If William Shakespeare was the Bard of Avon, then Philip Massinger (1583-1640) could also lay claim to that title, even though the Avon in question is the one which flows through Salisbury, rather than the one which flows through Stratford.
Massinger was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare, and his family seems to have been long established in Salisbury, since at least 1415, according to the city records. Like Shakespeare, he was a member of the esteemed theatre company The King’s Men. There is no record of him having written with Shakespeare, but he is known to have written with other players associated with him, including John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
It has long been suspected that Massinger was a secret Catholic, an accusation also levelled at Shakespeare, of course. Evidence for this assertion comes from the fact that he failed to obtain a degree from Oxford, that the Earl of Pembroke withdrew his patronage, and that his plays sometimes contain Catholic imagery and sympathetic portrayals of Catholic clergy. However, this evidence is inconclusive, and in the case of the plays, complicated by the fact that they were often written in collaboration with other people.
Perhaps Massinger’s most enduring legacy came long after his death. The phrase “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”, later to spawn many variants, first appears in TS Eliot’s essay simply entitled Philip Massinger, collected in the anthology Selected Prose of TS Eliot (edited by Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace 1975. ISBN 0-15-680654-1.)
