If Caroline dramatists demonstrated an immense and creative interest in urban locales and tropes of the city for their plays, so too did they find in the English countryside a setting ripe for dramatic appropriation. The deployment of non-urban locations, of regions that were far more clearly ‘not-London’ than Brome's Anti-London dream-world in The Antipodes, was not, however, a fixed or static strategy throughout the period. This chapter will chart the intrinsic shifts and transitions in understandings of the countryside and their manifestation on the Caroline public stages, beginning with one of the earliest Caroline dramas, Philip Massinger 's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (composed in 1625, the year of Charles's accession, although not published until 1633), and ending with two plays at the other end of the chronological spectrum which were, to all intents and purposes, the last publicly staged dramas in England before the civil war: Richard Brome's A Jovial Crew (1641) and James Shirley's The Sisters (1642). Tropes of the country will be seen to shade into debates about community that were to prove central to the political and social upheavals of the Caroline period and beyond.

A New Way to Pay Old Debts is a play that is still, regularly, if not frequently, revived on the stage. Part of the reason for its enduring popularity in the theatre is undoubtedly Massinger ‘s central and vibrant creation of his villainous protagonist, Sir Giles Overreach, a positive gift for any comic actor to perform. Sir Giles, as his name suggests, is a post-Marlovian overreacher, a social aspirant to wealth, title, and influence who is prepared to stop at nothing to achieve his ends. In A New Way to Pay Old Debts we see him mercilessly engineer the marriage of his reluctant daughter Margaret to an ageing aristocrat: ‘She must part with | That humble title, and write honourable, | Right honourable’ (II. i. 74–6); preparing the enclosure of his neighbour 's lands: ‘I'll make my men break ope his fences, | Ride o'er his standing corn, and in the night | Set fire on his barns, or break his cattle's legs’ (II. i. 35–8);