Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/646

 642 Adams III, Scene 1, Novall, when urged to send a challenge to Romont, exclaims: What vse is there of valor now a dayes? Tis sure, or to be kill'd, or to be hang'd. This seems toTbe a clear allusion to the efforts made by King James at this 'time to put a stop to dueling. Popular interest in the subject was excited by Chief Justice Hobart's famous decision on dueling, which was approved by King James on December 31, 1616; and this popular interest was at once re- flected in the drama, for example in Middleton's The Fair Quarrel, the title of which, as Professor Sampson has shown, is to be explained by a passage in Hobart's decision. 1 The Fair Quarrel, we know, was composed in 1617 (after March 13), and possibly The Fatal Dowry was written before the end of the year, while the subject was still fresh in the mind of the public. As to the source of the play, Mr. Lockert states that none is known for the main plot; a Spanish source has been suspected, but has not yet been discovered. The attempt to distribute the several portions of the play between the two collaborators by means of "aesthetic considerations, parallel passages, and metrical tests," is valuable in that it strikingly confirms the earlier conclusions of Boyle and Fleay, and moreover, reconciles their points of difference. The discussion of the stage history of the play, and its subsequent influence on dramatic literature is perhaps the most interesting section of the Introduction; indeed it would be difficult to find an Elizabethan play that has enjoyed in the form of "adaptations and derivatives" such a long and important career, both in England and on the Conti- nent. With the section labeled "Critical Estimate," as well as with the last section on the stage history of the play, one com- plaint may be made: the style at times tends to become pain- fully rhetorical. The reader quickly grows weary of the strained emphasis, and begins to flinch at the numerous strong adjec- tives, superlative statements, italicized words, and exclamation points. Occasionally, too, the sentences are marred by noisy diction or confused phraseology: "This is all the more rampant in that it is suddenly called back into activity after its period of obscuration;" "remains insufficiently motivated and sheerly inexplicable"; "a ponderous monotony of fancy;" "A harmon- ious twin-birth with his pride, at once proceeding from it, bound up with it, and on occasion over- weighing its scruples." For his text Mr. Lockert attempts to give a faithful reprint of the first, and only, quarto, printed by John Norton in 1632. This original edition, it is obvious, was set up from the prompt- 1 See Martin W. Sampson, Thomas Middleton, in Masterpieces of the Eng- lish Drama series, pp. 25-26.