SOURCE: Barton, Anne. “The Distinctive Voice of Massinger.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 1977, pp. 623-34.

In the following essay, Barton reviews Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson's 1959 edition of Massinger works and, unlike most critics from Eliot on, sees the mark of a distinctive artistic personality in Massinger's plays.

Philip Massinger died in 1640, fifteen years after his friend and collaborator John Fletcher. According to Aston Cokayne, who celebrated the curiosity in a poem, Massinger was buried in Fletcher's grave at St Saviour's, Southwark. This interment proved oddly symbolic. At least thirteen plays in which Massinger was a secret but important sharer were to be printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, without acknowledgment of his authorship. Moreover, as Fletcher's reputation gradually declined from its seventeenth-century height, it took Massinger's with it. Except for A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City Madam, comedies which stand apart...