A New Trick to Cheat the Devil

A New Trick to Cheat the Devil is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a comedy written by Robert Davenport that was first printed in 1639. One of only three surviving Davenport plays, it has been called an entertaining and extravagant farce.

The play was first published in 1639, in a quarto printed by John Okes for the bookseller Humphrey Blunden. This was the only edition of the play prior to the nineteenth century.

The 1639 quarto includes a short preface, apparently written by the bookseller. This prefatory note describes the play as "an Orphant, and wanting the Father which first begot it...." This seems to indicate that Davenport was dead by 1639; but other evidence suggests that he was still alive. In the following year, two plays, Nathanael Richards's Messalina and Thomas Rawlins's The Rebellion, were printed with commendatory poems written by Davenport. And the address "To the knowning Reader" prefixed to Davenport's King John and Matilda suggests that Davenport was still alive in 1655, when that play was first published.

No firm evidence on the play's date of authorship is extant. The earliest evidence for Davenport's career as a dramatist comes from 1624; the period from 1624 to its publication in 1639 has been regarded as the range of possible dates for New Trick.

One curious feature is that the play contains a "yellow starch" reference. in Act IV, scene 1, the Devil says "I was first father to this yellow Sterch...." This is an allusion to the fashion for wearing ruffs and cuffs dyed yellow, which was strongly associated with Mistress Anne Turner, the woman executed for her role in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury on 15 November 1615. References to yellow starch and "yellow bands" are common in plays written in the 1615–18 years, but seem rather dated in a play from the 1620s or '30s. (The same dating conundrum applies to Davenport's other comedy, The City Nightcap.) [For more data on yellow starch references, see: The World Tossed at Tennis.]

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