The structural fault is less surprising when it is ascertained to be fundamental--inevitable in the theme. The play breaks in the middle: it is really composed of two stories; the first two Acts present and resolve one action, while another, hitherto barely presaged, occupies the last three, and is the proper story of the Fatal Dowry. Charalois’ self-immolation for the corpse of his heroic father, and his rescue and reward by the great-hearted Rochfort, form a little play in themselves--a brief but stately tragi-comedy, which is followed by a tense drama of intrigue and retribution, of adultery and avenged honor--itself complete in itself, for which we are prepared in the first two Acts only by one figure, whose potentialities for disaster are ominous if not obvious:--Beaumelle, of whom more later. This plot-building by _enjambment_ precludes the slow, steady mounting of suspense from the initial moment and inexorable gathering of doom which are manifested in a well-conceived tragedy; yet crude, amorphous, inorganic as it may seem--defying, as it does, unity of action--like as it is to the earliest Elizabethan plays, which were concerned with a single career rather than a single theme, it would appear inevitably necessary, if a maximum effect is to be gained from the given plot-material. Just as Wagner found it impossible to do justice to the story of Siegfried without first presenting that of Siegmund and Sieglinde, so the experiment of Rowe (who in re-working the story for _The Fair Penitent_ relegated to expository dialogue the narration of what corresponds to the first two Acts of _The Fatal Dowry_) sadly demonstrated that unless the reader or audience actually sees, and not merely hears about, Charalois’ previous devotion, Rochfort’s generosity, and Romont’s loyalty, these characters do not attract to themselves a full measure of sympathy, and the story of their later vicissitudes is somehow unconvincing and falls flat. Massinger and Field accepted frankly the structural awkwardness of their plot as they had fashioned or found it. Making, apparently, no attempt to obviate its essential duality, they went to work in the most straightforward manner, and achieved, thanks in no small measure to that same resolute directness of approach, a drama of so naturalistic a tone as half to redeem its want of unity. _The Fatal Dowry_ is not an Aristotelian tragedy with a definite beginning, middle, and end--it is rather a cross-section of life. The unconventionality and vitality of such a production are startling, and obtain a high degree of verisimilitude.