The Excellent Comedy, Called the Old Law: Or, a New Way to Please You [in Five Acts, in Verse and Prose] by Phil Massinger, T. Middleton, W. Rowley ... to

Publisher Marketing: Title: The excellent comedy, called The Old Law: or, a new way to please you [in five acts, in verse and prose] by Phil Massinger, T. Middleton, W. Rowley ... Together with an exact and perfect catalogue of all the playes, with the authors names, etc. Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. The POETRY & DRAMA collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The books reflect the complex and changing role of literature in society, ranging from Bardic poetry to Victorian verse. Containing many classic works from important dramatists and poets, this collection has something for every lover of the stage and verse. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Massinger, Philip; Middleton, Thomas; Rowley, William; 1656. 4 . Ashley1126. Contributor Bio:  Massinger, Philip Philip Massinger was born in Salisbury in 1583, the son of a Wiltshire family (the surname is often spelled Messenger). His father was employed in the household of Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, at Wilton, his office being that of house-steward and agent to the Earl. Massinger was educated probably first at Salisbury grammar school, and afterwards at Oxford, which he left without a degree for reasons unknown. By 1613 he was writing plays for the theatre-manager Henslowe, to whom he applied for money when imprisoned with two fellow-dramatists Daborne and Field for debt. It is estimated that in some thirty years Massinger either wrote or had a hand in some 53 plays. His earliest collaborations and original plays were written for the King's Men, the company of which Shakespeare had been a member and a writer, playing at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. John Fletcher had succeeded Shakespeare as the King's Men's principal dramatist, and it was Fletcher with whom Massinger chiefly collaborated, Fletcher from whom he learnt much of his dramatic art, and Fletcher whom he succeeded in 1626 (after a short period of writing for the Queen's Men, playing at the Cockpit, or, as it was called when rebuilt after a fire, the Phoenix). He died in 1640 and was buried in Fletcher's grave in Southwark Cathedral. Massinger's works include the romances "The Duke of Milan" (1620), "The Great Duke of Florence "(1627), and "The Roman Actor" (1626), the comedies "The City Madam "(1632) and "The Guardian" (1633), and the tragicomedies "The Bondman" (1623) and "The Renegado" (1624). He also collaborated on 11 plays with John Fletcher, and may possibly have had a hand in Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Henry VIII" and" The Two Noble Kinsmen". Contributor Bio:  Middleton, Thomas Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist, born in 1572. Possibly of Dutch origin, very little is known of Dekker's early life and education. His career in the theatre began in the mid-1590s but it is unclear how or why Dekker came to write for the stage. By that time he was odd-jobbing for various London theatre companies, including both the Admiral's Men and its rivals the Lord Chamberlain's Men; he probably joined the large team of playwrights, including Shakespeare, who penned the controversial drama Sir Thomas More around this time. Dekker struggled to make ends meet, however, and in 1598 he was imprisoned for debt. 1599 was, by contrast, an annus mirabilis for Dekker. The theatrical entrepreneur and impresario of the Admiral's Men, Philip Henslowe, lists payments to Dekker that year for contributions to no fewer than eleven plays; two of these, Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker's Holiday, were selected to be performed at Court during the Queen's Christmas festivals. Dekker received royal favour again after the death of Elizabeth and the accession of King James I in 1603 when he was contracted with Ben Jonson to write the ceremonial entertainments for James's coronation procession through London. He was sorely in need of such commissions; the playhouses were closed for much of this year because of a plague outbreak that killed as many as a quarter of London's population. During the outbreak, he retooled himself as a writer of satires - a genre in which he had acquired some dramatic experience in 1602, when he penned Satiromastix, a play that took aim at Ben Jonson (who had lampooned him the previous year in Poetaster). Dekker's prose satires about the plague year reveal a new skill for gritty reportage and sympathetic attention to the enormous sufferings of the afflicted. He repeatedly returned to this genre when he was prevented, whether by theatre closures or by imprisonment, from writing for the stage. Like The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker's plays in the years of James's reign tend to dramatize the stories of citizens. And they again display a sympathetic fascination with socially marginal characters, often women - a prostitute (The Honest Whore, co-written with Thomas Middleton, 1604), a transvestite (The Roaring Girl, 1611, also co-written with Middleton), and a witch (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621, co-written with John Ford and William Rowley). But Dekker's financial woes continued through these years, and he was once more imprisoned for debt between 1612 and 1619, a harrowing experience that he later claimed turned his hair white. Upon his release, he continued to write plays, citizen pageants, and prose pamphlets, but he never enjoyed the success of his earlier years. He died, leaving his widow no estate except his writings, in 1632. Contributor Bio:  Rowley, William John Ford (1586-1639) was an English playwright whose works have often been cited as examples of the 'decadence' of Caroline Drama. In the 19th century he was admired by Charles Lamb but attacked by William Hazlitt and others, who accused him of lacking a sense of morality. However, many 20th-century critics have praised his insight into character and his skill in writing dialogueHis best known play is the bloody tragedy '"Tis Pity She's a Whore" (1627). Other works inlcude "Love's Sacrifice "(1627), the tragicomedy "The Lover's Melancholy" (1628), and "Perkin Warbeck "(1634), described by T. S. Eliot as "one of the very best historical plays in the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama."