Massinger

“ Whether Massinger ever acted or not, is as doubtful as every other incident of his early life. It was not until 1614 that a glimmering of his actual condition in life is seen through the darkness, and the disclosure is melancholy and discouraging. There is something touching, as well as dreary, in the gloom that one can only diversify with scenes of penury and imprisonment for debt. ”

“ Philip Massinger was the son of Arthur Massinger, a retainer in the household of the Earl of Pembroke. A retainer was often a gentleman of good birth but small means, and this was probably the condition of Arthur Massinger, who, from his carrying letters from his master, the Earl, to Queen Elizabeth, could not have been a man of low origin, else he would not have been admitted to the honour of conveying any dispatch to one who placed so much importance on lineage in those who entered her presence. ”

“ Believing that the matter of first importance is to estimate Massinger from the plays which he undoubtedly wrote, I have not given above my evidence in full for the impressions which I have formed of the “collaborated” plays. The results of my study of these plays may be [pg 162] summarised as follows: Massinger wrote considerable portions of The Prophetess, The False One, and Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt. His work can be traced in Thierry and Theodoret and The Bloody Brother. ”

“ True love is vehement--but it is delicate; and it would have elevated his thoughts, and purified his expressions. Massinger may have done justice to the intellect and companionship of his countrywomen, but he had no reverence for the most beautiful part of their nature; and in this, as in other respects, is far below Shakspeare.
The obscurity which overshadowed all Massinger’s career has rendered any communication, as we have seen, between him and Buckingham, doubtful ”

“ Borachia, the lady who loves wine, is drawn with a lighter hand than Massinger's; yet I feel that Fletcher, unassisted or unpruned, would have made the scenes in which she appears grosser than they are. Antonio, the Prince of Tarent, reminds us of a clean-limbed, honest English public-school boy; he is slow to take offence, but brave when provoked, sorry for the mischance of which he is the innocent cause, courteous, and ready on all occasions. ”

“ When the march was less difficult, and there was leisure for conversation, Mannering beguiled the way with tales and reminiscences which caused Massinger to wonder unceasingly that a man so variously gifted, possessed of such social charm, so wide an experience of men and books, should have elected to wear out his life amid a barbaric race. ”

“ It is significant that the most tender passage in Massinger,194 where Leonora bids Almira take consolation, has been assigned by some to Fletcher. In other words, Massinger is not in the front rank of genius, but no one would claim for him such a place. ”

“ Let us recall the great characters in Massinger; they are Paris, Luke, Sir Giles Overreach, Durazzo, Marullo, Malefort, Charalois, Antiochus, Camiola, Dorothea, Donusa, Almira. In the second rank we may put Timoleon, Romont, Bertoldo, John Antonio, Mathias, Wellborn, Athenais, Marcelia, Sophia, Cleora. Of these persons, the two that I think most men would like to have known best are Paris and Camiola. Notice, by the way, that there is seldom more than one great character in a play. Now, in Henry VIII there are three, the King, Catherine, and Wolsey. ”

“ Did sit triumphant.132 But there is another characteristic of Massinger's style and that perhaps more obvious still; it is full of courtliness and grace. A perusal of The City Madam, where the subject is the absurdity of the ladies of the Mansion House who ape the manners of the West End, suggests the question whether Massinger was ever attached to the Court. We do not know. He must, at any rate, have moved amongst refined and educated people. ”

“ Hence too, in Massinger, the continued flings at kings, courtiers, and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself. Beaumont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a servility of sentiment and a spirit of partizanship with the monarchical faction. ”

“ It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named—outside some few of Shakespeare’s—no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times,
“He frights men out of their estates,
And breaks through all law-nets—made to curb ill men—
As they were cobwebs.”
When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave which had been opened [95] shortly before for John Fletcher ”

“ Our ancestors certainly excelled us in the education which they bestowed on their animals. Banks's horse far surpassed all that have been brought up in the academy of Mr. Astley; and the apes of these days are mere clowns to their progenitors. The apes of Massinger's time were gifted with a pretty smattering of politics and philosophy. The widow Wild had one of them: "He would come over for all my friends, but was the dogged'st thing to my enemies! he would sit upon his tail before them, and frown like John-a-napes when the pope is named." The Parson's Wedding.—Gifford. ”

“ Mr. Gilchrist thinks (and I believe rightly) that Massinger, who evidently regarded the Duke of Buckingham with no favourable eye, here reflects on the use of sedan-chairs, which his grace first introduced, from Spain, about this period. They were carried, as Massinger says, "on men's shoulders," and the novelty provoked no small displeasure against the favourite, who, in thus employing his servants, was charged, by the writers of those times, with "degrading Englishmen into slaves and beasts of burden, to gratify his inordinate vanity."—Gifford. ”

“ Mortal man surely never looked upon so strange a scene—so crowded with all the elements of beauty, terror, and sublimity.
"Well worth the voyage," thought Massinger—"the dissevering of familiar ties and associations—but to have enjoyed this intoxicating experience!" How poor, how narrow the life which contented his compatriots!—which contented him before the Great Disaster, when his flight to this Ultima Thule appeared the welcome resort of a man careless of the future, if only relief might be gained from the intolerable anguish of the present. ”

“ I would credit Massinger with the admirably conducted trial-scene in the fourth act; but the concluding scene of the play, where Barnavelt is led to execution, I would ascribe, without hesitation, to Fletcher. In the scene (v. 1) where the French ambassador pleads for Barnavelt we recognise Massinger's accustomed temperance and dignity. To the graver writer, too, we must set down Leydenberg's solemn and pathetic soliloquy (iii. 6) , when by a voluntary death he is seeking to make amends for his inconstancy and escape from the toils of his persecutors. ”

“ Seldom trivial, it is never prosaic, and yet it is constantly on the border-line of prose. Massinger thought in blank verse because he was a dramatist rather than because he was a poet. Hence his enemies might say that his lines are prose in lengths; yet that would be an unjust accusation. The poetical “colour” is here, the ideal dignity, the atmosphere, although they obtrude themselves less on the reader than in most poets. Like Ovid, Massinger is one whose amazing facility carries us along like a flood—a writer who should be read in large quantities at a time ”

“ It is at once clear that they work on different lines. Massinger is a follower of Shakspere and Fletcher, though we can trace in some of his tragedies the influence of Webster and Tourneur. In his comedies, we see some approximation to Ben Jonson; it is instructive to compare Eastward Ho! with The City Madam. A fundamental difference of method is at once seen; Massinger deliberately eschews the use of prose. It must at once be conceded that he has left nothing on so colossal a scale as Every Man in his Humour, Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. ”

“ After Philip Henslowe’s death in 1616 Massinger and Fletcher began to write for the King’s Men. Between 1623 and 1626 Massinger produced unaided for the Lady Elizabeth’s Men then playing at the Cockpit three pieces, The Parliament of Love, The Bondman and The Renegado. With the exception of these plays and The Great Duke of Florence, produced in 1627 by the Queen’s servants, 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. ”

“ Friend of the great as he was, Ben Jonson was yet an Aristophanic, nay, a Rabelaisian democrat; Massinger is a gentleman and a courtier. The one has the vigour and immaturity of the Elizabethan age, and in him we feel in contact with the obsolete Mystery and Morality plays;431 the other has the refinement and romance of the Caroline era. The one is a powerful satirist and a pugnacious fighter; the other lives in an ideal world. ”

“ Such was the state of the stage when Massinger arrived in the metropolis, and dedicated his talents to its service. He joined a splendid fraternity, for Shakspeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shirley, were then flourishing at the height of their reputation, and the full vigour of their genius. Massinger came among them no unworthy competitor for such honours and emoluments as the theatre could afford. ”

“ Macaulay assigns to Massinger Acts I., II., III., and V.
A. H. C.: I find no trace of Massinger. Neither the plot is lucid nor the expression. The commercial scenes and the beggars' slang are both unlike anything in Massinger, and alien to his courtly mind.
14. The False One. (Massinger, Fletcher.) ”

“ First we have Gardiner and Lovell, then Henry and Suffolk, then Henry and Cranmer, then Henry and the old lady. Massinger constructed better than this.
V., 3, 1-113.—Such a speech as Cranmer makes (lines 58-69) is too short for Massinger's ample method, and its terse, broken style is singularly unlike his.
5. The few parallels of diction which Boyle brings forward are either from plays which are not certainly by Massinger, or may be explained as due to reminiscence or common phraseology. ”

“ In the department of literature the talent of the country had concentrated itself more and more on play-writing. Among Massinger's contemporaries we note Jonson, Chapman, Fletcher, Beaumont, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Rowley, Tourneur, Shirley—all keen and able dramatists. Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is typical of an age which had much culture, but which, without being exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre. ”

“ I do not deny that Ben Jonson was the greater man, but I find him more archaic and more difficult to read than Massinger. Much of the interest of his plays is dead for us, his local colour and topical allusions, which require so many notes, are more tedious; his personal likes and dislikes, his egotism, his vanity, are wearisome; and though his blank verse is strong and manly, it is not so melodious as Massinger's. The older man stands foursquare and solitary; the younger man reaches forward to posterity, and we feel him to be linked by his art and grace to ourselves. ”

“ John Fletcher and Mr. Philip Massinger,’ wrote that Fletcher and Massinger were buried in the same grave. Dyce supposed that ‘the same grave’ means nothing more than ‘the same place of interment,’ but there is no reason why the words should not be accepted in their literal sense.
Fletcher is seen at his best in his comedies. Few poets have been endowed with a larger share of wit and fancy, freshness and variety. Such plays as the ‘Wildgoose-Chase’ and ‘Monsieur Thomas’ are a feast of mirth from beginning to end. ”

“ I have before me several letters from him to persons of note and consequence, all signed "Arthur Massinger;" and to show his importance in the family to which he was attached, I need only mention, that in 1597, when a match was proposed between the son of Lord Pembroke and the daughter of Lord Burghley, Massinger, the poet's father, was the confidential agent employed between the parties. My purpose at present is to advert to a matter which occurred ten years earlier, and to which the note I am about to transcribe relates. ”

“ The plot is more elaborate, bustling, and improbable than we expect from Massinger. It is improbable that the young men (Act II., 2) should leap into the sea and [pg 154] leave Zenocia in the lurch. It is improbable that they should swim a league to shore with their swords erect in the air, though swords no doubt they must have if they are to behave as Fletcher's gentlemen behave. It is improbable that Rutilio in his flight (Act II., 4) should take refuge in a palace and find himself in the bedroom of the lady of the house. Difficulties of this kind are familiar enough in Fletcher. ”

“ Fletcher has more double endings, but very few run-on lines. Shakspere and Beaumont alone exhibit a somewhat similar metrical style.”169 This is interesting, because we shall see later on that Massinger was a devoted admirer and imitator of Shakspere in thought, device, and expression. It is not strange, therefore, that he should also copy his metre, or rather, develop his own on the same lines. To show how flexible and dexterous the metre of Massinger is, I will give two instances from The Bashful Lover. In the first Uberti encourages Gonzaga to persevere with the contest:
Uberti. ”