Massinger, Philip | A. L. Bennett (essay date 1966)
A. L. Bennett (essay date 1966)
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...
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