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Updated: June 16, 2025
Marlowe, Massinger, Ford, Decker, Middleton, Webster, and others of his associates led precarious and irregular lives as hack-writers for the stage, but Shakespeare, in his triple functions as actor, author, and shareholder of the Blackfriars and the Globe, rapidly acquired a fortune.
Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger's plays , was probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great part of this generation also, when he informs us, that 'with Massinger terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the stage itself survived him but a short time.
His thoughts resemble those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gardens of Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished from the productions of other soils, not only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not only to delight, but to elevate and purify.
The comic of Jonson is a scholar's excogitation of the comic; that of Massinger a moralist's. Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination.
There were, of the elder time, Massinger, drawing to the close of a successful career, Ford, with his growing fame, Marmion, Heywood, Carlell, Wither.
While the groundlings were crowding to see new plays by Shirley and Massinger, the editor of this volume was examining fresh varieties of auricula in "the gardens of Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie." It is wonderful how modern the latter statement sounds, and how ancient the former.
Jonson and Massinger, Webster and Shirley, were still living men in his childhood. The lyrics of Herrick, the sweet fancies of George Herbert, were fresh in men's ears as he grew to manhood. Even when he entered into the new world of the Restoration some veterans of this nobler school, like Denham and Waller, were still lingering on the stage.
As I rather doubted his competency to do the latter, knowing that his peculiar turn lies in the lyric species of composition, I questioned George what English plays he had read. He never seemed even to have heard of Fletcher, Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, and the worthies of Dodsley's Collection; but he is to read all these, to prepare him for bringing out his "Parallel" in the winter.
But if one seeks him in his home, transplants oneself to the soil of his country, and to the atmosphere of the century in which he lived; further, if one studies his contemporaries, and his immediate successors, and inhales the force wafted to us from Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare still, indeed, appears a being of the most exalted magnitude; but still, one arrives at the conviction that many of the wonders of his genius are, in some measure, accessible, and that much is due to the powerfully productive atmosphere of his age and time."
When the hot lion's breath singeth the fields. A little lower down, "At all parts" occurs in almost every play of Massinger. On page 232, "This I foresaw," is also very common in similar situations. Among numerous cases I refer to the Unnatural Combat, Act III., about the end, and Maid of Honour, II. iii., where exactly the same words are used. It is the most frequent of his many repetitions.
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