Philip Massinger - The Canon of Massinger's Works - Collaborations

Collaborations

With John Fletcher:

• Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, tragedy (August 1619; MS)
• The Little French Lawyer, comedy (c. 1619–23; printed 1647)
• A Very Woman, tragicomedy (c. 1619–22; licensed 6 June 1634; printed 1655)
• The Custom of the Country, comedy (c. 1619–23; printed 1647)
• The Double Marriage, tragedy (c. 1619–23; Printed 1647)
• The False One, history (c. 1619–23; printed 1647)
• The Prophetess, tragicomedy (licensed 14 May 1622; printed 1647)
• The Sea Voyage, comedy (licensed 22 June 1622; printed 1647)
• The Spanish Curate, comedy (licensed 24 October 1622; printed 1647)
• The Lovers' Progress or The Wandering Lovers, tragicomedy (licensed 6 December 1623; revised 1634; printed 1647)
• The Elder Brother, comedy (c. 1625; printed 1637).

With John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont:

• Thierry and Theodoret, tragedy (c. 1607?; printed 1621)
• The Coxcomb, comedy (1608–10; printed 1647)
• Beggars' Bush, comedy (c. 1612–15?; revised 1622?; printed 1647)
• Love's Cure, comedy (c. 1612–15?; revised 1625?; printed 1647).

With John Fletcher and Nathan Field:

• The Honest Man's Fortune, tragicomedy (1613; printed 1647)
• The Queen of Corinth, tragicomedy (c. 1616–18; printed 1647)
• The Knight of Malta, tragicomedy (c. 1619; printed 1647).

With Nathan Field:

• The Fatal Dowry, tragedy (c. 1619, printed 1632); adapted by Nicholas Rowe: The Fair Penitent

With John Fletcher, John Ford, and William Rowley (?), or John Webster (?):

• The Fair Maid of the Inn, comedy (licensed 22 January 1626; printed 1647).

With John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman (?):

• Rollo Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, tragedy (c. 1616–24; printed 1639).

With Thomas Dekker:

• The Virgin Martyr, tragedy (licensed 6 October 1620; printed 1622).

With Thomas Middleton and William Rowley:

• The Old Law, comedy (c. 1615–18; printed 1656).

Some of these "collaborations" are in fact more complex: revisions by Massinger of older plays by Fletcher and others, etc. (It is not necessary to suppose that Massinger, Fletcher, Ford, and Rowley-or-Webster sat down in a room together to write a play.)

More than a dozen of Massinger's plays are said to be lost, though the titles of some of these may be duplicates of those of existing plays. Eleven of these lost plays were manuscripts used by John Warburton's cook for lighting fires and making pies. The tragedy The Jeweller of Amsterdam (c. 1616–19) may be a lost collaboration, with Fletcher and Field.

The list given above represents a consensus of scholarship; individual critics have assigned various other plays, or portions of plays, to Massinger—like The Faithful Friends, or the first two acts of The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611).

Massinger's independent works were collected by Thomas Coxeter (4 vols., 1759, revised edition with introduction by Thomas Davies, 1779), by J. Monck Mason (4 vols., 1779), by William Gifford (4 vols., 1805, 1813), by Hartley Coleridge (1840), by Lt. Col. Cunningham (1867), and selections by Arthur Symons in the Mermaid Series (1887–9).

Subsequent work on Massinger includes Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, eds., The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger (5 vols., Oxford, 1976), Martin Garrett, ed., Massinger: the Critical Heritage (London, 1991), chapters in Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984) and Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984), and Martin Garrett, "Philip Massinger" in the revised Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2005).