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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.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

• 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 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

scenes, which the quarto text displays. The attribution to Shakespeare of the non-Fletcherian scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen has often been argued on the evidence of metrical tests and, more recently, of image clusters.[1] The case, based solely on stylistic grounds, is a strong one, and I think it abundantly supports the claim of the quarto titlepage that Shakespeare is a partial author of the play. I am assuming, at any rate, that he is. Some such assumption is necessary, for as will shortly appear, his presence in this or in any play of uncertain authorship must be determined on other than linguistic grounds. Shakespeare uses no language forms which, either in themselves or by virtue of their rate of occurrence, can serve to point immediately and unmistakably to his presence in a play of doubtful authorship. In the following analysis of the linguistic evidence to be derived from his unaided plays, I will proceed on the assumption that he is in fact Fletcher's collaborator in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and will confine myself to considering the extent to which the language practices displayed in his unaided work contrast with those displayed in the unaided work of Fletcher. This in turn will enable us to determine to what extent the shares of the two dramatists can be differentiated in a collaborated play, and thereby put us in a position to evaluate such evidence for the respective shares of their authorship as the quarto edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen contains.

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

holograph, and compositorial habits reflected in the printed editions. Even when certain control factors are present, the resultant evidence is not always consistent. Antony and Cleopatra (1607) and Timon of Athens (1608) date from the same period of Shakespeare's career; each play was first printed in the 1623 Folio, where the copy for each is said to have been Shakespeare's foul papers (Greg, The First Folio, pp. 398-403, 408-411). The Folio text of each play was set in its entirety by Compositor B.[3] Yet we find the contraction 'em occurring a scant 3 times in Antony, and 20 times in Timon, while the contraction i'th' occurs but 3 times in Timon and 25 times in Antony. Sometimes Shakespeare's language practices contrast with Fletcher's, and sometimes they do not. When 'em is found occurring most frequently in a play of Shakespeare's, as in Timon (20 times) or The Tempest (17 times), there is little to distinguish the rate of its usage there from its occurrence in those plays of Fletcher's—Women Pleased (23 times), The Mad Lover (25 times) —in which 'em is found least frequently. The 42 occurrences of i'th' in Coriolanus markedly exceed the greatest number of occurrences of the same form in any one of Fletcher's unaided plays (28 in The Humourous Lieutenant). Its occurrence in certain of Shakespeare's plays (e.g., The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline [20 times each], All's Well [14 times]) matches the use to which Fletcher puts it in certain of his (e.g., Rule a Wife [20 times], Bonduca and The Woman's Prize [14 times each]). And at the other end of the scale of usage, the practices of the two dramatists coincide as well (the 3 occurrences of i'th' in Timon have their parallel in the 4 i'th's of Fletcher's A Wife for a Month). Shakespeare's use of o'th' (which often occurs as a'th')[4] ranges, in the plays that I have examined, from the 2 o'th's of Measure for Measure, to the 45 occurrences of both forms (29 a'th's, 16 o'th's) in Coriolanus. Here again, at the lower extremity, we find a coincidence with Fletcherian practice (o'th' occurs but once in A Wife for a Month); when a'th'/o'th' occur most frequently in the Shakespearean plays that I have examined—as in The Tempest (o'th' 21 times), The Winter's Tale (o'th' 23 times), Cymbeline (o'th' 37 times), Coriolanus, antony (a'th' once, o'th' 22 times) —the level of usage there equals or exceeds that revealed in Fletcher's unaided plays, where both forms occur no more than a combined total of 21 times (in the Lambarde manuscript of The Woman's Prize). The upshot of all this is, simply, that (1) Shakespeare's use of 'em never exceeds Fletcher's, though in two plays (The Tempest and Timon) it comes close; (2) Shakespeare's use of i'th' in one play (Coriolanus) markedly exceeds Fletcher's, and in a number of other plays equals his; (3) Shakespeare's use of a'th' / o'th' in five plays (The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Coriolanus, Antony) equals or exceeds Fletcher'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

Shakespearean scenes nearly approximate the 12 occurrences of the form in Fletcher's scenes; the 21 occurrences of o'th' in the non-Fletcherian portion of the play markedly exceed the 8 occurrences of the form in the Fletcherian portion. This is surely worth noting: that the use of 'em, i'th', and o'th' in the two shares of The Two Noble Kinsmen—where the occurrence of 'em in the non-Fletcherian portion falls below the Fletcherian usage, i'th' nearly equals it, and o'th' exceeds it—is exactly comparable to the use of these forms demonstrated above in, respectively, the unaided work of Shakespeare and Fletcher. The contrasting practices of Shakespeare and Fletcher in the use of hath and ye complete the linguistic evidence for differentiating their shares in a play of their joint authorship.

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

of the sort posited by Fredson Bowers (On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists [1955], pp. 21-22), meets the conditions demanded by the linguistic facts of the case more satisfactorily than any other theory about the nature of the printer's copy for the quarto edition of the play.

Henry VIII

• 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 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

and Fletcher's very different methods of handling imagery, and illustrating the practice with pertinent passages from Henry VIII; he finds the source-material put to very different use in the two shares of the play; and he ends by quoting Ribner (who happens to hold with the theory of Shakespeare's sole authorship) to the effect that Henry VIII, far from exhibiting any particular structural unity, is in fact "a poorly-connected series of episodes." Two more opposite conclusions can hardly be reached from a single body of literary evidence, and one returns with something like relief to the statistical security of linguistic evidence.

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

carefully prepared manuscript was "probably in a single hand," and finds evidence from variations in speech-headings that the manuscript "was based on foul papers."

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;

but since the division of the play between two compositors remains unchanged in the light of Hinman's findings, and since of the two it is the practice of Compositor B (whose share in setting the play Hinman confirms) that is in question, Williams' conclusions remain valid. He observed that "the ratio between you and ye is almost exactly twice as great on A [i.e., X] pages as it is on B pages" (SB, VIII, 10). By the same token, Williams noted "that of the sixty-six 'em's found in the text, fifty-five appear on pages set by Compositor A [i.e., X], and only eleven on pages set by Compositor B."[7]

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

line of the play means anything, he might be observed doing just this at the outset of I,1, a scene that has never been claimed for him. I,3 and I,4 have been claimed for Fletcher. I,3 contains no ye's, but since you occurs but twice in the course of the scene, the absence of ye is hardly significant. There are 4 ye's evenly distributed throughout I,4, a surprisingly low number in view of that scene's 23 you's. Both scenes were set by Compositor X, who seems to have reproduced the Fletcherian 'em accurately enough: 7 times in I,3, where them does not occur; 12 times in I,4, where them is used once. How to account for the low proportion of ye's to you's in I,4, I do not know. I only know that, because they are distributed throughout the scene (at lines 2, 50, 63, and 86 of Alexander's edition) they provide better evidence for regarding that scene as wholly Fletcher's than do the 4 ye's of the following II,1, found at lines 1, 130, 131, and 132 of Alexander's edition. So with the 3 ye's of II,2, which occur at lines 68, 69, and 137. In both scenes, we are again dealing entirely with the work of Compositor X, and there is no reason to suppose that there were more ye's in his copy than those he set in print. I think that the ye's of II,1-2 represent Fletcher, but I regard them as Fletcherian interpolations in scenes that in all other respects are Shakespeare's.

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

has much claim to it. It is not simply that the act, as a whole, contains only 8 ye's as against 33 you's; the presence of Compositor B could provide a sufficient explanation for that. It is the manner in which the ye's of the act fall into little clusters which convinces me that here, as elsewhere in the play, we are dealing with Fletcher the interpolator and not Fletcher the original author. The 3 ye's of IV,1 occur in a clump in the last four lines (114,115,117) of the scene. Of the 5 ye's of IV,2, one occurs at line 22, the remaining four are found together at lines 83 (which contains two of them), 84, and 86.

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

he done so throughout V,2-4. Finally, the best non-linguistic evidence for Fletcher's presence in Henry VIII (evidence which makes it possible, I think, to view the ye's of the Folio text as valid signs of his presence) is all contained in the six scenes (I,3-4; III,1; V,2-4) which, as the linguistic evidence implies, are wholly his. There are no convincing traces of Fletcher's syntactic or rhetorical practices in the scenes in which the linguistic evidence suggests mere Fletcherian interpolation. Some examples of these practices had best be cited by scene.

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).

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).

The verb phrase of the passages above may become but a single finite verb, as in the following:

• 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 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).

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

solely his. The syntactic and rhetorical practices which they display, taken together with the linguistic evidence of the Folio text, establish his claim to a share in the play's authorship. This will never be granted by those who are bent on viewing Henry VIII as entirely Shakespeare's, but the burden of proof is on those who would deny Fletcher's presence there. They will have to explain two things. (1) how it is that, at the end of his career, the quality of Shakespeare's verse becomes at times, as any one of the passages cited above will prove, so distinctly Fletcherian as to have, demonstrably, more in common with the verse of The Loyal Subject than with that of The Tempest; and (2) how it is that, at the end of his career, the quality of Shakespeare's language practices becomes at times, as the linguistic evidence for Henry VIII will prove, so distinctly Fletcherian that the Bard is found spelling you, ye, à la Fletcher, to an extent that he had never, apparently, done before.