Abstract
Across the shadowy stage of the late Jacobean theater steps Philip Massinger, the last great figure in the play of a vanishing glory before the Puritans ring down the curtain on the epilogue of the greatest literary spectacle of the ages—the Elizabethan Drama. A century and a half will elapse before Massinger returns for his curtain call in that spotlight of popularity where his own age had held him; but, on his reappearance, he will find applause that increases in volume with the decades.|In recent years those who constantly stir the ashes of the past in search of live embers from which to rekindle the fires of literature have found the spark of immortality in the nineteen extant plays of the thirty- eight accredited either to Massinger's individual hand or to his collaboration with other dramatists.1 This is but a re-emphasis of the recognition that he commanded in his own day, a fact attested to by the frequency with which his plays were acted, and by some two dozen commendatory verses written about him by his contemporaries.