University of Virginia Library

The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (V)
by
Cyrus Hoy

In this fifth section of the present study, the shares of Fletcher's collaborators loom larger than do Fletcher's own. Of the five plays considered herein, his work is clearly evident in only one, The Maid in the Mill, written in collaboration with William Rowley. There are traces of Fletcher in a single scene of The Fair Maid of the Inn, but they are faint, and the supposition would seem to be that Fletcher's share in this, presumably the last play on which he worked, was assumed by Ford who, writing in collaboration with Massinger and Webster, brought the play to completion after his death. In the three remaining plays, I find traces of Fletcher in only one, The Nice Valour. Studies of the authorship problem prior to this one have suggested the possibility of Middleton's presence in this play, and I think that the extant text is, in all essential respects, his work, though whether he is present in the play as Fletcher's reviser or collaborator is impossible to say. But to prove his presence on the basis of linguistic evidence alone is not possible. There is nothing inconsistent between the linguistic pattern of The Nice Valour and that which emerges from Middleton's unaided plays, but evidence of a conclusive sort is lacking. So it is with the fourth play considered, The Laws of Candy. Previous studies of the authorship problem have suggested Ford as the sole or partial author of this play, and I am personally persuaded that it is his; but again the linguistic evidence is such that, while it does not rule out the possibility of attributing the play to Ford, neither does it establish his presence in it. And so, while I have attributed the major share of The Nice Valour to Middleton, and all of The Laws of Candy to Ford, I cannot suppose the authorship of either play to be proved on the basis of the evidence set forth below. With regard to the remaining play that is considered here, Wit at Several Weapons, I feel on somewhat surer ground, for I am able to adduce some linguistic

evidence which connects this play with the acknowledged collaborations of Middleton and Rowley, whose joint work I think it is.

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.

II

Rowley's unaided plays are usually said to be four in number: A Shoemaker A Gentleman; A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext; All's Lost by Lust; A Match at Midnight. That the last of these is indeed a work of Rowley's sole authorship, I seriously doubt. When the linguistic pattern which it displays is set against that exhibited by the other three plays, as in the table for Rowley's plays that is given below, it is soon apparent that, linguistically at least, A Match at Midnight is not of a piece with the others.[9] Linguistically, A Match displays too much of nearly everything: too many i'th's, too many o'th's, much too many ye's. The matter is of some importance, because to posit a pattern of linguistic usage for Rowley that takes into account A Match at Midnight, with its near-Fletcherian incidence of ye, is to assume

what none of the available evidence will bear out. That ye has no significant place in Rowley's language practices is clear from the evidence of the three plays that can be regarded as unquestionably his, and is corroborated by the evidence of those plays of which he was a joint author. In the linguistic patterns of these, ye is far from prominent. The whole of Middleton and Rowley's A Fair Quarrel yields but 7 ye's; their World Tost at Tennis displays but 6. Rowley and Webster's A Cure for a Cuckold has 5 ye's, as does the Rowley-Middleton-Massinger Old Law; Rowley and Heywood's Fortune by Land and Sea contains two. In the Rowley-Dekker-Ford Witch of Edmonton, ye occurs 9 times, but a number of these, especially the d'ye/t'ye combinations, are clearly Ford's. The Birth of Merlin, a play in which Rowley's hand is usually said to be the principal one, contains but 16 ye's. Most significant of all, for the purposes of the present study, is the fact that, as we shall see, ye occurs but 4 times in his share of The Maid in the Mill; were the form to occur on the scale indicated by A Match at Midnight, there would be no telling Rowley's share of the play from Fletcher's.

Rowley's use of such contracted forms as i'th', o'th', h'as, and 's for his has no significance as authorial evidence. There is nothing to distinguish between his use of hath and doth, and the practice of such a dramatist as Middleton. The contracted forms—a'th', sh'as/sh'ad, 'tas/ 'tad, ha'—to which I have drawn attention in the work of Middleton either do not occur in Rowley's unaided plays, or are found there to a negligible degree (there is a single occurrence of 'tas in A Woman Never Vext, and 4 instances of ha' in All's Lost by Lust, not counting the 15 occurrences of the latter form in A Match at Midnight, which are suspect). The most significant feature of Rowley's language practice is one which is not immediately discernible from the table of linguistic evidence for his unaided plays. This involves his use of the contracted pronominal form 'em, and sundry variants thereof. In only one of his unaided plays, A Shoemaker, is there a clear cut distinction between the 'em spelling of the pronominal contraction (which is used 23 times) and the expanded form (used 33 times). In A Woman Never Vext, the form of the contraction that is regularly used is 'm (30 times), as against 45 them's.[10] In All's Lost there are 17 them's, whereas the contracted form appears 5 times as 'em, once as 'm, 8 times as 'um.

Here the variation of contracted forms seems almost certainly to have been influenced by difference in compositorial practice. The single 'm occurs near the beginning of the play (sig. B2v). Thereafter, the form of the contraction that is regularly used (sigs. B3-E4) is 'em. But before the last 'em we have had the first 'um (sig. E3), and that form continues in use through sig. H1v, the last time that a contracted form of the pronoun appears in the play.

Did the matter end here, we would be dealing with nothing more than a compositorial spelling variant of a common enough sort. But there is evidence outside Rowley's unaided plays which proves conclusively that 'um was a form which he employed. Whether he also, on occasion, employed 'm is less certain. I would like to think that he did, because the 30 'm's of A Woman Never Vext explain what is otherwise inexplicable: the appearance of 2 'm's—a form that has not previously occurred in the play—near the end of The Maid in the Mill, when the Fletcherian ye's have abruptly broken off and Rowley's hand is once again discernible (as all students of the play agree) with the entrance of Antonio, Constable, and Officers. But our experience with the occurrence of 'um elsewhere in the plays of the canon has made this much clear: that a dramatist's tendency to use this less familiar form, rather than the more common 'em, is likely to lead to compositorial confusion. We have seen this in Thierry and Theodoret and The Scornful Lady, where 'em and 'um occur together in the same scenes. If Beaumont used the 'um form of the contraction—as the evidence of Philaster, The Scornful Lady, and A King and no King seems to imply—then it came out variously as 'em and 'am (in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Woman Hater), and 'm (in The Maid's Tragedy).[11] Thus it is not surprising to find Rowley's 'um appearing as 'm—assuming that his preference in the matter was fixed, and he did not occasionally write 'm himself.

But the form by which Rowley is known is 'um, and it now remains to demonstrate this. First, 'um is the form that occurs in Rowley's dedicatory letter (sig. A2) "To the Nobly Disposed, Virtuous, and Faithful-Breasted / Robert Grey, Esq." that prefaces the 1617 quarto of A Fair Quarrel. But the real proof lies in the linguistic evidence which this Middleton-Rowley collaboration displays—evidence that provides the key for distinguishing their shares in a play of their joint authorship.

A Fair Quarrel — Q 1617

                         

sigs.	ye	y'	'em	'um	'am	them	i'th'	a'th'	o'th'	h'as	sh'as	ha'
B-B2		1	4			1							[I,1(a)
B2v-C3v	2	3		8	1	4	3			1			[I,1(b)
C3v-D3		2	1				2	1			1	2	[II,1
E-E2v	1			2	1								[II,2
E3-F1v		4										1	[III,1
F3-F3v		7											[III,2
F4v												1	[III,3
G1v-G4	1			2		1							[IV,1
G4v-H							4						[IV,2
H2v-H3v	2	1	1	1			1						[IV,3
H3v-I2v [*]				15		1							[IV,4
H4-K2	1	2		6		1							[V,1

Here the alteration of 'em and 'um gives us our principal clue to the respective shares of the two dramatists. Middleton's 4 'em's mark his presence through the opening pages of I,1, to Russell's speech beginning "How now Gallants?" (sig. B2v) where we find the first signs of Rowley's presence. With the change of author comes a change in the form of the pronominal contraction that is immediately apparent. One of Rowley's 'um's has been reproduced as 'am, as it is again in the next scene (II,2) in which his hand is present. But thereafter the compositor would appear to have the spelling under control. I doubt that the appearance of 'em and 'um together in IV,3 is a mistake; both dramatists' work has been traced in the scene. The 15 'um's of IV,4 confirm what we know, that this, the "roaring" scene added to the second impression of the first quarto, is the work of Rowley. His work is evident throughout the remainder of the play. As for the remainder of Middleton's share: the occurrence of 'em, a'th', sh'as, and ha' together in II,1 points to his linguistic practice. The y's and ha's give evidence of his work in Act III. The only scene of the play that offers no shred of linguistic evidence for its authorship is IV,2.

For proof that the alternation of 'em/'um in the 1617 quarto of A Fair Quarrel is not the result of mere compositorial caprice, but does in fact point to two distinct linguistic practices, there is the evidence of another Middleton-Rowley collaboration, their Courtly Masque of The World Tost at Tennis, printed in quarto in 1620. The linguistic evidence exhibited in that edition is as follows.

The World Tost at Tennis — Q 1620

         

sigs.	ye	y'	'em	'um	them	i'th'	a'th'	o'th'	h'as	sh'as	'tas	ha'	[Ent.Five
B2v-D2	6	1		13	6	3	1						[Starches
D2v-E4		1	7		2	4[*]	1[**]	1	2	1	1	1	[Ent.King,etc.
E4v-F2		2		2		2[*]
F2v											1		[Last speech

Linguistically, the masque breaks into two main divisions, with 'um occurring regularly as the preferential form of the pronominal contraction through sig. D2, after which 'em begins to appear, to recur through most of the remainder. It is pleasant to note that the authorial division thus indicated by the linguistic evidence accords exactly with the division agreed to on the basis of verse tests by all those who have examined the Middleton-Rowley collaborations. Miss Wiggin, Stork, and Robb[12] are at one in attributing to Rowley everything from the beginning of the Induction to the entrance of the Five Starches. The Starches enter near the bottom of sig. D2; the last of the 13 'um's in this first division of the play occurs at the end of the stage direction which brings them on (". . . White-Starch challenging precedency, standing vpon her right by Antiquity, out of her iust anger presents their pride to vm."). About what follows, the students of Middleton and Rowley are not of one accord. Miss Wiggin would assign to Middleton everything from the entrance of the Starches to the end of the masque. Stork and Robb would exclude from this the prose speeches of Simplicity, which they attribute to Rowley. Without going into the details of the matter, which do not concern us here, it is sufficient for our purposes to note that all the linguistic evidence for Middleton's work is quite clearly confined to the second half of the masque. The one possible exception is the characteristically Middleton ath' which occurs (sig. B4v) in Rowley's share. But the evidence to be derived from the occurrence of the a'th'/o'th' contraction in the text is confusing at best; it occurs three times, and each time it is differently spelled; in addition to the ath' in Rowley's share of the masque, there are an oth' (sig. E1) and an a the (sig. E3) in Middleton's. The i'th'/i'the variants evident in the text may point to a kindred compositorial indecision. But the 7 'em's, and the use, for the first time in the text, of the contractions sh'as, 'tas, and ha', are evidence for Middleton's

presence through sigs. D2v-E4. I detect the return of Rowley with the stage direction "Enter King, a Lawyer, and Deceit as a Pettifogger," at the bottom of sig. E4. The 2 'um's in the Lawyer's speech beginning "I grant my Pils are bitter," on sig. E4v, together with the evidence of the verse, point in his direction. But Middleton has returned by the end of the masque, as all the commentators agree; and the 'tas in the final line (sig. F2v) provides us with a trace, however faint, of his linguistic presence.[13]

Still further evidence that the respective shares of Middleton and Rowley can be distinguished, in a general way at least, in a play of their joint authorship by the occurrence of 'em/'um is available in the 1653 quarto text of The Changeling, as the following table shows.

The Changeling — Q 1653

                             

sigs.	ye	y'	'em	'um	them	i'th'	o'th'	ha'
B-B4	1	3	1	2	1	2		1	[I,1
C-C3		1	1	3		1			[I,2
C4-D		2	2			1		1	[II,1
D-D3		2	7					3	[II,2
D3v								1	[III,2
D4-E3v		4	2	2	1		1		[III,3
E4-F1v		4	1					1	[III,4
F2-F3		1	2			2			[IV,1
F4				2					[IV,2(a)
F4-G1v		1	2					1	[IV,2(b)
G2v-G4v		1		7	4	1			[IV,3
H-H2		3	2		1			3	[V,1
H3-H4		1	4						[V,2
H4v-I3		1	1		2			1	[V,3

Here, as elsewhere, Rowley's 'um first appears as 'em (sig. B1v). 'Em and 'um appear together on sig. C3. But thereafter throughout Act I, which all students of the play agree is Rowley's, the pronominal form is 'um. 'Em, on the other hand, is the form that prevails throughout Act II, and this, by general scholarly assent, is Middleton's. Neither them, or a contraction thereof, occurs in the brief III,1 and 2. In Rowley's III,3, the form of the contraction varies in a manner that is familiar; it first appears as 'em (sig. D4v), then as 'um (sig. E1), again as 'em (sig. E2), finally as 'um as (sig. E2v). Middleton's III,4 displays a single occurrence of 'em; his IV,1, two occurrences of the form. The extent to which this particular piece of linguistic evidence can point to two distinct authorial practices when it has been

faithfully preserved in the printed text is shown in IV,2. Miss Wiggin, Robb, and Stork concur in giving the entire scene to Middleton, but the linguistic evidence displayed here makes possible a more precise attribution. Rowley opens the scene with the first five speeches that comprise the exchange between Vermandero and the servant; and 'um occurs twice in Vermandero's speech beginning "The time accuses 'um" (sig. F4). But immediately thereafter, with the entrance of Tomazo, Middleton's hand appears, and the Vermandero who has said 'um a few lines earlier now says 'em on the same quarto signature. The play's most striking cluster of 'um's (7 in all) occurs in IV,3, and this, one of the scenes in Alibius' madhouse, is acknowledgedly Rowley's. 'Em is the preferential form of the contraction throughout Middleton's V,1-2. The single occurrence of a contraction for them appears as 'em in Rowley's V,3. The evidence of the contraction ha' tends to corroborate the evidence of 'em/'um; of the 12 occurrences of ha' in the play, 10 appear in Middleton scenes. There is no trace in the quarto text of the Middleton contraction a'th'.

The remaining one of Middleton and Rowley's acknowledged collaborations, The Spanish Gipsy, like The Changeling, was printed in 1653, but the quarto text in which it survives displays none of the linguistic features that serve to distinguish their work in collaboration —a fact that may support the view that the play has been revised by Ford. We have seen how the more distinctive features of Middleton's language practices are absent from his work that was not printed until the mid-seventeenth century; and, with the notable exception of The Changeling, this tends to be true as well for such of Rowley's work as was first printed at this period. As no 'um's are to be found in the 1653 quarto of The Spanish Gipsy, neither does the form appear in Fortune by Land and Sea (Q 1655), The Old Law (Q 1656), A Cure for a Cuckold (Q 1661), The Birth of Merlin (Q 1661). But the single occurrence of 'um in the 1658 quarto of The Witch of Edmonton occurs (sig. H3v) in a speech of Young Banks, the Clown, and it is generally acknowledged that Cuddy Banks is entirely Rowley's creation.

Having shown the extent to which, on the evidence of linguistic criteria, the respective shares of Middleton and Rowley can be distinguished in their acknowledged collaborations, we return to the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, and the comedy of Wit at Several Weapons.

Wit at Several Weapons

• Middleton: I,1; II,1; III; IV.
• Rowley: I,2; II,2-4; V.

Since the time of Fleay, Middleton and Rowley's names have been associated with this play. The comic intrigue, with its premium on trickery not alone sedulously practiced but actively encouraged, has obvious affinities with the pattern of the action in Middleton's city comedies; and the Clown Pompey Doodle, a role that Rowley doubtless acted, has seemed to many Rowley's creation: "own brother" in the words of Robb, (p. 138) "to Cuddy Banks and Bustopha [in The Maid in the Mill]."

But one wants grounds more relative than this in attributing Wit at Several Weapons to Middleton and Rowley, and in the linguistic pattern which the text of the play in the 1647 folio affords, I think it is available. The pattern is by no means perfectly preserved, but the traces of it that persist are enough to make it clear that it is identical with the pattern we have found to exist in the quarto texts of A Fair Quarrel, The World Tost at Tennis, and The Changeling. Here, as in the acknowledged Middleton-Rowley collaborations, the pattern consists in fact of two alternating ones: that of Middleton being distinguished by an occasional occurrence of a'th' and the steady appearance of the contraction ha', while the pattern of Rowley is again marked by the here sporadic but significant appearance of 'um. In his portion of the play, Rowley used a contraction for them 24 times. This has been reproduced as 'um on 7 occasions which are distributed over three scenes (II,2; V,1-2). On the evidence set forth above, I submit that 'um is the form that Rowley used, and that its occurrence in the 1647 folio text of Wit at Several Weapons can therefore serve as evidence for determining his share in the authorship of the play. Here there is no question of the 'um contraction representing a compositorial spelling variant. 'Em and 'um occur together in each of the three scenes designated above; often they occur together in the same folio column (as at 72b, 73a, 89a). And it is important to note that 'um appears in no scenes but Rowley's; it is never found in scenes where either the Middleton a'th' or ha' contractions appear. Five instances of Middleton's a'th' have been preserved; since there are no occurrences of o'th', this would appear to be all of them, unless of course the a'th' spelling is held to be compositorial. But this seems unlikely, if for no other reason than that the precise form of the contraction is so various: it is found as a the in column 69b, just as it is on sig. E3 of Middleton's share of The World Tost at Tennis (above, p. 86); elsewhere in the

text it appears as a'th (twice, 84a), and a'the (84a, 86a). The i'th/i'the variant that is evident in the text may point here, as in The World Tost at Tennis, to a similar compositorial indecision. The play's single occurrence of h'ad appears in Middleton's I,1; of sh'as and sh'ad in his III,1. In view of Middleton's pronounced use of contractions in y' in his unaided plays, it is not surprising that all 7 occurrences of such contractions here are found in scenes which bear other evidence (either ha' or a'th' or both) of his authorship. Finally, there is the evidence of the interjections, push (or puh, or pish) and tush. Of these, Miss Wiggin (p. 38) notes that Middleton's favorite exclamation is Push! or Pish! while Rowley regularly used Tush! Robb (p. 133) comments that, while this "appears trivial grounds for discriminating between two men as author of a scene; nevertheless what [Miss Wiggin] says is true, and in conjunction with other evidence it is a perfectly sound basis of distinction." The fact is, Middleton's favorite exclamation appears almost as often in the form puh as it does as either push or pish. For instance, in A Trick to Catch the Old One, there are 4 occurrences of push, 3 of puh; in A Mad World, push 6 times, puh 10 times, pish once; in Michaelmas Term, push 3 times, puh 4 times, pish once; in The Phoenix, puh twice; in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, push once, pish 3 times; in More Dissemblers Besides Women, pish twice. I note but a single occurrence of tush in Middleton (in A Chaste Maid). In Rowley's All's Lost by Lust, on the other hand, tush appears 13 times; in A Shoemaker A Gentleman, 3 times. These preferences are reflected, though not exactly, in the two shares of Wit at Several Weapons. For the single occurrence of puh in Rowley's V,1, there are two in Middleton's I,1. The single occurrence of pish in Rowley's V,2 and the single occurrence of push in Middleton's III,1 might be said to cancel each other out; but at least the play's 6 occurrences of tush appear in Rowley scenes.

The play is unique among those in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon for the great number of phrases employing a, the weakened form of the o' contraction for on and of. I have already drawn attention to this as a characteristic feature of Middleton's linguistic practice, and I cite the following examples of such phrases from Wit at Several Weapons as further evidence for his presence here: "Would a' my life" (III,1; 79a); "bang'd a' both sides" (III,1; 80a); "take heed a that" (III,1; 80a) "few men dye a beating" (III,1; 80b); "beaten a both sides" (III,1; 80b); "could a yeelded" (III,1; 80b); "take it off a my finger" (III,1; 81b); "Sessions a Thursday, / Jury cul'd out a Friday, Judgment a Saturday, / Dungeon a Sunday, Tyburne a Munday"

(IV,1; 82a); "a man a' wit" (IV,1; 82a); "spite a your teeth" (IV,1; 82b); "think . . . / A' your poch't Scholler" (IV,1; 83a); "modesty a top of all your vertues" (IV,1; 83b); "A my troth" (IV,1; 83b); "out a' your wits" (IV,1; 83b); "for your cast a manchits out a'th Pantry, / Ile allow you a Goose out a'th Kitchin" (IV.1; 84a); "I ha' / kept out a Towne these two daies, a purpose" (IV,1 85a); "Oh that whores hat a' thine, a' the riding block" (IV,3; 86a).

A few points regarding the vocabulary of Middleton's scenes are worth noting. Sir Gregory's query in III,1 (81a), "Is Pompey growne so malepert? so frampell?" employs a word ("frampold") that occurs as well in the Inner Temple Masque ("frampole", sig. A3v), and in what, according to Bullen (I, xxxv), is a Middleton scene (III,1) of The Roaring Girl ("phrampell", sig. E3v). There is a reference at IV,1 (82a) to the Polychronicon, mentioned in the Prologue to Hengist, King of Kent by its author, Raynulph of Chester, who serves as the presenter of that play. The Neece's lines at IV,2 (85a): "After I have pelted you sufficiently, / I tro you will learne more manners," employs a verbal particle, the obsolete "tro" for "trow", that Middleton uses often (e.g., A Trick, II,1; A Game at Chess, II,1; Hengist, V,1; Women Beware Women, III,2; No Wit, No Help, I,3). The fact that the form occurs again in Rowley's V,2 (90a), within six lines of the pish that is found in that scene, may point to Middleton's presence at this point. Robb (p. 137) notes that "there is a good deal of composite writing in the play, scenes in the main by Rowley showing also signs of Middleton, and vice versa." Thus, in designating any given scene as the work of one or the other dramatist, it will be understood that I imply nothing more than that, in the scene in question, that dramatist's hand is the dominant one.

A word should be said regarding the possibility of Fletcher's presence in the play. I agree with Oliphant (The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, p. 454) that such a pair of lines as these from V,1 (87b) have a decidedly Fletcherian ring: "Upon my life the Knight will love you for't, / Exceedingly love you, for ever love you." And when, later in the same scene (89a), Witty-Pate says to his father: "You were not wont to slubber a project so," it is necessary to remind oneself that the mere appearance of a word with which a known author regularly signs his style is not an infallible warrant of his presence, so inured am I to Fletcher's use of "slubber" (e.g., in The Mad Lover, V,3; The Wild Goose Chase, II,2; Rule a Wife, IV,1; Monsieur Thomas, IV,1; Wit Without Money, I,1; Cupid's Revenge, II,3; The Custom of the Country, I,2; The Spanish Curate, II,2). The Epilogue subjoined to the first

folio text was spoken at the play's revival; with its anxious assurance that a little of Fletcher counts for much, it seems clearly to imply that his share in the authorship was never more than partial (Beaumont is not mentioned): It may be that what we are dealing with in the extant text is a Middleton-Rowley revision, undertaken when the play was revived, of an original by Fletcher and one or more unknown dramatists. But to seek to identify and apportion the shares of the original dramatists in a play that has been as extensively revised as this one (if there is a question of revision) seems gratuitous. Among other things, it raises the nice question: at what point does a revised play cease to be the play that was originally written and become a different play? Is the ship of Delos, after its every spar and plank have been replaced with new ones, the same ship or another? The only conclusions we can reach concerning the authorship of Wit at Several Weapons must be based on its only extant text, and the extant text represents, in all essential respects, the work of Middleton and Rowley.

• The Nice Valour
• Fletcher and Middleton: I,1; II,1; IV,1; V,2-3.
• Middleton: III; V,1.

Oliphant (pp. 449-450), after making a complicated division of The Nice Valour between Beaumont, Fletcher, and Middleton, concludes: "As it stands, the play is almost entirely Middleton's." I believe this is right, but it is hard to establish Middleton's claim to the play on the basis of linguistic evidence alone. There is only one linguistic feature of the extant text that points strongly in his direction, and that is the steady occurrence of ha' throughout the whole of the play, to the total of 23 times. This is the greatest number of times that ha' is to be found in any play of the canon, and is approached only by the 21 instances of the contraction that Beaumont brought to Love's Pilgrimage. The 18 contractions in y', together with the infrequent use that is made of ye, which appears but a scant 2 times, accord well with the practice revealed in Middleton's unaided plays. There are 'em's in abundance (29 in all), and this agrees well too with Middletonian practice, but avails nothing in establishing his claims to the authorship over those of such other dramatists as Beaumont or Fletcher. There are

11 occurrences of contractions in o'th'/o'the, but none in a'th'. But 'tas is found twice, and there are single occurrences of 'tad and h'ad. Evidence of a sort might be derived from the interjections used in the play, which as so often in Middleton, appear in a variety of forms: here, in single occurrences, are found pish, puh, pah, and pha. It can be fairly said that the pattern of linguistic evidence found in The Nice Valour is no more uncharacteristic of Middleton than is that found in several of his undoubted plays (e.g., A Chaste Maid, Women Beware Women), and rather more typical of his established practices than the pattern found in certain others (e.g., The Witch, Hengist). But in the absence of any external evidence linking the play with Middleton, the linguistic evidence is not strong enough in itself to prove the play his, and one turns perforce to such internal evidence as is supplied by the play's thematic material and the treatment thereof.

The question of authorship is here bound up with the unsatisfactory state of the extant text. Oliphant (p. 441) pointed out that The Nice Valour is the shortest play in the canon, and he enumerated some of the dislocations in the action that have resulted from abridgement. But whether the play as we have it has not only been abridged but has also been revised is by no means clear. The Prologue speaks of a revival, and this, together with the alternate title, The Passionate Mad Man, that the folio supplies, has generally been taken as evidence for revision. Since, however, Professor Baldwin Maxwell has shown[14] that the reference to Fisher's Folly (V,3) is an allusion, not to the pamphlet published in 1624, but to Jasper Fisher's London mansion, erected during the reign of Elizabeth, one of the chief reasons why, in Oliphant's words (p. 444), "the play is not to be looked upon as of a single date," has disappeared. Professor Maxwell gives evidence for dating The Nice Valour c. 1615/1616, and it is with Middleton's work at this period that the play has its closest affinities. Shamont's idealization of the Duke's sister, in The Nice Valour, is reminiscent of the Lord Cardinal's exaggerated regard for the widowed Duchess of Milan's vow of constancy, in More Dissemblers Besides Women; "her goodnesse is my pride," says Shamont of the Lady (II,1); "I make her constancy / The holy mistress of my contemplation," says the Cardinal of the Duchess (I,2). When Shamont overhears his brother conversing with the Lady, he denounces him for the sacrilege: "Has Honour so few daughters, never fewer, / And must thou aime thy treacherie at the best?" (IV,1). When the Duchess confesses to the Cardinal that she has come, after seven years, to love again, his first wrath is directed

against the lover who has tempted her: "better the man / Had never known creation, than to live / Th' unlucky ruin of so fair a temple" (II,1). Over the whole of The Nice Valour is an air of noble gravity, as in the speeches about virtue as the true nobility ("it is not in the power of Monarches / To make a Gentleman, which is a substance / Only begot of merit" [I,1]; "I cannot make you gentlemen, that's a work / Rais'd from your owne deservings; merit, manners, / And inborne vertue doe's it" [V,3]), and in Shamont's high-minded regard for the dignity of man ("How faine would I preserve mans forme from shame, / And cannot get it done?" [I,1]; "It afflicts me / When I behold unseemelinesse in an Image / So neare the Godhead, 'tis an injurie / To glorious Eternity" [I,1]). The reflective quality of these utterances is similar in kind to the detached sobriety that sets apart certain of the speeches in The Old Law; More Dissemblers; No Wit, No Help; and The Witch. But there is as well a note of grotesquerie in The Nice Valour that is also prevalent in the plays of what I suppose is to be termed Middleton's middle period.[15] In The Nice Valour this is to be principally found in the scenes concerning the Passionate Madman and his mistress who follows him through the period of his madness disguised as Cupid. As has been often noted, this sub-plot parallels closely the sub-plot of Beaumont's The Noble Gentleman, where the Lady solicitously follows the mad Shatillion, whose wit has been "turn'd . . . wild" by her "coy deniall" of his favors. I entirely agree with Professor Baldwin Maxwell (p. 161) that the scenes in The Noble Gentleman "dealing with the mad Shatillion and the faithful Lady who attends him are so much better conceived and so much more convincingly executed than the scenes of the Passionate Madman and his lady (Cupid) in The Nice Valour that one can hardly question that the Passionate Madman is an imitation or hardly believe that the same author conceived both situations."

The Cupid of The Nice Valour, unlike the Lady of The Noble Gentleman, is pregnant, and this, as much as anything else, accounts for the very different tone that characterizes the proceedings here. The Cupid is accompanied by her two brothers who, concerned for her shame, are anxious to have her married, lest she "be a mother before shee's known a Bride" (V,1). The efforts to bring the Passionate Madman to his senses thus take on a particular urgency; he must acknowledge the lady as his wife, and quickly (a marriage ceremony has already been performed). The very dubious humor of the sub-plot consists,

then, in a literal race against time ("Her shame growes big, brother; / The Cupids shape will hardly hold it longer," says one to another [V,1]). This, I am afraid, is rather too typical of the lower reaches of Middleton's humor in the plays of this middle period. The Cupid here can join the ranks of other Middleton ladies who bid fair to be mothers before they're known brides: Francisca in The Witch, Lactantio's mistress in More Dissemblers Besides Women, Philip Twilight's wife, whom he has unwisely passed off as his sister, in No Wit, No Help. There is no more grotesque scene in Middleton than the one in More Dissemblers where Lactantio's mistress, disguised as a page, is forced to take a dancing lesson in an advanced state of pregnancy. It is grotesque in the way that "the Dance of the old women, maskt" in IV,1 of The Old Law is grotesque; and the masque-like scenes wherein the pregnant Cupid dances in The Nice Valour have precisely the same grotesquerie. She enters "like a Cupid offring to shoot at [the Passionate Madman]" (II,1), just as the Cupids literally shoot at Hippolito in the masque at the end of Women Beware Women. And The Nice Valour is even furnished with a kind of antimasque when the cowardly courtier Lapet enters (V,1) with the Clown "and foure other like fooles, dancing, the Cupid leading." She is bearing the "Table" that accompanies Lapet's newly published book, "The uprising of the kick and the downfall of the Duello." The Table sets forth "all your Blowes, and Blow-men whatsoever, / in their lively colours, givers, and takers," and the Cupid holds it up to Lapet "at every strain, . . . acting the postures." Lapet reads from it as the seven strains follow, a blow for each strain ("Twinge all now," "Sowse upon Souse," "Douses single," "Justle sides," and so on). It is all very like the second antimasque of The Inner Temple Masque, where Dr. Almanac reads from his catalogue of days—good, bad, and indifferent ("here's Cock-a-hoop, This The gear cottons, and this Faint heart never;" etc.) a scene which itself has a parallel in III,1 of No Wit, No Help, where Weatherwise reads from his almanac ("Fifth day, neither fish nor flesh," "Sixth day, privily prevented," "Seventh day, shrunk in the wetting," and so on to the twelfth). This same Weatherwise is the subject of a passage, the phrasing of which may have its parallel in The Nice Valour. In I,1 of No Wit, No Help, the servant Savourwit says to his master: "Betwixt your son and master Sunset's daughter / The line goes even, . . . / But, sir, there's no proportion, height, or evenness / Betwixt that equinoctial and your daughter." The equinox and the even line appear in the fourth gentleman's account of the ideal courtier in I,1 of The Nice Valour: "Give me a man . . . / Can play at Equinoctium with the Line, / As even as the thirteenth of September."

The possibility of Fletcher's share in The Nice Valour should be raised. Certainly there are individual lines in the play that have a Fletcherian ring: "Has a good stroake at Tennis, and a stiffe one" (I,1); "Which makes an excellent husband, and a fond one" (II,1); "This is my feares construction, and a deep one" (IV,1); "that's my suit, / To part from Court for ever, my last suit. / And as you profess bounty, grant me that, Sir" (IV,1); "The chusing of these fellowes now will puzzle me, / Horribly puzzle me" (IV,1); "This is a brave Coward, / A jolly threatening Coward" (IV,1); "To performe one good office, nay a deare one" (V,2); "Beare witnesse heaven, this man destroyes his brother / When he may save him, his least breath may save him" (V,2); "It brings me hither still; by maine force hither" (V,3). The structure of the first three of these lines is especially typical of Fletcher (cf. e.g., "a close ward, and a sure one" [The Loyal Subject, III,2]; "she is a right good Princes, and a just one" [Women Pleased, I,1]; "This is a new way of begging, and a neat one" [The Pilgrim, I,2]; "I long to be a Husband, and a good one" [Rule a Wife, I,1]; cf. also below, p. 101).

But these lines are embedded in a text that, taken as a whole, is not Fletcher's. Whether or not it is Middleton's is beyond final proof. I think that it is; and so I have designated as his all those scenes which reveal no traces of Fletcher. Scenes which display seemingly Fletcherian lines in a non-Fletcherian context I have designated as the work of both dramatists. Beyond this, it seems unwise to attempt any differentiation in the shares of the two authors, just as it seems unwise to speculate how it was that Middleton came to be associated with Fletcher in a single play, whether as reviser or collaborator. However it was, Middleton's hand in the extant text is decidedly the predominant one; and the play as we have it in every way bears his stamp. The most telling argument in favor of this is that The Nice Valour, which is surely one of the oddities of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, with its anomalous mixture of elements satiric and romantic, makes most sense when it is viewed by the light of the tragi-comedies Middleton was writing during the second decade of the seventeenth century—the decade from which, in its extant state at least, The Nice Valour apparently dates.

• The Maid in the Mill
• Fletcher: I; III, 2-3; V,2a (to entrance of Antonio).
• Rowley: II; III,1; IV; V,1,2b (from entrance of Antonio to end).

In his Office-Book under date of 29 August 1623, Herbert records the licensing of "a new Comedy, Called, The Maid in the Mill; written by Fletcher, and Rowley" (Herbert, p. 25), and the attribution has

never been challenged. Linguistically, the play can be divided into two readily distinguishable parts. The share of Fletcher contains 175 ye's. In the share attributed to Rowley, the form occurs but 4 times. The Fletcherian portion displays the usual preference for 'em (used 20 times) to them (4 times); and the occurrence of the contractions i'th' (9 times), o'th' (8 times), h'as (3 times), 's for his (twice) is typical. Hath and doth do not occur.

It is the greatly reduced occurrence of ye that serves most clearly to distinguish Rowley's share of the play from Fletcher's. The fact that hath is found 6 times in the Rowley portion affords another contrasting feature in the shares of the two dramatists. Attention has been drawn (above, p. 84) to the two occurrences of 'm for them in Rowley's share of V,2—a contraction that appears 30 times in his A Woman Never Vext, and once in his All's Lost by Lust.

The 1647 folio text of the play appears to derive from a manuscript prepared by the scribe Ralph Crane. Evidence of this is afforded by the preservation of the Fletcherian ye, by the division of the text into scenes, and by the use of parentheses for enclosing proper names or forms of address in the vocative. Examples of this last practice can quite literally be found on every page of the first folio text. A few illustrations will suffice: "I have done (sweet Lady)" [1b]; "am I not able (Cosen)" [3b]; "Well (my Lord)" [5b]; "You had the better luck (Sister)" [6a]; "no more (sweet Beauty)" [9a]; "no grace (Gentlemen?)" [12a]; "I hear you (Sir)" [16a]; "pardon (my Soveraigne)" [21b].

• The Laws of Candy
• Ford: I-V.

Oliphant (pp. 476 ff.), following the lead of Mr. William Wells, attributed almost the whole of The Laws of Candy to Ford, reserving only the concluding dialogue of I,2 as Fletcher's. Certainly there is nothing in the play of Beaumont's or Massinger's, whose names have been associated with it; and I find nothing particularly Fletcherian about the end of I,2. On the other hand, the play has a number of affinities with Ford's unaided work, and in the state of our present knowledge, it seems best to regard The Laws of Candy as wholly his.

Not the least of the resemblances which exist between this play and Ford's seven acknowledged ones is the linguistic pattern which, it is not too much to say, they share in common. Linguistic evidence for his unaided plays is given in tabular form at the end of this section of the present study. From there it will be seen that his use of ye varies

from the 11 occurrences of the form in The Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, to the 65 ye's of The Fancies Chaste and Noble; The Laws of Candy contains 37. Hath occurs in Ford from 22 times (in Love's Sacrifice) to 45 times (in 'Tis Pity); it is found 39 times in The Laws of Candy. Doth occurs 9 times in The Laws of Candy, just as it does in Love's Sacrifice and The Lover's Melancholy; the 10 instances of 'em here match the 10 occurrences of the form in The Lady's Trial. I'th' occurs no more than 5 times in a single play of Ford's; it occurs twice in two plays, and not at all in one; it is used a single time in The Laws of Candy. O'th' does not appear in this play, as it does not appear in 'Tis Pity. H'as, which is used once in The Laws of Candy, appears but a single time in three of Ford's unaided plays, and not at all in the remaining four. Ford employs contractions in 's for his no more than 4 times in a single play, and not at all in four plays; none are used in The Laws of Candy. Whatever is to be said about the value of the linguistic evidence here, it cannot be denied that the pattern of language usage displayed by The Laws of Candy accords at every point with the pattern of similar forms displayed by Ford's acknowledged work. The pattern would be complete, and the evidence would be wellnigh conclusive, if The Laws of Candy displayed any of the contractions in 'ee (d'ee, t'ee, and the like) that are found in all of Ford's acknowledged plays, but none appears here.

A feature of Ford's rhetoric is his use of the phrases "for instance" and "in a word" to effect a transition within, or to summarize the import of, one of his long verse cadences. The following from The Broken Heart (I,2) is typical.

Both phrases are employed in The Laws of Candy:

• I gave life To quicken courage, to inflame revenge, To heighten resolution; in a word To out-doe action: (I,2)

---

99




• This gentleman, (as humble as you see him) Is even this Kingdomes treasure; In a word, 'Tis his chiefe glory that he is not wiser Then honest, (III,1)
• Then in a word, my Lord, your visitations Shall find all due respect: (III,2)
• Loves courtship is familiar, and for instance, See what a change it hath begot in me . . . . (IV,1)

There is a tendency in the play for the characters to punctuate their speech with multiple auxiliary verbs. Thus the heroine, when asked by a rejected suitor if it is indeed possible that she should combine such beauty with such cruelty, is made to reply: "I can, I doe, I will" (II,1). This represents the practice in its baldest form; elsewhere it can serve as the basis for a more elaborate statement, as here:

With this it is worth comparing the following, from Ford's The Fancies Chaste and Noble (IV,1): or this, from The Lover's Melancholy (III,1): or finally this, from The Lady's Trial (III,1): And the tendency, also evident in The Laws of Candy, to ring a some-what similar set of changes on the degrees of comparison, has its parallel in Ford as well. Such a passage as this from The Laws of Candy (III,1), seems cast in the same verbal mould as this, from The Lover's Melancholy (III,1):

Ford's fondness for directing his characters to bring properties onto the stage is worth noting in connection with the following stage direction from The Laws of Candy (III,3): "Enter Hyparcha (placing two chaires)." In The Broken Heart occurs this stage direction (IV,1; sig. I2):

And in Love's Sacrifice is found this (II,1; sig. E3v):

• The Fair Maid of the Inn
• Fletcher and Ford: IV,1.
• Ford: III.
• Massinger: I; V,3a (to entrance of the Host).
• Webster: II; IV,2; V,1-2, 3b (from entrance of the Host to end).

Massinger's share in the play has been recognized since the time of Boyle. Ford's presence was first suggested by Wells, Webster's by Sykes. The latter's division of the play is accepted by F. L. Lucas, who includes The Fair Maid of the Inn in volume four of his edition of Webster. Here it remains simply to show the extent to which the linguistic evidence corroborates the shares that have been claimed for Massinger, Webster, and Ford, and to draw attention to such evidence as exists for the presence of Fletcher.

Three distinct linguistic patterns are discernible in the 1647 folio text of the play. The first of these, evident through Act I and the first 297 lines of V,3, displays no ye's, no such contracted forms as i'th', o'th', or 's for his, and but single occurrences (in I,3) of h'as and 'em. The second pattern, to be traced through Act II, the second scene of Act IV, the first two scenes and the last 38 lines of the final scene of Act V, displays but a single ye, a decided preference for the expanded them to the contracted 'em (32 occurrences of them as against 8 of 'em in this section of the play), and all the occurrences of i'th', o'th', and 's for his that the play affords. The third pattern, which extends from III,1 through IV,1, displays an occasional ye and an occasional 'em (7 of each), and 7 occurrences of contractions in 'ee (d'ee and

t'ee), forms that are found no where else in the play.[16] The first pattern, barren as it is of ye and of all the normal contractions, is recognizably Massinger's. Pattern number two, with its paucity of ye's and 'em's, and its concentration of forms in i'th', o'th', and 's for his, displays the very qualities that, in an earlier section of the present study (SB, XII, 103-104) were noted in the linguistic pattern that emerged from an examination of the unaided plays of Webster. There it was found that ye occurs no more than twice in any one of Webster's three unaided plays; that 'em appears but thrice in a single play, and not at all in the remaining two; but that in a single play i'th', on the other hand, will occur from 31 to 46 times, o'th' (with the variant form a'th', which Webster also employs) from 19 to 22 times, and contractions in 's for his from 15 to 20 times. Webster employs i'th', o'th', and 's for his more frequently even than Fletcher does, and his practice has left its mark on his share of The Fair Maid of the Inn. The most significant single feature of pattern number three is the appearance of the contractions in 'ee, and these, as the linguistic table at the end of this section of the present study shows, are to be found in each of Ford's seven unaided plays. The infrequent use of ye and 'em in pattern three, and the absence from it of i'th', o'th', and 's for his, accord further with the pattern of linguistic usage established by Ford's unaided work.

Although the play, as it stands, is substantially the work of Massinger, Webster, and Ford, there is, I think, no doubt that traces of Fletcher are to be discerned in at least one scene (IV,1). No line could be more typically Fletcherian than Bianca's "Ile pray for yee / That you may have a vertuous wife, a faire one," with its schematic pattern of article-adjective-noun-article-a second adjective-"one," a recurrent rhetorical formula in Fletcher's unaided work (cf. e.g., "A dainty Wench, a right one," [Monsieur Thomas, I,1]; "a pretty Ring, a right one" [The Pilgrim, III,4]; "a Turkish man of War, a stout one" [A Wife for a Month, V,1]). As this accounts for one of the scene's 4 ye's, the following passage, also possessed of a Fletcherian ring, accounts for another:

The "they" (line 3) of both folios is usually emended: to "which" by Seward, "nay" by Dyce, "yea" by Lucas. The latter, in his note on the passage, suggests that "the confusion may be due to two alternative versions—Those virtues. . . they appear'd and that goodnesse . . . which should have been followed not by they, but it" (The Works of John Webster, IV,236). It is possible that we are in the very presence of a passage that has been worked over by the revising hand of Ford (the verb "abates" occurs in his III,1). The play was licensed by Herbert on 22 January 1626 as the work of Fletcher alone (Herbert, p. 31). Lucas adduces evidence for dating it subsequent to 27 March 1625. Fletcher died in August of that year. Oliphant (p. 471), struck by the smallness of Fletcher's contribution, saw in the play an early Fletcherian original revised by one or more unknowns in 1625 and at least once thereafter; he detected the presence of Webster, Massinger, and Ford, but being unable to find a period at which all three were writing for the King's Company, to which the play belonged, was unwilling to regard the play as of a single date. Fletcher's share in the play is much too small to admit of any judgments as to whether the work is early or late. There being no evidence to the contrary, I would suggest that the work is late—that it is, indeed, the last play on which Fletcher worked; that his share in it was never brought to completion; that it was finished by the trio of Webster, Massinger, and Ford. Massinger may have been present from the beginning, as perhaps was Webster; Ford, to judge from the evidence of IV,1, where he is overwriting Fletcher, was not. Whether all three were writing for the King's Company at this time we have no way of knowing. Massinger was; his Roman Actor was licensed for that company later in the same year as The Fair Maid (11 October 1626). There is nothing inherently impossible in supposing that Webster and Ford were too; and to do so involves us in less of a quagmire of speculation than to posit several layers of revision in order to account for their presence in the play.

I have not credited Ford with a share in Webster's II,1 of The Fair Maid, there being no linguistic evidence for doing so; but the fact that one passage therein echoes fairly closely a passage of similar import from III,2 of The Laws of Candy raises the possibility, given Ford's connection with both plays, that his work is present in that scene as well as in those that I have indicated. At one point in each play, a young man is sent to effect a reconciliation with an irascible older man who refuses to be placated, and in his wrath comes near to killing, or maiming, the emissary. In each case he desists from the same consideration of hospitable behavior, but not before he has made the emissary

aware of his danger. Here is the pertinent speech from The Laws of Candy (III,2): And this is the comparable passage from The Fair Maid of the Inn (II,1): Unless we have here a case of direct borrowing, I find it hard to believe that two such essentially colorless passages, completely lacking in imagery that could give them a common source, could so nearly reproduce each other if they were not the work of a single dramatist.

Footnotes to the Linguistic Tables for the Unaided Plays of Middleton, Rowley, and Ford[*]

                                                                 

		ye	y'	'ee	hath	doth	'em	'um	'm	them	i'th'	a'th'	o'th'	h'as	h'ad	sh'as	sh'ad	'tas	'tad	's his	ha'	a' he
Middleton
	MT	5	17		3	1	45[**]			7	28	9[***]	1	4		2		3		1	33	3
	Phoen.	4	20		3	1	38[**]			11	10[†]	5	1	12	1	3		1	1		17
	MWM	2	14		2	1	66			7	34	8	7	5		7		1		6	5
	TCOO	1	13	1	3	1	34		1	7	16	3		4		1		1	1	1	6
	YFG	6	25	1	4	1	58			19	11	7		8				4	2	1	9	5
	CMC	7	1		14	4	17			26	9[††]	1[†††]	2[††]	6							14
	NWNH	8	42		5	1	42			20	24		14	8	1	4			2	6
	MDBW		21		1		36			6	14		5	5	1	2	2	1		6
	Witch	1	15		14	4	36			8	18		5	5		7	2			2	4
	Widow	3	35				63			6	18		10	10	2	4		3		9	26	1
	Heng.		33		2		62			13	17		8	3						3
	WBW	2	51				43			10	23		10	9		7	2			7
	GC		9		4		38			5	5	3		5		2		2	2		2
	ITM		2		2		7			1	3[†]	1		4					1	1	3
	THI				5		1			2
	THV		1		3		1			1				1
	TI		1	1	5		2			1						1
	Hon.		4		4	7	5			2		1				2		1			2
Rowley
	WNV	10	12		15	1			30	45	4		1	2				1		6
	SG	34		1	26	4	23			33	11		3	8						2
	ALL	4	8	1	8	2	5	8	1	17	3		2[‡‡]								4	1
	MM	111	20		7	2	3			30	34		14	5	1					11	15
Ford
	LM	52	8	25	36	9	11			12	2		1[‡‡]	1						4		6
	BH	11	11	42	36	14	12			12	4		1	1								25
	LS	25	4	12	22	9	17			16	2		1	1							2	6
	TP	11	8	30	45	10	3			21										1	1	2
	PW	20	8	27	38	13	12			35	4		1									28
	FCN	65	11	8	29	3	13			22	4		7 [‡‡‡‡]			1				3	1	31
	LT	43	4	11	29	6	10			19	5		1			1						14

Wit at Several Weapons — F 1647

                                     

	ye	y'	'ee	you	hath	doth	'em	'um	them	i'th'	a'th'	o'th'	h'as	h'ad	sh'as	sh'ad	's his	ha'
I,i:		3		41			3		1	2[*]	1[**]		1	1				3
-,ii:				51	1		6	5	1
Total: I		3		92	1		9	5	2	2	1		1	1				3
II,i:				12			2			1[*]								3
--,ii:	1			70	1		4
--,iii:				13
--,iv:	1			30
Total: II	2			125	1		6			1								3
III,i:		2		104			11			5					1	1		17
Total: III		2		104			11			5					1	1		17
IV,i:	1	1		89			8			7[*]	3[**]		2				3	9
--,ii:				18			1			1[*]								3
--,iii:	1	1		20			1				1[**]
Total: IV	2	2		127			10			8	4		2				3	12
V,i:				102			2	1	2	1			1
--,ii:			1	93			5	1		2
Total: V			1	195			7	2	2	3			1
TOTAL:	4	7	1	643	2		43	7	4	19	5		4	1	1	1	3	35

The Nice Valour — F 1647

                                 

	ye	y'	you	hath	doth	'em	them	i'th'	o'th'	h'as	h'ad	sh'as	sh'ad	'tas	'tad	's his	ha'
I,i:		4	44			2	1	1	3	2	1			1		1	4
Total: I		4	44			2	1	1	3	2	1			1		1	4
II,i:	1	6	58			9	2	1	2	1				1		1	1
Total: II	1	6	58			9	2	1	2	1				1		1	1
III,i:		1	10					2		2						1	1
--,ii:		2	24			5		3	4[*]						1		2
--,iii:			7			1										1
--,iv:		1	2													1	3
Total: III		4	43			6		5	4	2					1	3	6
IV,i:	1	3	84			9	2	3	2	3						1	4
Total: IV	1	3	84			9	2	3	2	3						1	4
V,i:			6			1		1		3							5
--,ii:			11							1							1
--,iii:		1	31			2		1		1						1	2
Total: V		1	48			3		2		5						1	8
TOTAL:	2	18	277			29	5	12	11	13	1			2	1	7	23

The Maid in the Mill — F 1647

                                         

	ye	y'	you	hath	doth	'em	'm	them	i'th'	o'th'	h'as	's his	ha'
I,i:	23		13			2		1
-,ii:	10		11			7				1
-,iii:	29		30			4		1			2	1
Total: I	62		54			13		2		1	2	1
II,i:	1		49			1			1	3[*]		1
--,ii:	1	2	77	1		3		1		1	1
Total: II	2	2	126	1		4		1	1	4	1	1
III,i:			17	2		2
--,ii:	19		26			1			5		1	1
--,iii:	60		56			5		2	3	3
Total: III	79		99	2		8		2	8	3	1	1
IV,i:	1		79			5		1	2
--,ii:			11	1		8			1
--,iii:			6			2		1
Total: IV	1		96	1		15		2	3
V,i:	1	1	12										1
--,ii (a):	34		39			1			1	4
--,ii (b):		1	74	2		3	2		1
Total: V	35	2	125	2		4	2		2	4			1
TOTAL:	179	4	500	6		44	2	7	14	12	4	3	1

The Laws of Candy — F 1647

                               

	ye	you	hath	doth	'em	them	i'th'	o'th'	h'as
I,i:		5	2	3		1
-,ii:	4	47	7	1		8
Total: I	4	52	9	4		9
II,i:	1	126	4	2		4	1
Total: II	1	126	4	2		4	1
III,i:	4	19	1			5
--,ii:	5	40	1		1	7
--,iii:		34	1	2	7	6
Total: III	9	93	3	2	8	18
IV,i:	6	49	7		2	1			1
--,ii:	5	10	1			1
Total: IV	11	59	8		2	2			1
V,i:	12	71	15	1		3
Total: V	12	71	15	1		3
TOTAL:	37	401	39	9	10	36	1		1

The Fair Maid of the Inn — F 1647

                                           

	ye	y'	'ee	you	hath	doth	'em	them	i'th'	o'th'	h'as	's his	'a he
I,i:				80				5
-,ii:				8	1			1
-,iii:				11			1	1			1
Total: I				99	1		1	7			1
II,i:				43	1			2	2	2		2
--,ii:				19			4	5	2	2
--,iii:				1				1	1
--,iv:				18				3				1
Total: II				81	1		4	11	5	4		3
III,i:	2		3	16	3		6	4
--,ii:	1			29	1		1	1
Total: III	3		3	45	4		7	5
IV,i:	4	4	4	27	1			2					1
--,ii:	1			113	4		4	14	10		1	3
Total: IV	5	4	4	140	5		4	16	10		1	3	1
V,i:				17	1			1	2
--,ii:				8				3	1			1
--,iii (a)				32	5			6
--,iii (b)				8	1			3
Total: V				65	7			13	3			1
TOTAL:	8	4	7	430	18		16	52	18	4	2	7	1

Notes