Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/651

Rh remarkable play to have appeared suddenly amidst the run of secular pieces. It seems to have been popular, and was several times reprinted before the Restoration. That the Renegado should have found favour is still more remarkable. In itself it is a powerfully constructed play, strong in character and incident. Massinger's leaning to Roman doctrine is supposed to be shown by his making one of his heroines—a converted Turk, a sultan's sister—experience complete spiritual transformation after receiving the rite of baptism. But there is a more suggestive and stranger fact than this. The hero of the piece, Francisco, is a Jesuit priest, treated with profound respect throughout, a man of noble unselfish aims, running all risks to save and gain souls, exercising the strongest moral influence for the wisest and most benevolent purposes. Francisco's influence pervades the play, and is crowned with triumph at the end. He sails back to Venice with a noble lady rescued from the infidel, her virtue protected by an amulet during her captivity, a renegade military hero restored to his country and the church, a noble Venetian rescued from spiritual and physical perils, the beautiful sister of the sultan converted to Christianity. That a London audience should have tolerated this glorification of a Jesuit within twenty years of the Gunpowder Plot is an extraordinary fact, of which the explanation is still to seek. In the Maid of Honour the heroine relieves a highly complicated situation at the end by taking the veil, giving a third of her property to a nunnery, a third for pious uses, and a third to an honest, faithful, but to her unattractive lover. For this she is held up as "to all posterity a fair example for noble maids to imitate." Only an audience of very pious Catholics could have sympathized with such a conclusion.

Such plays show that Massinger, if not a Roman Catholic, was at least not blinded by the popular hatred of them, but could dwell in rapt admiration on what was noble and lofty in the motives supplied by the Roman Church. The strange thing is that he found a manager to produce these plays, or an audience to tolerate them. It may be doubted whether Massinger was ever a popular dramatist. His poverty is not indeed conclusive on this point, for the prices paid for plays were so small that a dramatist could hardly make a livelihood by play writing, unless he was also an actor or a theatrical manager. But the best qualities of his plays appeal rather to thoughtful politicians, moralists, and students of character than to the simple feelings of the ordinary playgoer. Only one of them, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (printed 1633), has kept the stage, and that chiefly because the leading character, Sir Giles Overreach, a sort of commercial Richard III., a compound of "the lion and the fox," provides many opportunities for a great actor. Like all Massinger's plays, it is most ingenious and effective in construction, but in this as in others he has been more intent upon the elaboration of a plot and the exhibition of a ruling passion than upon winning the love and admiration of his audience for heroes and heroines. The other personages besides Sir Giles are either conventional comic figures, or dim, feebly outlined, uninteresting characters. The reformed prodigal and the two pairs of lovers who outwit the cunning diplomatist by simple means seem poor, joyless, bloodless phantoms when put side by side with the rich life of Shakespeare's youthful lovers and reckless scapegraces, they are mere foils to Overreach; their life is not displayed, it is only indicated in the dialogue. With the exception of this play, all Massinger's have been relegated to the study since his own time. The Fatal Dowry (printed 1632), in which Massinger had the assistance of Field, was partially resuscitated by Rowe, being made the basis of the Fair Penitent. In Massinger's own judgment, the Roman Actor was "the most perfect birth of his Minerva." It is in effect a study of the tyrant Domitian, and of the results of despotic rule on the despot himself and his court; the intrigues and counter intrigues, the rise of sycophancy, the fall of honesty, the growth of the appetite for blood, the growth and final triumph of the spirit of revenge, are exhibited with great power. Among the dramatists of that great period, Massinger comes next to Shakespeare in the art of opening and developing a plot. The Bondman, the Duke of Milan, and the Great Duke of Florence are also favourable specimens of Massinger's power. But what was said by one of his admirers in the dedication of the City Madam is perfectly true, that, "though he composed many plays, he wrote none amiss." The manners and the characters are always clearly conceived, although the dramatist's strength is put forth in the portrayal of some one ruling passion. The action always marches forward steadily, with as little as possible of irrelevant digression; so steadily in fact is the main purpose pursued as to produce a certain air of labour and constraint. The language is never mean, and never turgid; in impassioned situations it wants fire and directness. If the stage were ever deliberately employed as an historical school, frequented by audiences anxious to get a clear and vivid impression of important situations, going to the theatre not to be interested against their will but willing to be interested, the dramas of Massinger would furnish excellent models.

Several of Massinger's plays are no longer extant. Eight of them were among those destroyed by Warburton's cook. The most recent edition of those remaining, nineteen in number, is Cunningham's (1870). Gifford edited Massinger with great care.

 MASSORAH (םםרה), better (מםרמ), a late Hebrew word meaning "tradition," is the technical term specially applied to the tradition by which Jewish scholars (Massorets, בטלי הםםרמ) sought to fix the correct writing and reading of the text of the Old Testament. An oral tradition on disputed points of this sort naturally existed from the early days of the Jewish schools, but the use of a written Massorah in notes on the margin of Bibles, at the end of Biblical codices or of the individual books contained in them, or in separate works appears to have followed the introduction of the vowel points, and to have been influenced by similar labours of Syrian scholars. See, vol. xi p. 600.

MASSOWAH, or, a town on the Abyssinian coast of the Red Sea, on a small coral island of the same name, in 15° 30′ N. lat. and 39° 30′ E. long. The height of the island is from 20 to 25 feet above the sea, the length does not exceed mile, and the breadth is about mile. The western half is occupied by the town; in the eastern half are Mohammedan burying-grounds and dismantled cisterns. Most of the dwelling-houses are mere straw huts; the mosque, the Roman Catholic church, the Government buildings and custom-house, and the residences of the principal merchants are of stone. Water was formerly scarce, and had for the most part to be carried from the mainland; but in 1872 an ancient aqueduct from Mokullu was restored, and continued by an embankment to the town. Besides the original Ethiopians, who speak a Tigré dialect corrupted with Arabic, the population, estimated at from 5000 to 6000, comprises Arabs from Yemen and Hadramaut, Gallas and Somalis, and Hindus from Surat. The trade, which consists mainly in exporting hides, butter, Abyssinian coffee, and civet, and importing European and Indian cotton goods and silks, increased in value from about £65,000 per annum in 1865 to from £240,000 to £280,000 between 1879 and 1881.

The island of Massowah (locally Base) has probably been inhabited from a very early date. It was at Massowah (Matzua, as they called it) that the Portuguese landed in 1542 under Christovão da Gama. Captured by the Turks in 1557, the island has remained more or less strictly a Turkish possession ever since. A military colony of Bosnians settled at Arkiko was appointed, not only to defend it in case of attack from the mainland, but to keep it supplied with water in return for $1400 per month from the town's customs. For some time in the close of last century Massowah was held by the sherif of Mecca, and it afterwards passed under Mehemet Ali of Egypt. The Turks were reinstated about 1850, but in 1865 they handed the island back to Egypt for an annual tribute of 2 million piastres.

See Bruce's Travels, vol. iv.; Heuglin in Petermann's Mittheilungen, 1860; Rassam, ''Brit. Mission to Abyssinia, 1869; Pennazzi in Nuova Antologia'', July 1880.

