Trollope's public reputation as one of the foremost exponents of realism in the novel and his private addiction to the Renaissance drama create an intriguing paradox; but even more fascinating is the influence of these plays on his writing of the novels. The parallels of moral and social pattern are partly due to Trollope's recognition of tensions in his own burgeoning society similar to those evident in the rapidly changing Jacobean world. The Jacobean dramatists employ several socio-moral diagrams: the redemption of the prodigal, the impoverishment of the gentry by the rising merchant class, the scrutiny of aristocratic values, the newly subversive spirit of the independent wealthy woman, and the testing of the response of feminine virtue to altered social conditions; which reappear in the novels that I wish to discuss: The Three Clerks, Miss Mackenzie, Ralph the Heir, Lady Anna, and The Prime Minister. However, the parallels between the plays and the novels are more than a general affinity of artistic interests. Since Trollope read and annotated 257 early plays, it is highly probable that some direct borrowing occurred.1 Indeed, Trollope himself admits as much in An Autobiography: 'How far I may unconsciously have adopted incidents from what I have read, either from history or from works of imagination, I do not know. It is beyond question that a man employed as I have been must do so. But when doing it I have not been aware that I have done it'. Moreover, his statement: 'I have found my greatest pleasure in our Old English dramatists, not from any excessive love of their work ... but from curiosity in searching their plots and examining their characters',2 suggests the strong likelihood of some specific indebtedness, and in two instances at least, as Bradford A. Booth has demonstrated, Trollope's debts range from verbal echoes of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in Orley Farm to his wholesale adoption of the plot of The Old Law, by Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley in The Fixed Period.3