husband. She seems to have had children. Miss Henrietta Massinger, claiming to be a direct descendant, died on 4 Aug. 1762 (London Mag. 1762). A portrait was engraved by Worthington after Thurston. Other engraved portraits by Grignion, T. Cross, and H. Robinson are extant (Evans, Cat. Nos. 7027 and 1914).
Massinger wrote fifteen plays unaided—tragedies, tragi-comedies, and comedies—and thence his characteristics as a dramatist are best deduced. Several of his plots are borrowed from Cervantes, and the influence of Spanish and Italian models is often apparent in both matter and manner. But in the masterly working-out of his plots and in his insight into stage requirements he has hardly an equal among his contemporaries either at home or abroad. His characters, as in Italian comedy, are to a great extent conventional. The tyrant grovelling at the feet of a mistress who glories in her power over him; that mistress boasting of her very questionable virtue, and consumed with a desire of forcing all within her sphere to feel and acknowledge the power of her beauty; the pert page and the flippant waiting-woman, are familiar figures in his pages. His men are generally under the influence of one ruling passion, which, paralysing all their mental powers, leads to the catastrophe. ‘For the most part,’ wrote Hazlitt, an unfriendly critic, ‘his villains are a sort of “lusus naturæ;” his impassioned characters are like drunkards or madmen; their conduct is extreme and outrageous, their motives unaccountable and weak.’ Generally speaking, he gives an impression of hardness, and seldom deviates into tender pathos. But his most characteristic trait is a peculiarly corrupt tone of thought, even in his heroines when they are intended as models of virtue. Their morality lies entirely in obedience to outward observances, and in no inner principle. Purity is not to be found in his world, and his obscenity seems often purposeless. The warning in his ‘Roman Actor,’ i. 3, that his portrayal of evil was intended to convey a wholesome reproof to the evil-minded, is unconvincing.
Massinger's language is generally full and flowing, with more of a rhetorical than a dramatic character. In a contemporary poem ‘On the Time-Poets’ (Choyce Drollery, 1656) it is said of him that his
Easy Pegasus will amble o'er
Some threescore miles of Fancy in an hour.
He wrote, according to Charles Lamb, ‘with that equability of all the passions which made his English style the purest and most free from violent metaphors and harsh constructions of any of the dramatists who were his contemporaries.’ Coleridge declares that Massinger's style is ‘differenced in the smallest degree possible from animated conversation by the vein of poetry.’ He often substitutes description for action, and is hardly ever carried away by his situations. He has consequently few passages of the highest poetical beauty. On the other hand, he seldom sinks into the trivial, and his sustained and even flow of language sometimes rises into very solemn eloquence, tinged with a melancholy which suggests a sermon. ‘No author repeats himself oftener or with less ceremony than Massinger’ (Gifford). A list of more than a thousand of repeated phrases and expressions, not counting the commonest, is given in ‘Englische Studien’ (v. 1, vii. 1, x. 3). This habit enables us to recognise Massinger's hand in anonymous or joint plays, and is especially useful in tracing the work of his early life, before his metrical characteristics, which are an adequate test of his later productions, became distinctive.
In his early work he introduces very much prose and rhyme, but in his later work he confines himself to blank verse. His blank verse shows a larger proportion of run-on lines and double endings in harmonious union than any contemporary author. Cartwright and Tourneur have more run-on lines, but not so many double endings. Fletcher has more double endings, but very few run-on lines. Shakespeare and Beaumont alone exhibit a somewhat similar metrical style.
I. Plays by Massinger alone (in approximate chronological order).—1. ‘The Duke of Milan,’ 4to, 1623; acted by the king's men at Blackfriars; probably written about 1618; partly founded on Josephus's ‘History of the Jews’ (xv. 4), and slightly on Guicciardini's ‘History’ (xv. c. iv.). There is a striking resemblance between the painting of the corpse in this play and in the ‘Second Maiden's Tragedy’ and the ‘Revenger's Tragedy.’ A réchauffé of it and Fenton's ‘Mariamne’ by Cumberland was played at Covent Garden 10 Nov. 1779. It was revived at Drury Lane, with Edmund Kean in the title-rôle, 9 March 1816. 2. ‘The Unnatural Combat,’ 4to, 1639; acted by the king's men at the Globe, probably about 1619. It is one of Massinger's most characteristic, but at the same time least pleasing, productions. 3. ‘The Bondman,’ 4to, 1624; licensed 3 Dec. 1623, and played at the Cockpit; partly founded on Plutarch. It was revived, 1 March 1661, when Pepys saw it; at Drury Lane 8 June 1719; and, altered by Cumberland, at Covent Garden 13 Oct. 1779. 4. ‘The Renegado,’ 4to, 1630;
