Professor Paul Hamelius of Liège set out to solve the difficulty, and in a scholarly article (Modern Language Review, July, 1909), he marshals the facts and seeks a solution. ‘Among her [Mrs. Behn’s] collected novels’[2] he writes ‘there is one entitled The Nun; or, The Perjur’d Beauty and Mr. Gosse has kindly informed me that the story is identical with The Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker which appears in the editio princeps of 1689 (inaccessible to me).’ Unfortunately he can find no analogy and is obliged to draw attention to other sources. He points to The Virgin Captive, the fifth story in Roger L’Estrange’s The Spanish Decameron (1687). Again: there is the famous legend of the lovers of Teruel as dramatized in 1638 by Juan Perez de Montalvan, Los Amantes de Teruel. An earlier comedia exists on the same subject written by A. Rey de Artieda, 1581, and yet another play by Tirso de Molina, 1635, based on Artieda. Hamelius was obviously not satisfied with his researches, and with a half-suggestion that Southerne may have merely intended to pay a compliment to his ‘literary friend Mrs. Behn,’ his conclusion is that ‘the question is naturally still open whether Southerne was not drawing from some more immediate source—possibly even from some lost version of the story by Mrs. Behn herself.’
In the course of my preparing the present edition of Mrs. Behn’s complete works, Mr. Gosse, adding yet another to innumerable kindnesses and encouragements, entrusted me with a little volume[3] from his private library: The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (12mo, 1689, Licensed 22 October, 1688), and I soon found this to be the immediate source of Southerne’s tragedy, a totally different novel from The Nun; or, The Perjur’d Beauty, and one, moreover, which has never till now been included in any edition of Mrs. Behn’s works or, indeed, reprinted in any form. It were superfluous to compare novel and tragedy detail by detail. Many striking, many minor points are the same in each. In several instances the nomenclature has been preserved. The chief divergence is, of course, the main catastrophe. Mrs. Behn’s execution could ill have been represented on the boards, and Southerne’s heroine, the victim of villainies and intrigue, is, it must be confessed, an infinitely more pathetic figure than guilty Isabella in the romance.
The story of a man returning after long absence and finding his spouse (or betrothed) wedded to another, familiarized to the generality of modern readers by Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, occurs in every shape and tongue. No. 69 of Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is L’Honneste femme à Deux Maris.[4] A more famous exemplar we have in the Decameron, Day IV, Novella 8, whose rubric runs: ‘Girolamo ama la Salvestra: va, costretto da’ prieghi della madre, a Parigi: torna, e truovala maritata: entrale di nascoso in casa, e muorle allato; e portato in una chiesa, muore la Salvestra allata a lui.’
Scenes of the amusing underplot of The Fatal Marriage which contain some excellent comedy, Southerne took directly from The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief (printed as Fletcher’s in 1640 and ‘corrected by Shirley’ in 1633 according to Herbert’s license). The purgatorial farce may be traced to the Decameron, Day III, 8. ‘Ferondo, mangiata certa polvere, è sotterrato per morto: e dall’ abate, chi la moglie di lui si gode, tratto dalla sepoltura, è messo in prigione e fattogli credere, che egli è in purgatoro; e poi risuscitato . . .’ It is the Feronde; ou, le Purgatoire of La Fontaine.
The Fatal Marriage; or, The Innocent Adultery long kept the stage.[5] On 2 December, 1757, Garrick’s version, which omitting the comic relief weakens and considerably shortens the play, was produced at Drury Lane with himself as Biron and Mrs. Cibber as Isabella. The actual name of the tragedy, however, was not changed to Isabella till some years after. Mrs. Barry, the original Isabella, was acknowledged supreme in this tragedy, and our greatest actresses, Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Crawford, Miss Young, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O’Neill, have all triumphed in the rôle.
[1] This has nothing to do with Scarron’s novel, L’ Innocent Adultère which translated was so popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bellmour carried it in his pocket when he went a-courting Laetitia, to the horror of old Fondlewife who discovered the tome, (The Old Batchelor, 1693), and Lydia Languish was partial to its perusal in 1775.
[2] Hamelius used the collected edition of 1705.
[3] It is interesting to note that the book originally belonged to Scott’s friend and critic, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
[4] Reproduced by Celio Malespini Ducento Novelle, No. 9 (Venice, 4to, 1609, but probably written about thirty years before).
[5] A French prose translation of Southerne is to be found in Vol. VIII of Le Theâtre Anglois, Londres, 1746. It is entitled L’Adultère Innocent; but the comic underplot is very sketchily analyzed, scene by scene, and the whole is very mediocre withal.