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In evaluating linguistic criteria as a test of authorship, it is obvious that no linguistic form can be regarded as distinctive of a particular dramatist in any absolute sense; the extent to which he employs a given form may distinguish sharply enough his practice from that of two other dramatists, but not necessarily from that of a third. Thus emerges the necessity, in determining linguistic criteria for the work of any one dramatist, of singling out forms which are at once representative of his language preferences, while serving to differentiate his work from the maximum number of his known or supposed collaborators. The value to be attached to any piece of linguistic criteria is, in the end, completely relative: all depends upon the degree of divergence between the linguistic patterns that are to be distinguished.

With regard to the linguistic patterns which distinguish respectively

the work of Fletcher and Massinger, these, as has been observed, and as will be seen readily enough from the tables at the end of this study, are composed of language preferences which are of an essentially opposite nature. From this it is to be concluded that, in distinguishing the grammatical usage of two dramatists, a given linguistic form need not be present in an author's work to afford evidence for determining his share of a collaborated play. On the contrary, when his collaborator is found to employ that form, its absence in the work of the dramatist in question affords the best possible evidence for distinguishing the work of the two. In a play of Fletcher and Massinger's joint authorship, the fact that Massinger is known to make little or no use of the pronominal form ye constitutes evidence just as positive for his work as Fletcher's known preference for the form constitutes for his. Evidence of this sort is of the best, precisely because here the degree of divergence between the linguistic patterns that are being distinguished is as great as it can well be. The one pattern is marked by a strong preference for ye, with the use of the form averaging fifty per cent; the other reflects a tendency to avoid the form altogether.

Such clearly opposed linguistic preferences are, unfortunately, rare. The extent to which the work of two such collaborators as Fletcher and Massinger can be distinguished by the presence or the absence of a single linguistic form—pronominal ye—is, indeed, quite exceptional in the annals of the Jacobean collaborated drama. More often, such linguistic preferences as can be shown to exist in the work of two dramatists are of a more quantitative sort, with a given linguistic form present in the work of both, but present at a higher rate of occurrence in the work of one than in that of the other. In such a case, the value to be attached to any single linguistic form as evidence for authorship must depend upon the extent to which, in their unaided work, the one dramatist will tend to employ it and the other to eschew it. The less the degree of difference in the use which two dramatists make of the same linguistic form in their unaided work, the less will be its value as evidence for distinguishing their shares in a play of divided authorship. As two dramatists tend to approximate each other in their use of a given language form, the evidential value of that form is accordingly diminished.

Fortunately for any attempt to determine authorship on the basis of linguistic preferences, a single language form may be used by both of two dramatists and yet be of value in distinguishing their work in collaboration, provided only that that form can be shown to occur at a consistently higher rate in the unaided work of one dramatist than in that of the other. The value to be attached to the verb form hath, as it occurs in the unaided work of Fletcher and Massinger, is a case in point. Hath is to be

found in the unaided plays of both dramatists, yet its occurrence in any single play of Fletcher's never equals its occurrence in any one of Massinger's plays. Similarly with ye in the work of Fletcher and Field: ye occurs with some regularity in Field's unaided plays, but its occurrence there never approaches the extraordinary frequency with which Fletcher employs the form. The evidence to be derived from linguistic preferences as sharply opposed as these is second in importance only to that which is the most significant of all: the evidence that is based upon language preferences which reveal themselves in the prevalence of a given form in the work of one dramatist and its absence in that of another.

Thus far, in considering the factors that must be taken into account in evaluating linguistic criteria, I have tried to emphasize the necessity for determining the extent to which a given language form does indeed point to a clear and unequivocal linguistic preference that will serve in distinguishing the work of two dramatists. It need hardly be said that no single linguistic preference will serve equally to distinguish the work of a given dramatist from that of all others. As I have already observed, a grammatical or linguistic practice that may tend to set a particular dramatist apart from two of his fellows will not necessarily set him apart from a third. It should be obvious that no piece of linguistic criteria can be evaluated in isolation; the significance which a single form may possess for distinguishing the work of any one dramatist will derive directly from the extent to which that form is present in the work of his collaborators. The frequent use of ye, hath, i'th' or whatever in the plays of any dramatist is of no value in distinguishing his work from that of dramatists who employ such forms with equal or even approximate frequency. And no importance can be attached to the absence of a particular form from the work of any one dramatist unless it is known to occur in some noticeable degree in the work of another. The linguistic pattern that has been adduced for a dramatist on the basis of his unaided work will, of course, remain constant. However, the value of the evidence to be attached to the presence or absence of such linguistic forms as contribute to the distinctive nature of this over-all pattern will obviously shift in relation to the prevalence of those same forms within such other linguistic patterns as may be present with it in a single play. Or, stated in another way: if a given linguistic form is known to occur with approximately the same frequency in the work of dramatists A, B and C, but does not occur at all in the work of dramatist D, then while that particular form will have no value as evidence for distinguishing the work of A, B and C, it will have considerable value for distinguishing the work of any one of these from dramatist D. The use of the verb form hath in the plays of Massinger and Field will not serve to distinguish these dramatists from each other, but it

may serve to distinguish both from Fletcher. And while the absence of ye from the plays of Massinger will have very little value in distinguishing his work from that of Beaumont, who seems to have employed the form at least as sparingly as Massinger himself, the fact that Massinger almost never uses ye will serve to distinguish his work not only from Fletcher's, but from that of Field as well.

Clearly, no linguistic form can be regarded as the exclusive property of a single writer. Just as clearly, however, writers can, and often do, demonstrate a preference for certain colloquial and contracted linguistic forms (a fact that is strikingly evidenced in the case of Fletcher and Massinger) and such preferences can often serve to set apart the work of one author from that of another. In a study such as this, the problem must be to distinguish what are, indeed, an author's preferential forms, and then to determine which of these can serve to differentiate his work from that of his associates. For such a purpose, the very best linguistic evidence will always consist in those forms which a given writer can be shown to have used with conspicuous frequency, but which those with whom he collaborated can be shown to have used ever so sparingly or not at all.