says Monck Mason, “will perceive that Rochfort and Charalois speak a different language in the Second and Third Acts, from that which they speak in the first and last, which are undoubtedly Massinger’s; as is also Part of the Fourth Act, but not the whole of it.”

Dr. Ireland, in a postscript to the text of The Fatal Dowry in Gifford’s edition, agrees with Mason in assigning the Second Act to Field and also the First Scene of the Fourth Act; the Third Act, however, he claims for Massinger, as well as that share of the play with which Mason credits him. Fleay and Boyle, the chief modern commentators who have taken up the question of the division of authorship with the aid of metrical tests and other criteria, agree fairly well with the speculations of their less scientific predecessors, and adopt an intermediate, reconciling position on the disputed Third Act, dividing it between the two dramatists.7

Boyle (Englische Studien, V, 94) assigns to Massinger Act I; Act III as far as line 316; Act IV, Scenes ii, iii, and iv; and the whole of Act V, with the exception of Scene ii, lines 80–120, which he considers an interpolation of Field, whom he also believes to have revised the latter part of I, ii (from Exeunt Officers with Romont to end).

Fleay (Chron. Eng. Dra., I, 208) exactly agrees with this division save that the latter part of I, ii, which Boyle believes emended by Field, he assigns to that author outright; and that he places the division in Act III twenty-seven lines later (Field after Manent Char. Rom.).

 In my own investigation I have used for each Scene the following tests to distinguish the hands of the two authors:

(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 

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