How does it come about, we may well ask, that this play possesses qualities so rare and so strangely at variance with those which are normal to the work of Massinger—its masterly portrait-gallery of dramatis personae and its inexhaustible field for interpretation. We can suspect an answer only in the complementary nature of the two minds that went to fashion it—in the union in this one production of the talents of Massinger and of Field.
A reference to the analysis of collaboration discloses that, so far as the actual writing of the play goes, the figure of Novall Senior is altogether the work of Massinger. His son, on the other hand, is almost entirely the work of Field; in Massinger’s share he appears only in the first part of [III, i], and in the scene of his surprisal and death. Indeed, both the young gallant himself and all his satellites can safely be put down as creations of the actor-dramatist. They have their parallels in his comedy of Woman is a Weathercock, down to the page whose pert asides of satiric comment are anticipated in the earlier work by those of a youngster of identical kidney. The long scene in which we are introduced to Beaumelle and given insight into her character and mental attitude is Field’s throughout; thereafter she has only to act out her already-revealed nature—first as the impudent adulteress and later as the repentant
sinner, in both of which roles she affords Massinger excellent opportunities to display his favorite powers of speech-making. Charalois, Romont, and Rochfort are treated at length by both dramatists.
But in a harmonious collaboration, such as The Fatal Dowry plainly was, the contributions of the two authors cannot be identified with the passages from their respective pens. Each must inevitably have planned, suggested, criticised. The question remains whether we can in any measure determine what part of the conception was due to each. Beyond the Novall Junior group we cannot establish distinct lines of cleavage. What we can do is to suggest the features of the finished product which Field and Massinger brought severally to its making—to point out the qualities of the two men which were joined to produce the play they have given us.
The outstanding excellences of Massinger were a thorough grasp of the architectonics of play-making in the building both of separate Act and entire drama; an adherence to an essential unity of design and treatment; a conscientious regard to the details of stage-craft; a vehicle of dignified and at times noble verse, without violent conceits or lapses into triviality, sustained, lucid, regular; and a genuine eloquence in forensic passages. His chief weaknesses were a certain stiffness of execution which made his plays appear always as structures rather than organisms, a ponderous monotony of fancy, and an inability to create or reproduce or understand human nature. His characters are normally types, their qualities—honor, virtue, bravery, etc.—mere properties which they can assume or lay aside at pleasure like garments, their conduct governed more by the exigencies of plot than by any conceivable psychology.
The weaknesses of Field—as revealed in his two independent comedies—were of a nature more evasive, less capable of definition. A tendency to weave too many threads into the action, an occasional hasty and skimping treatment of his scenes which leaves them unconvincing for lack of sufficient elaboration, and a general thinness of design and workmanship are discoverable. Defects such as these could be readily corrected by association with the single-minded, painstaking, thorough Massinger. On the other hand he possessed a lightness of touch, a blithe vigor, and a racy, though often obscene, humor foreign to his colleague. What is more important, he possessed a considerable first-hand knowledge of men and women, and an ability to put them in his plays and endow them with something of life—not to conceive great figures, such as dominate the imagination, but to reproduce with vitality and freshness the sort of people he saw about him—in other words, not to create but to depict; and furthermore Field seems to have had a special gift for sketching them rather clearly in a very brief compass.[11] Mr. Saintsbury was right in declaring that Massinger never could draw a woman. But Field could, and the critic was rather unfortunate in applying his broadly correct observation to the one woman of Massinger’s in the delineation of whom he had Field to help him!
With these facts in mind, the distinctive virtues of The Fatal Dowry can be accounted for. Massinger here possessed a colleague who had just those talents of insight and verve and grasp of life that were denied his own plodding, bookishly learned mind. Not only young Novall and his satellites, but Beaumelle certainly, and probably Pontalier (whom Massinger would have been more likely to degrade to the baseness of Novall’s other dependents) may be put down as essentially Field’s creations, while in the case of the others he was ever at Massinger’s elbow to guard him against blunders, if, indeed, their preliminary mapping out of the rather obvious lines along which the action and characters must develop were not of itself a sufficiently sure guide. To Massinger, on the other hand, may safely be ascribed the basic conception of such stately figures as Charalois and Rochfort, however much Field may have been responsible for preserving them as fresh and living portraits.
As to share in plot structure, in the absence of any known source, we may conjecture that the germ from which the play evolved was the conception of that situation by which Charalois, burdened as he is with an immense debt of thankfulness to Rochfort, finds himself suddenly called by the imperative demands of honor to do that which will strike his benefactor to the heart. The grounding of the hero’s debt of gratitude in the story of Miltiades and Cimon was probably the work of Massinger, of whose veneration for things classic we have abundant evidence, while to him also, we may believe, was due the shaping of the story in such fashion that he had opportunity to exploit his greatest gift in no less than two formal trials, one informal trial, and a long Act besides given over almost exclusively to verbose disputes and exhortations. The circumstances of the discovery of the amour of Beaumelle and Novall, while penned by Massinger, are more likely an invention of Field’s, not only as faintly reminiscent of his Amends for Ladies, but as according better with the general spirit of his work.
Several plays of the Massinger corpus are more striking on first acquaintance than The Fatal Dowry, and yet others surpass it in regard to this feature or that. It has not the gigantic protagonist of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, or the admirable structure of that fine play, which works with ever-cumulating intensity to one final, tremendous climax. It has not the impressiveness of The Duke of Milan, or its sheer sweep of tragic passion and breathless intensity, or anything so compelling as its great scene of gathering jealousy that breaks forth at last in murder. Its verse is less poetic than that of The Maid of Honor; it lacks the charm of The Great Duke of Florence, and the ethical fervor of The Roman Actor. But in utter reality, in convincing simulation of life, which holds good under the most exhaustive study and makes that study forever continue to yield new suggestions and new appreciations, and in abundance and inherent truthfulness of detailed characterization, it stands alone, and these sterling qualities must so outweigh its defects as to insure for it a high place, not only among the productions of its authors, but among the plays of the Jacobean Period as a whole.