_The Fatal Dowry_ in substantially its own proper form does not appear ever to have been acted after Jacobean times. * * * * * If the stage career of _The Fatal Dowry_ has been meagre, not so the extent of its influence. Its literary parenthood begins before “the closing of the theatres” and continues even to our own day. As early as 1638 it was echoed in _The Lady’s Trial_ of Ford. Here the figures of Auria, Adurni, Aurelio, and Spinella correspond roughly with Charalois, young Novall, Romont, and Beaumelle respectively. Auria has gone to the wars, and in his absence his wife is pursued by Adurni, who sits at table with her in private, when Aurelio breaks in upon them, bursting open the doors. Spinella bitterly resents the intrusion and the aspersions of the intruder, and when, on the return home of Auria, Aurelio accuses her to him, it is without shaking his faith in her loyalty. Here the analogy ends: spite of Auria’s incredulousness there is no rupture between the friends; Spinella establishes her innocence; and Adurni, while guilty enough in his intent against her, shows himself thereafter to be an essentially noble youth, who will defend to any length the lady’s honor which has become subject to question through fault of his, and for this gallant reparation, is not only forgiven, but even cherished ever after by the husband he had sought to wrong. The more steadily one regards the man John Ford and his work, the more probable does it appear that the relationship between _The Fatal Dowry_ and _The Lady’s Trial_ is not one of mere reminiscence or influence, but of direct parentage. That strange and baleful figure, who seems almost a modern Decadent born out of his time, had a profound interest in moral problems, to the study of which he brought morbid ethical sensibilities scarce matched before the latter nineteenth century. (Witness his conception, in _The Broken Heart_, of a loveless marriage as tantamount to adultery.) Ford’s talent for invention was deficient to the extent that he was hard put to it for plots. It is not at all unlikely that he surveyed the Massingerian tragedy, and, repelled by the conduct of its figures, exclaimed to himself: “I will write a play to centre around a situation as incriminating as that of Act III of _The Fatal Dowry_; but my personages will be worthier characters; I will show a lady who, spite of appearances, is of stainless innocence and vindicates her husband’s trust in the face of evidence; I will show a friendship strong enough to endure an honestly mistaken aspersion put upon the chastity of a wife, though the charge is not for one moment credited; I will show that even the would-be seducer may be a fine fellow at bottom, and set forth a generous emulation in magnanimity between him and the husband. See how finely everything would work out with the _right_ sort of people!” It is at least a plausible hypothesis.