¹ Fleay (Chron. Eng. Dra., I, 208) thinks that the otherwise lost Massinger play, The Judge, licensed by Herbert in 1627, and included in the list of Warburton’s collection, may have been The Fatal Dowry. He declares, moreover, that “the decree in favor of creditors in I, ii a was a statute made in 1623,” and suggests that Massinger after this date made over an independent play of Field’s, now lost. But I think that any one who surveys in The Fatal Dowry the respective hands of its authors will incline strongly to the conviction that this drama is the offspring of joint effort rather than the re-handling of one man’s work by another. The decree to which Fleay has reference appears to be that to be found in Statutes of the Realm, IV, ii, 1227–9, recorded as 21º Jac I, 19. This is an act passed by the parliament of 1623–4; it somewhat increases the stringency of the already-existing severe laws in regard to bankrupts, but contains nothing which even faintly suggests the decree in our play, by which the creditors are empowered to withhold the corpse of their debtor from burial; and, indeed, it is obviously impossible that a statute permitting any such practice could have been passed in Christian England of the seventeenth century. The fact is that this feature of the plot is taken direct from a classical author (see under Sources), and it would be gratuitous to assume in it a reference to contemporaneous legislation. As for the hypothesis that The Fatal Dowry and The Judge are the same play, in the utter absence of any supporting evidence it must be thrown out of court. This sort of identification is a confirmed vice with Fleay. The Judge is, moreover, listed as a comedy (see reprint of Warburton’s list in Fleay’s The Life and Work of Shakespeare, p.358).[?]

² Two other arguments—both fallacious—have been advanced for a more assured dating.

Formal prologues and epilogues came into fashion about 1620, and the absence of such appendages in the case of The Fatal Dowry has been generally taken as evidence for its appearance before that year; but for a Massinger production no such inference can be drawn—there is no formal prologue or epilogue in any of his extant plays before The Emperor of the East and Believe as You List, which were licensed for acting in 1631.

The suggestion (Fleay: Chron. Eng. Dra., I, p.208) that Field took the part of Florimel, and that the mention of her age as thirty-two years (II, ii, 17) has reference to his own age at the time the play was produced (thus fixing the date: 1619), is an idea so far-fetched and fantastic that it is amazing to find it quoted with perfect gravity by Ward (Hist. Eng. Dra. Lit., III, 39). That Field, second only to Burbage among the actors of his time, should have played the petty role of Florimel is a ridiculous supposition. It is strange that anyone who considered references of this sort a legitimate clue did not build rather upon the statement (II, i, 13) that Charalois was twenty-eight. But such grounds for theorizing are utterly unsubstantial; there is no earthly warrant for identifying the age of an author’s creation with the age of the author himself.[?]

³ I would not, however, think it very improbable that Field might have engaged in the composition of The Fatal Dowry immediately after his retirement, when the ties with his old profession were, perhaps, not yet altogether broken.[?]

⁴ On a careful inspection of the entire dramatic output of Massinger, both unaided work and plays done in collaboration, I have found worthy of record parallels to passages in The Fatal Dowry to the number of: 24, in The Unnatural Combat, 14 in the Massinger share (about ?) of The Virgin Martyr, 18 in The Renegado, 11 in The Duke of Milan, 10 in The Guardian, and in none of the rest as many as 8.—But Massinger’s undoubted share (?) of The Little French Lawyer yields 6; ? of The Double Marriage, 6; ? of The Spanish Curate, 6; ? of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, 4.[?]

⁵ E. g., I, i (Massinger) with its grave rhetoric uniformly sustained, and, in immediate succession, II, i (Decker), a medley of coarse buffoonery and tender and beautiful verse.[?]

⁶ As witness The False One. Here Massinger seems to have projected a stately historical drama of war and factional intrigue, with a conception of Cleopatra as the Great Queen, more a Semiramis or a Zenobia than “the serpent of old Nile,” and so treats his subject in the first and last Acts; while Fletcher “assists” him by filling the middle section of the play with scenes theatrically effective but leading nowhere, and in them makes the heroine the traditional “gipsy” Cleopatra.[?]

⁷ The only other modern attempt to apportion the play is that of C. Beck (The Fatal Dowry, Friedrich-Alexander Univ. thesis, 1906, pp.89–94). He assigns Massinger everything except the prose passages of II, ii and IV, i, and perhaps II, i, 93–109. His a priori theory of distribution seems to be that all portions of the play which he deems of worth must be Massinger’s. It is difficult to speak of Beck’s monograph with sufficiently scant respect.[?]

⁸ References to the plays of Massinger are either by page and column of the Cunningham-Gifford edition of his works (designated C-G.), or, in the case of plays in the Beaumont & Fletcher corpus in which he or Field collaborated, by volume and page of the Dyce edition (designated D.). Field’s two independent comedies are referred to by page of the Mermaid Series volume which contains them: Nero and Other Plays (designated M.).[?]

⁹ The figures for the speech-ending test for each scene will be found in the table at the end of this section, and are not given in the course of the detailed examination of the play, save in the case of one passage, where the ambiguity of their testimony is noted. In all other Scenes they merely corroborate the evidence of the other tests.[?]

¹⁰ This is all the more rampant in that it is suddenly called back into activity after its period of obscuration while she yielded herself to a cynical, immoral opportunism, and is now brought, by a fearful shock, to confront higher ethical values and real manhood. For this time she is given not a Novall but a Charalois to idealize.[?]

¹¹ See the figure of Captain Pouts in Woman is a Weathercock. He might easily have been made a mere miles gloriosus; instead he is a real man,—coarse, revengeful, dissolute, quarrelsome, hectoring—no doubt at heart a coward, but not more absurdly so in the face of his pretensions than many of his type in actual life. For characters clearly visualized in a few simple strokes, may be noted in the same play Lady Ninny, Lucida, and, apart from one speech (M. 356–7) out of character obviously for comic effect, Kate; in Amends for Ladies, Ingen. Examples of Field’s power in more idealistic work may be found in The Knight of Malta in the delineation of Montferrat’s passion (I, i) and in the scene between Miranda and Oriana (V, i).[?]

¹² Apparently The Fatal Dowry was not performed every day.[?]

¹³ During the run of this play one Warren, who was Powell’s dresser, claimed a right of lying for his master and performing the dead part of Lothario—about the middle of the scene Powell called for Warren; who as loudly replied from the stage, “Here Sir”—Powell (who was ignorant of the part his man was doing) repeated without loss of time, “Come here this moment you Son of a Whore or I’ll break all the bones in your skin”—Warren knew his hasty temper, and therefore without any reply jumped up with all his sables about him, which unfortunately were tied to the handles of the bier and dragged after him—but this was not all—the laugh and roar began in the audience and frightened poor Warren so much that with the bier at his tail he threw down Calista and overwhelmed her, with the table, lamp, books, bones, &c.—he tugged till he broke off his trammels and made his escape, and the play at once ended with immoderate fits of laughter—Betterton would not suffer The Fair Penitent to be played again, till poor Warren’s misconduct was somewhat forgotten—this story was told to Chetwood by Bowman [Sciolto]—(Genest, II, 281–2).[?]

¹⁴ This, of course, may require the substitution of a capital for a small letter, as when a mid-line word of the Quarto becomes in the re-alignment the first word of the verse.[?]