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Notes
F. G. Fleay first noted Shirley's connection with the play in his "Annals of the Careers of James and Henry Shirley," Anglia, VIII (1885), 408. Cf. A. H. Bullen, Works of Thomas Middleton (1885), I, xl and IV, 374; and Allan H. Stevenson, "Shirley's Years in Ireland," RES, XX (1944), 19.
In the unaided plays of Fletcher, a'th' is found 17 times (twice in The Mad Lover, once in The Island Princess, 10 times in the Lambarde Manuscript of The Woman's Prize, where the form would seem to be scribal, since it does not occur in the folio text of the play, even as the 4 appearances of the form in Knight's transcript of Bonduca have no equivalent in the folio). A'th' does not occur in any of the unaided plays of Massinger. It is found in none of the Fletcher-Massinger collaborations. In the plays connected with Beaumont, the appearance of the form becomes noticeable: twice in Cupid's Revenge, 10 times in A King and no King, twice in The Scornful Lady, once in Thierry and Theodore, twice in The Woman Hater. There is a single occurrence of a'th' in Wit Without Money; and the form appears twice in the manuscript—but not in the folio text—of The Honest Man's Fortune, again the work of the scribe Edward Knight.
Neither, it would appear, did the scribe Ralph Crane, since o'th', not a'th', is the form of the contraction used in his manuscript of The Witch.
Of the 7 occurrences of o'th' in A Mad World, 6 occur in the contraction vpo'th; doubtless, in combination with upon, Middleton employed the o and not the a spelling.
The NED explains a for on as a worn-down proclitic form of the Old English Preposition an (I, p. 2); a for of as "worn down from of, f being dropped before a cons[onant], and the toneless o sunk into the neutral ß, which being the ordinary sound of toneless a, . . . was here also written a" (I, p. 3).
For Beaumont's use of ha', see SB, XI (1958), 88 ff. For Field's use of the form, see SB, XII (1959), 92 ff. For the occurrence of ha' in the Fletcher-Massinger collaborations, see SB, XII (1959), 92, footnote 6.
Dewar M. Robb, in his "The Canon of William Rowley's Plays," (MLR, XLV [1950], 129-41), observing that A Match at Midnigh was accepted as Rowley's till the time of Fleay, states that "no sufficient evidence has yet been adduced to deprive him of its authorship" (p. 140). But elsewhere (p. 133, footnote 9) he comments that it is "perhaps significant" that Rowley's commonest exclamation, "Tush!" does not appear frequently in this play.
It is surely significant that the 'm contraction, which appears steadily through sigs. A2-F3 (just before the end of Act III) is used only once (IV,1; sig. G4) thereafter. In what follows (Acts IV and V; sigs. G3-I3) occur 9 of the play's 10 occurrences of ye. This may either point to a difference in compositorial practices, or it may bear out Fleay's suggestion (Chronicles of the English Drama, II, 102) that the last two acts of A Woman Never Vex were borrowed from an older play.
Fletcher seems to have used the 'um spelling too. For a full discussion of the whole vexed matter of 'em/'um and its occurrence in the canon, see SB, XI (1958), 97-98, and the linguistic tables at the end of that section of the present study (pp. 100-106).
Pauline G. Wiggin, An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Middleton-Rowley Plays (1897), pp. 39-40; C. W. Stork, William Rowley (1910), p. 41; Dewar M. Robb, op. cit., p. 138.
The other occurrence of 'tas in the quarto text, it should be noted, is found (sig. D3) in one of Simplicity's prose speeches, which Miss Wiggin regards as Middleton's, but which Stork and Robb would assign to Rowley.
For evidence for the dating of Middleton's plays, see R. C. Bald, "The Chronology of Middleton's Plays," MLR, XXXII (1937), 33-43.
For the occurrence of contractions in 'ee elsewhere in the plays of the canon, see SB, XII (1959), 92-93.
Abbreviations. (References to the quarto, octavo, or manuscript text upon which all statistics in the present study have been based are given in parentheses after each title.) ALL, All's Lost by Lust (Q 1633); BH, The Broken Heart (Q 1633); CMC, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Q 1630); FCN, The Fancies Chaste and Noble (Q 1638); GC, A Game at Chess (edited from the manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge by R. C. Bald, 1929); Heng., Hengist, King of Kent: or the Mayor of Queenborough (edited from the manuscript in the Folger Shakespeare Library by R. C. Bald, 1938); Hon., Honourable Entertainments (a reprint of the 1621 octavo, prepared by R. C. Bald, The Malone Society, 1953); ITM, The Inner Temple Masque (Q 1619); LM, The Lover's Melancholy (Q 1629); LS, Love's Sacrifice (Q 1633); LT, The Lady's Trial (Q 1639); MDBW, More Dissemblers Besides Women (Q 1657); MM, A Match at Midnight (Q 1633); MT, Michaelmas Term (Q 1607); MWM, A Mad World, My Master (Q 1608); NWNH, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (O 1657); Phoen., The Phoenix (Q 1607); PW, Perkin Warbeck (Q 1634); SG, A Shoemaker A Gentleman (Q 1638); TCOO, A Trick to Catch the Old One (Q 1608); THI, The Triumphs of Honor and Industry (Q 1617); THV, The Triumphs of Honor and Virtue (Q 1622); TI, The Triumphs of Integrity (Q 1623); TP, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Q 1633); Widow, The Widow (Q 1652); Witch, The Witch (Bodleian Library, MS. Malone 12, edited by W. W. Greg and F. P. Wilson, The Malone Society, 1948); WBW, Women Beware Women (O 1657); WNV, A Woman Never Vex (Q 1632); YFG, Your Five Gallants (Q n.d.).
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