It was the custom in those days, as in the time of Plautus at Rome,[5] for playwrights to revise old plays; and still more was it usual for them to collaborate.[6] We find Massinger at work in this way with Field,[7] Daborne,[8] [pg 003] Dekker, Tourneur, and above all, with Fletcher. With the latter he worked from 1613 to 1623. In that year, for some unknown reason, he seceded from the service of the leading company of actors of the day, who went by the name of the King's men, and wrote unaided three plays for the Queen's men, The Parliament of Love, The Bondman, and The Renegado. After Fletcher's death, in 1625, Massinger rejoined the King's men, and wrote for them until his death in 1640.
It has been surmised from the vivid colouring of The Virgin Martyr[9] and the plot of The Renegado,[10] where a Jesuit plays a leading part and is portrayed in a pleasing light, that Massinger turned Roman Catholic. The evidence for this theory is quite inadequate. Indeed, we might as well argue from Gazet's language that the author followed the Anglican via media.[11] Plots derived from French, Spanish, and Italian sources would naturally contain Roman Catholic machinery. We might as well infer that Shakspere was a Roman Catholic because Silvia goes to Friar Patrick's cell,[12] or because Friar Laurence is prominent in Romeo and Juliet.[13]
We know that Massinger lived a life of comparative poverty; on one occasion we find him, with two other dramatic authors, asking for a loan of £5.[14]
The person who thus obliged the three writers was Philip Henslowe, a dyer, theatrical lessee, and speculator, who acted as a kind of broker between actors and authors, buying from the one and selling to the other; we still possess his diary, containing information as to the prices which he gave for plays.[15] The prologue of The Guardian shows us that for two years before 1633 Massinger had been under a cloud, and had abstained from writing. Two of his plays had failed in 1631—The Emperor of the East[16] and Believe as You List[17]—so he appears to have put forth his full strength in The Guardian.
The dedications of Massinger's plays which have been preserved show that he was often dependent for support on the leaders of what he once or twice calls “the nobility.”[18]
The connexion of the poet with the family of which his father was the loyal and trusted servant has been exaggerated by some;[19] in the dedication of The Bondman, written in 1623, to Philip, Earl of Montgomery,[20] the poet distinctly states that though the Earl had helped the play at its first performance by his “liberal suffrages” yet he was personally unknown to him.[21] Amongst others to whom we find dedications is George Harding, Baron Berkeley, to whom Webster inscribed The Duchess of Malfi. It is pleasant to read in the dedication of The Picture “to my honoured and selected friends of the Noble Society of the Inner Temple” that Massinger received “frequent bounties” from them.
The plays give us no clear evidence that Massinger ever travelled abroad,[22] though such a passage as The Great [pg 006] Duke of Florence, II., 2, 5-21, rather suggests a visit to Italy. Nor have we any ground for supposing that he was, like Shakspere, an actor, unless indeed an obscure reference in the Dublin poem to the Earl of Pembroke be so interpreted.[23] In London he lived on the Bankside, Southwark. The story of his death is told us by our gossiping old friend Anthony à Wood, in his Athenae Oxonienses.[24] Massinger went to bed one night well, and [pg 007] was found dead the next morning. He was buried at St. Saviour's on March 18th, 1639/40.[25] The funeral was “accompanied by comedians,” a phrase which seems to show that his professional friends did him honour at the last; he is described in the monthly accounts of St. Saviour's as “a stranger”—that is to say, a non-parishioner. His intimate friend Sir Aston Cokaine tells us that he shared the grave of his friend John Fletcher;[26] and in 1896 a window in the south aisle of the nave of Southwark Cathedral was unveiled in his honour by Sir Walter Besant.[27]
What was the atmosphere in which Massinger lived? The days of James I. and Charles I. were less heroic than those of Elizabeth. In foreign politics England intervened once or twice in an ineffective way, and a good deal of sympathy was shown, much of it in a practical fashion, for the cause of the Protestant King of Bohemia. Gardiner[28] has pointed out that Charles I. gave permission to the Marquis of Hamilton to carry over volunteers in aid of Gustavus Adolphus just as James I. had allowed [pg 008] Vere to carry over volunteers to the Palatinate. Hamilton sailed in July, 1631, and The Maid of Honour was printed in 1632. The whole plot of this play recalls the relations of England to the Protestant cause on the Continent. Thus, William. Lord Craven, to whom Ford's Broken Heart is dedicated, and who was knighted at the age of seventeen, after his “valiant adventures” in the Netherlands under Henry, Prince of Orange, went to the assistance of Gustavus Adolphus in 1631, when only twenty-two years old.
Wars in the Low Countries are vaguely referred to in various passages, as, e.g., in The Fatal Dowry:[29]