Fletcher's collaborations with Field, together with two of his unaided
plays that have undergone revision, will be dealt with in this section of the
present study.
The collaborations with Field are four in number. The series of
Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One is the joint
work
of the two dramatists. The Knight of Malta and The
Queen
of Corinth represent a tripartite collaboration between Fletcher,
Field,
and Massinger. In The Honest Man's Fortune we have, I
think,
a play that is basically Field's own work, but in which he was assisted in
individual scenes of single acts by Massinger and Fletcher.
Fletcher's comedy of The Night Walker was, as we
know
from the Office-Book of Sir Henry Herbert, revised by James Shirley in the
1630's; this external evidence for Shirley's revision is corroborated, as will
be seen, by the internal linguistic evidence which the first quarto text of the
play affords. The comedy of Wit Without Money would seem
to furnish a parallel case of non-authorial revision of a Fletcherian original.
Here, however, there is no external evidence for revision, and the internal
evidence can only be supplied negatively, as it were, from the well-nigh
complete absence of the Fletcherian ye from the substantive
quarto edition.
