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
21 of both forms together in
White Devil). "O'th", "o'th'"
and
"o'the" occur altogether 43 times, only one of which is from
Appius
and Virginia, and none at all from the
Characters.
Finally, the "y'" contraction occurs 13 times, as "y'are" 12 times and
"y'ave" once; save one "y'are" in
Monuments of Honor, all
these uses are in
Devils Law-case and
Appius and
Virginia. "Ye" is found eight times, but "you" occurs over 2600
times.
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.
