The “Turks,” Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado

No one seems to have had any doubts about Philip Massinger’s politics. That politics has consistently been read in terms of commitment to war against Spain, critique of court favorites, and condemnation of unparliamentary taxation and excessive wresting of the prerogative. In many ways, this reading has remained unchallenged since the late nineteenth century, when S. R. Gardiner argued that “the political element in Massinger” consisted of support for the restitution of the Palatinate and a critique of Stuart prerogative politics—policies Gardiner associated with “Massinger’s patron,” the earl of Pembroke. Since Gardiner, political readings of Massinger—by Martin Butler, Jerzy Limon, Margot Heinemann—have all situated him among the “opposition” dramatists, as a parliamentarian and a supporter of the international Protestant cause.¹