The Fatal Dowry

The Fatal Dowry

1 Fleay (Chron. Eng. Dra., I, 208) thinks that the otherwise lost Massinger play, The Judge, licensed by Herbert in 1627, and included in the list of Warburtons collection, may have been The Fatal Dowry. He declares, moreover, that the decree in favor of creditors in I, ii a was a statute made in 1623, and suggests that Massinger after this date made over an independent play of Fields, now lost. But I think that any one who surveys in The Fatal Dowry the respective hands of its authors will incline strongly to the conviction that this drama is the offspring of joint effort rather than the re-handling of one mans work by another. The decree to which Fleay has reference appears to be that to be found in Statutes of the Realm, IV, ii, 12279, recorded as 21 Jac I, 19. This is an act passed by the parliament of 16234; it somewhat increases the stringency of the already-existing severe laws in regard to bankrupts, but contains nothing which even faintly suggests the decree in our play, by which the creditors are empowered to withhold the corpse of their debtor from burial; and, indeed, it is obviously impossible that a statute permitting any such practice could have been passed in Christian England of the seventeenth century. The fact is that this feature of the plot is taken direct from a classical author (see under Sources), and it would be gratuitous to assume in it a reference to contemporaneous legislation. As for the hypothesis that The Fatal Dowry and The Judge are the same play, in the utter absence of any supporting evidence it must be thrown out of court. This sort of identification is a confirmed vice with Fleay. The Judge is, moreover, listed as a comedy (see reprint of Warburtons list in Fleays The Life and Work of Shakespeare, p.358).[] 2 Two other argumentsboth fallacioushave been advanced for a more assured dating. Formal prologues and epilogues came into fashion about 1620, and the absence of such appendages in the case of The Fatal Dowry has been generally taken as evidence for its appearance before that year; but for a Massinger production no such inference can be drawnthere is no formal prologue or epilogue in any of his extant plays before The Emperor of the East and Believe as You List, which were licensed for acting in 1631. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 44015
Author: Field, Nathaniel
Release Date: Oct 23, 2013
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Massinger, Philip, 1583-1640
Editor: Lockert, Charles Lacy, 1888-