ger, born in 1584, died in 1639. His surviving works
were composed, with one exception, after 1620. They represent,
therefore, the tastes of the playgoing classes during the rapid
development of the great struggle which culminated in the rebellion. In
a literary sense it is the period when the imaginative impulse
represented by the great dramatists was running low. It is curious to
reflect that, if Shakespeare had lived out his legitimate allowance of
threescore years and ten, he might have witnessed the production, not
only of the first, but of nearly all the best works of his school; had
his life been prolonged for ten years more, he would have witnessed its
final extinction. Within these narrow limits of time the drama had
undergone a change corresponding to the change in the national mood. The
difference, for example, between Marlowe and Massinger at the opening
and the close of the period--though their births were separated by only
twenty years--corresponds to the difference between the temper of the
generation which repelled the Armada and the temper of the generation
which fretted under the rule of the first Stuarts. The misnomer of
Elizabethan as applied to the whole school indicates an implicit
perception that its greater achievements were due to the same impulse
which took for its outward and visible symbol the name of the great
Queen. But it has led also to writers being too summarily classed
together who really represent very different phases in a remarkable
evolution. After making all allowances for personal idiosyncrasies, we
can still see how profoundly the work of Massinger is coloured by the
predominant sentiment of the later epoch.

As little is known of Massinger's life as of the lives of most of the
contemporary dramatists who had the good or ill fortune to be born
before the days of the modern biographical mania. It is known that he,
like most of his brethren, suffered grievously from impecuniosity; and
he records in one of his dedications his obligations to a patron without
whose bounty he would for many years have 'but faintly subsisted.' His
father had been employed by Henry, Earl of Pembroke; but Massinger,
though acknowledging a certain debt of gratitude to the Herbert family,
can hardly have received from them any effective patronage. Whatever
their relations may have been, it has been pointed out by Professor
Gardiner[6] that Massinger probably sympathised with the political views
represented