University of Virginia Library

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The language forms which constitute the greater part of my evidence for authorship consist, as will have been observed, of linguistic preferences which—in a great number of cases—are made manifest in only the most minute typographical features of a printed text. In dealing with such forms, and especially when one is preparing to attach any great importance to the frequency of their occurrence, the question is naturally raised as to the extent to which an author's choice of contractions is preserved in the transmission of his text. It is well known that certain seventeenth-century compositors possessed clearly defined spelling preferences which were imposed upon whatever text they might be setting, and one wonders just how far such compositorial preferences were carried. Would a compositor, for instance, venture to impose his own preferences among colloquial and contracted forms upon a text as well? If so, then any study such as the present one is the sheerest kind of folly, for the linguistic forms by means of which one is seeking to identify a given dramatist's share in a collaborated play might have been introduced into the text by any number of unknown compositors.

There is no reason, however, to believe that compositors took undue liberties with the contracted forms in the manuscript before them; there is, on the contrary, good reason for believing that they reproduced such forms with considerable fidelity. Both W. E. Farnham and Paul Elmer

More have drawn attention to the extent to which the same contractions occur, with only slight variation, in the Beaumont and Fletcher quartos and folios. As Farnham has observed, it is clear from the verse that such contractions were intended by the author, and honoured by the printer, because they are a necessary part of the metrical structure. And equally to the point is his further observation that differences in the use of contractions in the parts of a collaborated play are "too orderly to be ascribed to the vagaries of a printer" (Farnham, op. cit., p. 332). No one can seriously consider the two linguistic patterns present in such a play as The Spanish Curate, coinciding as they do with the beginning of acts and scenes, to represent the language habits of two compositors. If such linguistic patterns did in fact represent the language preferences of two compositors, their occurrence would be found to accord with the bibliographical units of the printed text, and would not in any way be related to the act and scene divisions of the play itself. Finally, the manner in which the same linguistic preferences can be shown to persist throughout the unaided plays of a given dramatist, though the extant texts of these are the work of several different printers, affords the ultimate proof that language forms of the sort which can furnish evidence for authorship originated with the author himself, and are sufficiently preserved in a printed text. Fletcher's strong preference for the pronominal form ye is just as evident in the 1639 quarto text of Monsieur Thomas, printed by Thomas Harper, or in the 1640 quarto of Rule a Wife, printed by Leonard Lichfield, as in the remaining twelve plays of his unaided authorship, printed for the first time by Humphrey Moseley in the 1647 folio. The unaided Massinger canon presents what is perhaps an even stronger argument for this contention, for it is the product of even more diverse compositorial hands. Of Massinger's fifteen unaided plays, thirteen were published, and these represent the work of eleven printers. Yet the linguistic preferences which emerge from these are completely consistent within themselves, and what is equally striking, they are preferences which in no way contradict what we know of Massinger's language from the manuscript—in his autograph—of one of his unpublished plays. A study of the occurrence, in some one hundred plays, of the linguistic forms that are here employed as authorial evidence, convinces me that, in the greater number of cases, the use of such forms—either in the unaided plays of a given dramatist or in plays of divided authorship—is far too systematic to admit the possibility that their presence has been affected, in any truly significant degree, by compositorial intervention.

If, however, the evidence available would tend to absolve compositors from the charge of tampering with the contractions in the manuscript which they were set to reproduce, the same cannot, apparently, be said

for certain scribes in their preparation of transcripts for the use of the theatre, the printer, or a private patron. The three scribal transcripts which exist for Fletcher's unaided plays demonstrate, on the one hand, a reasonable accuracy in reproducing the linguistic preferences of the author on the part of such a scribe as Ralph Crane and, on the other, the far more erratic practice of such a scribe as Edward Knight, with the practice of the unidentified scribe of The Woman's Prize falling somewhere between the two.

Crane prepared a private transcript of Fletcher's The Humourous Lieutenant (titled in his manuscript Demetrius and Enanthe). Since his text contains some seventy-five lines not present in the text of the first folio, the supposition is that Crane's transcript derives from Fletcher's original manuscript, whereas the folio text represents a prompt-book containing theatrical abridgements. In his transcript, Crane introduces some thirty-four ye's not present in the text of the folio, while he omits some fourteen ye's which the folio text exhibits, but the difference of approximately twenty ye's in the total occurrence of the form in the two texts is not great. It speaks, in fact, well for the care with which Crane reproduced his copy when it is compared with the wide divergence in the occurrence of ye in the two extant texts of another of Fletcher's unaided plays. Bonduca (For a careful study of Crane's characteristics as a transcriber, see R. C. Bald, Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, p. 95, but more especially his edition of A Game at Chesse by Thomas Middleton, pp. 171-173.)

The text of Bonduca is extant in a scribal transcript, prepared by Edward Knight, the book-keeper of the King's Company, from Fletcher's foul papers, and in the text of the 1647 folio, printed from the prompt-book. In the folio text, the pronoun ye is used 352 times; in Knight's transcript, the occurrence of the form has been reduced by more than half, to 147 times. The variation in the two texts in this respect is of significance because, on the basis of the first folio, the percentage of ye's to you's is the highest to be found in any play of Fletcher's unaided authorship. If, however, Bonduca survived only in Knight's manuscript, the play would present the lowest percentage of ye's to you's in all Fletcher, with the occurrence of the form falling markedly below its normal frequency in his unaided plays.

There is evidence of scribal intervention affecting the use of ye in another Fletcher play, The Woman's Prize, and there is good reason to suppose that the scribe responsible for the reduction in the occurrence of the form is once again Knight. Like Bonduca, The Woman's Prize is extant in two texts: an undated private transcript, prepared by an unidentified scribe, and the text of the 1647 folio. In the first folio text, ye occurs but 84

times, a number far below the usual occurrence of the form in Fletcher's unaided work. In the manuscript, ye is found 133 times, and while this still represents the lowest occurrence of the form in Fletcher, the increase of 49 ye's makes for a rather more satisfactory basis for regarding the play as Fletcher's own.

There is external evidence which almost certainly has some bearing on the first folio text of the play and the linguistic forms which it exhibits. On 18 October 1633 the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, suppressed a performance of The Woman's Prize (he refers to the play by its alternate title, The Tamer Tamed), which the King's Company had scheduled for that afternoon. On the following morning the prompt-book was brought to him, whereupon he proceeded to purge it of "oaths, prophaness, and ribaldrye" (Herbert, p. 20). The play, Herbert explains, was an old one, evidently licensed during the Mastership of one of his predecessors, which the King's Company had sought to revive, under a different title, without applying for a new license. Herbert was thereby deprived of his licensing fee, a matter about which he felt strongly, as he indicates in the entry in his Office Book, though he advances another and more public-spirited reason why old plays should not be restaged without the allowance of the Master of the Revels: "they may be full of offensive things against church and state; the rather that in former times the poetts tooke greater liberty than is allowed them by mee" (p. 22).

The upshot of the whole affair was that two days later, on 21 October, Herbert returned the prompt copy, properly expurgated, to the players, accompanied by a note to Edward Knight enjoining him to "purge [the actors'] parts, as I have the booke." The players' capitulation to Herbert's demands was complete; two of their chief members apologized for "their ill manners" and asked his pardon, and the following month Fletcher's The Loyal Subject, which had been licensed by Sir George Buc in 1618, was submitted to Herbert for re-licensing.

Mr. R. C. Bald, in a most valuable discussion of the two texts of The Woman's Prize in his Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (p. 60), points out that, while "the manuscript omits two whole scenes (II.i and IV.i), two passages of fourteen and seven lines respectively, and eight of three lines or less" that are included in the folio, the manuscript exhibits, on the other hand, "eleven passages . . . varying in length from half a line to nine lines," which the folio omits. It is Mr. Bald's opinion that the manuscript gives the play, which was originally performed in 1610 or 1611, "as cut for acting before Herbert's time," while "the folio gives a fuller version of the play, but observes the cuts that were made by Herbert in 1633." To observe the cuts that Herbert demanded, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that a new prompt-book was drawn

up, and if a new prompt-book was prepared, it seems clear enough from Herbert's note of 21 October that the task would be performed by the book-keeper Knight. From Knight's transcript of Bonduca we know how the Fletcherian ye diminished under his hand (see Bald, pp. 99-100), and I can only account for the small number of ye's in the folio text of The Woman's Prize by supposing the manuscript from which that text derives to have been prepared by him. With regard to the scribal transcript, the supposition would be that the scribe responsible for it has been somewhat more faithful in reproducing the language forms that must have stood in the original. Since the manuscript text reflects more clearly than the folio the quality of the Fletcherian original, I have used it as the basis for the statistics set forth for The Woman's Prize in the linguistic tables at the end of the present study.

The possibility of scribal intervention should perhaps be considered in relation to two other of the plays which can be regarded as Fletcher's unaided work, Rule a Wife and A Wife for a Month. These, apparently Fletcher's last plays, exhibit after The Woman's Prize the least number of ye's of all the fourteen plays that I consider to be his. The first folio text of A Wife for a Month gives clear indication of author's foul papers, but it is not impossible that the text has derived from a not too careful transcript of these. Two speeches are printed in alternately abridged and expanded versions, and there is a bad tangle in the second scene of the fourth act which clearly would have had to be set to rights before the manuscript in back of the first folio text could have been used as a prompt book. But if Knight's transcript of Bonduca is any indication of his work for a private patron, he would not have been above letting such difficulties stand in a text which he prepared, if it were not to serve as a theatrical prompt copy. And if the total number of ye's still present in the text of A Wife for a Month (176) does indeed represent a reduction from the original number, Fletcher's favourite pronoun has here been given much the same treatment as Knight accorded it in his Bonduca manuscript.

The substantive text of Rule a Wife, that of the 1640 quarto, probably derives, as Prof. Jump has suggested, "either from a prompt-book or from a manuscript directly descended from a prompt-book."[7] The play was licensed for acting by Sir Henry Herbert on 19 October 1624, and four months later, on 8 February 1625, Herbert re-licensed The Honest Man's Fortune, for which Knight had prepared a new prompt book that is extant in his autograph. It would seem likely, then, since he was actively employed by the King's Company at this time, that Knight prepared the prompt-book for Rule a Wife as well. There is evidence of a sort in the quarto of Rule a Wife that might be considered to link it with his

work. The chief feature which the quarto and the Bonduca manuscript have in common is a frequent occurrence of the contraction 'um (for 'em). Since Knight employs 'em throughout his manuscript of The Honest Man's Fortune, 'um is not likely to represent his own linguistic preference. And since the form is 'em throughout the 1640 quarto of Rollo, Duke of Normandy, printed in the same house and in the same year as Rule a Wife, it seems improbable that the 'um spelling is compositorial. I regard it rather as a Fletcherian form which Knight has reproduced forty-six times in his transcript of Bonduca, and—perhaps—thirty-two times in the manuscript behind the quarto of Rule a Wife. Seventeen times in the Bonduca manuscript, Knight uses the spelling hir for her. The hir spelling occurs twenty-nine times in the quarto of Rule a Wife, and it is the prevalent spelling throughout the manuscript of The Honest Man's Fortune. The evidence is admittedly not great, but combined with the fact that Knight was the probable person to have prepared a prompt-book for the King's Company at this period, it seems at least possible that the diminished number of ye's (213) in the quarto of Rule a Wife may be traced to his intervention in the transmission of the text.