Philip Massinger (born 1583) was the son of a gentleman patronized by the noble house of Pembroke. The poet was educated at St. Alban Hall, Oxford, but left without taking a degree (1606). He had fallen into debt, and commenced play-writing in 1614; his earliest known piece, in which Dekker took part, "The Virgin Martyr," was acted in 1622. The period represented is that of the persecution under Diocletian, and the piece is old-fashioned enough; introducing the angelic companion of St. Dorothea, and the devil who attends the persecutor, Theophilus, a very late convert. Torture is introduced on the stage, and Theophilus slays his daughters, whom he had tortured out of Christianity back into the Olympian faith, and whom Dorothea reconverts by arguments with which they must already have long been familiar. There is a tendency to credit Dekker both with the most gracious passages of verse in the piece and with the stupid but energetic ribaldries of Hircius and Spungius. "The Unnatural Combat" (duel between a son and a father who rivals Cenci in Shelley's tragedy), "The Duke of Milan," with a most unnatural plot, "The Roman Actor," "The Fatal Dowry," are among Massinger's tragedies; some twelve of his plays were burned in manuscript by Betty Baker, or Barnes, the cook of Warburton, the herald. If they contained such scenes as that of "the ghost of young Malefort," slain by his father, "naked from the waist, full of wounds, leading in the Shadow of a lady, her face leprous," our regret for them may not be overwhelming. We have plays enough in which a man is poisoned by the venomed paint on a canvas or on a dead lady's face; plays enough in which victims (as in "The Roman Actor") are cruelly tortured on the stage. That Massinger has noble passages and great _tirades_ is undeniable, and he is one of the four or five successors of Shakespeare who are said by their admirers to follow most closely in his footsteps. The play which keeps Massinger's memory green in common recollection is his "A New Way to pay Old Debts". The great part is that of Sir Giles Overreach, a financial ruffian, suggested probably by a real character equally nefarious, Sir Giles Mompesson. A victim of Overreach's in his own nephew, Wellborn, and the play shows how Wellborn, with the aid of a rich and virtuous widow, Lady Allworth, cozens Overreach into advancing money; how his creature, Marrall, chouses him; and how his daughter, Margaret, marries young Allworth, and not the peer for whom the usurer designed her. Described as "both lion and fox," Overreach, always ready to fight, is more successful in the furious than in the furtive part of his nature. He bullies man and defies God in seeking satisfaction of his two chief desires, to ruin and humiliate his social superiors and to plunder the widow and the orphan or any other victim whose loss may be his gain.