The suggestion (Fleay: _Chron. Eng. Dra._, I, p. 208) that Field took the part of Florimel, and that the mention of her age as thirty-two years (II, ii, 17) has reference to his own age at the time the play was produced (thus fixing the date: 1619), is an idea so far-fetched and fantastic that it is amazing to find it quoted with perfect gravity by Ward (_Hist. Eng. Dra. Lit._, III, 39). That Field, second only to Burbage among the actors of his time, should have played the petty role of Florimel is a ridiculous supposition. It is strange that anyone who considered references of this sort a legitimate clue did not build rather upon the statement (II, i, 13) that Charalois was twenty-eight. But such grounds for theorizing are utterly unsubstantial; there is no earthly warrant for identifying the age of an author’s creation with the age of the author himself. [3] I would not, however, think it very improbable that Field might have engaged in the composition of _The Fatal Dowry_ immediately after his retirement, when the ties with his old profession were, perhaps, not yet altogether broken. [4] On a careful inspection of the entire dramatic output of Massinger, both unaided work and plays done in collaboration, I have found worthy of record parallels to passages in _The Fatal Dowry_ to the number of: 24, in _The Unnatural Combat_, 14 in the Massinger share (about ⅗) of _The Virgin Martyr_, 18 in _The Renegado_, 11 in _The Duke of Milan_, 10 in _The Guardian_, and in none of the rest as many as 8.--But Massinger’s undoubted share (⅓) of _The Little French Lawyer_ yields 6; ⅖ of _The Double Marriage_, 6; ⅖ of _The Spanish Curate_, 6; ⅖ of _Sir John van Olden Barnavelt_, 4. [5] _E. g._, I, i (Massinger) with its grave rhetoric uniformly sustained, and, in immediate succession, II, i (Decker), a medley of coarse buffoonery and tender and beautiful verse. [6] As witness _The False One_. Here Massinger seems to have projected a stately historical drama of war and factional intrigue, with a conception of Cleopatra as the Great Queen, more a Semiramis or a Zenobia than “the serpent of old Nile,” and so treats his subject in the first and last Acts; while Fletcher “assists” him by filling the middle section of the play with scenes theatrically effective but leading nowhere, and in them makes the heroine the traditional “gipsy” Cleopatra. [7] The only other modern attempt to apportion the play is that of C. Beck (_The Fatal Dowry_, Friedrich-Alexander Univ. thesis, 1906, pp. 89-94). He assigns Massinger everything except the prose passages of II, ii and IV, i, and perhaps II, i, 93-109. His _a priori_ theory of distribution seems to be that all portions of the play which he deems of worth must be Massinger’s. It is difficult to speak of Beck’s monograph with sufficiently scant respect.