The Renegado is one of the most shamelessly entertaining plays of its age, fetching its inspiration from a number of works by Cervantes, based on his own experiences as a captive in Algiers. Introducing the eroticized captivity narrative to the English stage, Massinger's tragicomedy combines it with the long-popular romance motif of a Christian hero's conquest of an exotic princess. But even as it indulges in romantic fantasy, The Renegado engages with contentious issues of national and international politics, offering a provocative response to the sectarian feuds dividing England in the 1620s, while exploiting wider European fears of the expansionist Muslim empire of the Ottomans. Through its treatment of religious confrontation and conversion, Massinger's play offers important insights into early modern constructions of the Islamic world, and emerges as a piece with unexpected resonances for our own time.
This is the first major single-volume edition of
The Renegado, making it properly available to all students and teachers of early modern drama. With detailed on-page commentary notes and an illustrated introduction assessing its impact on the Renaissance stage as well as its particular relevance to our contemporary multi-cultural society, it is a stimulating and original teaching edition.
An extract from Cervantes'
The Prisons of Algiers, a key source for the play, is given in an appendix and the whole Cervantes text is available on the Arden website as an additional resource.
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.
Neill, Michael: - Michael Neillis Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Issues of Death(1997) and Putting History to the Question (2000). He has edited Anthony and Cleopatra (1994) and Othello (2006) for the Oxford Shakespeare, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (2006) for New Mermaids, Massinger's The Renegado (2010) for Arden Early Modern Drama, and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (2013) for Norton Critical editions. He is currently preparing Webster's The Duchess of Malfi for Norton, and co-editing The Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy (with David Schalkwyk).
