The Bondman (play)
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The Bondman is a later Jacobean-era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger, first published in 1624. The play has been called "the finest of the more serious tragicomedies" of Massinger.[1]
The Bondman was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 3 December 1623, as The Noble Bondman, and was acted by the Lady Elizabeth's Men at the Cockpit Theatre, and also performed for the Court at Whitehall Palace. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 12 March the following year, 1624, and published soon after in a quarto printed by Edward Allde for the booksellers John Harrison and Edward Blackmore. A second quarto appearing in 1638. Massinger dedicated the play to Philip Herbert, then the Earl of Montgomery and later Earl of Pembroke and Lord Chancellor. Massinger had an important and long-standing connection with the Herbert family through his father. (The play was a "modest success...in untying the purse strings of Philip Herbert" and winning Massinger some patronage support.)[2]
The drama proved popular in its own era and long after. William Cartwright depended heavily upon it when writing his own drama The Royal Slave (1636). The Bondman was revived during the Restoration era; in the first years of the 1660s it was performed repeatedly by several companies, Killigrew's King's Company, Davenant's Duke's Company, John Rhodes's troupe, and perhaps George Jolly's too.[3]
Samuel Pepys saw the play in 1661, and praised Thomas Betterton's performance as Pisander. Betterton played the role at Drury Lane as late as 1719. Richard Cumberland produced an adaptation that was staged at Covent Garden in 1769. Later, a segment of Act I, scene iii was abstracted for its patriotic message and distributed as a broadside prior to the expected invasion of Napoleon.[4]