The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the
Beaumont
and Fletcher Canon (I)
by
Cyrus Hoy
I
The Beaumont and Fletcher canon consists traditionally of
fifty-two plays, but it has long been recognized that of these only
a small number represent the work of the two dramatists in
collaboration.[1] The exact number
has yet to be determined, but modern scholarship is agreed that
less than twelve of the vast corpus of plays which are currently
designated by Beaumont and Fletcher's names are indeed products of
their joint authorship. Essentially, the some forty plays that
remain represent the unaided work of Fletcher, or Fletcher's work
in collaboration with dramatists other than Beaumont. Chief among
these is Philip Massinger, whose share in the plays of the corpus
can be demonstrated beyond any doubt, but there are others, and
Beaumont-and-Fletcher scholarship from Fleay to Oliphant has
suggested as candidates for the authorship of the non-Beaumont,
non-Fletcher, non-Massinger portions of the plays in question, the
names of virtually every
dramatist known to have been plying his trade in Jacobean London.
Among those whose names, with varying degrees of plausibility, have
been advanced, are Nathan Field, William Rowley, Middleton,
Shirley, Ford, Webster, Tourneur, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Chapman,
Daborne, and Robert Davenport.
Any investigation into the authorship of the plays which
comprise the Beaumont and Fletcher canon will not, in the nature of
things, consist merely in separating the work of Beaumont from the
work of Fletcher. Quite apart from the problem of determining which
among the fifty-two plays of the corpus are indeed Beaumont and
Fletcher collaborations, there remains the very sizeable task of
distinguishing the work of Fletcher from
that of his various other collaborators apart from Beaumont. To
distinguish any given dramatist's share in a play of dual or
doubtful authorship, one must possess some body of criteria which,
derived from the unaided plays of the dramatist in question, will
serve to identify his work in whatever context it may appear. On
this score, the question of authorship in the Beaumont and Fletcher
canon is complicated at the very outset, for with the exception of
his
Masque, there is no play that can with any certainty be
regarded as the unaided work of Beaumont. And while the
Masque may afford a good enough indication of Beaumont's
metrical habits, the poetic diction in which its verse is cast
tends to preclude any widespread use of the linguistic
forms—especially contractions—which comprise the particular
body of criteria to be used as authorial evidence in the present
study. Thus, in establishing evidence that can be used in
determining the respective shares of the
collaborating dramatists, it is necessary to proceed from the known
to the unknown, the known in this case being the unaided plays of
Fletcher (which, as will be seen, can be identified) and of
Massinger (about which there is no problem of identification).
My purpose in the present study is to show (1) how the unaided
plays of Fletcher can be singled out from among the other plays of
the canon, and (2) how the pattern of linguistic preferences which
emerges from Fletcher's unaided plays contrasts sufficiently with
the language practices in the unaided plays of Massinger as to
afford a basis for distinguishing the work of the two dramatists
one from the other. It will be noted that the tests to be applied
in this and subsequent studies tend not so much to overturn the
usual assignment of shares in the plays of the canon as to confirm
previous attributions by a more extensive use of linguistic
evidence than has hitherto been brought to bear upon the works in
question. This is particularly true of Fletcher and Massinger,
whose shares have been assigned within reasonably specific limits
since the days of Boyle and Oliphant; though it might be argued
that tests of the present kind serve to base such assignments on
rather more
demonstrable evidence than has sometimes been used in the past,
while they tend as well to define somewhat more precisely the
extent of previous attributions. In the case of such dramatists as
Field, Shirley, and Ford, it will be seen in a later article that
linguistic evidence provides a more certain basis for assigning
their share in the plays of the canon than has yet been
available.
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
The following tables set forth the rate of occurrence, in the
unaided plays of Fletcher and Massinger, of those linguistic forms
which are of value in distinguishing the respective shares of the
two dramatists in plays of divided authorship. I have omitted
The Faithful Shepherdess from the number of Fletcher's
unaided plays, for although it is undoubtedly Fletcher's own,
linguistically at least it has nothing in common with any other of
his unaided works. Its language is that of pastoral poetry,
uncol-loquial and somewhat archaic. It abounds in linguistic forms
(most notably the third person auxiliary forms hath and
doth) which Fletcher seldom or never uses in his other
unaided plays, while all the most distinguishing of his colloquial
forms are either completely absent, or present in only a negligible
degree. Nothing could be more misleading than to regard the
language of The Faithful Shepherdess as typically
Fletcherian.
Of the linguistic forms cited in the tables below, ye is
much the most important for purposes of authorial evidence. Since
Fletcher employs the form as both subject and object, direct or
indirect, in either singular or plural number, the rate of its
occurrence in his unaided plays is very high. In the fifteen
unaided plays of Massinger, the form occurs but twice. Contractions
in y' (y'are, y'ave and the like) are much less
frequent in Fletcher, and are of no value in distinguishing
Fletcher's work from Massinger's. The two occurrences of
y'are in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas, Rule a Wife,
Bonduca, and The Pilgrim, for example, are matched
by
the
two instances of the form in Massinger's
The Bondman. The
single instances of
y'ave and
y'have in,
respectively, Fletcher's
The Chances and
Bonduca
are
paralleled by single appearances of the same forms in,
respectively, Massinger's
A New Way to Pay Old Debts and
The Guardian. There is nothing to distinguish Massinger's
use of contractions in
y' from Fletcher's, and I have not
included them among the forms cited in the following tables.
Regarding the verb form
hath, there is a distinct difference
in the Fletcher-Massinger usage. In Fletcher, the form never occurs
more than 6 times in a single play, and in two plays it occurs not
at all. In Massinger, on the other hand,
hath never occurs
less than 8 times in any one play, and generally it is found a good
deal more often than this—as often as 46 times in a single play.
Doth comes in only one of the fourteen Fletcherian plays
listed below, but since it
appears but 5 times in Massinger, the distinction in the practice
of the two dramatists on this point is not great. The contraction
'em appears in all of Fletcher's unaided plays, from 23
times in
Women Pleased to 130 times in
The Loyal
Subject. In certain of Massinger's plays, it will be noted,
'em is to be found occurring as frequently as it does in
certain of Fletcher's. But it seems significant that all of these
(e.g.,
The Picture, The Guardian, The City Madam) are late
plays, licensed for acting after Fletcher's death in 1625.
[8] In Massinger's early plays, which
would
presumably reflect his language practices at the time of his
collaboration with Fletcher,
'em is used a good deal more
sparingly than in the unaided plays of Fletcher or in the later
work of Massinger himself: 7 times, for example, in
The
Parliament of Love, 9 times in
The Renegado, 12
times
in
The Duke of Milan. I
tabulate the occurrence of the form for whatever value it may have
as a piece of corroborating evidence for distinguishing the work of
the two dramatists.
The evidence to be derived from the contraction i'th'
is,
on the whole, good. Despite the fact that the 7 occurrences of the
form in Fletcher's The Island Princess are equalled in
Massinger's The Guardian, the form is found at least 4 times
in all of Fletcher's plays, where it may appear as many as 28
times, while it is found in but 5 plays of Massinger's, and in none
of these more than 7 times. It may be worth noting that the five
plays in which the form occurs are late ones, and that i'th'
appears in no
play of Massinger's written before Fletcher's death. A form,
however, which Massinger tends to employ occasionally, but which
occurs only a single time in Fletcher, is the contraction
i'the. The contraction
o'th' affords evidence of
a
sufficiently clear-cut sort: the form occurs at least once in all
fourteen of Fletcher's unaided plays; it occurs not at all in
Massinger. The colloquial form
a (for
he) is
found
in
six of Fletcher's plays, but appears in none of Massinger's. Of a
similar nature is the contraction
'is (for
he is),
present in five of Fletcher's unaided plays, but not present in
Massinger.
H'as (for
he has) is found at least
twice
in each of the fourteen unaided plays of Fletcher, but it occurs
only a single time in Massinger. The contraction
t' (for
to, before a following vowel or
h) affords
evidence
of a sort for Massinger; it occurs at least once in ten of his
fifteen unaided plays, but is
found only a single time in Fletcher. Contractions involving
's for
his occur chiefly in Fletcher following
the
prepositions
in and
on. There are single
instances
in
Fletcher of enclitic
's for
his with four other
prepositions (
at, for, to, up); with an adverb
(
than); with a verb (
strike). In Massinger,
's
for
his occurs but three times: twice in the contraction
in's, once in the contraction
of's. Only the uses
of
's for
his with
in and
on
have seemed
worth recording in the tables that follow.
As for contractions in 's for us, these
occur
most
commonly in Fletcher with the imperative verb form let. I
find only two occasions in which Fletcher has used enclitic
's for us after other notional verbs
(put
and
make); elsewhere, he uses the form only after the
preposition on (5 times). In Massinger, 's for
us is used only in the contraction let's, and
even
this quite normal form Massinger uses very sparingly. It is the
only contraction in 's for us that I have
recorded
below. The enclitic use of 't for it with both
prepositions and verbs (in contractions such as in't, on't,
for't, to't, is't) is standard in the work of Elizabethan and
Jacobean dramatists, and contractions of this sort are of no worth
in distinguishing the work of Fletcher and Massinger, for their
rate of occurrence in the work of each is virtually identical. In
the following tables I have recorded
only one form in 't for it, the contraction
of't, and this only because the form does not appear in
Fletcher, while it occurs from one to nine times in thirteen of the
fifteen unaided plays of Massinger.
To summarize the chief features of the linguistic patterns of
Fletcher and Massinger: the Fletcherian pattern is one which is
marked above all by the constant use of ye; one which
exhibits a strong preference for the contraction 'em to the
expanded form them; one which regularly employs such other
contractions as i'th', o'th', h'as, and 's for
his, and which makes sparing use of the third person
singular verb forms hath and doth. Stated
Linguistic Tables for the Unaided Plays of Fletcher and
Massinger[*]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
's(his)
|
's(us)
|
|
ye
|
hath
|
doth
|
'em
|
i'th'
|
i'the
|
o'th'
|
a
|
'is
|
h'as
|
t'
|
in's
|
on's
|
let's
|
Fletcher
|
M. Thom. |
343 |
6 |
|
27 |
9 |
|
6 |
|
|
2 |
|
3 |
|
10 |
R. W. |
213 |
2 |
|
35[†]
|
20 |
|
12 |
|
5 |
7 |
|
3 |
1 |
12 |
Bon. |
352 |
1 |
|
95 |
14 |
|
10 |
4 |
|
10 |
|
4 |
1 |
27 |
Chan. |
290 |
2 |
|
44 |
12 |
|
4 |
4 |
|
10 |
|
2 |
|
20 |
I. P. |
258 |
|
|
64 |
7 |
|
8 |
1 |
8 |
5 |
|
1 |
|
14 |
H. L. |
367 |
5 |
|
80 |
28 |
|
11 |
2 |
|
11 |
|
3 |
3 |
11 |
L. S. |
424 |
3 |
|
130 |
13 |
|
10 |
|
|
4 |
|
2 |
1 |
10 |
M. L. |
308 |
6 |
|
25 |
16 |
1 |
4 |
15 |
4 |
7 |
|
3 |
|
17 |
Pilg. |
400 |
3 |
|
62 |
15 |
|
9 |
|
|
9 |
|
7 |
|
18 |
Valen. |
412 |
4 |
|
71 |
12 |
|
8 |
2 |
|
4 |
|
2 |
|
16 |
W. M. |
176 |
|
|
41 |
4 |
|
1 |
|
1 |
2 |
|
5 |
1 |
17 |
W. P. |
288 |
3 |
|
23 |
15 |
|
16 |
|
|
6 |
|
4 |
2 |
3 |
W. G. C. |
543 |
1 |
|
61 |
8 |
|
6 |
|
1 |
3 |
1 |
|
1 |
15 |
W. Pr. |
133 |
4 |
3 |
58 |
14 |
|
21[‡]
|
|
|
3 |
|
3 |
|
10 |
Massinger
|
D. M. |
|
46 |
|
12 |
|
1 |
|
|
|
|
8 |
|
|
1 |
Bond. |
|
8 |
1 |
15 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
|
|
2 |
P. L. |
1 |
21 |
|
7 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
R. A. |
|
28 |
|
14 |
|
2 |
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
|
5 |
Pict. |
|
35 |
|
52 |
5 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
|
1 |
Ren. |
|
21 |
|
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
Bel. |
|
36 |
|
26 |
|
1 |
E. E. |
|
31 |
1 |
26 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
M. H. |
|
25 |
|
31 |
|
5 |
|
|
|
|
2 |
N. W. |
|
16 |
|
36 |
2 |
1 |
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
|
|
1 |
G. D. F. |
|
26 |
|
15 |
U. C. |
|
23 |
|
16 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
B. L. |
1 |
41 |
3 |
21 |
3 |
2 |
|
|
|
|
5 |
2 |
|
1 |
Guard. |
|
26 |
|
47 |
7 |
4 |
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
|
3 |
C. M. |
|
19 |
|
46 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
1 |
numerically, it is a pattern in which the average rate of
occurrence for the forms in question is as follows:
Contraction |
Average occurrence per play |
ye |
322 |
hath |
3 |
'em |
59 |
them |
8 |
i'th' |
14 |
o'th' |
9 |
h'as |
6 |
's (his) |
5 |
The full significance of these figures can best be realized when
they are compared with the average rate of occurrence for the same
forms in the unaided work of Massinger. There
ye occurs
twice in fifteen plays.
Hath occurs at an average rate of 27
times. In the seven plays of Massinger's sole authorship written
before Fletcher's death, and so reflecting most nearly the author's
linguistic preferences during the period of his collaboration with
Fletcher,
'em is used an average of 12 times per play,
them an average of 23 times. The contraction
i'th'
is
found 18 times in five of Massinger's unaided plays, all of which
date after the death of Fletcher.
O'th' does not appear in
any of Massinger's unaided plays;
h'as is found but once (in
a post-Fletcher play);
's for
his occurs twice
(both
times in a play written after Fletcher's death). In the linguistic
pattern which emerges from the unaided plays of Massinger written
during Fletcher's lifetime, it can fairly be said then that the
Fletcherian
ye has no parallel; that Massinger's average use
of
hath is nine times greater than Fletcher's; that the
Fletcherian preference for
'em to
them is
precisely
reversed in Massinger; and that the contractions
i'th', o'th',
h'as, and
's for
his are completely
absent
from
his work at this period. The linguistic patterns of the two are as
nearly opposite as they could well be.
Notes