The Quarto, and the various modern editions and translations of The Fatal Dowry have already been recorded in the opening pages of the [Introduction]. In the editions there noted of the collected works of Massinger will be found all the plays which bear his name. (Believe As You List appears only in Cunningham’s edition of Gifford and in the Mermaid Series’ Massinger.) Field’s two independent plays, Woman is a Weathercock (Q. 1612) and Amends for Ladies (Q’s. 1618, 1639), were reprinted by J. P. Collier, London, 1829. They are included in Thomas White’s Old English Dramas, London, 1830; in W. C. Hazlitt’s edition of Dodsley’s Old English Plays, London, Reeves and Turner, 1875; and in the Mermaid Series volume, Nero and Other Plays, with an Introduction by A. W. Verity, London and New York, 1888. All other extant dramas in which either Massinger or Field had a share may be found in any edition of the collected works of Beaumont & Fletcher, with the exception of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, which appears in vol. II of Bullen’s Old Plays, London, Weyman and Sons, 1883.

The stage version of The Fatal Dowry by Sheil is printed in French’s Acting Edition, vol. 9. Of the related plays, The Lady’s Trial and The Fair Penitent may be found in all editions of the collected works respectively of John Ford and Nicholas Rowe; The Fair Penitent is also published along with Rowe’s Jane Shore in the Belles Lettres Series, 1907. For The Insolvent, see The Dramatic Works of Aaron Hill, Esq., 2 vols., 1760. DER GRAF VON CHAROLAIS ein Trauerspiel von Richard Beer-Hofmann is printed by S. Fischer, Berlin, 1906.

The following works have bearing upon the play or its authors:

Footnotes: Preface and Introduction

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. [↩]