SOURCE: Edwards, Philip. “Massinger the Censor.” In Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, edited by Richard Hosley, pp. 341-50. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962.

In the following essay, Edwards argues that Massinger was a thoroughgoing moralist who nonetheless was capable of producing fine dramas in which he restrained his own views and displayed a moral tolerance.

Massinger seems to have been one of the reluctant dramatists of his age: a gentleman in reduced circumstances who became a playwright as gentlewomen later became governesses. That he would have preferred to be a lord (of the old school) seems a safe guess. What he might have done, as a nobleman, to educate his family, his tenants, his neighbors—and, indeed, his king and his country—he had to do in his plays. Everyone who writes on Massinger recognizes him as a moralist, a sage and...