Looks at the critical reception to this Jacobean playwright from the early 17th to the late 19th century. Includes extensive selections from Pepys, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and Swinburne, with briefer comments from Scott, Byron and Keats.

Introduction; Part 1 Texts; Chapter 1 Nathan Field, Robert Daborne, and Philip Massinger; Chapter 2 John Taylor; Chapter 3 Sir Thomas Jay; Chapter 4 Thomas May; Chapter 5 Philip Massinger; Chapter 6 William Davenant(?); Chapter 7 Philip Massinger; Chapter 8 Sir Henry Herbert; Chapter 9 William Heminge; Chapter 10 Sir Aston Cokaine; Chapter 11 Wit's Recreations; Chapter 12 Abraham Wright; Chapter 13 Philip Kynder; Chapter 14 Samuel Pepys; Chapter 15 Gerard Langbaine; Chapter 16 Anthony Wood; Chapter 17 Nicholas Rowe; Chapter 18 Oliver Goldsmith; Chapter 19 George Colman; Chapter 20 Thomas Davies; Chapter 21 Reviews of The Bondman; Chapter 22 Henry Bate; Chapter 23 Reviews of The Magic Picture; Chapter 24 Richard Cumberland; Chapter 25 Charles Lamb; Chapter 26 William Gifford; Chapter 27 The Edinburgh Review; Chapter 28 William Gifford; Chapter 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Chapter 30 Sir James Bland Burges; Chapter 31 Sir Walter Scott; Chapter 32 The Times; Chapter 33 William Hazlitt; Chapter 34 John Hamilton Reynolds; Chapter 35 Beauties of Massinger; Chapter 36 John Keats; Chapter 37 George Gordon, Lord Byron; Chapter 38 Thomas Campbell; Chapter 39 Thomas Lovell Beddoes; Chapter 40 Richard Lalor Sheil(?); Chapter 41 Henry Neele; Chapter 42 Henry Hallam; Chapter 43 Hartley Coleridge; Chapter 44 The City Madam; Chapter 45 Edwin P.Whipple; Chapter 46 Sir Adolphus William Ward; Chapter 47 Sir Leslie Stephen; Chapter 48 Frances Ann Kemble; Chapter 49 Algernon Charles Swinburne; Chapter 50 James Russell Lowell; Chapter 51 Arthur Symons; Chapter 52 Edmund Gosse;