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Philip Massinger (1583 – 17 March 1640) was an Englishdramatist. His plays, includingA New Way to Pay Old Debts,The City Madam, andThe Roman Actor, are noted for theirsatire andrealism, and their political and social themes.
The son of Arthur Massinger or Messanger, he was baptised at St. Thomas'sSalisbury on 24 November 1583. He apparently belonged to an old Salisbury family, for the name occurs in the city records as early as 1415. He is described in his matriculation entry atSt. Alban Hall,Oxford (1602), as the son of a gentleman. His father, who had also been educated at St. Alban Hall, was a member of parliament, and was attached to the household ofHenry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Herbert recommended Arthur in 1587 for the office of examiner in theCourt of the Marches.[1]
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, who would come to oversee the London Stage and the royal company as King James's Lord Chamberlain, succeeded to the title in 1601. It has been suggested that he supported Massinger at Oxford, but the omission of any reference to him in any of Massinger's prefaces points to the contrary. Massinger left Oxford without a degree in 1606. His father had died in 1603, and that may have left him without financial assistance. The lack of a degree and the want of patronage from Lord Pembroke may both be explained on the supposition that he had becomeRoman Catholic. On leaving the university he went to London to make his living as a dramatist, but his name cannot be definitely affixed to any play until fifteen years later, whenThe Virgin Martyr (registered with theStationers Company, 7 December 1621) appeared as the work of Massinger andThomas Dekker.[1]
During these years he worked in collaboration with other dramatists. A joint letter, fromNathan Field,Robert Daborne and Philip Massinger, toPhilip Henslowe, begs for an immediate loan of five pounds to release them from their "unfortunate extremity", the money to be taken from the balance due for the "play of Mr. Fletcher's and ours." A second document shows that Massinger and Daborne owed Henslowe £3 on 4 July 1615. The earlier note probably dates from 1613, and from this time Massinger apparently worked regularly withJohn Fletcher. SirAston Cockayne, Massinger's constant friend and patron, refers in explicit terms to this collaboration in a sonnet addressed toHumphrey Moseley on the publication of his folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658), and in an epitaph on the two poets he says: "Plays they did write together, were great friends, And now one grave includes them in their ends."[1]
After Philip Henslowe's death in 1616 Massinger and Fletcher began to write for theKing's Men. Between 1623 and 1626 Massinger produced unaided for theLady Elizabeth's Men, then playing at theCockpit Theatre, three pieces,The Parliament of Love,The Bondman andThe Renegado. With the exception of these plays andThe Great Duke of Florence, produced in 1627 byQueen Henrietta's Men, Massinger continued to write regularly for the King's Men until his death. The tone of the dedications of his later plays affords evidence of his continued poverty. In the preface toThe Maid of Honour (1632) he wrote, addressingSir Francis Foljambe and Sir Thomas Bland: "I had not to this time subsisted, but that I was supported by your frequent courtesies and favours."[1]
The prologue toThe Guardian (licensed 1633) refers to two unsuccessful plays and two years of silence, when the author feared he had lost the popular favour. It is probable that this break in his production was owing to his free handling of political matters. In 1631, SirHenry Herbert, theMaster of the Revels, refused to license an unnamed play by Massinger because of "dangerous matter as the deposing of Sebastian, King of Portugal", calculated presumably to endanger good relations between England and Spain. There is little doubt that this was the same piece asBelieve as You List, in which time and place are changed, Antiochus being substituted for Sebastian, and Rome for Spain. In the prologue, Massinger ironically apologises for his ignorance of history, and professes that his accuracy is at fault if his picture comes near "a late and sad example." The obvious "late and sad example" of a wandering prince could be no other thanCharles I's brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine. An allusion to the same subject may be traced inThe Maid of Honour. In another play by Massinger, not extant, Charles I is reported to have himself struck out a passage put into the mouth of Don Pedro, king of Spain, as "too insolent." The poet seems to have adhered closely to the politics of his patron,Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, who had leanings to democracy and was a personal enemy of the Duke of Buckingham. The servility towards the Crown displayed inBeaumont and Fletcher's plays reflected the temper of the court ofJames I. The attitude of Massinger's heroes and heroines towards kings is very different. Camiola's remarks on the limitations of the royal prerogative (Maid of Honour, Act V, Scene v) could hardly be acceptable at court.[1]
Massinger died suddenly at his house near theGlobe Theatre, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Saviour's,Southwark, on 18 March 1640. In the entry in the parish register he is described as a "stranger", which, however, implies nothing more than that he belonged to another parish.[1] He is buried in the same tomb as Fletcher. That grave can be seen to this day in the chancel of what is nowSouthwark Cathedral near London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames. There the names of Fletcher and Massinger appear on adjacent plaques laid in the floor between the choir stalls. Next to these is a plaque commemoratingEdmund Shakespeare (William's younger brother) who is buried in the cathedral, although the exact location of his grave is unknown.
The supposition that Massinger was aRoman Catholic rests upon three of his plays,The Virgin Martyr (licensed 1620),The Renegado (licensed 1624) andThe Maid of Honour (c. 1621).The Virgin Martyr, in which Dekker probably had a large share, is really a miracle play, dealing with the martyrdom of Dorothea in the time ofDiocletian, and the supernatural element is freely used. Caution must be used in interpreting this play as an elucidation of Massinger's views; it is not entirely his work. InThe Renegado, however, the action is dominated by the beneficent influence of a Jesuit priest, Francisco, and the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is enforced. InThe Maid of Honour a complicated situation is solved by the decision of the heroine, Camiola, to take the veil. For this she is held up "to all posterity a fair example for noble maids to imitate."[1]
Conversely, characters in Massinger's plays sometimes masquerade as Catholic clergy (The Bashful Lover) and even hear believers' confessions (The Emperor of the East)—a violation of a sacrament that would be surprising for a Catholic.
As noted above, Massinger placed moral and religious concerns over political considerations, in ways that offended the interests of king and state in his generation. While not a "democrat" in any modern sense (no one in his society was), Massinger's political sympathies, insofar as we can determine them from his works, might have placed him in a predicament similar to that of the head of the house he revered, the Earl of Pembroke—who found that he could not support King Charles in theEnglish Civil War, and became one of the few noblemen to back the Parliamentary side. Massinger did not live long enough to have to take a position in that conflict.
It seems doubtful whether Massinger was ever a popular playwright, for the best qualities of his plays would appeal rather to politicians and moralists than to the ordinary playgoer. He contributed, however, at least one great and popular character to the English stage. Sir Giles Overreach, inA New Way to Pay Old Debts, is a sort of commercialRichard III, a compound of the lion and the fox, and the part provides many opportunities for a great actor. He made another considerable contribution to the comedy of manners inThe City Madam. In Massinger's own judgmentThe Roman Actor was "the most perfect birth of his Minerva." It is a study of the tyrantDomitian, and of the results of despotic rule on the despot himself and his court. Other favourable examples of his grave and restrained art areThe Duke of Milan,The Bondman andThe Great Duke of Florence.[1]
For an examination of William Shakespeare's influence on Massinger, seeT. S. Eliot's essay on Massinger. It includes the famous line, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal...."
In 2021,Making Massinger, a play by Simon Butteriss, was recorded and streamed by Wiltshire Creative, who commissioned it. The play is in verse and described as a revenge tragicomedy. The cast includes Samuel Barnett, Edward Bennett, Hubert Burton, Julia Hills, Jane How and Nina Wadia.
The following scheme is based on the work ofCyrus Hoy, Ian Fletcher, and Terence P. Logan. (See References.)
WithJohn Fletcher:
With John Fletcher andFrancis Beaumont:
With John Fletcher andNathan Field:
With Nathan Field:
With John Fletcher,John Ford, andWilliam Rowley (?), orJohn Webster (?):
With John Fletcher,Ben Jonson, andGeorge Chapman (?):
WithThomas Dekker:
WithThomas Middleton andWilliam Rowley:
Some of these "collaborations" are in fact more complex: revisions by Massinger of older plays by Fletcher and others, etc. (It is not necessary to suppose that Massinger, Fletcher, Ford, and Rowley-or-Webster sat down in a room together to write a play.)
More than a dozen of Massinger's plays are said to be lost,[a] though the titles of some of these may be duplicates of those of existing plays. Eleven of these lost plays were manuscripts used byJohn Warburton's cook for lighting fires and making pies.[1] The tragedyThe Jeweller of Amsterdam (c. 1616–19) may be a lost collaboration, with Fletcher and Field.
The list given above represents a consensus of scholarship; individual critics have assigned various other plays, or portions of plays, to Massinger—likeThe Faithful Friends, or the first two acts ofThe Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611).
Massinger's independent works were collected byThomas Coxeter (4 vols., 1759, revised edition with introduction byThomas Davies, 1779), by J. Monck Mason (4 vols., 1779), byWilliam Gifford (4 vols., 1805, 1813), byHartley Coleridge (1840), by Lt. Col. Cunningham (1867), and selections byArthur Symons in theMermaid Series (1887–1889).[1]
Subsequent work on Massinger includes Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, eds.,The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger (5 vols., Oxford, 1976), Martin Garrett, ed.,Massinger: the Critical Heritage (London, 1991), chapters inAnnabel Patterson,Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984) and Martin Butler,Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984), and Martin Garrett, "Philip Massinger" in the revisedDictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2005).
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Massinger, Philip".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 868–869. | This articlecontains a list that has not been properly sorted. SeeMOS:LISTSORT for more information. Pleaseimprove this article if you can.(February 2024) |
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