1640 Outside Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey the most glorious gathering of the literary dead is to be found in the louche South Bank premises of Southwark Cathedral. There are literary monuments (plaques and windows) to John Bunyan, Lancelot Andrewes, Samuel Johnson, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer. And, of course, Shakespeare, whose brother Edmund is buried there. Also buried there is Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher, and a rival dramatist of his later years, Philip Massinger (interred on this date). Had Shakespeare himself died in one of the regular plagues of the early 17th century he too would, it is certain, have found his resting place here – a few hundred yards as it was from the Globe.
Massinger deserves to be better known than he is. He was born in 1583 in Salisbury, the son of a landed MP and fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Little is known of Philip Massinger’s life – it is uncertain, for example, whether he was married or widowed in his adult years.
It is known that he was at St Alban Hall, Oxford in the early years of the 17th century, and at least one source records that he was distracted from his studies by a passion for poetry, romances and drama. He left without a degree, around the time of his father’s death in 1603. It is speculated that thereafter he was, for a while, an actor or ‘player’.
He was evidently financially distressed in the years that followed. In 1613 he is found, with fellow playwrights Nathan Field and Robert Daborne, writing from the Clink debtors’ prison (another few hundred yards from the theatres and Southwark Cathedral), asking a theatrical manager acquaintance for £5.
As with Shakespeare (who was retired to Stratford during the years of Massinger’s fame as a dramatist), Massinger’s relationship with the Catholic Church is uncertain. It was a difficult time to have too pronounced a faith. Internal evidence of his drama suggests that he was cognisant with Catholicism, and he had relatives who had been recusants.
During the years of his main activity as a playwright (the second decade of the 17th century) Massinger fell into the common practice of collaborative authorship (with Fletcher, notably), something that has led to problems for scholars trying to distinguish various hands. His favoured genre – much to the taste of theatregoers of the period, evidently – was the tragicomedy.
After 1620, Massinger left the company he had been with for several years (the King’s Men) and wrote a number of single-handed works, notably his best-known and most-revived play, the comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625) – one of the earliest and most effective satires on mercantilism and the corruptions of early capitalism, in the magnificent character Sir Giles Overreach.
Massinger seems to have been relatively well off at this period of his career. Various bits and pieces can be picked up about his professional life (mainly through quarrels with fellow authors) over the next fifteen years. But he is one of those major figures in English literature whose biography, as we know it, could be written on the back of a postage stamp. He died in March 1640 in a house in the South Bank theatre district. It is recorded that ‘he went to bed well, and dyed suddenly – but not of the plague’. He was buried on 18 March, at the cost of £2 (Massinger not being a parishioner), by one account in the same grave as John Fletcher. His last collaboration.