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ii
Now that all the linguistic evidence is in, we may proceed to tabulate our findings by way of conclusion. The shares of Fletcher and his collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon stand as follows.
- Fletcher alone (15 plays): Bonduca, The Chances, The Island Princess, The Humourous Lieutenant, The Loyal Subject, The Mad Lover, Monsieur Thomas, The Pilgrim, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Valentinian, A Wife for a Month, Women Pleased, The Wild Goose Chase, The Woman's Prize (plus The Faithful Shepherdess, not included in the present study for reasons stated in SB, VIII, p. 142).
- Fletcher and Massinger (11 plays): Barnavelt, The Custom of the Country, The Double Marriage, The Elder Brother, The False One, The Little French Lawyer, The Lovers' Progress, The Prophetess, The Sea Voyage, The Spanish Curate, A Very Woman.
- Fletcher and Beaumont (9 plays): The Captain, The Coxcomb, Cupid's Revenge, A King and no King, The Maid's Tragedy, The Noble Gentleman, Philaster, The Scornful Lady, The Woman Hater.
- Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger (3 plays): Beggars' Bush, Love's Cure, Thierry and Theodoret.
- Fletcher, Beaumont, and Jonson (1 play): Love's Pilgrimage.
- Fletcher, Massinger, Jonson, and Chapman (1 play): Rollo, Duke of Normandy.
- Fletcher and Field (1 play): Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One.
- Fletcher, Field, and Massinger (3 plays): The Honest Man's Fortune, The Knight of Malta, The Queen of Corinth.
- Fletcher and Shirley (1 play): The Night Walker.
- Fletcher, plus an unidentified reviser (1 play): Wit Without Money.
- Fletcher and Rowley (1 play): The Maid in the Mill.
- Fletcher and Middleton (1 play): The Nice Valour.
- Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, and Ford (1 play): The Fair Maid of the Inn.
- Fletcher and Shakespeare (2 plays): The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII.
- Fletcher is wholly absent from three plays in the corpus: Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Wit at Several Weapons (attributed to Middleton and Rowley), The Laws of Candy (attributed to Ford).
Of the fifty-four plays considered in the course of this study, Fletcher then is the sole or partial author of fifty-one. Massinger, whose share in the corpus is second only to Fletcher's, as Sir Aston Cockaine pointed out long ago, is present as reviser or collaborator in nineteen plays. Beaumont is the sole or partial author of fourteen, Field the partial author of four. Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, and Ford are each present in two plays; Shirley and Webster are each present in one. Shakespeare is present in one of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, and Fletcher is present in one of the plays of the Shake-speare canon.
Chambers, surveying the authorship of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon in 1923, thus adjudged previous efforts at dealing with the problem: "the process of metrical analysis initiated by Fleay and Boyle may be regarded as fairly successful in fixing the characteristics of the very marked style of Fletcher, although it certainly raises more questions than it solves as to the possible shares not only of Massinger, but of Jonson, Field, Tourneur, Daborne, Middleton, Rowley, and Shirley, as collaborators or revisers, in the plays as they have come down to us" (The Elizabethan Stage, III, 216).
For all that the linguistic evidence can accomplish, the shares of certain of the dramatists that Chambers named must remain problematic. Linguistic evidence cannot establish Jonson's presence in Rollo, or Middleton's in The Nice Valour. But it can, at the very least, confirm or deny assumptions based on other evidence regarding a given
With linguistic evidence it is all, finally, a matter of more or less, as this essay in evaluating it, and applying it to the authorial problem which the Beaumont and Fletcher canon poses, will have abundantly indicated. There is linguistic evidence of a modest sort for attributing Wit at Several Weapons to Middleton and Rowley; there is linguistic evidence of a more decisive sort for tracing Shirley's revising hand in The Night Walker; there is linguistic evidence of the most decisive sort of all for determining the work of Fletcher in virtually all the plays where he is taken as being present. And having reached a decisive means of determining the work of Fletcher, we are in a position to determine with equal decisiveness the collaborated work of Massinger, because his language practices are so thoroughly at variance with Fletcher's, and because very nearly all of his work in collaboration was done with Fletcher.
It remained for linguistic evidence to show what metrical evidence never showed: that it is possible to distinguish the work of Fletcher and Massinger on the basis of fundamentally different language practices. To demonstrate just how fundamental this difference is, and how decisively it will serve to differentiate their work in collaboration, has been the most signal achievement of this study. On the basis of it, I will venture to make a large claim. There is no longer any mystery about Massinger's share in the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. That beng so, it will no longer be excusable for the author of a book on Massinger to decline to consider his work in collaboration on the plea that, Massinger being "deeply involved in the tangled undergrowth of collaboration which surrounds the Beaumont-Fletcher corpus," to do so would call "for a preliminary volume quite away from [the author's] purposes," and would only end by "confus[ing] the reader and obscur[ing] the object of [the] study, Massinger himself."[9]
| ye | y' | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | i'the | a'th' | o'th' | o'the | h'as | 's his | ha' | t' | |
| Temp. | 5 | 26 | 13 | 17 | 42 | 16 | 21 | 1 | 4 | ||||||
| WT | 3 | 1 | 42 | 7 | 6 | 61 | 20 | 23 | 1 | 8 | 3 | ||||
| Cym. | 4 | 1 | 80 | 20 | 2 | 70 | 20 | 37 | 14 | 1 | |||||
| Tim. | 6 | 6 | 29 | 9 | 20 | 66 | 3 | 2 | 10 | 5 | 2 | 4 | |||
| Cor. | 8 | 5 | 51 | 9 | 14 | 128 | 42 | 29 | 16 | 3 | 14 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Ant. | 4 | 4 | 43 | 5 | 3 | 53 | 25 | 1 | 22 | 3 | 4 | 2 | |||
| Tro. | 6 | 60 | 36 | 43 | 11 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | |||||
| Meas. | 1 | 2 | 71 | 24 | 41 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| AWEW | 4 | 4 | 52 | 6 | 5 | 50 | 14 | 9 | 3 | 8 | 1 |
| ye | y' | you | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | o'th' | h'as | 's his | t' | |
| I,i: | 35 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 1 | ||||
| -,ii: | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | ||||||
| -,iii: | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||
| -,iv: | 2 | 1 | 5 | 3 | ||||||||
| -,v: | 1 | |||||||||||
| TOTAL: I | 1 | 53 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 9 | 1 | 1 | ||
| II,i: | 6 | 3 | 3 | 2 | ||||||||
| --,ii: | 7 | 30 | 1 | 10 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 2 | 7 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| --,iv: | ||||||||||||
| --,v: | 4 | 34 | ||||||||||
| --,vi: | 1 | |||||||||||
| TOTAL: II | 9 | 4 | 78 | 1 | 14 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | |||
| III,i: | 1 | 24 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | ||||||
| ---,ii: | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,iii: | 20 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,iv: | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| ---,v: | 8 | 1 | 18 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||||
| ---,vi: | 11 | 60 | 10 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: III | 19 | 3 | 123 | 2 | 11 | 5 | 3 | 11 | ||||
| IV,i: | 2 | 1 | 26 | 4 | 2 | |||||||
| --,ii: | 8 | 11 | 3 | 1 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 10 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: IV | 2 | 1 | 44 | 2 | 15 | 6 | 1 | 2 | ||||
| V,i (a): | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| -,i (b): | 3 | 2 | 2 | |||||||||
| -ii: | 4 | 1 | 39 | 5 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| -,iii: | 16 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | |||||||
| -,iv: | 18 | 4 | 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: V | 7 | 1 | 82 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 8 | 1 | |||
| TOTAL: | 37 | 10 | 380 | 16 | 1 | 55 | 31 | 22 | 29 | 5 | 1 |
| ye | y' | you | hath | doth | 'em | them | i'th' | o'th' | h'as | 's his | t' | ha' | |
| I,i: | 1 | 22 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 1 | 2 | ||||
| -,ii: | 24 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 3 | |||||
| -,iii: | 2 | 7 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| -,iv: | 4 | 4 | 23 | 12 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| TOTAL: I | 5 | 4 | 71 | 8 | 1 | 23 | 11 | 3 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 2 | |
| II,i: | 4 | 20 | 4 | ||||||||||
| --,ii: | 3 | 12 | 1 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| --,iii: | 1 | 25 | 1 | 2 | |||||||||
| --,iv: | 2 | 50 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 | ||||||
| TOTAL: II | 7 | 3 | 107 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | ||||
| III,i: | 20 | 30 | 5 | ||||||||||
| ---,ii (a): | 38 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | |||||
| ---,ii (b): | 6 | 37 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| TOTAL: III | 26 | 105 | 8 | 1 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | ||||
| IV,i: | 3 | 1 | 13 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| --,ii: | 5 | 20 | 3 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: IV | 8 | 1 | 33 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | ||||||
| V,i: | 1 | 41 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | |||||
| -,ii: | 12 | 1 | 42 | 6 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| -,iii: | 7 | 2 | 13 | 13 | 1 | 3 | 1 | ||||||
| -,iv: | 6 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| TOTAL: V | 25 | 5 | 99 | 3 | 20 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| TOTAL: | 71 | 13 | 415 | 24 | 2 | 63 | 25 | 18 | 25 | 2 | 10 | 6 | 1 |
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