Conclusion
We feel that it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions from
these studies. To summarize, we have here a MS written in the first quarter
of the seventeenth century, by an author who was almost certainly a
professional dramatist, whose handwriting (pace Shapiro)
cannot
be identified with any of the dramatists whose hands are known, who could
write very much in Webster's vein, and who used a great number of
expressions and images that Webster employed, who was a well-read man,
and a careful, even finicky author. If this author was not John Webster, we
would like to know who else meets all these conditions. We mean the
question seriously, for if any of Webster's contemporaries were able to do
all this, it would be valuable to know it. None of the known dramatists
seems at all likely as a candidate, but of course we cannot, on that basis
alone, rule anyone out. The number of professional dramatists of whose
work nothing survives declines sharply in the Jacobean
period, and we do not find it plausible to attribute this MS to an unknown.
Our conclusion, bearing all the evidence in mind, is that the attribution to
Webster is not impossible, and indeed that the evidence for his authorship
is a good deal stronger than that for some of the works which have been
attributed in part to him in the past. The Cambridge
Webster
will, for want of convincing contrary evidence, include some of these
doubtful collaborative texts; it will also include, as a "possible" work, the
Melbourne Manuscript fragment.
