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I

The claims of Middleton and Rowley to a share in the plays of the canon will be dealt with first. Linguistic evidence for the unaided plays of Middleton, together with a selection of his city entertainments, is given in tabular form at the end of this section of the present study. Of the thirteen plays listed there, only two, The Widow and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, raise any question as to Middleton's unaided authorship. The Widow was published in quarto in 1652 with a title-page ascription to Middleton, Fletcher, and Jonson. The Simpsons can find no trace of Jonson in the extant text, and as they observe,[1] Fletcher is no less difficult to discover in the play. To set the linguistic forms that the play exhibits against those displayed in the body of Middleton's unaided work is to show how much of a piece they are, and how uncharacteristic of Fletcher the language pattern of The Widow—with its 3 ye's, its 35 y's, its 26 ha's—is. No Wit, No Help was first published in the 1657 octavo edition of Middleton's Two New Plays. The play is generally held to have undergone certain revisions by Shirley, the reference in III, 1 to the year 1638 as the present year (a date eleven years after Middleton's death) being the clearest sign of a non-authorial hand.[2] But while the 1657 octavo text does not exhibit what, to judge from the quartos printed during the first three decades of the seventeenth century and from his autograph manuscript of A Game at Chess, seem some of Middleton's most characteristic language forms, these forms, as we shall see, often suffer loss (and in the case of the Middleton a'th' for the contraction o'th' the loss is total) in the texts printed in the 1650's. On the other hand, the extant text of No Wit, No Help does contain occurrences of two forms (sh'as for she has, and 'tad for it had) which, on the evidence available, seem to be Middleton's. Thus, the extant text of the play appears to retain traces at least of Middleton's linguistic practices; and since there is nothing anomalous in the pattern of linguistic usage that the text exhibits, there seems no reason why such confirmatory evidence as is to be gathered from it should not be taken into account.

About a number of Middleton's language practices, there is nothing

very singular. The occurrence of ye in his plays is negligible; it occurs not at all in three plays, and is found no more than 8 times in a single play. Contractions in y', however, occur more frequently, though the variation between plays is extreme, from the single y'are of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside to the 51 instances of a variety of such contractions (y'are, y'have, y'ave) in Women Beware Women. Middleton's use of hath ranges from the 14 occurrences in A Chaste Maid and The Witch, to no occurrences in Women Beware Women and The Widow. Doth occurs no more than 4 times in a single play, and not at all in 5 plays. The typical Middleton practice with regard to both forms is perhaps most clearly seen in his autograph manuscript of A Game at Chess, when hath is used 4 times and doth does not appear. In twelve of Middleton's thirteen unaided plays, the contracted 'em exceeds—and often greatly exceeds—the expanded them. The contraction i'th' occurs regularly throughout his unaided work, and his use of it is indistinguishable from that of any number of his contemporary dramatists. It is with regard to the contraction o'th' that we find what appears to be a distinct linguistic practice. The evidence is fragmentary, but such as it is, it indicates clearly that the contraction which generally appears in early seventeenth century drama as o'th' was spelled by Middleton at'h'. The a'th' spelling is a perfectly normal variant of the o'th' contraction, and the sporadic occasions when it has occurred in the midst of a predominantly o'th' pattern in the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon have been duly noted in the various linguistic tables in previous sections of the present study.[3] But in Middleton, the a'th' spelling is not sporadic, but is evidence of a prevailing feature of his linguistic practice. The basis for regarding the a'th' spelling as authorial is the fact that it appears 3 times in the autograph manuscript of A Game at Chess (o'th' does not occur). In four printed texts as well, a'th' is found alone: 7 times in Your Five Gallants, 3 times in A Trick to Catch the Old One, once in the Inner Temple Masque, once in Entertainment III of the Honorable Entertainments. Elsewhere, the two forms appear together, so pointing up the truth that compositors did not always distinguish between them.[4] But the a'th' spelling is found in each of the other Middleton quartos printed during the first three decades of the century: 9 times in Michaelmas Term, as against a single occurrence of o'th'; 8 times in A Mad World my Masters (o'th' 7 times); 5 times in The Phoenix (o'th' once); once in A Chaste Maid (o'th' twice).[5] Thereafter, the form appears no more, for the printed texts of Middleton's unaided plays published during the 1650's (The Widow; No Wit, No Help; Women Beware Women; More Dissemblers Besides Women) do not preserve the a'th' spelling. When it appears in the plays of which Middleton was a joint author that were printed during this period, its occurrence is undependable. The form appears twice in the 1656 quarto text of Middleton, Rowley, and Massinger's The Old Law, once in a part of II,1 (sig. D4) that seems to be Middleton's, once in a scene (IV,1; sig. G3v) that is certainly Rowley's. And in the 1662 quarto of Middleton and Webster's Anything for a Quiet Life the form occurs twice, but both times in a section of V,1 (sig. G1) that is usually attributed to Webster, who, as has been seen in an earlier section of the present study (SB, XII, 103), occasionally employs the form.

As I have already observed, the a'th' spelling in Middleton is but one feature of a general linguistic practice that is evident in all his work. He regularly employs a, the weakened form of the prepositions on and of, in a variety of phrases, and not alone in the standard contraction for on/of the.[6] In this, of course, he is not alone among his contemporary dramatists, and it is the sheer frequency with which such phrases as the following occur in his unaided work that gives them any significance as authorial evidence: "a tother side" (A Trick, sig. G1 A Game at Chess, III,1,56); "a my troth" (A Trick, sigs. G2, H1v; A Mad World, sigs. H1, H2v; Phoenix, sig. B1); "a my life" (A Trick, sig. H2); "a my credit" (A Mad World, sig. G4v); "a horseback" (A Mad World, sig. H3v; A Chaste Maid, sig. G2); "a Sundaies" (Michaelmas Term, sig. E1v); "a purpose" (A Trick, sig. A4; Hengist, IV,2,22; No Wit, No Help, sig. E4v); "a one side" (World Tost at

Tennis, sig. D4v); "a this side" (A Trick, sig. D4; World Tost, sig. D3); "a both sides" (Honorable Entertainments, sig E1v); "a this fashion" (A Trick, sig. C4v); "a such a nature" (Michaelmas Term, sigs. F3v, F4); "a pound a Beef" (No Wit, No Help, sig. D6v); "peece a plate" (A Trick, sig. C4v).

Middleton's use of the contraction h'as for he has is very like Fletcher's;[7] but he uses as well a series of related forms that are rather more distinctive. Of these, the most significant is sh'as for she has, which appears in ten of his thirteen unaided plays, in The Triumphs of Integrity, and in Entertainments VIII and X of the Honorable Entertainments. The corresponding past tense forms—h'ad for he had, and sh'ad for she had—Middleton makes less use of, but they are worth noting in his work because they are so infrequent elsewhere. Sh'as does not occur in the unaided plays of either Fletcher or Massinger. In the plays of the canon considered thus far in the present study, it occurs but a single time in two: in The Double Marriage, and in the Lambarde manuscript text of Beggars' Bush. H'ad occurs in six of Fletcher's unaided plays: twice in The Pilgrim, a single time in The Mad Lover, Valentinian, A Wife for a Month, Women Pleased, and in the Lambarde manuscript text of The Woman's Prize. It occurs a single time in one of the unaided plays (Believe as you List) of Massinger. Elsewhere among the plays of the canon considered thus far, there are single occurrences of h'ad in The Scornful Lady, The Maid's Tragedy, Love's Pilgrimage, The Coxcombe, The Honest Man's Fortune, The Queen of Corinth (plays connected with either Beaumont or Field). Sh'ad is found in none of the unaided plays of Fletcher; a single time in one (The Duke of Milan) of Massinger; and elsewhere in the canon to this point, a single time in The Knight of Malta and in the manuscript text of Beggars' Bush.

The contraction 'tas for it has is found in eight of Middleton's unaided plays, and there is a single occurrence as well in Entertainment X of the Honorable Entertainments. The corresponding contraction 'tad for it had appears in five of the unaided plays. Both forms are found twice in Middleton scenes of The Old Law. For all the fact that 'tas is found no more than 4 times in any one play, and 'tad no more than twice, Middleton's use of both contractions is worth noting, again, because of their infrequency elsewhere. Fletcher uses 'tas twice in a single play (Rule a Wife); Massinger never uses the form in his unaided work. Elsewhere in the canon 'tas appears twice in Wit Without Money; once in The Lovers' Progress, Thierry and Theodoret,

The Noble Gentleman, The Honest Man's Fortune. Neither Fletcher nor Massinger uses 'tad in his unaided work; and elsewhere it is found in only four plays of the canon: twice in Cupid's Revenge, and in the manuscript of Beggars' Bush; once in Thierry and Theodoret, and in The Little French Lawyer.

There is nothing significant in Middleton's use of contractions in 's for his. The final feature of his linguistic pattern that does possess value as authorial evidence is his use of the contraction ha' for have. The form has been found in the work of other dramatists whose shares in the plays of the canon have been previously examined, notably in the work of Beaumont and Field.[8] Ha' is found in nine of Middleton's thirteen unaided plays, in the Inner Temple Masque, and in the Honorable Entertainments. Although the form seems to have suffered no diminution in the 1652 quarto of The Widow, it appears in none of the plays printed in octavo in 1657. Even in the plays in which the form does appear, its rate of occurrence varies widely, from the 33 occurrences in Michaelmas Term to the 2 in A Game at Chess; but, with the exceptions already noted, and the manuscript text of Hengist, King of Kent, from which it is wholly absent, the persistence with which ha' appears in Middleton's unaided work makes it worth noting.