Giles Overreach, brings about his employer's
discomfiture, regardless of his own ruin, is very like the denouement of
the Brass and Quilp part of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, may have suggested it
(for _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_ lasted as an acting play well into
Dickens's time), and, like it, is a little improbable. But the play is an
admirable one, and Overreach (who, as is well known, was supposed to be a
kind of study of his half namesake, Mompesson, the notorious monopolist) is
by far the best single character that Massinger ever drew. He again came
close to true comedy in _The City Madam_, another of the best known of his
plays, where the trick adopted at once to expose the villainy of the
apparently reformed spendthrift Luke, and to abate the ruinous extravagance
of Lady Frugal and her daughters, is perhaps not beyond the limits of at
least dramatic verisimilitude, and gives occasion to some capital scenes.
_The Bondman_, _The Renegado_, the curious _Parliament of Love_, which,
like others of Massinger's plays, is in an almost AEschylean state of
text-corruptness, _The Great Duke of Florence_, _The Maid of Honour_ (one
of the very doubtful evidences of Massinger's supposed conversion to Roman
Catholicism), _The Picture_ (containing excellent passages, but for
improbability and topsy-turviness of incident ranking with _The Duke of
Milan_), _The Emperor of the East_, _The Guardian_, _A Very Woman_, _The
Bashful Lover_, are all plays on which, if there were space, it would be
interesting to comment; and they all display their author's strangely mixed
merits and defects. _The Roman Actor_ and _The Fatal Dowry_ must have a
little more attention. The first is, I think, Massinger's best tragic
effort; and the scene where Domitian murders Paris, with his tyrannical
explanation of the deed, shows a greater conception of tragic poetry--a
little cold and stately, a little Racinish or at least Cornelian rather
than Shakesperian, but still passionate and worthy of the tragic
stage--than anything that Massinger has done. _The Fatal Dowry_, written in
concert with Field and unceremoniously pillaged by Rowe in his once famous
_Fair Penitent_, is a purely romantic tragedy, injured by the unattractive
character of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance (Massinger
never could draw a woman), and by not a few of the author's favourite
improbabilities and glaring or rather startling non-sequiturs of action,
but full also of fin