and Boyle alike declare that its single long Scene is divided between
the two authors, but are unable to agree as to the point of division.
The first 316 lines are beyond question the work of Massinger. The tilt
between Romont and Beaumelle is conducted with that flood of rhetorical
vituperation by which he customarily attempts to delineate passion;
in no portion of the play is his diction and sentence-structure more
marked; and the parallels to passages elsewhere in his works reappear
with redoubled profusion. Indeed, they become too numerous for complete
citation; let it suffice to refer ll. 43-4 to D. III, 477; ll. 53-4 to
C-G. 173 a; ll. 80-3 to D. III, 481; l. 104 to C-G. 532 a; l. 116 to
C-G. 146 b; ll. 117-8 to D. VI, 294 and D. VI, 410; ll. 232-5 to C-G.
307 a, also to 475 b, and to D. VIII, 406; while the phrase, _Meet with
an ill construction_ (l. 238) is a common one with Massinger (cf. C-G.
76 a, 141 b, 193 b, 225 b, 339 b), as are such ironic observations as
the _Why, ’tis exceeding well_ of l. 293 (cf., e. g., 175 b). This part
of the Scene contains 45 per cent. double endings and 36 per cent.
run-on lines.
The last 161 lines of the Act with scarcely less certainty can be
established as Field’s, though on a first reading one might imagine,
from the wordiness of the vehement dialogue and the rather high ratio
(19:11) of speeches ending in mid-line, that the hand of Massinger
continues throughout. But the closest examination no longer will reveal
traces of that playwright’s distinctive handiwork, while a ratio of 17
per cent. for double endings and 28 per cent. for run-on lines, the
introduction of rhyme, the oaths, and the change from the previous
full-flowing declamation to shorter, more abrupt periods are vouchers
that this part of the Scene is from the pen of the actor-dramatist. We
can scarcely imagine the ponderous-styled Massinger writing anything
so easy and rapid as
_I’ll die first.
Farewell; continue merry, and high heaven
Keep your wife chaste._
Such phrases as _So I not heard them_ (l. 352) and _Like George
a-horseback_ (l. 433) in the loose structure of the one and the slangy
scurrility of the other, exhibit no kinship to his manner; l. 373,
_They are fools that judge me by my outward seeming_ recalls a Field
passage in _The Queen of Corinth_ (D. V, 444) _They are fools that hold
them dignified by blood_. There is here and there, moreover, a certain
violence of expression, a compressed over-trenchancy of phrase, that
brings to mind the rant of the early Elizabethans, and is found among
the Jacobeans only in the work of Rowley, Beaumont, and Field. For the
last named, this is notably exemplified in the opening soliloquy of
_The Knight of Malta_; we cannot but recognize the same touch here in
ll. 386-8:
_Thou dost strike
A deathful coldness to my heart’s high heat,
And shrink’st my liver like the calenture._
The _Something I must do_, which concludes the Act, is repeatedly
paralleled in Massinger’s plays, but a similar indefinite resolve is
expressed in _Woman is a Weathercock_ (M. 363), and it consequently
cannot be adduced as evidence of his hand. Immediately above, however
(ll. 494-6), we encounter, in the allusion to the Italian and Dutch
temperaments, a thought twice echoed by the “stage-poet” in plays of
not greatly later date, _The Duke of Milan_ and _The Little French
Lawyer_ (C-G. 90 a; D. III, 505). It may represent an interpolation by
Massinger; it may be merely that this rather striking conclusion to the
climatic speech of his collaborator’s scene so fixed itself on his mind
as to crop out afterwards in his own productions.
In the short disputed passage (ll. 317-343) which separates what is
undoubtedly Massinger’s from what is undoubtedly Field’s, it would
appear that both playwrights had a hand. The _’Sdeath and Gads me!_,
the play upon the word _currier_, and the phrase, _I shall be with
you suddenly_ (cf. _Q. of Cor._ D. V, 467) speak for Field; while
Massinger, on the other hand, parallels
_His back
Appears to me as it would tire a beadle;_
with
_A man of resolution, whose shoulders
Are of themselves armour of proof, against
A bastinado, and will tire ten beadles._--C-G. 186 b;
and the phrase “to sit down with a disgrace” occurs something like a
dozen times on his pages, especially frequently in the collaborated
plays--that is to say, in the earlier period of his work, to which
_The Fatal Dowry_ belongs. It is probable, and not unnatural, that
the labors of the partners in composition overlapped on this bit of
the Scene, but metrical analysis claims with as much certainty as
can attach to this test in the case of so short a passage that it is
substantially Massinger’s, and should go rather with what preceeds than
with what comes after it, the verse being all one piece with that of
the former section. It has 37 per cent. double endings and 41 per cent.
run-on lines.
IV, i, opens with a prose passage for all the world like that of
_Woman is a Weathercock_, I, ii, with its picture of the dandy, his
parasites, and the pert page who forms a sort of chorus with his
caustic _asides_; and writes itself down indisputably as by the same
author. Novall Junior and his coterie appear here as in their former
presentation in II, ii. We have again the same racy comedy, the same
faltering of the vehicle between verse and prose (see ll. 61-8;
137-153). After the clearing of the stage of all save Romont and young
Novall, uninterrupted verse ensues, which, despite a rather notable
parallel in _The Beggars’ Bush_, D. IX, 9 to l. 174, is evidently
Field’s also. An analogue of ll. 180-1 is discoverable in _Amends
for Ladies_ (M. 421), as is of the reference (l. 197) to “fairies’
treasure” in _Woman is a Weathercock_ (M. 344). Novall’s exclamation
(l. 182), _Pox of this gun!_ and his retort (l. 201), _Good devil to
your rogueship!_ are Fieldian, and the entire passage possesses a
vigor and an easy naturalness which declare his authorship. It is not
improbable, however, that his contribution ends with the fragmentary
l. 207, and that the remaining four lines of the Scene are a Massinger
tag. _The Maid of Honour_ (C-G. 28 a) furnishes a striking parallel
for ll. 208-9, while for 210-1 cf. C-G. 192 a. The metrical tests for
IV, i, confirm Field: 22 per cent. double endings; 22 per cent. run-on
lines.
With the next Scene the hand of Massinger is once more in evidence with
all its accustomed manifestations. One interested in his duplication of
characteristic phrasing may refer for comparison ll. 13-4 to C-G. 299
b; l. 17 to C-G. 241 a; ll. 24-6 to C-G. 547 b; ll. 29-30 to C-G. 425
b; l. 57 to C-G. 41 b, 70 b; l. 94 to C-G. 182 b. The Scene contains 32
per cent. double endings and 37 per cent. run-on lines. The authorship
of its two songs is less certain. Field was more given to song-writing
than was Massinger, and the second of this pair is reminiscent in its
conception of the Grace Seldom episode in _Amends for Ladies_ (II, i).
The short IV, iii is by Massinger. In evidence of him are its 36 per
cent. of double endings and 55 per cent. of run-on lines, its involved
sentence structure, and the familiar phrasing which makes itself
manifest even in so brief a passage (e. g.: _To play the parasite_,
l. 7--cf. V, iii, 78 and C-G. 334 b. Cf. also ll. 9-10 with D. III,
476; and l. 22 with C-G. 40 b, 153 a, 262 b.).
The same dramatist’s work continues through the last Scene of the Act.
This, the emotional climax of the play, representing a quasi-judicial
procedure, affords him abundant opportunity for fervid moralizing and
speech-making, of which he takes advantage most typically. Massinger
commonplaces are l. 29, _Made shipwreck of your faith_ (cf. C-G. 55 b,
235 a, 414 b); l. 56, _In the forbidden labyrinth of lust_ (cf. C-G.
298 b); l. 89, _Angels guard me!_ (cf. C-G. 59 b, 475 b); l. 118-9,
_and yield myself Most miserably guilty_ (cf. C-G. 61 b, 66 b, 130
a; D. VI, 354); etc.; while within a year or so of the time when he
wrote referring to “those famed matrons” (l. 70), he expatiated upon
them in detail (see _The Virgin Martyr_, C-G. 33 a). Yet more specific
parallels may be found: for l. 63 cf. C-G. 179 a; ll. 76-7, cf. C-G. 28
a; l. 78, cf. C-G. 32 b; ll. 162-3, cf. C-G. 3 b, in a passage wherein
there is a certain similarity of situation; l. 177, cf. D. IX, 7.
Were any further confirmation needed for Massinger’s authorship, the
metrical tests would supply it, with their 36 per cent. double endings
and 34 per cent. run-on lines.
The most cursory reading of V, i is sufficient to establish the
conviction that its author is not identical with that of the earlier
comic passages--is not Field, but Massinger. The humor, such as it is,
is of a graver, more restrained sort--satiric rather than burlesque; it
has lost lightness and verve, and approaches to high-comedy and even
to moralizing. One feels that the confession of the tailor-gallant is
no mere fun-making devise, but a caustic attack upon social conditions
against which the writer nurtured a grudge. Massingerian are such
expressions as _And now I think on’t better_ (l. 77--cf. C-G. 57 b,
468 a, 615 a; D. XI, 28), and _use a conscience_ (l. 90--cf. C-G. 444
a, 453 a), while the metrical evidence of 36 per cent. double endings
and 29 per cent. run-on lines fortifies a case concerning which all
commentators are in agreement. But despite the unanimity of critical
opinion hitherto, I am not sure that Field did not contribute a minor
touch here and there to the Scene. Such contribution, if a fact, must
have been small, for the Massinger flavor is unmistakable throughout;
yet in the _Plague on’t!_ and the _’Slid!_, in the play upon words
(ll. 13-4, 20-1, 44), which is rare with Massinger and common with
Field, in the line, _I only know_ [_thee_] _now to hate thee deadly_:
(cf. _Amends for Ladies_, M. 421: _I never more Will hear or see thee,
but will hate thee deadly._), we may, perhaps, detect a hint of his
hand.
Scene ii (which in the Quarto ends with the reconciliation of Charalois
and Romont, the entry of Du Croy, Charmi, etc. being marked as the
beginning of a third Scene, though the place is unchanged and the
action continuous, wherefore modern editors disregard the Quarto’s
division and count Scene ii as including all the remainder of the Act)
presents the usual distinctive earmarks of a Massinger passage. The
last third of it, however (ll. 80-121), has, on account of the presence
of several rhymes, been commonly assigned to Field. No doubt his hand
is here discernable; l. 118, _mark’d me out the way how to defend it_,
is scarcely a Massinger construction either; but I cannot think Field’s
presence here more than that of a reviser, just as in the latter half
of I, ii. The language remains more Massinger’s than Field’s; and while
the passage is over-short for metrical tests to be decisive, the 39
per cent. of double endings and 35 per cent. of run-on lines which it
yields (for the earlier part of the Scene the figures are respectively
28 per cent. and 35 per cent.) are corroborative of Massinger’s
authorship. Cf. also ll. 96-8 with this from _The Renegado_ (C-G. 157
a):
_This applause
Confirm’d in your allowance, joys me more
Than if a thousand full-cramm’d theatres
Should clap their eager hands._
Of the final Scene, V, iii, little need be said. It brings before us
again a court-room, with another trial, and continues the manner of
its predecessor, I, ii, as only Massinger can. His customary formulae,
_stand bound_, _play the parasite_, etc., are here; characteristic too
are his opposition of _wanton heat_ and _lawful fires_ (ll. 141-2--cf.
C-G. 37 b; D. V. 476), while further material for comparison may be
found in ll. 95-6 with _Respect_, _wealth_, _favour_, _the whole world
for a dower_ of _The Virgin Martyr_ (C-G. 6 b), and in ll. 165-7:
Char. _You must find other proofs to strengthen these
But mere presumptions._
Du Croy _Or we shall hardly
Allow your innocence._
with C-G. 39 a and b:
_You must produce
Reasons of more validity and weight
To plead in your defence, or we shall hardly
Conclude you innocent._
The last passage cited for comparison also exhibits another feature
normal to the work of this dramatist: the splitting of an observation,
frequently a single sentence, between two speakers; so ll. 38-9, and
again, l. 59. The Scene and play are rounded off with the pointing of a
moral, so indispensable to Massinger’s satisfaction.
To sum up, therefore, disregarding for practical purposes the slight
touches of Field in I, ii, ll. 146-_end_; III, i, ll. 317-343; V, ii,
ll. 80-_end_; and perhaps in V, i;--and the apparent Massinger touches
in IV, i, and possibly at one or two other points in the Field Scenes,
we may divide the play as follows:
MASSINGER: I; III, ll. 1-343; IV, ii, iii, iv; V.
FIELD: II; III, ll. 344-_end_; IV, i.
A metrical analysis of the play is appended in tabular form, in
which I have computed separately the figures for each portion of any
Scene on which there has been a question. It will be noted that the
single simple test of the mid-line speech-ending would, with but two
exceptions--one (III, i, c) doubtful, and the other (V, ii, b) too
short a passage to afford a fair test--have made a clean-cut and
correct determination of authorship in every case.
A = Scene
B = Prose Lines
C = Verse Lines
D = Double Endings
E = Per Cent.
F = Run-on Lines
G = Per Cent.
H = Fragmentary Lines
I = Rhymed Lines
J = Speeches Ending in Mid-line
K = Speeches Ending with Line
L = Author
==========+====+=====+=====+====+====+====+===+====+====+====+=========
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L
----------+----+-----+-----+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+---------
I, i | -- | 196 | 64 | 33 | 56 | 29 | 1 | 2 | 42 | 22 |Massinger
I, ii (a) | -- | 145 | 64 | 45 | 48 | 33 | 1 | 2 | 25 | 14 |Massinger
I, ii (b) | -- | 158 | 57 | 36 | 57 | 36 | 0 | 12 | 30 | 16 |Massinger
| | | | | | | | | | |(Field
| | | | | | | | | | |revision)
II, i | -- | 145 | 29 | 20 | 22 | 15 | 4 | 16 | 19 | 17 |Field
II, ii | 82 | 273 | 57 | 21 | 52 | 19 | 9 | 12 | 47 | 50 |Field
III, i (a)| -- | 316 | 142 | 45 |114 | 36 | 1 | 2 | 67 | 29 |Massinger
III, i (b)| -- | 27 | 10 | 37 | 11 | 41 | 3 | 0 | 13 | 6 |Massinger
| | | | | | | | | | |(with
| | | | | | | | | | |Field?)
III, i (c)| -- | 161 | 28 | 17 | 45 | 28 | 0 | 10 | 19 | 11 |Field
IV, i | 88 | 124 | 27 | 22 | 27 | 22 | 4 | 6 | 26 | 24 |Field
IV, ii | -- | 104 | 33 | 32 | 38 | 37 | 2 | 2 | 24 | 10 |Massinger
IV, iii | -- | 22 | 8 | 36 | 12 | 55 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 |Massinger
IV, iv | -- | 195 | 71 | 36 | 67 | 34 | 0 | 6 | 32 | 8 |Massinger
V, i | -- | 107 | 38 | 36 | 31 | 29 | 1 | 2 | 16 | 5 |Massinger
V, ii (a) | -- | 80 | 22 | 28 | 27 | 34 | 0 | 2 | 17 | 2 |Massinger
V, ii (b) | -- | 41 | 15 | 37 | 14 | 35 | 0 | 8 | 3 | 3 |Massinger
| | | | | | | | | | |(Field
| | | | | | | | | | |revision)
V, iii | -- | 229 | 98 | 43 | 50 | 22 | 0 | 4 | 34 | 19 |Massinger
----------+----+-----+-----+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+---------
CRITICAL ESTIMATE
No less an authority than Swinburne has pronounced _The Fatal Dowry_
the finest tragedy in the Massinger _corpus_. Certainly it would be
the most formidable rival of _The Duke of Milan_ for that distinction.
It occupies an anomalous position among the works of the “stage
poet.” His dramas are, as a rule, strongest in construction; he
went at play-making like a skillful architect, and put together and
moulded his material with steady hand. They are likely to be weakest
in characterization. Massinger could not get inside his figures and
endow them with the breath of life; they remain stony shapes chiseled
in severely angular and conventional lines, like some old Egyptian
bas-relief. But _The Fatal Dowry_ is strong in characterization and
defective in construction.
The structural fault is less surprising when it is ascertained to be
fundamental--inevitable in the theme. The play breaks in the middle:
it is really composed of two stories; the first two Acts present and
resolve one action, while another, hitherto barely presaged, occupies
the last three, and is the proper story of the Fatal Dowry. Charalois’
self-immolation for the corpse of his heroic father, and his rescue
and reward by the great-hearted Rochfort, form a little play in
themselves--a brief but stately tragi-comedy, which is followed by
a tense drama of intrigue and retribution, of adultery and avenged
honor--itself complete in itself, for which we are prepared in the
first two Acts only by one figure, whose potentialities for disaster
are ominous if not obvious:--Beaumelle, of whom more later. This
plot-building by _enjambment_ precludes the slow, steady mounting of
suspense from the initial moment and inexorable gathering of doom which
are manifested in a well-conceived tragedy; yet crude, amorphous,
inorganic as it may seem--defying, as it does, unity of action--like
as it is to the earliest Elizabethan plays, which were concerned
with a single career rather than a single theme, it would appear
inevitably necessary, if a maximum effect is to be gained from the
given plot-material. Just as Wagner found it impossible to do justice
to the story of Siegfried without first presenting that of Siegmund
and Sieglinde, so the experiment of Rowe (who in re-working the story
for _The Fair Penitent_ relegated to expository dialogue the narration
of what corresponds to the first two Acts of _The Fatal Dowry_) sadly
demonstrated that unless the reader or audience actually sees, and
not merely hears about, Charalois’ previous devotion, Rochfort’s
generosity, and Romont’s loyalty, these characters do not attract to
themselves a full measure of sympathy, and the story of their later
vicissitudes is somehow unconvincing and falls flat.
Massinger and Field accepted frankly the structural awkwardness of
their plot as they had fashioned or found it. Making, apparently, no
attempt to obviate its essential duality, they went to work in the most
straightforward manner, and achieved, thanks in no small measure to
that same resolute directness of approach, a drama of so naturalistic
a tone as half to redeem its want of unity. _The Fatal Dowry_ is not
an Aristotelian tragedy with a definite beginning, middle, and end--it
is rather a cross-section of life. The unconventionality and vitality
of such a production are startling, and obtain a high degree of
verisimilitude.
Both authors seem to have been themselves inspired by their virile
theme to give to it their best work. The stately, somewhat monotonous
verse of Massinger, which never loses dignity and is so incapable of
expressing climaxes of passion, is once or twice almost forgotten,
or else rises to a majesty which transfigures it. Though forensic
declamation was always the especial forte of this dramatist, he
literally out-did himself in his management of the suit for the dead
Marshal’s body. The elaborate rhetoric of Charmi, checked by the stern
harshness of Novall Senior, the indignant outburst of Romont, and the
sad, yet noble calmness of Charalois’ speech in which he presses the
forlorn alternative, succeed one another with striking contrast; the
very flow of the verse changes with the speaker in a manner which
recalls the wonderful employment of this device by Shakespeare, as, for
example, in the First Act of _Othello_. In the final Scene of Act IV,
Massinger achieves a climax worthy of Fletcher himself;--save, perhaps,
the _denouement_ of _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, and the great scene
in _The Duke of Milan_ in which Sforza’s faith in his Duchess is broken
down by aspersion after aspersion, until he slays her, only to learn
the terrible truth one instant later, it is the most dramatic situation
he ever worked up. Field, too, seems to have been on his mettle: his
verse is more trenchant, his care greater than in his two earlier
comedies; the lines (II, i, 126-7)
_My root is earthed, and I a desolate branch
Left scattered in the highway of the world,_
touch the high-water mark of his poetic endeavor.
Blemishes, indeed, are not unapparent. The episodic first Scene of Act
V is a rather stupid piece of pseudo-comedy by Massinger, which serves
no function adequate to justify its existence, while it interrupts the
thread of the main story at a point where its culminating intensity
does not, of right, permit such a diversion. Gifford in commenting upon
this Scene makes the amazing pronouncement that it serves “to prove
how differently the comic part of this drama would have appeared, if
the whole had fortunately fallen into the hands of Massinger.” Surely
never was criticism more fatuous.
But the most serious--indeed, the outstanding--defect of the play
is the easy readiness of Charalois to break with Romont. The calm,
unregretful placidity with which he untwists the long web of friendship
with a man who has stood by him through weal and woe, who has courted a
prison’s chains for his sake, shocks us, and repels us with its flinty
self-sufficiency. It is not that we know him to be wrong and Romont
to be right; suppose the high faith of Charalois in Beaumelle to be
entirely justified and the charge of Romont to be as groundless as it
is wildly delivered and unconvincing, yet there is no excuse for the
_immediacy_ with which, on the first revelation of what he himself
has demanded to know, the hero rejects, along with the report of his
friend, the friend himself, whose aim could have been only his best
interest. For the fault lies not in the situation, which is sound, but
in its over-hasty development. A little more length to the scene, a few
more speeches to either participant in the dialogue, a little longer
and more vituperative insistence on the part of Romont in the face
of Charalois’ warnings that he has gone far enough, and the quarrel
would have been thoroughly realized and developed. As it is, it comes
on insufficient provocation; the hero, at the moment when he should
excite regret and sympathy because of his blind, mistaken trust in his
unworthy wife, excites rather indignation; the later words of Romont
with which he justifies his unshaken loyalty to his comrade turn back
the mind perforce to that comrade’s lack of loyalty to _him_, and
unwittingly ring out as a judgment upon Charalois:
_That friendship’s raised on sand,
Which every sudden gust of discontent,
Or flowing of our passions can change,
As if it ne’er had been:_--
The faulty passage, it will be noted upon reference to the analysis
of shares in collaboration, is by the hand of Field. Unconvincing
precipitancy in the conduct of situations marks his work elsewhere,
notably in the _Amends for Ladies_.
As it has already been said, the strongest feature of the play is its
characterization. Almost every figure is, if not an individual, at
least a type so vitalized as to appear to take on life. One or two
touches, to be sure, of conventional Massingerian habits of thought
still cling about them; even the noblest cannot entirely forget to
consider how their conduct will pose them before the eyes of the world
and posterity. But apart from such slight occasional lapses, they may
truthfully be said to speak and move quite in the manner of real men
and women.
The hero, Charalois, is drawn as of a gentle, meditative, temperate,
and self-possessed disposition, in strong and effective contrast to his
friend. Though his military exploits are spoken of with admiration, and
Romont testifies that he can “pursue a foe like lightning,” he betrays
a certain readiness to yield to discouragement scarce to be expected
in the son of the great general. In consequence of these facts, he has
been described by some (notably Cunningham, in his Edition of Gifford,
Introduction, p. xiii;--cf. also Phelan, p. 61; and Beck, pp. 22-3) as
“a Hamlet whose mind has not yet been sicklied o’er by the pale cast
of thought,” and his long silence at the opening of Act I is compared
to that of the Danish Prince on his first appearance. But, in reality,
excess of pride is the chief reason of Charalois’ backwardness on this
occasion, and thereafter he acts promptly and efficiently always. The
same over-sensitive pride continues to manifest itself throughout
the play--when he is confronted with Rochfort’s generosity; when he
finds (III, i, 365 ff.) that it is he who is the object of the jests
of Novall Junior and his satellites (though scarce a breath earlier
he has chided Romont for noticing the yapping of such petty curs);
and in the viscissitudes of the catastrophe and its consequences. A
harmonious twin-birth with his pride, at once proceeding from it, bound
up with it, and on occasion over-weighing its scruples, is an extreme
punctiliousness at every turn to the dictates of that peculiarly
Spanish imperative, “the point of honor,”--a consideration so prominent
throughout the play as to have convinced many critics that the source
of the story, although still undiscovered, must have been Spanish.
These two traits--pride and an adherence to “the point of honor,” are
almost invariably the mainsprings of Charalois’ conduct. His pride
holds him back from supplicating in behalf of his father the clemency
of the unworthy ministers of the law, till he is persuaded by Romont
that honor not only permits but requires that he do so; he feels
that honor demands that he sacrifice himself to secure his father’s
burial, and he does it; that honor demands that he put away his friend
in loyalty to his wife, and he does it; that honor demands that he
slay the adulteress--and he does it; he even consents to lay bare the
details of his ignominious wrong before the eyes of men, because he is
brought to believe that “the point of honor” calls for a justification
of his course and the holding of it up as an example to the world.
It is a striking and consistent portrait--how unlike the usual
conventionally noble hero of romantic drama!
Romont, however, is the finest figure of the play. He draws to
himself rather more than his share of interest and sympathy, to the
detriment of the protagonist. Of a type common enough on the stage
of that day--the bluff, loyal soldier-friend of the hero--he is yet
so thoroughly individualized that we can discuss him and calculate
what he will do in given situations, even as with a character of
Shakespeare’s. The portrait suffers from no jarring inconsistencies;
almost his every utterance is absolutely in part, and adds its touch
to round out our conception of him. His negligence of his personal
appearance, his quick temper, his impulsiveness, his violence, his
lack of restraint, his fierce, uncompromising honesty, his devotion
to the “grave General dead” and his unshaken fidelity to the living
son, his flashes of unexpected tenderness, his homage for the
reverend virtue of Rochfort--a sort of child-like awe for what he
knows is finer if not of truer metal than his own rough spirit, his
ill-disguised scorn for Novall Junior and his creatures, “those dogs
in doublets,” his lack of tact which unfits him for effective service
in the delicate task of preserving Beaumelle’s honor, and dooms his
story to Charalois to disbelief and resentment, his prompt, fearless
decisiveness of action, the tumultuous flood of nervous and at times
eloquent speech which pours from his lips when he is aroused, yet
dies in his throat when he is lashed by a woman’s tongue--a flood of
speech which is most torrential when the situation is most doubtful
or hopeless of good issue, but which gives place to a self-possessed
terseness when he is quite sure of his ground:--all go to give detail
and reality to a character at once amazingly alive and irresistibly
attractive. “Romont is one of the noblest of all Massinger’s men,”
says Swinburne, “and Shakespeare has hardly drawn noble men more nobly
than Massinger.” To find a parallel creation who can over-match him in
vigor of presentation and theatrical efficiency, we must go back to the
Melantius of Beaumont and Fletcher. These two characters represent the
ultimate elaborations of the stock figure of the faithful friend and
blunt soldier; Melantius is the supreme romantic, Romont the supreme
realistic, development of the type.
Yet though Romont is the most compelling of the _dramatis personae_,
into none does Massinger enter more thoroughly than the noble figure of
Rochfort. Utter devotion to virtue, to which he had paid a life-long
fidelity, is the key-note of the nature of the aged Premier President,
and accordingly in him the deep-seated ethical seriousness of the
“stage-poet” found a congenial expression. A statelier dignity is wont
to echo in his lines than in the utterance of any other character; they
breathe an exalted calm, a graciousness, a grave courtesy, as though
the very spirit of their speaker had entered them.
An inability to judge the character of others was his great weakness--a
weakness which he himself realized, for he called upon Beaumont to
confirm the one strikingly sure, true appraisement which he exhibited,
his admiration for Charalois. Characteristically, this weakness seems
to have taken the form of a too-generous estimate of his fellows. This
caused him to bestow his vacated office upon the harsh and unjust
Novall, and to be blind to the disposition of his daughter, and the
danger that lay in her intimacy with Novall Junior. But if his kindly
nature saw the better side of even that contemptible young man, he at
least understood him well enough not to take him at all seriously as a
suitor for Beaumelle’s hand.
Of the Novalls, father and son, there is a much briefer presentation.
Yet even so, in the case of old Novall we have as masterly a sketch
as in Romont a detailed study. His every word is eloquent of his
stern, not to say _mean_, nature--curt and severe towards others, all
prejudice where he himself is concerned, inexorably malevolent against
those who incur his animosity. Yet it never enters his head to seek the
satisfaction of his hate in any way save through the law; for example,
he does not seize upon, or even think seriously of, Pontalier’s proffer
of private vengeance; the law is his sphere--he will abuse it to his
advantage, if he can, but he will not go outside of it. He is, in other
words, the Official Bureaucrat _par excellence_, and his enmity against
the martial house of the Charaloises and the rigor with which he is
said to “cross every deserved soldier and scholar,” and, on the other
hand, the detestation in which Romont holds him, are manifestations of
the feud of type against type. It has been suggested that the especial
fervor with which he is devoted to execration argues a prototype in
actual life, and that in him is to be recognized Sir Edward Coke,
notorious for the savage vindictiveness of his conduct towards Sir
Walter Raleigh.
Novall Junior, the cowardly, foppish, and unscrupulous gallant, though
a flimsy personality, affords once or twice, in the Fieldian prose,
rather good humor: e. g.--
_Nay, o’ my soul, ’tis so; what fouler object in the world, than to see
a young, fair, handsome beauty unhandsomely dighted, and incongruently
accoutred? or a hopeful chevalier unmethodically appointed in the
external ornaments of nature? For, even as the index tells us the
contents of stories, and directs to the particular chapters, even so
does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or
woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as
it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality and
habiliment of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable,
gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding,
than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside._ (IV, i,
48-60.)
Of the remaining characters, only two call for especial notice.
The three Creditors are a blemish upon the otherwise striking
verisimilitude of the play; they are impossible, inhuman monsters of
greed and relentlessness, who serve as vehicles for a kind of grotesque
comedy. A personal rancour on the part of the authors may have been
responsible for this presentation, as it is probable that they
themselves had had none-too-pleasant experiences with money-lenders.
Pontalier, however, is very well conceived and skillfully executed.
Occupying a relation to Novall Junior quite similar to that of Romont
to Charalois, he is yet differentiated from his parallel, while at
the same time he is kept free from any taint of the despicableness
and fawning servility which are chiefly prominent in the parasites of
the vicious and feather-brained young lord. There is something really
pathetic about this brave, honorable soldier, committed to the defense
of an unworthy benefactor, ranged on the side of wrong against right,
by his very best qualities: his noble sense of gratitude, his loyalty,
his devotion to what he conceives to be his duty. It will be observed
that he never joins with the rest of the group about Novall Junior in
their jibes against Charalois and Romont.
The last figure for consideration, and not the least important, is
Beaumelle. So general has been the misconception of her character that
it calls for a more detailed analysis than has been accorded to the
other personages of the drama, or than the place she occupies might
appear to warrant. That place, indeed, is not a striking one; she is
scarce more than a character of second rank, appearing in but few
scenes and speaking not many lines. Yet her part in the story is one
of such potentialities that in Rowe’s version of the same theme her
analogue becomes the central figure, and even in _The Fatal Dowry_ a
failure to understand her has probably been at the bottom of most of
the less favorable judgments that have been passed upon the play, while
those critics who appraise it higher yet acknowledge her to be its
one outstanding defect. “_The Fatal Dowry_,” says Saintsbury (_Hist.
Eng. Lit._, vol. ii, p. 400) “... is ... injured by the unattractive
character of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance
(Massinger never could draw a woman).” She is declared by Swinburne to
be “too thinly and feebly drawn to attract even the conventional and
theatrical sympathy which Fletcher might have excited for a frail and
penitent heroine: and the almost farcical insignificance and baseness
of her paramour would suffice to degrade his not involuntary victim
beneath the level of any serious interest or pity.” If these and
similar pronouncements were well founded, the play as a cross-section
of life would have the great weakness of being unconvincing at a very
vital point. A study of the text, however, will discover Beaumelle
to be portrayed, in the brief compass of her appearance, in no
wise inadequately, but rather, if anything, somewhat beyond the
requirements of her dramatic function--will reveal her, not, indeed,
a personage of heroic proportions and qualities, but a young woman of
considerable naturalness, plausibility, and realistic convincingness.
The trouble has probably been that the critics of Beaumelle have
passed hastily over the very scurrilous prose scene in which she first
appears. They have looked on this passage as merely a piece of Fieldian
low-comedy, a coarse bit of buffoonery which pretends to no function
save that of humor, and can sustain not even this pretense. Nothing can
be further from the truth. The passage _is_ a piece of coarse comedy
such as Field had an over-fondness for writing; but it is something
more; in reality, a proper understanding of the heroine is conditioned
upon it.
Beaumelle is a young girl whose mother, we may infer, has long been
dead. The cares of the bench have been too great to allow her father
time for much personal supervision of her; she has had for associates
her two maids, and of these she not unnaturally finds the gay and
witty, but thoroughly depraved, Bellapert the more congenial, and
adopts her as her mentor and confidant. She is in love, after a
fashion--caught, like the impressionable, uncritical girl she is, by
the fair exterior of a young magnificent, whose elegant dress and
courtly show of devotion quite blind her to his real worthlessness--and
there is scant likelihood of her getting the man who has charmed
her fancy. Her disposition is high-spirited and wayward, but not
deliberately vicious; she has certain hazily defined ideals, mingled
with the same romantic mist through which the superfine dandy, Novall,
appears in her eyes a very Prince Charming: she “would meet love and
marriage both at once”; she desires to preserve her honor. She has
ideals, but she doubts their tangibility; she is in an unsettled
state of mind, questioning the fundamentals of conduct and social
relationships, in much need of good counsel. In that perilous mood
she talks with Bellapert--Bellapert, the dearest cabinet of her
secrets--Bellapert, the bribed instrument of Novall--and is told
by that worldly-wise wench that marriage almost never unites with
love, but must be used as a cloak for it; that honor is a foolish
fancy; that a husband is a master to be outwitted and despised. The
shaft sinks home all too surely; a visit at that very moment by
Beaumelle’s lover completes the conquest, when her father interrupts
their tete-a-tete--her father, who comes with the anouncement that
she must marry a man whom she does not even know! In the scene where
the destined bride and groom are brought face to face, she stands
throughout in stony silence quite as eloquent as the more famous
speechlessness of Charalois at the beginning of the play. She has
ever been “handmaid” to her father’s will; she realizes all her hopes
and fortunes “have reference to his liking;” and now she obeys, with
the bitter thought in her heart that Fate, in denying her her will,
has wronged Love itself (II, ii, 154); only when Charalois turns to
her with a direct question, “Fair Beaumelle, can you love me?” does
she utter a word--then from her lips a brief, desperate, “Yes, my
lord”--and a moment later (II, ii, 315) she is weeping silently. (Her
answer was honest in as far as she really did mean to give to the man
chosen for her husband her duty with her hand.) Then the voice of the
tempter whispers in her ear, she feels its tug at her heart, and with a
cry, “Oh, servant!--Virtue strengthen me!” she hurries from the room.
That is the situation at the end of the Second Act and first part of
the play; an appreciation of its significance makes the connection with
what follows less arbitrary and inorganic.
When Beaumelle next appears, in the Third Act, there has been a change.
We may imagine that she has had time to ponder those cynical maxims
of Bellapert on the natural course of romance. Her union has been
unwilling; she does not care for her husband; Novall appeals to her as
much as ever: with her eyes open, she deliberately chooses the path of
sin--because the enforced marriage which shattered her hopes must needs
appear to her the final demonstration of the correctness of her maid’s
contention (towards which she was already inclining) that she has been
foolishly impractical to dream of the satisfaction of her heart’s wish
through wedlock, but that it is by secret amour that love must be, and
is wont to be, enjoyed.
It may not be unreasonable to regard the resourcefulness and effrontery
which characterize her throughout the Third Act as the result of a sort
of mental intoxication, into which she has been lifted by her reckless
resolve and the consciousness of danger; at any rate she now shows
herself altogether too much for Romont; she finds a shrewdness and an
eloquence that carry her triumphant to the consummation of her desire.
When discovery ensues, her paramour is slain, and she herself is haled
to die, she is overcome--abruptly and, one might say, strangely--with
remorse and penitence. But it is not at all by one of those
theatrically convenient but psychologically absurd changes of heart so
frequent in the drama of that period; nothing, indeed, could be more
true to life. Novall Junior, coward and fop that he was, has hitherto
always borne himself in lordly fashion before her, even when they were
surprised by Romont; but now at last she beholds him stripped to the
shivering abjectness of his contemptible soul, that she may observe
his baseness. She sees him cowed and beaten and slain, while Charalois
(whom she never knew before their marriage nor has tried to understand
in the brief period of their wedlock) with his outraged honor and
irresistible prowess assumes to her eyes the proportions of a hero; and
with her girl’s romanticism[10] of nature, she bows down and worships
him. It is somewhat the same note that is struck by Thackeray in the
similar situation where Rawdon Crawley, returning home unexpectedly,
finds his wife with Lord Steyne and knocks the man down.
_It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there
trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave,
victorious._
So it was with Beaumelle. Except for one brief cry of “Undone for
ever!” she utters no word from the moment of the surprise to the end
of the Scene. She hangs back, shrinking, for a moment, when ordered
into the coach with the dead body of her partner in guilt. “Come,” says
Charalois, in terrible jest, “you have taught me to say, you must and
shall.... You are but to keep him company you love--” and she obeys
mutely.
Thus, all contriteness, Beaumelle goes to her fate. It should be
observed how, even at the last, her tendency to romantic idealization
vehemently asserts itself; she looks fondly back (IV, iv, 53) to an
imagined time, which never really existed, when she was “good” and “a
part of” Charalois, made one with him through the virtuous harmony of
their minds!--no voice is more unfaltering than her own to pronounce
her doom as both righteous and necessary, and she conceives herself
to climb, by her ecstatic welcoming of death, into the company of the
ancient heroines and martyrs. In its realism of the commonplace and its
slightly ironic conception, it is the outline drawing of a character
that might have received elaborate portraiture at the hands of Flaubert.
Whether we are to regard this consistent “study in little” as a
deliberate piece of work on the part of the authors, must remain a
matter of opinion. There is no similar figure elsewhere in the dramatic
output of Massinger, nor any quite so minutely conceived within the
same number of speech-lines in that of Field, and one could scarce
be blamed for believing that a number of hap-hazard, sketchy strokes
with which the collaborators dashed off a character whom they deemed
of no great importance, all so fell upon the canvas that, by a miracle
of chance, they went to form the lineaments of a real woman. The
discussion of the probability or possibility of such a hypothesis would
carry us very far afield, and would involve the question of the extent
to which all genius is unconscious and intuitive. But however that may
be, the _result_ of their labors remains the same, there to behold in
black and white, and Beaumelle, so far from being a poorly conceived
and unsatisfactory wanton who is the chief defect of the play, is
a figure of no mean verisimilitude who succeeds after a fashion in
linking together the loose-knit dual structure of the drama; to whose
main catastrophe she adds her own tragedy, a tragedy neither impressive
nor deeply stirring, it is true, for she is a petty spirit from whom
great tragedy does not proceed--but tragedy still--the eternal,
inevitable tragedy of false romanticism, that has found its culmination
in the person of Emma Bovary.
In this study of Beaumelle, _The Fatal Dowry_ has been subjected to
a much more intensive examination than it is the custom to bestow
upon the dramas of the successors of Shakespeare. The truth is that
the plays of the Jacobean period do not, as a rule, admit of such
analysis. In most of them, and especially in the plays of Massinger, he
who searches and probes them comes presently to a point beyond which
critical inquiry is stopped short with a desperate finality; be they
ever so strikingly splendid and glittering fair in their poetry and
their characterization, these dazzling qualities lie upon the surface,
and a few careful perusals exhaust their possibilities and tell us all
there is to know of them. But _The Fatal Dowry_, though less imposing
than a number of others, stands almost alone among its contemporaries
in sharing with the great creations of Shakespeare the power to open
new vistas, to present new aspects, to offer new suggestions, the
longer it is studied. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, as has
already been said, it is not so much a tragedy of the accepted type as
a cross-section of life.
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.
STAGE HISTORY--ADAPTATIONS--DERIVATIVES
Beyond the statement on the title-page of the 1632 Quarto, that
_The Fatal Dowry_ had been “often acted at the Private House in
Blackfriars by his Majesties Servants,” nothing is known of its
early stage history. It was not revived after the Restoration, and
until the publication of the Coxeter edition of Massinger seems to
have been almost unknown. At last, in 1825, an emended version was
placed upon the boards by no less an actor than the great Macready.
January 5 of that year was the date, and Drury Lane the place, of
its initial performance, Macready himself taking the part of Romont,
Wallack--Charalois, Terry--Rochfort, and Mrs. W. West--Beaumelle. “The
play was well acted and enthusiastically applauded,” says Macready in
his _Reminiscences_ (p. 228); “its repetition for the following Tuesday
was hailed most rapturously; but Friday[12] came, and with it a crowded
house, to find me laboring under such indisposition that it was with
difficulty I could keep erect without support.” Macready’s serious
illness cut short the run of the play, and when he was at length (April
11) able to take it up again, the interest of the public had abated,
and it in consequence was repeated only a few times--seven being the
total number of its performances.
The variant of _The Fatal Dowry_ in which Macready acted was the work
of Sheil, and involved substantial divergences. Romont’s release from
prison follows immediately upon Novall Senior’s consent to his pardon,
and in consequence, together with his conversation with Rochfort, is
transferred from Act II to the close of Act I, while the redemption of
Charalois takes place at the funeral of his father, which concludes