The Virgin Martyr
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The Virgin Martyr is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy written by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, and first published in 1622. It constitutes a rare instance in Massinger's canon in which he collaborated with a member of the previous generation of English Renaissance dramatists – those who began their careers in the 1590s, the generation of Shakespeare, Lyly, Marlowe and Peele.
The play was licensed for performance on 6 October 1620; the license refers to a "reforming" of the play, which has been taken to indicate an element of censorship. The work was reportedly staged at the Red Bull Theatre.
The play was popular, and was revived during the Restoration era, in 1661 and 1668, when it was seen by Samuel Pepys. John Dryden was influenced by the Dekker/Massinger play in writing his Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (1669).
The Virgin Martyr was published in quarto in 1622, with subsequent quarto editions in 1631, 1651, and 1661. The 1661 quarto, a reprint of the 1651 text, was "the only play by Massinger to be printed without alteration during the Restoration period."[1]
Collaboration
Scholars have disputed the nature of that collaboration: it has been suggested that the extant text may be a revision by Massinger of the lost play Diocletian (1594).[2] Others have doubted this hypothesis, since it supposes that Dekker wrote the lost Diocletian, a conclusion for which there is no evidence. And since Diocletian is a secondary figure in The Virgin Martyr, it can make as much sense to suppose that the two are completely different plays.
Critics have tended to argue that Dekker most likely wrote the prose comedy scenes in the play, while Massinger concentrated on the main plot. Some have also seen Dekker's hand in the title role of Dorothea. Massinger would return to the subject of Diocletian's reign two years after this play, in The Prophetess, one of his collaborations with John Fletcher.
Sources
The play's central event, the martyrdom of St. Dorothea of Caesarea, is mentioned by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs. Robert S. Miola claims that Dekker and Massinger modeled their play on the Mercia of Joseph Simon, a tragedia sacra on Saint Chad.[3] However, that argument is implausible: Mercia by Joseph Simons was published only in 1648.[4]
Genre
The Virgin Martyr has been categorized as a "saint's play" or tragedia sacra, a dramatic form that evolved in Roman Catholic societies after the Counter-Reformation, but was generally unknown in Protestant England. The work has been called "the only post-Reformation saint's play on the London stage before the theatres were closed in 1642."[5] Critics have disagreed as to whether the play indicates something about the personal faith of the authors; it has sometimes been taken as an indication of Massinger's supposed Catholicism, though other commentators have considered the play a work of superficial and sensational entertainment, produced "for exclusively theatrical purposes"[6] with no larger religious meaning. (If the play had been perceived as pro-Catholic in its own era, it would not have been allowed on the stage.)
The play presents several challenging aspects. It is generally classed as a tragedy, since the protagonist dies at the end – but the spiritual message of the play complicates the normal catharsis of tragedy. (If Sophocles or Shakespeare showed Oedipus or Hamlet returning as a happy ghost at the end of his play, the drama in question would be very different.) The Virgin Martyr presents problems of staging, such as the appearance of an "invisible" angel in Act IV. In his edition of Massinger's works, William Gifford notes that the Admiral's Men had among their props a "robe for to go invisible." Gifford speculates that "It was probably of a light gauzy texture, and afforded a sufficient hint to our good-natured ancestors, not to see the character invested with it."[7] The same or a similar effect could have been employed in The Virgin Martyr.
The subject matter of the play, Christian conversion and martyrdom, is almost guaranteed to provoke passionate and extreme reactions. A few have classed the play among Massinger's best works; yet Charles Kingsley called it "one of the foulest plays known," one that "contains the most supra-lunar rosepink of piety, devotion and purity" coupled with "the stupidest abominations of any extant play."[8] Modern critics have focused a more tempered attention on the play's religious and spiritual themes.[9]
Music
The play was also associated with dramatic and innovative uses of music in its productions. Its music inspired one of the most striking entries in Pepys' Diary: "but that which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world was the wind-musique when the Angell comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me; and endeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife."[10] (Pepys was then unfamiliar with the exotic sounds of the recorder, a rare instrument in England at the time.)[11]