A New Way To Pay Old Debts - Class Conflict

Class Conflict

The play illustrates the hardening of class distinctions that characterized the early Stuart era, leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War. In Elizabethan plays like The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), it was acceptable and even admirable that a young nobleman marry a commoner's daughter; other plays of the era, like Fair Em (c. 1590) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597-9), share this liberal attitude toward social mobility through marriage. In A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in contrast, Lord Lovell would rather see his family line go extinct than marry Overreach's daughter Margaret, even though she's young, beautiful, and virtuous. In Act IV, scene i, Lovell specifies that his attitude is not solely dependent on his loathing of the father's personal vices, but is rooted in class distinction. Lovell rejects the idea of his descendants being "one part scarlet" (aristocratic) and "the other London blue" (common).

The drama's class conflict can seem obscure to the modern reader, since Sir Giles Overreach appears as an upper-class, not a lower-class figure: he is a knight and a rich man with large country estates, who lives the lavish lifestyle of the landed gentry. There is even a family connection between hero and villain: Frank Welborn is the nephew of Sir Giles' late wife. Yet Sir Giles himself expresses the conflict by noting that he is a "city" man — he comes from the financial milieu of the City of London with its worldly and materialistic values, the domain of nascent capitalism in contrast to the older social order rooted in feudalism. He observes that there is "More than a feud, a strange antipathy / Between us," the men of money, "and true gentry."

For a conservative moralist like Massinger, the upper classes, the "true gentry," have a right to run society insofar as they fulfill the moral and ethical obligations of their traditional roles. It is Overreach's rejection of those tradition moral and ethical standards, his embrace of ruthless competition, that makes him a villain.