Lothario that her affair is to be revealed. Lothario and Camilla flee that night, and the maid flees the next day. Anselmo searches for them in vain before learning from a stranger of his wife's affair. He starts to write the story but dies of grief before he can finish. Lothario is a character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96) and also in the play "The Fair Penitent" (1703), by Nicholas Rowe, based on the earlier 17th-century play, "The Fatal Dowry" (which itself drew on Cervantes). In Rowe's play, Lothario is a libertine who seduces and betrays Calista; and its
The Fair Penitent pursued "neoclassical simplicity" but in the process sacrificed the "underlying moral principles" of the original. Rowe shifted the setting from Dijon to Genoa, and changed the main characters' names: Rowe also accentuated the role of the female protagonist, making the play much more a vehicle for a female star performer, a "better acting piece" for a prominent actress. Where the original "concentrates largely on the legal and political affairs of the cuckolded husband," Rowe focused far more directly on the domestic tragedy of Calista's infidelity. The play was staged at both of the major London theatres of the day, Drury