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Fletcher's collaborations with Field, together with two of his unaided plays that have undergone revision, will be dealt with in this section of the present study.
The collaborations with Field are four in number. The series of Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One is the joint work of the two dramatists. The Knight of Malta and The Queen of Corinth represent a tripartite collaboration between Fletcher, Field, and Massinger. In The Honest Man's Fortune we have, I think, a play that is basically Field's own work, but in which he was assisted in individual scenes of single acts by Massinger and Fletcher.
Fletcher's comedy of The Night Walker was, as we know from the Office-Book of Sir Henry Herbert, revised by James Shirley in the 1630's; this external evidence for Shirley's revision is corroborated, as will be seen, by the internal linguistic evidence which the first quarto text of the play affords. The comedy of Wit Without Money would seem to furnish a parallel case of non-authorial revision of a Fletcherian original. Here, however, there is no external evidence for revision, and the internal evidence can only be supplied negatively, as it were, from the well-nigh complete absence of the Fletcherian ye from the substantive quarto edition.
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