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An Experiment with Massinger's Verse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederic L. Jones
Frederic L. Jones*
Affiliation:
Mercer University
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Extract

While reading the plays of Massinger, I was struck by the frequency with which he terminates his lines with the insignificant words of and to. As I went from play to play I found these words bobbing up in the important end position with surprising regularity. Curiosity led me to measure this regularity by an actual count and classification in all his plays, and then to ascertain the practice of his predecessors and contemporaries. My idea was that in these two small words there might be found a distinguishing characteristic of Massinger's verse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1932 , pp. 727 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932

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References

2 The average for Tourneur is without a doubt unreliable. It is based on The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy, the last of which cannot be his. The differences between the figures for these two plays are paralleled only once or twice by the plays of known playwrights. Here are the figures:

The Atheist's Tragedy 23 27 8 9 31 36
The Revenger's Tragedy 1 7 0 1 1 8

E. H. C. Oliphant assigns the play to Middleton, with whose average the figures agree much more nearly. See Oliphant, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (1927), pp. 90–92. Since this paper was written, further evidence against Tourneur's authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy has appeared in the London Times Literary Supplement (April 23, 1931), in connection with which I offered the present evidence in a note entitled “Cyril Tourneur,” in the Supplement for June 18, 1931.

3 The play by J. S. is Andromana, or The Merchant's Wife (publ. 1660). Fleay and Schelling tell us that J. S. is not James Shirley. Though this is easily possible, one would, judging by the figures, at least suspect Shirley.

3a In the of and to count only whole verse lines are included. Often, of course, the last line of a speech is not a complete verse line, the verse line being completed by the first type line of the next speech.

4 The Plays of Massinger, ed. Gifford (New York, 1857), pp. 346–347.

5 Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, i, p. 208.

6 Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, ii, p. 100.

7 Ibidem, ii, p. 100.

8 Gifford, The Plays of Massinger, p. 495.

9 Ibidem, p. 525.

10 All references to G. C. Macaulay are to his Appendix to Chapter v, Cambridge History of English Literature, vi, pp. 155–158. References to Fleay are to his Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama.

11 Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, ii, p. 214.

12 “Die Nachamung spanischer Komödien in England,” Archiv, xcix, 271.

13 See The Knight of Malta, The Queen of Corinth, The Double Marriage, and The Lover's Progress.

14 It is only fair to add that the results of this test do not agree nearly so well with the conclusions of Oliphant, whose Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, 1927, I inspected after this paper was written.

15 Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, i, 425.