JOHN WEBSTER.

[Died about 1638.]

LANGBAINE only informs us of this writer that he was clerk of St. Andrew's parish, Holborn,* and esteemed by his contemporaries. He wrote in conjunction with Rowley, Dekker, and Marston. Among the pieces entirely his own are 'The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' the tragedy of Appius and Virginia,' 'The Devil's Law Case,' and 'The Duchess of Malfi.' From the advertisement prefixed to 'Vittoria Corombona,' the piece seems not to have been successful in the representation. The author says "that it wanted that which is the only grace and setting out of a tragedy, a full and understanding auditory." The auditory, it may be suspected, were not quite so much struck with the beauty of Webster's horrors as Mr. Lamb seems to have been, in writing the notes to his 'Specimens of our old Dramatic Poetry.' In the same preface Webster deprives himself of the only apology that could be offered for his absurdities as a dramatist by acknowledging that he wrote slowly; a circumstance in which he modestly compares himself to Euripides. In his tragedy of The Duchess of Malfi,' the duchess is married and delivered of several children in the course of the five acts.

JOHN FORD.

[Born, 1586. Died, 1640?]

It is painful to find the name of Ford a barren spot in our poetical biography, marked by nothing but a few dates and conjectures, chiefly drawn from his own dedications. He was born of a respectable family in Devonshire; was bred to the law, and entered of the Middle Temple at the age of seventeen. At the age of twenty he published a poem, entitled 'Fame's Memorial,' in honour of the deceased Earl of Devonshire; and, from the

*["Gildon, I believe, was the first who asserted that our author was clerk of St. Andrew's. I searched the registers of that church, but the name of Webster did not occur in them; and I examined the MSS. belonging to the Parish Clerks' Hall, in Wood-street, with as little success."-Dyce's Webster, vol. i. p. 1.]

dedication of that piece, it appears that he chiefly subsisted upon his professional labours, making poetry the solace of his leisure hours. All his plays were published between the years 1629 and 1639; but before the former period he had for some time been known as a dramatic writer, his works having been printed a considerable time after their appearance on the stage; and, according to the custom of the age, had been associated in several works with other composers. * With Dekker he joined in dramatizing a story which reflects more disgrace upon the age than all its genius could redeem, namely, the fate of Mother Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, an aged woman, who had been recently the victim of legal and superstitious murder

"Nil adeo fœdum quod non exacta vetustas

Ediderit."

The time of his death is unknown.†

WILLIAM ROWLEY.

[Born 15-. Died, 1640?]

OF William Rowley nothing more is known than that he was a player by profession, and for several years at the head of the Prince's company of comedians. Though his name is found in one instance affixed to a piece conjointly with Shakspeare's, he is generally classed only in the third rank of our dramatists. His Muse is evidently a plebeian nymph, and had not been educated

* [Honour Triumphant,' and ' A Line of Life,' two tracts by Ford, unknown to the editors of his works, were reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1843.]

† I have declined obtruding on the reader some passages in Ford's plays which possess a superior power to a scene in 'The Lover's Melancholy,' because they have been anticipated by Mr. Lamb in his 'Dramatic Specimens.' Even if this had not been the case, I should have felt reluctant to give a place to one dreadfully beautiful specimen of his affecting powers, in the tragedy of 'The Brother and Sister.' Better that poetry should cease, than have to do with such subjects. The Lover's Melancholy' has much of the grace and sweetness that distinguishes the genius of Ford. ["Mr. Campbell speaks favourably of the poetic portion of this play; he thinks, and I fully agree with him, that it has much of the grace and sweetness which distinguish the genius of Ford. It has also somewhat more of the sprightliness, in the language of the secondary characters, than is commonly found in his plays."-Gifford.]

[Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I. The play in which his name is printed conjointly with Shakspeare's is called 'The Birth of Merlin.']

in the school of the Graces. His most tolerable production is 'The New Wonder, or a Woman never Vexed.' Its drafts of citizen life and manners have an air of reality and honest truth; the situations and characters are forcible, and the sentiments earnest and unaffected. The author seems to move in the sphere of life which he imitates with no false fears about its dignity, and is not ashamed to exhibit his broken merchant hanging out the bag for charity among the debtors of a prison-house.

PHILIP MASSINGER.

[Born, 1583. Died, 1640.].

THE father of this dramatic poet was attached to the family of Henry, the second Earl of Pembroke, and died in the service of that honourable house. The name of a servant carried with it no sense of degradation in those times, when the great lords and officers of the court numbered inferior nobles among their followers. On one occasion the poet's father was the bearer of letters from the Earl of Pembroke to Queen Elizabeth; a circumstance which has been justly observed to indicate that he could be no mean person, considering the punctilious respect which Elizabeth exacted from her courtiers.

Massinger was born at Salisbury,* or probably at Wilton, in its neighbourhood, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, in whose family he also appears to have been educated. That nobleman died in the poet's sixteenth year, who thus unfortunately lost whatever chance he ever had of his protecting kindness. His father continued indeed in the service of the succeeding earl,† who was an accomplished man, a votary of the Muses, and one of the brightest ornaments of the courts of Elizabeth and James; but he withheld his patronage from a man of genius, who had claims to it, and would have done it honour, for reasons that have not been distinctly explained in the scanty and sorrowful history of the poet. Mr. Gifford, dissatisfied with former reasons alleged for this neglect, and convinced from the perusal of his writings that Massinger was a Catholic, conjectures that it may be attributed to his having offended the earl by having apostatized while *[He was baptized in St. Thomas's Church, Salisbury, 24th November, 1583.] † William, the third Earl of Pembroke.

at the university to that obnoxious faith. He was entered as a commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, in his eighteenth year, where he continued only four years. Wood and Davies conclude that he missed a degree, and was suddenly withdrawn from the university, in consequence of Pembroke's disapprobation of his attachment to poetry and romances, instead of logic and philosophy. Mr. Gifford prefers the authority of Langbaine, that he was not supported at all at Oxford by the Earl of Pembroke, but by his own father, and concludes that he was withdrawn from it solely by the calamitous event of his death. Whatever was the cause, he left the university abruptly, and, coming to London, without friends, or fortune, or profession, was, as he informs us himself, driven by his necessities to the stage for support.

From the period of his arrival in London in 1606 till the year 1622, when his 'Virgin Martyr' appeared in print, it is sufficiently singular that we should have no notice of Massinger, except in one melancholy relic that was discovered by Mr. Malone in Dulwich College, namely, a letter subscribed by him and two other dramatic poets,* in which they solicit the advance of five pounds from the theatrical manager,† to save them from the horrors of a gaol. The distressful document accidentally discovers the fact of Massinger having assisted Fletcher in one of his dramas, and thus entitles Sir Aston Cokayne's assertion to belief, that he assisted him in more than one. Though Massinger therefore did not appear in print during the long period already mentioned, his time may be supposed to have been partly employed in those confederate undertakings which were so common during the early vigour of our stage; and there is the strongest presumptive evidence that he was also engaged in plays of his own composition, which have been lost to the world among those literary treasures that perished by the neglect of Warburton, the Somerset herald, and the unconscious sacrilege of his cook. Of Massinger's fame for rapidity in composition Langbaine has preserved a testimony in the lines of a contemporary poet : after the date of his first printed performance, those of his subsequent works come in thick succession, and there can be little doubt that the period preceding it was equally prolific.

*Nathaniel Field and Robert Daborne.

† [Philip Henslowe. See Collier's Life of Alleyn, p. 120.]

Of his private life literally nothing can be said to be known, except that his dedications bespeak incessant distress and dependence, while the recommendatory poems prefixed to his plays address him with attributes of virtue which are seldom lavished with flattery or falsehood on those who are poor. In one of his dedications he acknowledges the bounty of Philip Earl of Montgomery, the brother to that Earl of Pembroke who so unaccountably neglected him; but, warm as Massinger's acknowledgments are, the assistance appears to have been but transitory.* On the 17th of March, 1640, having gone to bed in apparent health the preceding night, he was found dead in the morning, in his own house in the Bankside. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Saviour's, and his fellow-comedians attended him to the grave; but it does not appear from the strictest search that a stone or inscription of any kind marked the place where his dust was deposited; even the memorial of his mortality is given with a pathetic brevity, which accords but too well with the obscure and humble circumstances of his life: "March 20, 1639-40, buried Philip Massinger, a stranger;"† and of all his admirers, only Sir Aston Cokayne dedicated a line to his memory. Even posterity did him long injustice; Rowe, who had discovered his merits in the depth of their neglect, forbore to be his editor, in the hopes of concealing his plagiarism from "The Fatal Dowry ;' and he seemed on the eve of oblivion, when Dodsley's reprint of our old plays brought him faintly into that light of reputation which has been made perfectly distinct by Mr. Gifford's edition of his works.

SIR JOHN SUCKLING.

[Born, 1608. Died, 1641.]

SUCKLING, who gives levity its gayest expression, was the son of the comptroller of the household to Charles I. Langbaine tells

* [This is a mistake-the assistance was even continued to the widow. "Mr. Philip Massinger, author of severall good playes, was a servant to his lordship, and had a pension of twenty or thirty pounds per annum, which was payed to his wife after his decease. She lived at Cardiff, in Glamorganshire."-Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire, edited by John Britton, 4to., 1847, p. 91.]

[The real entry in the register is, "1639. March 18. Philip Massinger, stranger"—that is, a non-parishioner.] In The Fair Penitent.'