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124 The Renaissance 1485–1660<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS I am sure villainous ones, sir.<br />

FOLLYWIT Some raw, simple fools?<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS Nay, by th’ mass, these were enough for thievish<br />

knaves.<br />

FOLLYWIT What, sir?<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS Which way came you, gentlemen? You could not<br />

choose but meet ’em.<br />

FOLLYWIT We met a company with hampers after ’em.<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS Oh, those were they, those were they, a pox<br />

hamper ’em!<br />

FOLLYWIT [aside] Bless us all again!<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS They have hamper’d me finely, sirrah.<br />

FOLLYWIT How, sir?<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS How, sir? I lent the rascals properties to furnish<br />

out their play, a chain, a jewel, and a watch, and they watch’d<br />

their time and rid quite away with ’em.<br />

FOLLYWIT Are they such creatures?<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS Hark, hark, gentlemen! By this light, the watch rings<br />

alarum in his pocket! There’s my watch come again, or the very<br />

cousin-german to ’t. Whose is ’t, whose is ’t? By th’ mass, ’tis he;<br />

hast thou one, son? Prithee bestow it upon thy grandsire. I now<br />

look for mine again, i’ faith. Nay, come with a good will or not at<br />

all; I’ll give thee a better thing. A prize, a prize, gentlemen!<br />

HAREBRAIN Great or small?<br />

SIR BOUNTEOUS At once I have drawn chain, jewel, watch, and all!<br />

Francis Beaumont in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607–8)<br />

parodies the conventions of old-fashioned chivalry, as a city apprentice<br />

takes parts in a ‘play-within-the-play’. Philip Massinger’s A New Way<br />

to Pay Old Debts (1625–26) remained one of the most popular social<br />

comedies for more than two hundred years. The theme of class<br />

superiority (the upper class, and the rising mercantile middle class)<br />

begins to be popular here, and will assume greater and greater<br />

prominence in the literature of the eighteenth century. With characters<br />

like Greedy and Frank Wellborn, Massinger’s play brings the city<br />

comedy (here set near Nottingham) to new heights; in Sir Giles<br />

Overreach – ‘a cruel extortioner’ – it created one of the great comic

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