(a) Broad aesthetic considerations: the comparison of style and method of treatment with the known work of either dramatist.
(b) The test of parallel phrases. Massinger’s habit of repeating himself is notorious. I have gone through the entire body of his work, both that which appears under his name, and that which has been assigned to him by modern research in the Beaumont & Fletcher plays, and noted all expressions I found analogous to any which occur in The Fatal Dowry. I have done the same for Field’s work, examining his two comedies, Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies, and Acts I and V of The Knight of Malta and III and IV of The Queen of Corinth, which the consensus of critical opinion recognizes (in my judgment, correctly) as his. He is generally believed to have collaborated also in The Honest Man’s Fortune, but the exact extent of his work therein is so uncertain that I have not deemed it a proper field from which to adduce evidence. His hand has been asserted by one authority or another to appear in various other plays of the period, he having served, as it were, the role of a literary scapegoat on whom it was convenient to father any Scene not identified as belonging to Beaumont, Fletcher, or Massinger; but there is no convincing evidence for his participation in the composition of any extant dramas save the above named.
(c) Metrical tests. I have computed the figures for The Fatal Dowry in regard to double or feminine endings and run-on lines. Massinger’s verse displays high percentages (normally 30 per cent, to 45 per cent.) in the case of either. Field’s verse varies considerably in the matter of run-on lines at various periods of his life, but the proportion of them is always smaller than Massinger’s. His double endings average about 18 per cent. I have also counted in each Scene the number of speeches that end within the line, and that end with the line, respectively. (Speeches ending with fragmentary lines are considered to have mid-line endings.) This is declared by Oliphant (Eng. Studien, XIV, 72) the surest test for the work of Massinger. “His percentage of speeches,” he says, “that end where the verses end is ordinarily as low as 15.” This is a tremendous exaggeration, but it is true that the ratio of mid-line endings is much higher in Massinger than in any of his contemporaries—commonly 2:1, or higher.
We find the [First Scene of Act I] one of those skillful introductions to the action which the “stage-poet” knew so well how to handle, for which reason, probably, he was generally intrusted with the initial Scene of the plays in which he collaborated. Thoroughly Massingerian are its satire upon the degenerate age and its grave, measured style, rhetorical where it strives to be passionate, and replete with characteristic expressions. Especially striking examples of the dramatist’s well-known and never-failing penchant for the recurrent use of certain ideas and phrases are: As I could run the hazard of a check for’t. ([l. 10])—cf. [8]C-G. 87 b, 156 b, 327 b; D. V, 328; XI, 28;—You shall o’ercome. ([l. 101])—cf. C-G. 230 b, 248 b, 392 a;—and [ll. 183–7]—cf. C-G. 206 a, 63 a, 91 a, 134 b. The correspondence between [ll. 81–99] and the opening of The Unnatural Combat has already been remarked on, while further reminiscences of the same passage are to be found elsewhere in Massinger (C-G. 104 a, 195 b). Metrical tests show for the Scene 33 per cent. double endings and 29 per cent. run-on lines, figures which substantiate the conclusions derivable from a scrutiny of its style and content.[9]
In [I, ii] Massinger appears in his element, an episode permitting opportunities for the forensic fervor which was his especial forte. Such Scenes occur again and again in his plays: the conversion of the daughters of Theophilus by the Virgin Martyr, the plea of the Duke of Milan to the Emperor, of old Malefort to his judges in The Unnatural Combat, of Antiochus to the Carthagenian senate in Believe as You List. From the speech with which Du Croy opens court ([I, ii, 1–3])—cf. the inauguration of the senate-house scene in The Roman Actor, C-G. 197 b,
Fathers conscript, may this our meeting be
Happy to Caesar and the commonwealth!
—to the very end, it abounds with Massingerisms: Knowing judgment; Speak to the cause; I foresaw this (an especial favorite of the poet’s); Strange boldness!; the construction, If that curses, etc;—also cf. [l. 117] ff. with
To undervalue him whose least fam’d service
Scornes to be put in ballance with the best