it has to be treated separately, because it involves an independent theme.
An echo of the simple theme of The Grateful Dead is found in two English plays—Massinger's Fatal Dowry and Rowe's Fair Penitent. In the former young Charalois goes to prison to release his father's body from the clutch of creditors, who wish to keep it unburied for vengeance.[1] He is rescued by Rochfort, who pays the debts and gives him his daughter in marriage. The intrigues of love and vengeance that follow do not concern us. In Rowe's play, which was based on Massinger's, this part has been curtailed to a few slight references. Altamont gives himself as ransom for his father's body to the greedy creditors, who will not allow burial to take place. He is rewarded by the care and bounty of Sciolto, who becomes a second father to him.
Stephens was certainly right in connecting[2] the story in The Fatal Dowry with The Grateful Dead, though it is only a fragment and lacks some of the most essential features of the complete theme. The ghost, indeed, does not appear at all, but the part played by Rochfort may be regarded as a greatly sophisticated reminiscence of that trait, especially since he not only rescues the hero, but provides him with a wife. The echo of the theme is too vague for us to distinguish the form in which it was found by Massinger, though I think that we should not go far wrong in supposing that he had in mind some narrative, either popular or literary, nearly approaching the compound type treated in chapter vi. below. As one of the comparatively few traces that the motive has left in England this double dramatic use is not without interest.[3]
- ↑ An unnecessarily nauseating reason is given by one of them (Act i. so. i.), but this seems to be of Massinger's invention.
- ↑ P. 8.
- ↑ It is interesting also to note that a Viennese dramatist of our own day has adapted Massinger's drama, retaining a vague reminiscence of the thankful dead. The curious may see Der Graf von Charolais by Richard Beer-Hofmann, 1905.
