If the Elizabethan play is confused, long spun out, and not especially edifying, it is yet occasionally intense in its emotional effect and maintains some verisimilitude of life and character. Rowe's artificially ingenious and morally mellifluous play, if edifying, is never thrilling. Its conventional persons and scenes do not depict life by action; they declaim sentimentally a story that ends in a sermon. In its conventionalization and moralization Rowe illustrates the main tendencies of the drama, tendencies derived largely from the French, but it must not be thought that either his play or the majority in the century altogether forsake English models for French. Rowe's declamations and laments, immeasurably inferior in all respects, differ essentially from Racine's in that they fail to disclose psychological moments and emotional crises. They also differ from Racine in their retention of spectacle, incident, and business in accord with English tradition. Like other of his contemporaries and successors, Rowe was prone to copy the Elizabethans at their worst. The most Elizabethan thing in his play, though not found in "The Fatal Dowry," is the setting for the long famous fifth act. "The Scene is a Room hung with Black; on one side, Lothario's body on a Bier; on the other, a Table with a Scull and other Bones, a Book, and a Lamp on it. Calista is discovered on a Couch in Black, her Hair hanging loose and disordered: After Musick and a Song, she rises and comes forward"--and begins her midnight soliloquy. Perhaps, as Dr. Ward surmises, this business went far to give the act its great effectiveness. Of the two later "She-tragedies," "Lady Jane Grey" presents the usual love intrigue (fomented here by the discarded rival), the female protagonist, and much Protestant and Whig patriotism, but nothing not paralleled in Rowe's other plays. "Jane Shore" (1714), one of the most popular plays of the century, represents another treatment of "the fair penitent," this time not only in a story used in the Elizabethan drama, but in a style avowedly in imitation of Shakespeare's.