The Old Law

The Old Law, or A New Way to Please You is a seventeenth-century tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger. It was first published in 1656, but is generally thought to have been written about four decades earlier.

The play first appeared in a badly-printed 1656 quarto issued by the bookseller Edward Archer (his shop was "at the sign of the Adam and Eve"), with the three dramatists' names on the title page. Scholars have little doubt about the general accuracy of the attribution; the doubt that does exist centres on the role of Massinger, since the play shows many typical signs of being a Middleton/Rowley collaboration. "Probably all critics are sure of the presence of Middleton and Rowley, but Massinger's contribution has been difficult to trace." David Lake, in his study of attribution problems in the Middleton canon, holds that Massinger's share consisted only of a light revision, and that signs of his hand are strongest in the first half of the single scene in Act V, the trial scene. Lake's breakdown of the play as a whole is this:

An earlier study by George Price reached similar conclusions, though Price gave Massinger's revision a larger role in shaping the result. Middleton was primarily responsible for the serious main plot, involving the characters Cleanthes and Simonides and their families, and Rowley the comic subplot involving Gnotho — a division of responsibilities wholly in keeping with their usual manner of collaboration. (Rowley also wrote the opening and closing scenes, as he did in another of his collaborations with Middleton, The Changeling.) Price judged that the 1656 quarto was set into type from a theatre prompt-book.

Critics have placed the original version's date of authorship in the 1614–18 period, based on the limited evidence available; Massinger's revision was done perhaps c. 1626, for a new production by the King's Men.

The quarto of The Old Law is noteworthy in that it included a list of plays published to that date, an expansion of a list published earlier in 1656 in the first edition of The Careless Shepherdess. These were the first attempts to catalogue the entire field of the printed drama of English Renaissance theatre. The list in The Old Law contains 651 titles. The 1656 lists would later be expanded by Francis Kirkman in his play lists of 1661 and 1671.

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