Note 6 — INTRODUCTION

As witness The False One. Here Massinger seems to have projected a stately historical drama of war and factional intrigue, with a conception of Cleopatra as the Great Queen, more a Semiramis or a Zenobia than “the serpent of old Nile,” and so treats his subject in the first and last Acts; while Fletcher “assists” him by filling the middle section of the play with scenes theatrically effective but leading nowhere, and in them makes the heroine the traditional “gipsy” Cleopatra. [↩]