The Fatal Dowry

by Philip Massinger; Nathaniel Field

Later Texts

There is no other seventeenth century edition of The Fatal Dowry. It was included in various subsequent collections, as follows:

• I. The Works of Philip Massinger—edited by Thomas Coxeter, 1759—re-issued in 1761, with an introduction by T. Davies.
• II. The Dramatic Works of Philip Massinger—edited by John Monck Mason, 1779.
• III. The Plays of Philip Massinger—edited by William Gifford, 1805. There was a revised second edition in 1813, which is still regarded as the Standard Massinger Text, and was followed in subsequent editions of Gifford.
• IV. Modern British Drama—edited by Sir Walter Scott, 1811. The text of this reprint of The Fatal Dowry is Gifford’s.
• V. Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford—edited by Hartley Coleridge, 1840 (et seq.). This follows the text of Gifford.
• VI. The Plays of Philip Massinger. From the Text of William Gifford. With the Addition of the Tragedy Believe as You List. Edited by Francis Cunningham, 1867 (et seq.). The Fatal Dowry in this edition, as in the preceding, is a mere reprint of the Second Edition of Gifford.
• VII. Philip Massinger. Selected Plays. (Mermaid Series.) Edited by Arthur Symons, 1887–9 (et seq.).

In addition to the above, The Fatal Dowry appeared in The Plays of Philip Massinger, adapted for family reading and the use of young persons, by the omission of objectionable passages,—edited by Harness, 1830–1; and another expurgated version was printed in the Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, 1810. Both of these are based on the text of Gifford.

The edition of Coxeter is closest of all to the Quarto, following even many of its most palpable mistakes, and adding some blunders on its own account. Mason accepts practically all of Coxeter’s corrections, and supplies a great many more variants himself, not all of which are very happy. Both these eighteenth century editors continually contract for the sake of securing a perfectly regular metre (e. g.: You’re for You are, [I, i, 139]; th’ honours for the honours, [I, ii, 35]; etc.), while Gifford’s tendency is to give the full form for even the contractions of the Quarto, changing its ’em’s to them’s, etc. Gifford can scarce find words sharp enough to express his scorn for his predecessors in their lack of observance of the text of the Quarto, yet he himself frequently repeats their gratuitous emendations when the original was a perfectly sure guide, and he has almost a mania for tampering with the Quarto on his own account. Symons’ Mermaid text, while based essentially on that of Gifford, in a number of instances departs from it, sometimes to make further emendations, but more often to go back from those of Gifford to the version of the original, so that on the whole this is the best text yet published.

There has been a German translation by the Graf von Baudisson, under the title of Die Unselige Mitgift, in his Ben Jonson und seine Schule, Leipsig, 1836; and a French translation, in prose, under the title of La dot fatale by E. Lafond in Contemporains de Shakespeare, Paris, 1864.