Philip Massinger: Selected Plays

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Philip Massinger was one of the most prolific and formally accomplished of the Jacobean playwrights, yet he has been consistently undervalued relative to his contemporaries. This Symons selection includes A New Way to Pay Old Debts — Massinger's most celebrated play and one of the great comic villain roles in the English canon: Sir Giles Overreach, a rapacious landgrabber who destroys everyone around him in his hunger for social advancement. The play had enormous success in the nineteenth century, with both Kean and Garrick playing Overreach to great effect. Massinger's range, from dark tragicomedy to moral satire, deserves wider recognition.