Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/180

 142 NOTES AND QUERIES. [i2s.vm.F E B.i9,i92i. share of ' The Fatal Dowry' is Act II., j Act III. sc. i., after the second entry of Novall Junior, and Act IV. sc. i. As the assignment of these parts of the play to him has hitherto rested chiefly upon evidence of a negative kind, having been arrived at by subtracting the scenes that clearly show the more easily recognizable hand of Mas- singer, it is desirable that 1 should give some positive evidence of his authorship of the parts of this play referred to before I proceed to assign to him plays, or portions of plays, of which external proof of his authorship is lacking. First, then, at the beginning bf Act II. sc. i. we have the word " practic " ... .a man but young Yet old in judgment ; theoric and practic In all humanity. This is a word that, to the best of my knowledge, Massinger never uses in his indepenclent plays. Field has it in the first scene of ' Amends for Ladies ' : Indeed, my knowledge is but speculative, Not practic ; I have it by relation, &c. In the same scene we have the verb "to exhaust " used in its primary sense of "draw out " : your thankless cruelty, And savage manners of unkind Dijon, Exhaust these floods, an uncommon use of the word not to be met with in Massinger which will be found again in ' A Woman is a Weathercock, ' I. i. : Were you my father flowing in these waves, Or a dear son exhausted out of them Three times in 'The Fatal Dowry,' we have allusions by gallants to the dis- arranging or crumpling of their "bands." Two of these occur in the second scene of Act II. Here Liladam says to Novall Junior : Ud's-light ! my lord, one of the purls of your band is, without all discipline, fallen out of his rank. and a little later on, when Malotin says to Pontalier : Dare these men ever fight on any cause ? Pontalier replies : Oh. no ! 'twould spoil their clothes, and put their bands out of order. The third is in IV. i. where Aymer, who has been roughly handled by Romont, exclaims : Plague on him, how he has crumpled our bands ! These allusions point clearly to Field, in whose ' Amends for Ladies ' there are two more allusions of the same kind one in 111. iii. where Lady Bright says of Master Pert : I have seen him sit discontented a whole play, because one of the purls of his band was fallen out of his reach to order again and the other in IV. iii. where Ingen, during the course of his duel with Lord Proudly, observes that he " had like to have spoiled " his lordship's " cutwork band." In II. ii. Novall Junior addresses Bellapert in this strain : No autumn nor no age ever approach This heavenly piece ; which Nature having- wrought, She lost her needle, and did then despair Ever to wof-k so lively and so fair ! while in IV. i. Aymer begs Novall Junior to put his looking-glass aside lest, " Narcissus- like," he should dote upon himself and die . . . .and rob the world Of Nature's copy, that she works form by. No doubt hyperbolical speeches not much differing from these may be found in Massinger, but they are particuh rly charac- teristic of Field, who has two references to Nature's fashioning of men in each of his independent plays. With the above pas- sages we may compare Pendant's adulatory speech addressed to Count Frederick in* ' A Woman is a Weathercock,' I. ii. : Nature herself, having made you, fell sick In love with her own work, and can no more JVJake man so lovely, being diseased with love. Count Frederick mildly protests : Pendant, thou'lt make me dote upon myself, and Pendant replies : Narcissus, by this hand, had far less cause. Both in ' The Fatal Dowry ' and ' A Woman is a Weathercock ' there is much talk of clothes and tailors. Pontalier in ' The Fatal Dowry ' (II. ii.) says of Liladam and Aymer : If my lord deny, they deny ; if he affirm,, they affirm : they skip into my lord's cast skins some ticice a year, &c. and in 'A Woman is & W r eathercock, ' II. i., Pendant, when asked by Mistress Wagtail' how he came by his good clothes, replies : By undoing tailors ; and then my lord (like a snake) casts a suit every quarter, ivhich I slip into* Again in IV. i. Aymer says of Novall Junior : . . . .bis vestanients sit as if they grew upon him, or art had urought them on the same loom as Nature framed his lordship Compare Lady Bright 's comment on Pert in ' Amends for Ladies,' III. iii. : I do not think but he lies in a case o' nights- He walks as if he were made of gins as if Nature' had tcrovght him in a frame