that he surveyed the Massingerian tragedy, and, repelled by the conduct of its figures, exclaimed to himself: “I will write a play to centre around a situation as incriminating as that of Act III of The Fatal Dowry; but my personages will be worthier characters; I will show a lady who, spite of appearances, is of stainless innocence and vindicates her husband’s trust in the face of evidence; I will show a friendship strong enough to endure an honestly mistaken aspersion put upon the chastity of a wife, though the charge is not for one moment credited; I will show that even the would-be seducer may be a fine fellow at bottom, and set forth a generous emulation in magnanimity between him and the husband. See how finely everything would work out with the right sort of people!” It is at least a plausible hypothesis.

Nicholas Rowe, who was the first modern editor of Shakespeare, contemplated also an edition of Massinger, but gave up the project that he might more safely plunder one of his plays. Rowe’s famous tragedy, The Fair Penitent, was deliberately stolen from The Fatal Dowry. It appeared in 1703, and spite of a ludicrous accident13 which cut short its first run, took rank as one of the most celebrated dramas of the English stage. Rowe lived during the vogue of the “She-tragedy,” while the canons of literary criticism of his day demanded a “regular,” pseudo-classical form and a sententious tone. Accordingly, in his hands the chief figure in the play, as is evidenced by the change in title, becomes the guilty wife, here called Calista, who is “now the evil queen of the heroic plays; now the lachrymose moralizer;” the theme is indeed her story, not Altamont’s (Charalois)—her seduction (prior to the nuptuals 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 

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