ABSTRACT
This final chapter examines Massinger’s staging of visual art-property paintings and statues-as sites for spectatorship and interpretation, focusing primarily on the spectatorial function of the magical miniature in his 1629 tragicomedy The Picture. This play, Massinger’s most complex exploration of the dramatic function of visual art, uses the miniature picture of the title as an interpretive element within the play; it acts as a dramaturgical catalyst in the same fashion as the playswithin and inset masques already examined, and like them, its relation with its onstage spectator is at the heart of its dramatic function. However, although this play is Massinger’s most complex use of a staged artwork, it is by no means his only staging of visual art-he presents paintings in The Renegado (1624) and The Emperor of the East (1631) and statues in The Virgin Martyr (1620), The Parliament of Love (1624) and The Roman Actor (1626). Therefore I will begin by examining Massinger’s less complex use of statues and paintings, before using some of the patterns established by these readings to examine the function of the miniature in The Picture.
