Linguistic Discriminators between Webster and
Heywood
Attempts to determine the authorship of Appius and
Virginia are
complicated by ignorance over its date of composition. Metrical and
stylistic
considerations have led most commentators to conclude that
"Appius
lies at one end or other of Webster's development" (Lucas, III, 122), but
there is no agreement over which end: it has been dated 1603-4 at the one
extreme, 1626-34 at the other. Bentley finds the evidence of earlier scholars
"at best inadequate, often absurd, and frequently tied to arguments for
hypothetical collaborators," but judges that "the period from 1624 to
Webster's death seems to have slightly more to be said for it than have the
other dates offered" (V, 1246). Lucas favoured 1625-7 as the most likely
date of composition, and 1624 is the year under which it is entered in the
Schoenbaum-Harbage Annals. In view of the paucity of hard
evidence on the matter, however, Heywood and Webster characteristics that
fail to differentiate between the
dramatists throughout the first quarter of the seventeenth century are of
little
legitimate use.
Another complicating factor is doubt over the extent of Webster's
participation in the plays in which he is alleged to have collaborated, such
as
Anything for a Quiet Life, The Fair Maid of the
Inn, and
A Cure for a Cuckold—and again there are problems
of
chronology. Could we be certain of his shares in these plays, a wider range
of data concerning his stylistic and sub-stylistic characteristics would be
available to us, and we might better be able to gauge and understand the
changes in his art. But only the early collaborations with Dekker,
Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho
(1605), can
be apportioned between the parties with any precision or confidence.
[9]
In pursuit of "linguistic" features that may serve to distinguish
between
Webster and Heywood, I have examined the three plays of Webster's
undoubted sole authorship and fifteen plays known to be the unaided work
of Heywood, including The Captives and The Escapes
of
Jupiter, extant in manuscripts generally agreed to be autograph. The
minutiae studied were those that Cyrus Hoy, David J. Lake, and others
have
shown to fall into patterns discriminating neatly between the various
Jacobean and Caroline dramatists—colloquial contractions such as
'em, I've, e'en,
ha', i'th'; linguistic
preferences for ye, you, or 'ee,
hath or
has; exclamations, oaths, and other expletives; affirmative
particles
(Ay, Yes, or Yea); connectives
such as among
or amongst, betwixt or between,
while or
whilst; and habits in the setting out, spelling, and
punctuation of the text.[10]
In many of these respects the two authors are closely alike. Neither
makes liberal use of a wide range of contractions and both eschew
has and does in favour of the formal
hath and
doth,[11] except that
Webster
favours has and
does in
The Devil's Law Case: we cannot know
whether the
change reflects chronology (
The White Devil is usually dated
1612,
The Duchess of Malfi 1614, and
The Devil's Law
Case 1617),
or was made in the interests of decorum, the colloquial forms being felt
more
appropriate to tragi-comedy than to tragedy. Another possible explanation
would look to the probable origins of the texts. John Russell Brown judged
that
The White Devil was printed from the author's own
papers, that
The Duchess of Malfi was printed from a transcript, probably
in the
hand of Ralph Crane, and that while for
The Devil's Law
Case the
indications were slight and inconclusive, they appeared to point to a literary
rather than a theatrical manuscript.
[12]
Although Webster and Heywood avoid various forms common in the work
of other dramatists —and these forms are absent from
Appius—both men are rather fond of aphetic
forms, such as
'fore and
'gainst, which occur
several times in
Appius; and even the exclamation
Ha!, a
recognized favourite
of Webster's, is of very little value in discriminating his writing from that
of
Heywood, who uses it quite often in several plays. Murray (
A Study
of
John Webster, p. 38) asserts that instances of
'tis in
Heywood's
work are "relatively few," but in
The Captives,
The
English
Traveller, and
The Fair Maid of the West,
Part
II
Heywood uses
'tis with a Websterian liberality, and in some
other
plays his rate of use is not significantly lower than Webster's.
Among the more striking idiosyncracies of Heywood's autographs,
the
only one to survive into several printed texts is the spelling
Ey for the
affirmative Ay (I in most dramatists), but its
appearance in a
Quarto as late as 1654 would be most surprising, and it is in fact absent
from
Appius.[13]
The main features of Webster's linguistic pattern were noted by Hoy.
Remarking that, apart from the switch to has and
does in
The Devil's Law Case, the linguistic practices evident in
Webster's
plays comprise a pattern that is "extremely consistent," Hoy showed that,
though Webster avoids most contractions, "his use of i'th',
o'th' (which often occurs in his work as a'th'),
and 's
for his in each of his three unaided plays far exceeds the
occurrence
of these forms in any single play of such other dramatists whose unaided
work I have examined as Fletcher, Massinger, Field, and Ford."[14] Heywood makes little use of
i'th',
o'th', or 's for his. The two
dramatists also differ in
their preferences over connectives, one or two expletives are favoured by
one man but not the other, and there are a few pseudo-bibliographical
markers. Figures for some discriminators that prove
relevant to Appius and Virginia are presented in Table 3 at
the end of
this article. I have omitted good discriminators between Webster and
Heywood that fail to appear in Appius, such as the locution
Gramercy, which turns up in almost all Heywood's plays but
is never
used by Webster.
The forms listed in Table 3 vary in their power to discriminate.
Heywood
uses more contractions in i'th', o'th', and
to th' towards
the end of his career, to which period Appius is perhaps most
likely
to belong, but the rate of occurrence in his plays always falls far short of
Webster's. Most of Heywood's to th' contractions are merely
variants
of the use, which he favours, of th' before a vowel; only five
examples in The Captives and three within the two parts of
The
Fair Maid of the West are the genuine to th'
contraction before a
consonant, which is the type employed by Webster. For't
appears
with Websterian frequency in 2 Fair Maid but none of
Heywood's
other plays, though Webster's use is itself variable. A few examples of
i'th', o'th', to th', and
for't in a scene of
Appius would be perfectly compatible with Heywood's
authorship.
Far more distinctive is Webster's
liking for of't, which is completely absent from the Heywood
plays.
Though I have not entered figures in the table, Webster's partiality for
enclitic 't contractions generally is much greater than
Heywood's, and
his range is wider, including many more examples of 't
appended to a
verb—proclaim't, swear't,
bring't, whisper't,
and the like. Heywood usually restricts himself to the more common
't contractions, such as is't, in't,
do't,
to't. The total numbers of enclictic 't
contractions in Webster's
plays, according to my rather quick counts, are: The White
Devil 68,
The Duchess of Malfi 102, The Devil's Law
Case 76. There
are only four Heywood plays in which the total falls outside the range 5-25;
in 1 Fair Maid, 2 Fair Maid, and The
Captives it is
about 50, and in The English Traveller about 60. Again, in
three of
the four later Heywood plays
the figures are high and the rate of use Websterian. Clearly the number and
type of 't contractions in a scene of Appius can
be used only
as slight supporting evidence. The most obvious discrepancy between
Heywood and Webster in their use of contractions concerns 's
for
his: any instance of this type of contraction in
Appius must
constitute strong evidence for Webster's hand.
The connectives ought to supply useful testimony. Whereas Heywood
greatly prefers betwixt (83 times) to between
(22),[15] and whilst (150
times) to while
(10), Webster employs between exclusively (28 times), and
prefers
while (19 times) to whilst (6). Though in
The White
Devil and The Duchess of Malfi Webster shares
Heywood's
preference for amongst over among, in
The Devil's Law
Case this preference is reversed. Thus while,
among, and
between will, with varying decisiveness, point to Webster,
whilst and betwixt to Heywood.
A further pointer to Webster's authorship has not been tabulated. In
The White Devil he adopts the classical and Jonsonian
practice of
using small capitals for speech prefixes and setting them within the line
when
a new speech continues a line of verse. In The Duchess of
Malfi and
The Devil's Law Case small capitals are replaced by
lower-case italic
(the names beginning with a capital, of course), but speeches continuing a
line of verse still often begin within the line. This practice is entirely alien
to
the Heywood
autographs; it occurs sporadically in the Quartos of
The Royal King
and
the Loyal Subject and
The English Traveller, and a
few times in
The Rape of Lucrece,
The Golden Age, and
(on a single
page)
The Silver Age, but it is not otherwise a feature of
Heywood's
plays.
