Philip Massinger

The Custom of the Country Philip Massinger

The Custom of the Country is a Jacobean stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, originally published in 1647 in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio. John Dryden referred to the play in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie; he is concerned to defend Restoration plays from the charge of lewdness, and claims that there is more "bawdry" in this play than in all later plays combined. The play was rarely staged even during the century after Fletcher's death, when his plays remained current on the stage. In 1998, it received a staged reading at the new Globe Theatre in London. It forms part of the 2013 Actors' Renaissance Season at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Playhouse.