and before the opening of the play), her grief, her plight, her exposure, her death;—she holds the centre of the stage to the very end. The number of the dramatis personae is cut down to eight; all touches of comedy are excised; and the double plot of the original is unified by the bold stroke of throwing back to a time before the opening of the play the entire episode of the unburied corpse and the origin of the hero’s friendship with the father of the heroine.
Discussions of the relative merits of The Fair Penitent and its source have been almost invariably acrimonious. Nor is this to be wondered at, for after reading the old tragedy with its severe dignity and noble restraint, one can scarce peruse without irritation the cloyingly melifluous
, emasculated verse of Rowe—by turns grandiloquent and sentimental. The characterization of The Fair Penitent is, in the main, insipid, and while Rowe’s heroine holds a commanding place in her drama to which Beaumelle does not pretend, the latter is a great deal more natural, and indeed, for that matter, far more truly a “penitent.” An exception to the general insipidity is Lothario, who is the analogue of the insignificant Novall Junior—“the gay Lothario”—whose very name has been ever since a synonym for the graceful, graceless, devil-may-care libertine—whose figure has been the prototype of a long line of similar characters in English literature, beginning with Richardson’s Lovelace and not yet closed with Anthony Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau. Beside this striking creation, the seducer of Beaumelle shows poorly indeed; but it is doubtful if the old dramatists would have consented to paint such an attractive rogue, had they been able; they wanted their Novall to be just the cowardly, dandyfied thing they made him. Beyond the portrait of Lothario, small ground for praise can be found in The Fair Penitent. That part of the action of The Fatal Dowry which under Rowe’s treatment antedates the rise of the curtain is narrated in the most stiffly mechanical sort of exposition; the action is developed by such threadbare theatrical devices as a lost letter and an overheard conversation; the voluble speeches of the several characters are, throughout, declamatory effusions almost unbelievably divorced from the apposite utterance of any rational human being under the circumstances. An Altamont who has been assured and reassured from his bride’s own lips of her aversion for him can fling himself from a quarrel with his life-long friend in hysterical defence of her, to seek solace in her arms—
There if in any pause of love I rest
Breathless with bliss upon her panting breast,
In broken, melting accents I will swear,
Henceforth to trust my heart with none save her;
a Sciolto who has given his daughter a dagger with which to end her shame, and then has arrested her willing arm with the prayer that she will not dispatch herself until he is gone from the sight of her, can thereupon take leave of her with the statement:
There is I know not what of sad presage
That tells me I shall never see thee more.