The Picture (Massinger play)

The Picture is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger, and first published in 1630.

The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 8 June 1629; it was acted by the King's Men at both of their theatres, the Globe and the Blackfriars. The play was published in quarto the following year; Massinger dedicated the work to the members of the Inner Temple. The play was popular and highly regarded in its own era; in 1650 Richard Washington wrote an elegy on Massinger in his own copy of the quarto of The Picture.

Massinger's sources for his plot were the 28th novel in Volume 2 of The Palace of Pleasure (1567) by William Painter, and an anonymous English translation of The Theatre of Honour and Knighthood (1623) by André Favyn.

The 1630 quarto contains an unusually full cast list of the original King's Men's production of the play:

The list is informative on the state of the King's Men company at this period. The veteran Lowin, who was likely the Iago to Richard Burbage's Othello three decades earlier, was by his early 50s tending toward senior roles. The clown Hilario, played by John Shank, is a thin-man character; the thin man was apparently a standard feature of the King's Men's dramaturgy — in the previous generation of Shakespeare and Burbage, hired man John Sinklo had filled thin-man clown roles like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Shadow in Henry IV, Part 2. And the female character of Queen Honoria is written for a supremely beautiful woman; she is more than once described as a "Juno" — which raises questions as to how the boy player Thompson managed the role.

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