 | |  |
Linguistic Tests
As noted above, Professor Cyrus Hoy has done more to bring order to the attribution of authorship in the Jacobean era than any other scholar. It is owing to his researches that the respective shares of playwrights in the so-called Beaumont and Fletcher canon can now be discussed with some degree of confidence. Unfortunately, the data on Webster, which Hoy derived from the three major plays, contain some alarming inconsistencies. The survey he made to determine if Webster had a share in The Honest Man's Fortune seemed to establish that Webster had a strong preference for "hath" and "doth" rather than "has" and "does", and that he virtually never used the abbreviation "'em", preferring instead the full form "them", but that he did regularly employ such contracted forms as "i'th'" and "o'th'" (or "a'th") and "'s" for "his", but not the contraction "y'", or "ye" for the second person plural. Strangely, in The Devils Law-case, Webster uses "has" almost exclusively, and uses a few of both "y'" and "ye", a startling degree of inconsistency.[38]
It seemed worthwhile to extend Hoy's sample into the other concorded texts.[39] This search revealed that "a'th" and its cognate forms, "a'the", "a'th'", and "ath'" occur 21 times, almost exclusively in The Devils Law-case and The White Devil (there is one usage in Monuments of Honor, and one in the Characters). "Does" occurs 20 times, all but six in The Devils Law-case; "doth" 107 times; "'em" only four times, against "them" 382 times; "has" 98 times, all but 15 of which are in Devil's Law-case, against 256 uses of "hath". The contractions "i'th", "i'th'" occur 129 times, "i'th" chiefly in Devils Law-case, "i'th'" in the other works, but at a much lower frequency rate (36 for Devils Law-case compared to
The MS agrees with these preferences in using "hath", "them" and "you" to the exclusion of "has", "'em" and "ye/y'"; neither "doth" nor "does" occurs; but most damagingly, none of the Websterian contracted forms is to be found. A closer look, however, reveals surprisingly few places where the contracted constructions could have been used: l. 58 ("in ye"), and ll. 76, 118 and 143 ("of ye"). Besides, of these four only one (l. 118) is in verse, where such contractions are, on the whole, more likely to be used. Still, the plain fact is that they are not used, and prima facie this is a major strike against Webster's authorship of the MS. However, it seemed an obvious step to examine the four pages of The White Devil selected above for vocabulary tests from this linguistic point of view also. Like the MS, it agrees with the general statistics by using "doth", "hath", "them", and "you"; it uses only one of the contracted forms ("ath'/a'the", thrice, in prose passages), and there are at least two places in the scene where a contraction might have been used but was not ("in the"). The relative infrequency of the use of contracted forms in the Webster canon, combined with the fact that he did use uncontracted forms on occasion, means that their absence from the MS cannot be regarded as absolutely ruling out Webster's authorship, in view of the agreement in the case of the more common linguistic preferences. But, once again, it strikes an equivocal note, weakening, not strengthening, the case.[40] Of course there are other verbal and linguistic tests that might be used to explore these questions further, especially the sort of collocational tests of linguistic patterns which computers are now beginning to perform on literary texts. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, we lack the appropriate programmes and facilities to carry out such tests; this must be a matter for subsequent investigation.
| | |