Carnarvon responded in any positive way to the dedication is obscure. The 1633 quarto was the only edition of the play in the seventeenth century. Its later popularity onstage guaranteed frequent reprints, with 52 editions between 1748 and 1964 (not counting collections); others have followed since. Genre Dramaturgically, A New Way to Pay Old Debts contains elements of melodrama, comedy of manners, realism, and social satire, in a distinctive combination. The villain The play also falls into the category of the "villain play", a drama in which the dominant figure is not a traditional protagonist or hero but his antagonist, a figure of evil. In the context of English Renaissance drama, the villain play grew out of the "ranting Herod" of the Medieval morality play. In the Elizabethan era, Christopher Marlowe was the great innovator in the villain play, with Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta; Shakespeare's Richard III is another obvious example in the subgenre. In A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Massinger took the villain play in a new direction of social realism: his villain is not a king or a conqueror but a credible figure from contemporary life. The play's dominating character, Sir Giles Over-reach, is based on the real-life Sir Giles Mompesson. (Sir Giles' assistant in villainy, Justice Greedy, was suggested by Mompesson's associate Sir Francis Michell.) The power of the role of Sir Giles may lie in Massinger's success in depicting a blatant villain who has a quality of everyday believability. Sir Giles is down-to-earth in his cold malice: The audience is presented with a character they might meet in their own lives, to their own cost. Class conflict The play illustrates the hardening of class distinctions that characterised 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 Over-reach's daughter Margaret, even though she is young, beautiful, and virtuous. In Act IV, scene i, Lovell specifies that his attitude is not solely dependent on his loathing of