He is sometimes called Junior or the Younger to distinguish him from his father (1609–58) of the same name, a Doctor of Divinity who was Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford (1646–58) and Keeper of the University Archives.
The younger Langbaine was born in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford; his father's second son, he was apprenticed to a bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard in London, but was sent to University after his older brother William died in 1672.
Langbaine devoted his critical energies to the attempt to bring order and understanding to the stage drama of his era.
[2] By his own testimony (in A New Catalogue), Langbaine collected printed editions of 980 plays and masques, not counting drolls and interludes.
A discourse of horsemanship: directing the right way to breed, keep and train a horse, for ordinary hunting and plates was published in Oxford in 1685 for Nicholas Cox, bookseller.
Langbaine was active in the period when the first attempts were being made to clarify and comprehend the lush confusion of English drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.