SOURCE: Bennett, A. L. “The Moral Tone of Massinger's Dramas.” Papers on Language and Literature 2, No. 3 (Summer 1966): 39-56.

In the following essay, Bennett argues that Massinger was at his best when dealing with moral and political questions and was less successful at dramatizing romantic situations.

It is remarkable that Philip Massinger, a dramatist without a ready wit and with only a modicum of humor, should have written the most successful comedy of Jacobean times (exclusive of Shakespeare's). What is stranger still, though perhaps not inexplicable, is that a writer with such an intense moral earnestness should have the morality of his dramas questioned by so many good critics. “Everyone who writes on Massinger,” says Philip Edwards in a temperate and entirely sympathetic essay on the subject, “recognizes him as a moralist, a sage and serious man determined to indicate what behavior was acceptable and what was not.”¹ Hazelton...