to see
    A country knight's son and heir walk bare before you
    When you are a countess,

    while she herself expects to “take the upper hand of a squire's wife, through justice” (City Madam, I.i.71-77). Luke Frugal similarly promises to revive “the memory / Of the Roman matrons who kept captive queens / To be their handmaids” (City Madam, III.ii. 162-164). Massinger's revolutionaries (like the Commonwealth leaders after them) can still conceive of social change only within the framework of what Andrew Sharp has called “heraldic definition.” See Andrew Sharp, “Edward Waterhouse's View of Social Change in Seventeenth Century England,” Past and Present, LXII (1974), 27-46.

41. Compare Greedy's marvelous comical iconoclasm when Lovell offers his hand:

    This is a lord, and some think this a favour;
    But I had rather have my hand in a dumpling.

    (III.ii.165-166)

42. Houshold Government, V5^v-V7. Walzer, pp. 193-196, notes the way in which the Puritan insistence on voluntary marriage tended to “subtly … undermine” the authority of parents which they ostensibly maintained.

43. Houshold Government, Y4-Z1.

44. Batty, S4^v,Bb4. Cf. George Wither's Fidelia in which the poet inveighs against parental tyranny:

    For though the will of our Creator binds
    Each child to learn and know his parents' minds,
    Yet sure am I so just a deity
    Commandeth nothing against piety.

    (Quoted in Walzer, p. 194)

    For a thoroughgoing patriarchalist like Filmer, on the other hand, no such qualification of authority is possible. Filmer maintained: “1. That there is no form of government, but monarchy only. 2. That there is no monarchy but paternal. 3. That there is no paternal monarchy, but absolute, or arbitrary. 4. That there is no such thing as an aristocracy or democracy. 5. That there is no such form of government as a tyranny. 6. That the people are not born free by nature” (quoted in Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, p. 115).

45. Batty, S3^v-S4^v.

46. Quoted in John Danby, Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (London, 1965), p. 184.

47. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), p. 55.

48. Seneca, De beneficiis I.3.2-5.

49. Venice Preserved, ed. Malcolm Kelsall, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln, Nebr., 1969), I.i.201, 211.