Believe as You List

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Believe as You List is a Caroline era tragedy by Philip Massinger.

The play originally dealt with the legend that Sebastian of Portugal had survived the battle of Alcácer Quibir, and the efforts of Philip II of Spain to suppress the "false Sebastians." On January 11, 1631, Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, noted in his records that he refused to license the play because "it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian, king of Portugal, by Philip the Second...." To avoid the censor, Massinger was obliged to move the setting of his play to the ancient world, substituting the Roman Republic for Spain and an Asiatic King Antiochus for Sebastian. (This may have been partially inspired by the post-defeat career of Hannibal.)

The revised play was licensed by the Master of the Revels on May 6, 1631, and was premiered the next day, May 7, by the King's Men. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register twice, on September 9, 1653 and June 29, 1660, but never printed in the 17th century. For several decades in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, it was generally believed that the play was lost, destroyed in John Warburton's kitchen; but a manuscript of the play was discovered in 1844, and published in 1849. The still-extant autograph manuscript, preserved in the British Museum, reveals the play's revision: at a few points Massinger lapsed and used the original names of characters and settings, and then corrected them — with "Sebastian" twice, "Venice" instead of "Carthage", and similar slips.

Scholars and critics have remarked on the play's debt to the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, and have observed a close relationship between Massinger's play and John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, though it is uncertain which play preceded the other.[1]

The play was revived in 2005 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, under the title Believe What You Will. As the original has not survived in its entirety, pastiche period verse was composed to fill the gaps, and the restored script published under the new title.

[edit] Synopsis

Antiochus, defeated and deposed by Roman armies 22 years earlier, comes out of hiding and travels from court to court around the Mediterranean; but the Roman envoy Flamininus manages to bully or bribe every potential ally into rejecting him, until he has nowhere to turn. In the first version, Sebastian was counselled by a hermit, suggestive (perhaps) of Massinger's (alleged) Roman Catholicism; in the revised text, the hermit is replaced by a Stoic philosopher.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Logan and Smith, p. 100.

[edit] References

  • Clark, Ira. The Moral Art of Philip Massinger. Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 1993.
  • Guildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron. Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama. New York, Columbia University Press, 1908.
  • Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.