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I

The criteria which I propose to apply in investigating the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher corpus is of a linguistic nature. By linguistic criteria I mean nothing more complicated than an author's use of such a

pronominal form as ye for you, of third person singular verb forms in -th (such as the auxiliaries hath and doth), of contractions like 'em for them, i'th' for in the, o'th' for on/of the, h'as for he has, and 's for his (as in in's, on's, and the like). There is nothing particularly new in the use of criteria of this sort, and I can claim no originality for any of the linguistic tests that I apply in the course of this study. In 1901, A. H. Thorndike drew attention to the use of the colloquial contraction 'em as a possible test of authorship.[2] Thorndike found the form to occur frequently in Fletcher, and not at all in Massinger, but since his evidence for Massinger was based on Gifford's edition—wherein 'em is consistently expanded to them—his conclusions were vitiated, as he later pointed out in an errata slip. Nonetheless, the use of 'em as opposed to them can afford a significant clue to distinct linguistic preferences, and the relevance of Thorndike's evidence remains, though it does not apply in quite such a clear-cut fashion to Fletcher and Massinger as he originally believed.

In editing The Spanish Curate for the Variorum Beaumont and Fletcher in 1905, R. B. McKerrow noted the marked preference for the colloquial form ye of the pronoun you in Fletcher's portion of that play, and W. W. Greg, in his Variorum edition of The Elder Brother, made the same observation with regard to that play. The extent to which Fletcher employs the pronominal form ye was noted independently by Paul Elmer More, who commented upon it in an article in The Nation in 1912.[3] In 1916, in an article in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, W. E. Farnham considered the use of such contractions as 't (for it, as in to't, on't, in't, etc.), 's (for his or us, as in on's, in's, to's, etc.), i'th', o'th', and the like, as a possible clue to authorship.[4] Most recently, in 1949, A. C. Partridge has applied linguistic evidence of this sort in his study of the authorship of Henry VIII, adding such additional criteria as is to be derived from the occurrence of the auxiliary do as a mere expletive in affirmative statements, and the use of the inflexional ending -th in the third person singular of notional and auxiliary verbs.[5] Linguistic tests of the sort that I have indicated have not, however, been hitherto applied to the question of authorship on any very considerable scale. The observations of both McKerrow and Greg were made

incidentally in the course of editing single plays, and neither ever pursued the matter further. Paul Elmer More, after examining the occurrence of ye in fourteen plays, and pointing to the possible value that such evidence might have as an indication of Fletcher's share in the plays of the canon, added that work of the sort required for any detailed study of the subject was not much to his taste, and must be left to another. Farnham, who did not consider at all the occurrence of ye, dealt with 't, 's and contractions involving the (i'th', o'th', etc.) in only eight plays. And Partridge, to the present time, has been concerned only with Henry VIII. Thus the various linguistic tests that have been proposed during the past half century have yet to be applied systematically to all of the plays which comprise the Beaumont and Fletcher canon.

From an examination of the language forms present in the plays of the canon, at least one distinct pattern of linguistic preferences is evident at once. This is chiefly marked by the widespread use of the pronominal form ye, together with the frequent use of such contracted forms as i'th', o'th', 'em, h'as, 's for his, and a markedly infrequent use of third person singular verb forms in -th. The pattern can be traced throughout fourteen plays: ye is used repeatedly from the beginning to the end of each, and this is enough to set them apart from every other play in the canon. They are: Monsieur Thomas, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Bonduca, The Chances, The Island Princess, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Loyal Subject, The Mad Lover, The Pilgrim, Valentinian, A Wife for a Month, Women Pleased, The Wild Goose Chase, The Woman's Prize. In no one of these does ye ever occur less than 133 times (in The Woman's Prize), and in the remaining thirteen plays its rate of occurrence is much higher than this, as high as 543 times (in The Wild Goose Chase). Elsewhere in the canon, ye never occurs with anything approaching this frequency. In certain plays (e.g., The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Nice Valour, The Coxcomb, A King and no King), ye appears sporadically or not at all. In certain others (e.g., The Spanish Curate, The Prophetess, The False One, Barnavelt, The Maid in the Mill) the form appears, but it is to be found clustered in single acts or scenes, and does not occur throughout the length of an entire play. Thus, when ye is found to occur regularly throughout each of fourteen plays—and this in a manner that is not paralleled in any of the other thirty-eight plays of the canon—it seems reasonable to conclude that one is here in the presence of a distinct linguistic preference that can be of use in determining the work of the dramatist whose practice it represents.

To identify the dramatist whose linguistic practice is marked by the widespread use of ye is not difficult. He is clearly not Beaumont. The plays of the canon with which Beaumont's name is most closely associated—plays

like Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, A King and no King, The Knight of the Burning Pestle—are precisely those in which ye seldom or never occurs. Nor is Massinger the dramatist in question. An examination of Massinger's fifteen unaided plays shows that, in all of these, ye occurs but twice; in all other instances, Massinger employs the pronominal form you. And the contracted forms (i'th', o'th', and the like) which are found to accompany the use of ye in the plays of the canon, are like ye itself conspicuous by their absence in the unaided work of Massinger, whose use of contractions is remarkably conservative. The assumption—a virtually inescapable one—is that the linguistic pattern characterized by a superabundance of ye's must represent the pattern of Fletcher. For three of the fourteen plays in question (The Loyal Subject, A Wife for a Month, and Rule a Wife) there is external evidence for Fletcher's sole authorship,[6] and I have no hesitation in regarding them all as his unaided work.

That they are unaided work can, I think, be demonstrated by comparing the manner in which ye occurs in them with its occurrence elsewhere in the canon. As I have already observed, in these fourteen plays the occurrence of ye, and all the linguistic phenomena that accompany its prevalence (absence of third-person verb forms in -th, frequency of such contractions as i'th', o'th', h'as, 's for his), is constant in its appearance through every act and virtually every scene. In plays of the type of The Spanish Curate and The Prophetess, however, the linguistic pattern established by the occurrence of ye is to be found only within single acts, or within individual scenes within acts, at the end of which it is abruptly broken off. In such cases, it is usually preceded or followed by a pattern of a quite different sort: one in which, first of all, the occurrence of ye is sharply reduced, and in which a decrease in the occurrence of other contracted forms is accompanied by an increased use of the verb form hath. In a very great number of cases, the linguistic pattern which accompanies the pattern established by ye is that of Massinger. A comparison of the first two acts of The Spanish Curate, the first two acts of The Prophetess, and the first act of Barnavelt, to cite but three examples, will indicate the manner in which the two linguistic patterns alternate within the same play.

It is, I think, valid to conclude that when a play, of the type represented by The Spanish Curate, demonstrates in consecutive acts and scenes two such sharply opposed linguistic patterns as those characterized by the prevalence and the absence of ye, then that play must represent the work of two separate dramatists. On the other hand, when in a play

of the sort represented by The Loyal Subject or Monsieur Thomas a single linguistic pattern is found to be maintained through virtually every scene of its five acts, there is I think no real room for doubt that that play is the work of a single author. Regarding the fourteen plays of this sort in the canon, the linguistic pattern which links them together as the work of a single dramatist is far too distinct in itself, and far too evident throughout each, to admit the possibility of a second hand intervening in their authorship. When a second hand appears in a scene that has been formerly dominated by the Fletcherian linguistic pattern, its presence is noticeable at once. If the second hand is that of a collaborator, then the pattern will be immediately interrupted, and will appear but sporadically throughout the play, as it does in such plays as The Spanish Curate and The Prophetess. If the second hand is that of a reviser, then the whole pattern will be obscured: ye's will, for the most part, disappear, or their number will be greatly reduced, and the whole texture of Fletcherian accidence is altered. The canon affords an illustration of this in The Night Walker, originally one of Fletcher's unaided plays, but revised in its extant text by Shirley.

Since the Fletcherian linguistic pattern is so pronounced and so discernible wherever his unaided work is present, I cannot consider his unaided work to be in fact represented in any play where this pattern is not evident. Thus I cannot agree with all those who have previously studied the Beaumont and Fletcher corpus in placing Wit Without Money among the plays of Fletcher's sole authorship. The linguistic pattern that emerges from this play resembles far more closely the pattern to be found in The Night Walker than the pattern which prevails in such plays as Monsieur Thomas or The Wild Goose Chase.