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Believe as You List
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Believe as You List
Believe as You List is a Caroline era tragedy by Philip Massinger, famous as a case of theatrical censorship.
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 11 January 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, and there being a peace sworn between the kings of England and Spain." To avoid the censor, Massinger was obliged to move the setting of his play to the ancient world, substituting ancient Rome for Spain and a Seleucid King Antiochus for Sebastian.
The revised play was licensed by the Master of the Revels on 6 May 1631, and was premiered the next day, 7 May, by the King's Men. (If the play was intended for the winter season, it was meant for the Blackfriars Theatre. The troupe's summer season at the Globe Theatre is thought to have begun in May, and the play may have been staged there instead.)
In place of the genuine contemporary history of Sebastian, Massinger had to concoct a substitute story in the ancient world. He imagined Antiochus III the Great as having been completely defeated by the Romans in the Battle of Thermopylae (191 BC), to the point of losing his throne and becoming an exile and a wanderer (something far from the actual truth). Antiochus's career in the play resembles that of Hannibal after the Second Punic War: Antiochus travels from state to state around the Mediterranean, looking for sanctuary and support; but the Romans manage to bully or bribe potential allies 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.
Massinger's source for the original drama about Sebastian was likely Edward Grimeston's General History of Spain (1612). The original version of the play must have treated one of the Sebastian pretenders as genuine. There were at least four such pretenders, and men were executed in 1594 and 1605 for claiming to be the Portuguese king. For the revised version, Massinger used Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World and Plutarch's Life or Titus Flaminius.
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.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register twice, on 9 September 1653 and 29 June 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. Massinger re-copied the play into its second Antiochus version; but still-extant autograph manuscript, now MS. Egerton 2828 in the collection of 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, and "Venice" instead of "Carthage." Damage from damp makes portions of the MS. illegible.
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Believe as You List
Believe as You List is a Caroline era tragedy by Philip Massinger, famous as a case of theatrical censorship.
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 11 January 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, and there being a peace sworn between the kings of England and Spain." To avoid the censor, Massinger was obliged to move the setting of his play to the ancient world, substituting ancient Rome for Spain and a Seleucid King Antiochus for Sebastian.
The revised play was licensed by the Master of the Revels on 6 May 1631, and was premiered the next day, 7 May, by the King's Men. (If the play was intended for the winter season, it was meant for the Blackfriars Theatre. The troupe's summer season at the Globe Theatre is thought to have begun in May, and the play may have been staged there instead.)
In place of the genuine contemporary history of Sebastian, Massinger had to concoct a substitute story in the ancient world. He imagined Antiochus III the Great as having been completely defeated by the Romans in the Battle of Thermopylae (191 BC), to the point of losing his throne and becoming an exile and a wanderer (something far from the actual truth). Antiochus's career in the play resembles that of Hannibal after the Second Punic War: Antiochus travels from state to state around the Mediterranean, looking for sanctuary and support; but the Romans manage to bully or bribe potential allies 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.
Massinger's source for the original drama about Sebastian was likely Edward Grimeston's General History of Spain (1612). The original version of the play must have treated one of the Sebastian pretenders as genuine. There were at least four such pretenders, and men were executed in 1594 and 1605 for claiming to be the Portuguese king. For the revised version, Massinger used Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World and Plutarch's Life or Titus Flaminius.
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.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register twice, on 9 September 1653 and 29 June 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. Massinger re-copied the play into its second Antiochus version; but still-extant autograph manuscript, now MS. Egerton 2828 in the collection of 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, and "Venice" instead of "Carthage." Damage from damp makes portions of the MS. illegible.