Philip Massinger: the man and the playwright

Abstract

Little apology is necessary by way of preface to a critical study of Messinger. No full -length, detailed study of the playwright has eve appeared in English. All that we have of what might be called 'book length' is a very brief work by Professor Cruickshank that was published over thirty years ago, and this can scarcely now be considered adequate. Even critical essays on Messinger are rare, and comments and asides on the playwright which have appeared in the more general studies of the Jacobean- Caroline period have not usually been notable either for their perspicacity or for the knowledge they reveal of his work. It is in some measure as an attempt to fill this gap that this thesis has been written.I have not, however, attempted to claim for Massinger a position or an importance that does not accord with his worth. He is not, it must be admitted, a great, or even always a very good, dramatist. Nevertheless, his plays are of considerable interest as samples of the romantic tragi- comedies that held the stage after the death of Shakespeare. In addition, it must be remembered that Messinger was the principal writer for the public theatres from 1625 to 1640 -- a fact that in itself argues for his claim to closer examination. Thus the first object of this thesis has been an examination and appraisal of certain aspects of Messinger's dramatic technique.Of additional, and perhaps in some respects even greater, interest, however, is the character of Massinger himself; a character that emerges with extraordinary clarity and precision of detail from a reading of his plays. Therefore, my second object has been to reveal or deduce something of the nature of i;iassinger's mind and character; to attempt, if you like, to see Messinger plain. Both of these objects are comprehended in the title of this thesis.Perhaps something of the eclipse which Massinger's work has undergone amongst students can be explained by the fact that he is deeply involved in the tangled undergrowth of collaboration which surrounds the Beaumont- Fletcher corpus. The reader will find little discussion of such matters in this thesis. Many scholars have laboured on the problems of the Jacobean collaborators, and their work forms an extensive literature in itself, embracing studies in ,eaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Field, Shirley, Heywood, and practically every other writer of the period as well as the vast mass of documentary material pertaining to the stage of the times. I have felt, then, that to deal adequately with such material would have celled for a preliminary volume quite away from my immediate purposes, and that the consideration of such problems here would have confused the reader and obscured the object of my study, Massinger himself. It has seemed to iv me preferable to approach the Jacobean situation from the other end, and, by considering Massinger in the plays which are definitely his, to make my work absolute as far as he is concerned, but at the same time make it a ground -work to the wider study of the dramatic collaboration of Fletcher and his group by establishing the Massingerian technique and method of approach. It follows, therefore, that the plays with which I am almost solely concerned in this thesis are the fifteen plays which Massinger wrote on his own.Of course, in a general critical study of any playwright as prolific as Messinger, it is essential, in order to contain the subject within reasonable bounds, that a certain amount of material should be allowed to 6o by the board. This is perhaps rather a negative way of saying that I have consciously and deliberately dealt only briefly with one or two topics which are sometimes considered important in a study of a playwright. My deliberate intention in this respect will be better understood when I say that I consider such topics as jetsam rather than as flotsam. My dismissal of questions of collaboration and attribution has already been explained. Similarly, I have considered that questions of the sources of Massinger's plays have already been exhaustively covered by the industrious researches of German scholars at the beginning of this century, and that the more technical aspects of versification are, in Massinger's case, of interest chiefly in connexion with problems of collaboration. I have chosen to concentrate chiefly (though not by any means exclusively) on matters which have become prominent largely within the last thirty or forty years -- such matters as stagecraft, dramatic structure, the dramatist's view of the world, and blank -verse style. I have endeavoured to deal with such matters in ways that, while they have become commoner in studies of Shakespeare, have not yet been applied at all extensively to other writers -- and have certainly never been applied to Massinger before. I have also endeavoured to suggest new methods of approach (in particular in respect of matters of style) which might be applied with profit to other Jacobean dramatists. Throughout the thesis I have constantly compared and contrasted Massinger with Shakespeare; with Shakespeare, that is to say, both as a yardstick of dramatic excellence whose work is universally known and admired, and as the only other writer of the period with whom Massinger can be fully and fairly contrasted. In addition, in the general biographical introduction which comprises my first chapter I have re- examined and re- assessed the many conjectures and speculations which surround the facts of Massinger's life and have added some new facts and deductions. of my own.It is perhaps not out of place here to make a plea for a full and modern edition of the plays of Massinger. Gifford's edition, which I have had perforce to use for this thesis, is a remarkable piece of work for its period but is now quite out -of -date and hopelessly inadequate. Several of the plays have been published in individual and fairly modern editions (See Bibliography), but this is not sufficient. What is required is a complete edition which will give the reader (I am not so concerned for the student of textual or bibliographical matters) a text which he can both study and enjoy and from which the scholar can draw his line-references, similar to those which we now possess for Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Of course, such an edition would have to part of a wider plan which embodied an edition of all the Beaumont and Fletcher plays. At the moment it is not possible to obtain Beaumont and Fletcher in an edition which is either convenient or reliable. Such an edition, the Variorum Edition, under the general editorship of A.H.Bullen, was started in 1904, but for some reason or other only four volumes of the projected twelve appeared.. Scholars will never be able to start properly on all the problems of the Jacobean theatre until such editions become generally available. Until then, there must remain much research into this interesting period of the drama which it will be difficult, or even impossible, to carry out.