"The Fair Penitent" is also interesting as an adaptation of an Elizabethan play. Rowe borrowed the plot and some hints in the characterization from "The Fatal Dowry" of Massinger and Field, but he refashioned the scenes and rewrote the verse in accord with current modes. While "The Fatal Dowry" is by no means one of the best of Elizabethan tragedies, a comparison of it with Rowe's version of the story emphasizes the losses which tragedy was suffering as it moved farther and farther from its old traditions.[28] "The Fair Penitent" reduces the host of _dramatis personae_ to eight, the fair penitent, her husband, his rival, his sister, and three friends or confidants, and confines the action to one place and something over twenty-four hours. Much of the action of the early play is omitted or reduced to narrative, including all the opening scenes of the funeral of the husband's father and the origin of his friendship with the father of the heroine. The various attempts of the faithful friend to mend matters are also restricted, and Massinger's usual trial scene omitted. The result of these structural changes is a loss of verisimilitude. The old play had something of the illusion of a true history; in "The Fair Penitent" the action, though narrowed, is still far too much for the time supposed, and improbabilities are solved by well-worn theatrical devices. The guilt is discovered by means of a lost letter and an over-heard conversation, and throughout literary and moral proprieties lead to a reduction of action and an increase of talk. This is well illustrated in the scenes in which the husband confronts the guilty wife. In "The Fair Penitent," the wife and Lothario are having a final meeting, or declamation contest, on the day after the wedding. She upbraids him and incidentally relates the story of her seduction; the husband overhears. In "The Fatal Dowry," the husband comes unexpectedly to the house of Aymer where the lovers have an assignation. Aymer is attempting to divert him with music, when a laugh is heard within,--more music, and the lady's laugh again. The husband rushes from the stage and returns driving in the lovers. Further, the restricted action of Rowe's play causes a conventionalizing of the characters. The wife and her lover are shallow persons in Massinger's play, but they have some plausibility. In Rowe, he becomes the avenging rival; she, an impossible declaimer, now the evil woman of the heroic plays, now the lachrymose moralizer. The moralizing, emphatic in all of Rowe's plays, also adds to the general artificiality. Calista dies after most voluble repentance, and her husband matches her "groan for groan and tear for tear."