A New Source for Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence (1627)

Abstract

Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence is a lively tragicomedy licensed for performance in 1627. Its title situates the play among the works related to or featuring members of the Medici family through the reference to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a title which was bestowed on Cosimo I by Pope Pius V in 1569. This corpus of plays, delineated by T. S. R. Boase and Lisa Hopkins, includes several dramatic texts, ranging from Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1593) to John Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1636), which closes the cycle of Medici-inspired plays.1 As Philip Edwards and Colin A. Gibson rightly argue, the main source of Massinger’s play is A Knack to Know a Knave (1592), whose language is echoed throughout.2 On the other hand, the tragicomedy also reveals some interest in Italian history, even though historical exactitude was not Massinger’s concern. Given the historical inaccuracy, Boase deems the Florentine setting of the play as ‘a world of complete fantasy’.3 Edwards and Gibson, instead, observe that Massinger conflated different phases of the Medici history, boldly treating ‘a traditional fiction as though it were comparatively recent European history (Cosimo I was Duke of Florence from 1537−74; Cosimo II from 1609−1621)’.4 Matthew Steggle sees the tragicomedy as a broad dramatization of the life of Cosimo I but does not corroborate his observation.5 As I argue, some textual evidence from the play may support this claim and demonstrate that Massinger relied on a historiographical source which has not been identified so far. Massinger’s choice to portray a specific phase of Medicean history was not fortuitous. He precisely selected the Medici ruler who could be the best mirror for the English monarchy in 1627: for King Charles I, who was in the first years of his reign when the play was performed, and his Queen Henrietta Maria, whose mother, Marie de’ Medici, belonged to the Italian dynasty protagonist of the tragicomedy. Massinger’s concerns for morality and decency, as well as his religious and political positions, must have driven his choice of Cosimo I as a model for the protagonist of his tragicomedy.