Philip Massinger wrote a few commemorative poems, commendations of other playwrights, and dedicatory epistles in verse and prose. These have been collected by Donald Lawless in a 1968 monograph, The Poems of Philip Massinger with Critical Notes. Massinger’s reputation, however, rests firmly on his plays.

Philip Massinger’s missing plays are the stuff of legend: An eighteenth century book dealer, Joseph Warburton, bought and stacked away in a closet an undetermined number of Massinger manuscripts, which his cook mistook for scrap and used, sheet by sheet, to line pie plates and start fires. What outlived the cook is a body of competently, sometimes brilliantly, plotted plays, which are variations on three or four themes and character types.

In the past, critics such as Arthur Symons and Ronald Bayne have complained that Massinger’s works offer no new insights into the relationship between human beings and society, no existential questions about the right and wrong of a character’s course. They found his thinking conventional and his heroines smug. Later critics, such as Mark Mugglio and A. P. Hogan, attempted to rescue Massinger from such charges by arguing that he was subtly challenging the very assumptions his plays seem to support.

In fact, Massinger’s plays do make conventional assumptions about art, society, and human motives. Art teaches pleasantly; society naturally forms a hierarchy in which those of good blood, well educated, rule over those of less exalted natures. Humans act from love, greed, ambition, or simple fellowship. Working from these assumptions, Massinger dramatizes the unsuccessful attempts of citizens who wish to rise above their natural stations. He twits the younger generation for its impatience, he upholds loyalty as an almost ultimate value, and he polishes with loving care his portraits of the loyal and the innocent, the gruff and the greedy.

Though he does not challenge his culture’s values, Massinger can still fascinate and delight a modern audience for three reasons. First, he fills his scenes with accurate observations of daily details. He savors the dodges by which a shrewd merchant secures a mortgage, the puff pastries and sherry sauces that a good chef can concoct, the pearl necklaces and tavern reckonings on which social status so often depends. Even in his most serious plays, one finds him lavishing stage time on the petty rituals and daily clutter that make people feel comfortably at home in the middle class. Through Massinger, one becomes intimate with the Renaissance Everyman, a hearty and surprisingly broad-minded figure.

Second, Massinger composes good, though not memorable, poetry and satisfying plots. His characters can dependably explain themselves and can use the common stock of images. Having apprenticed himself to such masters of double and triple plots as Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher, Massinger could weave most pleasing tapestries of contrasting threads. The saint’s sweetness shows grandly against a background of sinners; the jealous man’s frenzy, against the loyal anger of his wife.

Third, Massinger had an apparently lifelong fascination with the way that passion attacks reason. He continually examines the “something snapped” movement of a character’s mind. In a Massinger character, passion’s attack can numb the will as suddenly as the wasp’s sting paralyzes the spider. Like Robert Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Massinger concentrates sometimes on symptoms, sometimes on causes, sometimes on cures for the victims of jealousy or of “heroical love.” His impassioned characters may be enrapt by Providence (as in The Virgin Martyr) or entrapped by their own possessive natures (as in A New Way to Pay Old Debts) or by the lure of other characters (as in The Maid of Honour