Philip Massinger

Philip Massinger left no recorded sayings and scarcely any trace of his private life—yet his plays made him a working playwright in the crowded theatre world of Jacobean London.

In this study, early-20th-century scholar Alfred Hamilton Cruickshank sets out to give Massinger’s plays the close attention already lavished on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Born in Salisbury in 1584, Massinger went from Oxford to London, where he wrote alongside John Fletcher and other playwrights, then for the King’s Men. The fragments of his career hint at a life shaped by collaboration, uncertain fortunes and the demands of a changing stage; the plays, meanwhile, carry the conflicts and anxieties of the age. With so little biography to guide him, what can Cruickshank discover by reading the work closely?

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