A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

DRAMA

1. Philip Massinger (1583–1640) was born at Salisbury, educated at Oxford, and became a literary man in London, writing plays for the King’s Men, a company of actors. If we may judge from his begging letters that survive, he found in dramatic work little financial encouragement. He died and was buried in London.

Massinger did much hack-work, and was fond of working out topical and moral themes; so that a large amount of his work is of little permanent importance. The best of his many plays are A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625) and The City Madam (1632), two quite fine comedies; and The Duke of Milan (1618) and The Unnatural Combat (1619), quite respectable tragedies. The level of Massinger’s workmanship is laudably high; he is remarkably uniform in quality; and in a few cases (as in that of Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts) he has created characters of real distinction. He followed the fashion of the time in collaborating with other dramatists. The Virgin Martyr, produced jointly with Dekker, is perhaps the most important of this class of play.

2. John Ford (1586–1640) was born in Devonshire, educated at Oxford, and studied, though he seems never to have practiced, law. He became an active producer of plays, chiefly tragedies, both on his own account and in collaboration with other playwrights.

In his nature Ford had a morbid twist which gave him a strange liking for the horrible and the unnatural. His plays are unequal in quality; but the most powerful of them are prevented from being revolting by their real tragic force and their high literary aims. In The Broken Heart (acted in 1629) he harrows the reader’s feelings almost beyond endurance; his Perkin Warbeck (1634), a historical tragedy, is reckoned to be the best historical drama outside of Shakespeare; and in The Witch of Edmonton (about 1633) he collaborated with Dekker and Rowley to produce a powerful domestic drama. Others of the sixteen plays attributed to him are The Lover’s Melancholy (1629), Love’s Sacrifice (1633), and The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638).