SOURCE: Knights, L. C. “The Significance of Massinger's Social Comedies, with a Note on ‘Decadence’.” In Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, pp. 270-300. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937.

In the following essay, Knights views Massinger as the last of the Elizabethans, as his works are concerned with aristocratic values and show little interest in the middle class or common people.

The first symptom of decadence that we notice in Massinger is his dependence on Shakespeare. Canon Cruickshank gives a close-packed page to ‘a few examples of the imitation of incidents’, and over seven pages to ‘parallels in thought and diction’.¹ The nature of this indebtedness is discussed by Mr Eliot, who concludes that,

Massinger's feeling for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and his vocabulary were not in co-operation. … Every vital development in language is a development of feeling as well. The...