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The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the
Beaumont and
Fletcher Canon (VII)
by
Cyrus Hoy
[*]
This monograph concludes with an account of Fletcher's presumptive collaborations with Shakespeare, only one of which has a place in the standard Beaumont and Fletcher canon. About Fletcher's share in The Two Noble Kinsmen, there is no real difficulty. The linguistic evidence is sufficient to point with reasonable clarity to the specific scenes of his authorship. Shakespeare's presence in the play will have to be proved on other than linguistic grounds. All that can be said is that the linguistic pattern displayed in the non-Fletcherian scenes that are generally attributed to him is not inconsistent with the pattern of linguistic preferences—in so far as there is one—exhibited in the acknowledged work of his last period. Since the case for Fletcher's presence in Henry VIII is, in large part, based on the widespread use of ye in the text of the 1623 Shakespeare folio, it has been deemed proper to close the present study of Fletcher's work in collaboration with an examination of the evidence—linguistic and other—for his share in that play: a share which, were it ever to be finally allowed, would constitute not the least of his latter-day claims to fame.
- Fletcher: II,2-6; III,3-6; IV; V,1a (to exit of Palamon and Knights), 2.
- Shakespeare: I; II,1; III,1-2; V,1b (from exit of Palamon and Knights to end), 3-4.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The play was first published in quarto in 1634 with a title-page ascription to Shakespeare and Fletcher. There is linguistic evidence of a sort for the presence of Fletcher in the 37 ye's sprinkled over seven
Linguistic evidence for nine of Shakespeare's plays is given in tabular form at the end of this section of the present study. The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Timon, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra are his last six plays, excluding the questionable Pericles, prior to 1613, the date of both the plays—The Two Noblc Kinsmen and Henry VIII—of which Shakespeare and Fletcher have been said to be joint authors. The remaining three Shakespearean plays that I have examined (Troilus and Cressida, All's Well, and Measure for Measure) represent his work at a slightly earlier period (c. 1602-1604).[2]
The problem of Shakespeare's linguistic practices is a vast one, necessarily involving as it does a complex of questions concerning the nature of the manuscript behind any one of the sundry printed texts of his plays, scribal influences where that manuscript is not an author's
But the most effective linguistic evidence for distinguishing the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher consists in Shakespeare's use of the third person singular verb forms hath and doth, and his general avoidance of pronominal ye. Doth is found but 3 times in a single one of Fletcher's unaided plays (in the Lambarde manuscript of The Woman's Prize); it appears in all the plays of Shakespeare that I have examined, from the 5 occurrences of doth in Antony to the 36 occurrences of the form in the quarto text of Troilus. Fletcher uses hath no more than 6 times in a single play, and in two of his unaided works it does not occur at all. Hath occurs in all the Shakespearean plays that I have examined, and it is used with great frequency, from 26 times in The Tempest to 80 times in Cymbeline. Shakespeare uses ye in all nine of the plays considered below, but he uses it sparingly; it occurs no more than 8 times in a single play (Coriolanus); Timon, and the quarto text of Troilus exhibit 6 occurrences each; from there the occurrences of ye dwindle to the single instance of the form in Measure for Measure.
When we turn to the linguistic evidence displayed in the non-Fletcherian scenes of the quarto text of The Two Noble Kinsmen, we find that, while it is certainly not sufficient in itself to establish Shakespeare's presence in the play, it accords very closely with the pattern of linguistic practices to be derived from the tables for his last plays given below. And, I would maintain, it contrasts with the linguistic pattern of Fletcher, which exists side by side with it in The Two Noble Kinsmen, in precisely the manner that Shakespeare's language practices, viewed as a whole in his last plays, contrast with the practices exhibited in the unaided plays of Fletcher. All of the quarto's 37 ye's are Fletcher's; none occur in scenes that do not otherwise bear the signs of his stylistic manner. Hath is used 3 times in Fletcher's scenes, 13 times in non-Fletcherian ones. The 16 occurrences of 'em in the non-Fletcherian scenes fall below the 39 occurrences of the form in Fletcher's share of the play; the 10 occurrences of i'th' in the presumably
A word should be said regarding the low incidence of ye in the quarto text. It was the opinion of Greg (The First Folio, p. 98) that the 1634 quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen was "evidently printed from a prompt-copy written or at least annotated by Edward Knight." In a previous section of the present study (SB, VIII, 139), I have drawn attention to the drastic reduction which the Fletcherian ye has undergone in Knight's transcript of Bonduca. If it could be assumed that he did, indeed, prepare the manuscript behind the quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen, then an explanation for the low occurrence of ye in Fletcher's scenes would be readily at hand. Recently, however, in a previous volume of these Studies (XI, 61-84), Dr. F. O. Waller has suggested annotated foul papers as the copy for the quarto text. That the foul papers, if such they were, were annotated for use in the playhouse, is evident from a number of stage directions of distinctly theatrical origin that survive in the quarto print. Dr. Waller is aware of the obstacle that the diminished number of ye's in Fletcher's scenes puts in the way of a theory of foul papers as quarto copy. The alternatives that he suggests by way of overcoming this are: (1) an hypothesis of mixed copy, consisting of the foul papers of Fletcher's collaborator, and a transcript of Fletcher's own scenes; and (2) an annotated intermediate scribal transcript. Any theory of foul papers as the immediate source of the quarto text is, I think, altogether untenable; the linguistic evidence will not support any such conjecture. And I am frankly dubious about Dr. Waller's statement (SB, XI, 84) that "Fletcher seems to have given the text a final reworking." If he did give the text a final reworking—even such an "haphazard and incomplete" one as Dr. Waller has in mind—it seems odd that there are no ye's in the non-Fletcherian scenes, and that the ye's in Fletcher's own are so few. I think Dr. Waller's other alternative, an intermediate scribal transcript
- Fletcher: I,3-4; III,1; V,2-4.
- Shakespeare: I,1-2; II,3-4; III,2a (to exit of King); V,1.
- Fletcher and Shakespeare: II,1-2; III,2b (from exit of King to end); IV,1-2.
Henry VIII
Henry VIII has its place—and it remains secure when the disintegrators of Shakespeare have done their worst—in a greater canon than the Beaumont and Fletcher one, and it will perhaps seem gratuitous to introduce the question of its authorship here, at the end of the present study. But the question of Fletcher's share in the play is a perennially interesting one; and since the problem of his collaboration with Shakespeare has already been raised in connection with The Two Noble Kinsmen, it has seemed proper to proceed to an account of the second—and more famous—of the two plays in which the collaboration of the two dramatists has been presumed. Further, there is the fact that the evidence on which Fletcher's claim to a share in the authorship of Henry VIII must come finally to rest is, precisely, the very linguistic evidence on which the present effort to distinguish his work in collaboration with dramatists other than Shakespeare has been based. Even Mr. R. A. Foakes, the play's most recent editor, who is disinclined to accept Fletcher's presence in Henry VIII, admits so much (Henry VIII, revised Arden Shakespeare [1957], pp. xix-xx). Mr. Foakes thinks that Heminge and Condell would not have included Henry VIII in the First Folio of 1623 had they not believed it to be entirely his; and Mr. Foakes finds further evidence for single authorship in the use of the chronicle materials that provide the play's sources; in the "unified, if special, conception and spirit" which the play exhibits; and in the play's "structure of imagery, which . . . cuts across the proposed authorship division and suggests a single mind at work" (pp. xxiii-xiv). To the arguments from the play's inclusion in the 1623 Folio, Prof. R. A. Law has made what must be the only effective reply. "Who," he says, "is ready to accredit the Bard with the Hecate lines in Macbeth?" ("The Double Authorship of Henry VIII," Studies in Philology, LVI [1959], 487.) Prof. Law further counters Mr. Foakes's arguments for single authorship by invoking the authority of Lamb regarding Shakespeare
The linguistic evidence for authorship which the play affords has been examined in detail by A. C. Partridge (The Problem of "Henry VIII" Reopened [1949], pp. 15-26). Suffice it to say at this point that the text of the play in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio reveals two distinct linguistic patterns: one marked by the occurrence of ye in eleven of the play's sixteen scenes, to a total of 71 times,[5] and a distinct preference for the contraction 'em to the expanded pronominal form them; the second pattern is marked by the absence of ye, a preference for them to 'em, and the frequent use of hath which, with one exception (I.1) is never found in a scene containing ye. Since, as the linguistic tables given below for Shakespeare's last plays make very clear, ye is a form which he seldom employs, the great question is: how to account for the unparallel occurrence of ye in the Folio text of Henry VIII. It is not compositorial. The play, we now know from the forthcoming investigations of Dr. Charlton Hinman, was set by Compositor B and another compositor, who was not A but whom Dr. Hinman will identify. However, it is agreed that the distribution of ye in the Folio text accords not at all with the bibliographical units of the printed edition.[6] The form obviously stood in the manuscript from which the Folio text was printed, and so the question: what was the nature of the printer's copy for the Folio edition of Henry VIII. Greg (First Folio, p. 425) said it "was clearly a carefully prepared manuscript, in whose hand or hands there is no evidence to show." Foakes (SB, XI, 60) conjectures that the
If the manuscript were in a single hand, was it a scribal transcript, or an author's fair copy? If one holds to the theory of single authorship, and posits a transcript, then the ye's of the Folio print might perhaps be supposed to have entered the text through the offices of the scribe who prepared the copy. If one holds to the theory of single authorship, and posits an author's fair copy, then one must account for the Folio's ye's by supposing either that (1) Shakespeare at the end of his career began frequently to employ a pronominal form that he had never displayed any fondness for in the past, or (2) that he had employed it in the past, but that elsewhere in the Folio Compositors B and his partner X who set the text of Henry VIII never managed to reproduce it on anything approaching the scale on which it appears in that play.
If one holds to the theory of dual authorship, then of course the presence of the ye's in the Folio text of Henry VIII poses no problem; they are there because they stood in the manuscript from which the Folio text of the play was printed, and they stood in that manuscript because one of the authors—who in such a theory would be Fletcher—put them there. There would be no way of proving that a scribe did not put them there were no additional evidence available to point in the direction of Fletcher; but as I will presently show, there is. For the moment we will consider Mr. Foakes's argument (Henry VIII, p. xx) that the case for Fletcher's presence in the play, based on linguistic evidence, is weak because the pattern of usages displayed in the play is not "Fletcherian enough." He cites the low proportion of ye's to you's in the scenes claimed for Fletcher, and observes, rightly, that the incidence of ye falls suspiciously below normal Fletcherian practice. Driven to extremity, one could always posit the inevitable Knight transcript to account for this falling-off; but if the Folio copy was, as Greg would have it, "a carefully prepared manuscript," then Knight had nothing to do with it. In any case, another explanation is at hand; the occurrence of ye in the Folio text of the play seems clearly to have been affected by compositorial practice. This was demonstrated by the late Philip Williams in a previous volume of these Studies (VIII, 3-14). On the pages of Henry VIII set by Compositor B, Williams found a ratio of 208 you's to 25 ye's, or eight to one, while on the pages set by Compositor X (B's partner) he found a ratio of 191 you's to 48 ye's, or four to one. Williams identified the share of Compositor X as the work of Compositor A, as it had become traditional to do before Hinman;
Mr. Foakes is aware (Henry VIII, p. xxi) that Compositor B altered ye to you in Troilus and Cressida; he does not seem to be aware of the extent to which Compositor B did so in Henry VIII, for he can say (p. xxii), by way of dismissing the argument "that the peculiarities assigned to different authors existed in the copy on which the Folio text is based": "However, we do not know how far, or in what differing degrees these compositors altered their copy for this particular play, or who was responsible for that copy." In view of Williams's statistics, I would suggest that only the last part of this statement is entirely true. What Mr. Foakes failed to realize is that Compositor B's known tendency to alter ye's to you's serves, by providing an explanation for the relatively low occurrence of ye in Henry VIII, to remove his own objection that the purportedly Fletcherian language usages in the play "are not Fletcherian enough." If Compositor B, or any other compositor in the Shakespeare Folio, were ever found changing you's to ye's, then the principal linguistic argument for Fletcher's share in the play would go up in smoke. Given Compositor B's known habit regarding ye, one can hardly expect the chief feature of Fletcherian linguistic usage to appear in undiminished abundance in the printed text of any play on which he worked.
I think that the truth about Fletcher's share in Henry VIII is to be found where truth generally is: midway between the extreme views that have traditionally been held regarding it. Those who would deny his presence in the play altogether are wrong to do so, for he is assuredly there. Those who award him ten and one-half of the play's sixteen scenes (the usual ascription) claim too much. In a number of these (e.g., II,1-2; IV,1-2), I am convinced that Fletcher has done nothing more than touch up a Shakespearean passage, or insert a passage of his own in a Shakespearean context. If the occurrence of ye in the opening
III,1 provides the strongest linguistic evidence of Fletcher's presence to this point in the play. It also provides a striking example of differences in the practice of two compositors. The scene in the Folio occupies sigs. v3v and v4r. Sig. v3v was set by Compositor X. It contains 13 ye's, 14 you's. Sig. v4r was set by Compositor B. It contains 7 ye's, 16 you's. The first 203 lines of III,2 (to the exit of the King) are universally regarded as Shakespeare's; the last half of the scene is often attributed to Fletcher. In it ye, which has not appeared in the Shakespearean portion, occurs 6 times. The occurrence is suspiciously low in proportion to the 37 you's found in this presumably Fletcherian half of the scene. Since we are here dealing with the work of Compositor B, there is of course the strong possibility that a number of Fletcher's ye's have been changed to you's. Still, I find the distribution of such occurrences of ye as are present suspicious; it is too reminiscent of the distribution of ye in II,1-2. The 6 instances of the form appear at lines 239, 240, 241, 242, 278, and 365, and that being so, I am not at all sure that one is justified in attributing to Fletcher the superb speeches made by Wolsey after his fall. I think that what we are dealing with is, once again, Fletcherian interpolations in a scene that is essentially Shakespeare's.
The work of Compositor B continues throughout Act IV, which is generally assigned in its entirety to Fletcher. I seriously doubt that he
The distinction to be noted between the occurrence of ye in single isolated clusters within a scene, and its periodic occurrence throughout the whole of a scene, is I think of considerable importance for the authorial evidence that attaches to the form. The distinction is particularly important in the case of the present play where the tendency in the past too often has been to attribute to Shakespeare's collaborator whole scenes of Shakespeare's own in which the collaborator has done little more than interpolate a handful of lines of his own, or touch up after his own fashion occasional passages of the original author's. Perhaps we can best appreciate this distinction when we move from Act IV of Henry VIII, where I am convinced the traces of Fletcher that are discernible are mere interpolations, to the last three scenes of Act V, of which I am equally convinced he is the sole author. These, together with III,1, constitute his strongest claim to a share in the play. With V,2-4 we are back in the presence of Compositor X once more, and the traces of ye become much stronger: 12 in V,2 (as against 42 you's), 7 in V,3 (13 you's), 6 in V,4 (3 you's).
The weakness in my theory of Fletcher as an interpolator in certain scenes of Henry VIII, and as the sole author of others, is that so many of the scenes (III,2b; IV,1-2) wherein the linguistic evidence points, in my opinion, to mere Fletcherian interpolation were set by Compositor B. It might be argued that the small clusters of ye's in these scenes are all that Compositor B has preserved of a more pervasive Fletcherian linguistic pattern. If all the scenes which have been claimed for Fletcher alone in the past, but which I would write-off as containing Fletcherian interpolations merely, were set in print by Compositor B, I would be properly hesitant about urging any such theory regarding his presence in the play. But at least two scenes (II,1-2) set by Compositor X contain just such odd clusters of ye's as are to be found in Compositor B's IV,1-2; and there is no reason to suppose that Compositor X tampered with the ye's that stood in his copy. He seems not to have done so, at any rate, in the section of III,1 that he set, nor has
The Fletcherian structure of such a line as this has been noted in a previous section of the present study (SB, XIII, 96, where some examples are cited from Fletcher's unaided plays).
The repetition with different modifiers, and the use of "too," is typically Fletcherian. Compare the following from his unaided work: "This worme that crept into ye has abus'd ye, / Abus'd your fathers care, abus'd his faith too" (The Loyal Subject, II,5); "tis a Ring: a pretty Ring, a right one: / A ring I know too! the very same Ring" (The Pilgrim, IV,1); "modest to the world too, wondrous modest" (A Wife for a Month, IV,1).
I am sorry my integrity should breed,
And service to his Majesty and you,
So deep suspicion, where all faith was meant.
(III,1,50-53)
These lines of Wolsey's to Katharine seem to have given trouble to past editors. Foakes, in his note on the passage in the New Arden edition, observes that Singer transposed lines 52-53, thereby "giving a smooth flow to the sense." But in Foakes's opinion, "they seem to indicate a dramatic intention—Wolsey thinks first of his own selfimportance, his intrinsic worth, then mentions, as a second thought, and in parenthesis, his service to others." The fact is, the construction— wherein the elements of a compound subject ("integrity," "And service") are separated by an intervening verb phrase ("should breed") — is distinctly Fletcherian, and I would submit that there is no stronger evidence for Fletcher's presence in Henry VIII than the occurrence in the play of this particular syntactic arrangement. In the passage in question, it makes for an extreme parenthetical inversion, but so it often does in Fletcher's unaided plays. Compare the following:
- I still weeping till old time had turn'd me, And pitying powers above into pure christall (A Wife for a Month, IV,1)
- These noble thoughts sir, have intic'd us forward, And minds unapt for ease to see these miracles, (The Island Princess, I,1)
- those great deserts The King hath layd up of ye, and the people, (The Mad Lover, I,1)
- there is nothing now but truth to save me, And your forgivenesse (Valentinian, IV,4).
- Thou point to which my life turnes, and my fortune, (Women Pleased, I,1)
- All heavens care [be] upon yee, and my prayers (The Chances, III,1).
The burden of my sorrows fall upon ye.
(III,1,110-111)
The admonition, twice repeated (sometimes oftener), is frequent in Fletcher. Compare the following: "Take heed, take heed young Ladies: still take heed" (The Loyal Subject, IV,3); "Take heed for honours sake take heed" (The Mad Lover, IV,1); "Take heed, by all our love take heed" (Valentinian, III,3).
If you have any justice, any pity,
If ye be any thing but churchmen's habits—
Put my sick cause into his hands that hates me?
Alas! has banish'd me his bed already,
His love too long ago!
(III,1,115-120)
Since virtue finds no friends—a wife, a true one?
A woman, I dare say without vain-glory,
Never yet branded with suspicion?
Have I with all my full affections
Still met the King, lov'd him next heav'n, obey'd him,
Almost forgot my prayers to content him,
And am I thus rewarded?
(III,1,125-133)
This good man—few of you deserve that title—
This honest man, wait like a lousy footboy
At chamber door? and one as great as you are?
(V,3,137-140)
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her;
She shall be lov'd and fear'd. Her own shall bless her:
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.
(V,5,25-35)
Katharine is the speaker in the first two of these passages, Henry in the third, Cranmer in the last. Anyone who is familiar with Fletcher's rhetorical cascades cannot fail to recognize his manner in all of them. The manner consists in a number of separate devices, all evident here: the highly compressed syntax (n.b. III,1,118-120 and 129-132); the towering spiral of appositives, each dilating in its small way on the subject at hand (e.g., III,1,125-128; V,3,137-139); the parenthetical insertions in the first three passages; the use of what Puttenham would term "Antistrophe" ("when ye make one word finish many verses in sute, and . . . to finish many clauses in the middest of your verses"[8]) at III,1,130-132, and regularly throughout Cranmer's christening speech. The use of "too" at III,1,120 is comparable to its use at I,4,28, discussed above. The verbal sequence at the end of III,1,126 ("a wife, a true one") is similar to the rhetorical formula noted in Fletcher's unaided work in a previous section of the present study (SB, XIII, 101).
The passages just discussed provide a fair measure of the Fletcherian quality of the verse in those scenes of Henry VIII which I regard as
ii
Now that all the linguistic evidence is in, we may proceed to tabulate our findings by way of conclusion. The shares of Fletcher and his collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon stand as follows.
- Fletcher alone (15 plays): Bonduca, The Chances, The Island Princess, The Humourous Lieutenant, The Loyal Subject, The Mad Lover, Monsieur Thomas, The Pilgrim, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Valentinian, A Wife for a Month, Women Pleased, The Wild Goose Chase, The Woman's Prize (plus The Faithful Shepherdess, not included in the present study for reasons stated in SB, VIII, p. 142).
- Fletcher and Massinger (11 plays): Barnavelt, The Custom of the Country, The Double Marriage, The Elder Brother, The False One, The Little French Lawyer, The Lovers' Progress, The Prophetess, The Sea Voyage, The Spanish Curate, A Very Woman.
- Fletcher and Beaumont (9 plays): The Captain, The Coxcomb, Cupid's Revenge, A King and no King, The Maid's Tragedy, The Noble Gentleman, Philaster, The Scornful Lady, The Woman Hater.
- Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger (3 plays): Beggars' Bush, Love's Cure, Thierry and Theodoret.
- Fletcher, Beaumont, and Jonson (1 play): Love's Pilgrimage.
- Fletcher, Massinger, Jonson, and Chapman (1 play): Rollo, Duke of Normandy.
- Fletcher and Field (1 play): Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One.
- Fletcher, Field, and Massinger (3 plays): The Honest Man's Fortune, The Knight of Malta, The Queen of Corinth.
- Fletcher and Shirley (1 play): The Night Walker.
- Fletcher, plus an unidentified reviser (1 play): Wit Without Money.
- Fletcher and Rowley (1 play): The Maid in the Mill.
- Fletcher and Middleton (1 play): The Nice Valour.
- Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, and Ford (1 play): The Fair Maid of the Inn.
- Fletcher and Shakespeare (2 plays): The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII.
- Fletcher is wholly absent from three plays in the corpus: Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Wit at Several Weapons (attributed to Middleton and Rowley), The Laws of Candy (attributed to Ford).
Of the fifty-four plays considered in the course of this study, Fletcher then is the sole or partial author of fifty-one. Massinger, whose share in the corpus is second only to Fletcher's, as Sir Aston Cockaine pointed out long ago, is present as reviser or collaborator in nineteen plays. Beaumont is the sole or partial author of fourteen, Field the partial author of four. Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, and Ford are each present in two plays; Shirley and Webster are each present in one. Shakespeare is present in one of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, and Fletcher is present in one of the plays of the Shake-speare canon.
Chambers, surveying the authorship of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon in 1923, thus adjudged previous efforts at dealing with the problem: "the process of metrical analysis initiated by Fleay and Boyle may be regarded as fairly successful in fixing the characteristics of the very marked style of Fletcher, although it certainly raises more questions than it solves as to the possible shares not only of Massinger, but of Jonson, Field, Tourneur, Daborne, Middleton, Rowley, and Shirley, as collaborators or revisers, in the plays as they have come down to us" (The Elizabethan Stage, III, 216).
For all that the linguistic evidence can accomplish, the shares of certain of the dramatists that Chambers named must remain problematic. Linguistic evidence cannot establish Jonson's presence in Rollo, or Middleton's in The Nice Valour. But it can, at the very least, confirm or deny assumptions based on other evidence regarding a given
With linguistic evidence it is all, finally, a matter of more or less, as this essay in evaluating it, and applying it to the authorial problem which the Beaumont and Fletcher canon poses, will have abundantly indicated. There is linguistic evidence of a modest sort for attributing Wit at Several Weapons to Middleton and Rowley; there is linguistic evidence of a more decisive sort for tracing Shirley's revising hand in The Night Walker; there is linguistic evidence of the most decisive sort of all for determining the work of Fletcher in virtually all the plays where he is taken as being present. And having reached a decisive means of determining the work of Fletcher, we are in a position to determine with equal decisiveness the collaborated work of Massinger, because his language practices are so thoroughly at variance with Fletcher's, and because very nearly all of his work in collaboration was done with Fletcher.
It remained for linguistic evidence to show what metrical evidence never showed: that it is possible to distinguish the work of Fletcher and Massinger on the basis of fundamentally different language practices. To demonstrate just how fundamental this difference is, and how decisively it will serve to differentiate their work in collaboration, has been the most signal achievement of this study. On the basis of it, I will venture to make a large claim. There is no longer any mystery about Massinger's share in the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. That beng so, it will no longer be excusable for the author of a book on Massinger to decline to consider his work in collaboration on the plea that, Massinger being "deeply involved in the tangled undergrowth of collaboration which surrounds the Beaumont-Fletcher corpus," to do so would call "for a preliminary volume quite away from [the author's] purposes," and would only end by "confus[ing] the reader and obscur[ing] the object of [the] study, Massinger himself."[9]
| ye | y' | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | i'the | a'th' | o'th' | o'the | h'as | 's his | ha' | t' | |
| Temp. | 5 | 26 | 13 | 17 | 42 | 16 | 21 | 1 | 4 | ||||||
| WT | 3 | 1 | 42 | 7 | 6 | 61 | 20 | 23 | 1 | 8 | 3 | ||||
| Cym. | 4 | 1 | 80 | 20 | 2 | 70 | 20 | 37 | 14 | 1 | |||||
| Tim. | 6 | 6 | 29 | 9 | 20 | 66 | 3 | 2 | 10 | 5 | 2 | 4 | |||
| Cor. | 8 | 5 | 51 | 9 | 14 | 128 | 42 | 29 | 16 | 3 | 14 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Ant. | 4 | 4 | 43 | 5 | 3 | 53 | 25 | 1 | 22 | 3 | 4 | 2 | |||
| Tro. | 6 | 60 | 36 | 43 | 11 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | |||||
| Meas. | 1 | 2 | 71 | 24 | 41 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| AWEW | 4 | 4 | 52 | 6 | 5 | 50 | 14 | 9 | 3 | 8 | 1 |
| ye | y' | you | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | o'th' | h'as | 's his | t' | |
| I,i: | 35 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 1 | ||||
| -,ii: | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | ||||||
| -,iii: | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||
| -,iv: | 2 | 1 | 5 | 3 | ||||||||
| -,v: | 1 | |||||||||||
| TOTAL: I | 1 | 53 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 9 | 1 | 1 | ||
| II,i: | 6 | 3 | 3 | 2 | ||||||||
| --,ii: | 7 | 30 | 1 | 10 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 2 | 7 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| --,iv: | ||||||||||||
| --,v: | 4 | 34 | ||||||||||
| --,vi: | 1 | |||||||||||
| TOTAL: II | 9 | 4 | 78 | 1 | 14 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | |||
| III,i: | 1 | 24 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | ||||||
| ---,ii: | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,iii: | 20 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,iv: | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,v: | 8 | 1 | 18 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||||
| ---,vi: | 11 | 60 | 10 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: III | 19 | 3 | 123 | 2 | 11 | 5 | 3 | 11 | ||||
| IV,i: | 2 | 1 | 26 | 4 | 2 | |||||||
| --,ii: | 8 | 11 | 3 | 1 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 10 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: IV | 2 | 1 | 44 | 2 | 15 | 6 | 1 | 2 | ||||
| V,i (a): | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| -,i (b): | 3 | 2 | 2 | |||||||||
| -ii: | 4 | 1 | 39 | 5 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| -,iii: | 16 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | |||||||
| -,iv: | 18 | 4 | 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: V | 7 | 1 | 82 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 8 | 1 | |||
| TOTAL: | 37 | 10 | 380 | 16 | 1 | 55 | 31 | 22 | 29 | 5 | 1 |
| ye | y' | you | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | o'th' | h'as | 's his | t' | ha' | |
| I,i: | 1 | 22 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 1 | 2 | ||||
| -,ii: | 24 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 3 | |||||
| -,iii: | 2 | 7 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| -,iv: | 4 | 4 | 23 | 12 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: I | 5 | 4 | 71 | 8 | 1 | 23 | 11 | 3 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 2 | |
| II,i: | 4 | 20 | 4 | ||||||||||
| --,ii: | 3 | 12 | 1 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 1 | 25 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| --,iv: | 2 | 50 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 | ||||||
| TOTAL: II | 7 | 3 | 107 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | ||||
| III,i: | 20 | 30 | 5 | ||||||||||
| ---,ii (a): | 38 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | |||||
| ---,ii (b): | 6 | 37 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| TOTAL: III | 26 | 105 | 8 | 1 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | ||||
| IV,i: | 3 | 1 | 13 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| --,ii: | 5 | 20 | 3 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: IV | 8 | 1 | 33 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | ||||||
| V,i: | 1 | 41 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | |||||
| -,ii: | 12 | 1 | 42 | 6 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| -,iii: | 7 | 2 | 13 | 13 | 1 | 3 | 1 | ||||||
| -,iv: | 6 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: V | 25 | 5 | 99 | 3 | 20 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| TOTAL: | 71 | 13 | 415 | 24 | 2 | 63 | 25 | 18 | 25 | 2 | 10 | 6 | 1 |
notes
For Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI of this series, see Studies in Bibliography, vols. VIII, IX, XI, XII, XIII, and XIV.
For a summary of the relevant facts in the case, plus some additional evidence based on patterns of imagery, see Kenneth Muir, "Shakespeare's Hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen," Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), 50-59.
Dates cited for Shakespeare's plays, here and in what follows, are those adopted by W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955).
Notably in plays believed to have been set from foul papers or an authorial fair copy. with regard to the plays listed in the linguistic table below, this includes All's Well, Antony, Timon, Coriolanus, and the quarto text of Troilus. See Greg (First Folio, pp. 342, 353, 403, 411, 407). Regarding the copy for the quarto text of Troilus, however, see Walker (Textual Problems, p. 82).
My figures and Prof. Partridge's do not always agree, in part because he has included the Prologue and Epilogue in his count, while I have regularly omitted these from my tabulations in the present study.
R. A. Foakes, "On the First Folio Text of Henry VIII," Studies in Bibliography, XI (1958), 57. The shares of the two compositors as set forth in Foakes's table (p. 55) are confirmed by Hinman, whose findings affect only the identity of the compositor wrongly identified by Foakes as Compositor A. Sigs. x4r and x4v (the last leaf of the play), unaccounted for in Foakes's table, according to Hinman were set by this compositor.
Everyone who has counted the 'em's in the play has arrived at a different total. Williams found 66; Partridge, counting the 2 in the Epilogue, found 64; I, not counting the Epilogue, find 63.
I wish to acknowledge a double debt of gratitude to Professor Fredson Bowers who has watched over this study since it was begun as a doctoral dissertation in 1952, and who, as the Editor of these Studies, has allowed me access to their pages over the past seven years. I wish as well to express my thanks to Dr. M. C. Bradbrook of Girton College, Cambridge, who with her inimitably wise counsel helped to guide my research into the right ways when it was in its earliest stages. For any lapses in judgment, or any arithmetical errors of calculation which this study may ever be found to exhibit, I alone, it goes without saying, am responsible.
Abbreviations. (Statistics for Shakespeare's plays listed in the table above are based on the text of the 1623 Folio with the exception of Troilus and Cressida, figures for which are based on the text of the 1609 quarto.) Ant. Antony and Cleopatra; AWEW, All's Well that Ends Well; Cor. Coriolanus; Cym. Cymbeline; Meas., Measure for Measure; Temp., The Tempest; Tim. Timon of Athens; Tro., Troilus and Cressida; WT, The Winter's Table.
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