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 ⅗) 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 (⅓) of The Little French Lawyer yields 6; ⅖ of The Double Marriage, 6; ⅖ of The Spanish Curate, 6; ⅖ 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. [↩]