John Webster and Thomas Heywood in
Appius
and Virginia: A Bibliographical Approach to the
Problem of Authorship
by
MacD. P. Jackson
Introduction
John Webster's reputation rests upon two fascinating Italianate
tragedies
which, though displaying such baroque excess of local elaboration and such
straining for sensational effect as to lack clarity of outline or obvious
coherence of purpose or point of view, are pervaded by a distinctive and
haunting atmosphere that blends savagery, melancholy, and a nerve-tingling
sense of impending doom. And the "Tussaud laureate" who created
The
White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi set his seal no
less surely
on their dazzling tragi-comic counterpart, The Devil's Law
Case. But
Appius and Virginia, first published in 1654 with a title-page
ascription to Webster, is less clearly a product of the same singular
imagination; for this Roman tragedy is "striking in its almost classical
simplicity of construction" (Lucas, Webster's Works, III,
146). In
plot it is straightforward, direct, and unified, and in style it is restrained.
Can
such a work really be
Webster's?
Rupert Brooke thought not, vigorously arguing in 1913 that Webster's
sole contribution to Appius was the revision of I.i and IV.i,
the play
being Heywood's.[1] Most scholars
have
since apportioned Appius between Webster and Heywood,
although
Bentley was characteristically impatient at what he pronounced
"impressionism rationalized," and saw "no grounds for any dogmatic
assertions about the authorship" (Jacobean and Caroline
Stage, V,
1247). F. L. Lucas could scarcely be accused of dogmatism on the subject.
In his standard edition of Webster's works he hesitantly ascribed I.i, I.ii,
III.ii, III.iii, IV.i, and V.i to Webster alone, considered II.ii largely his,
and
found traces of his work in every scene except (doubtfully) II.i, IV.ii, and
V.ii. In his massive two-volume study of the playwright, Fernand Lagarde
surveyed all the evidence for authorship of Appius and
Virginia, and
on the basis of his own intimate knowledge
of the dramatist and of an analysis of orthographical and linguistic forms
concluded: "Nous proposons d'attribuer sans réserve à
Webster I.i.,
I.ii., II.ii., III.iii., III.iii., IV.i. et V.i., et de lui concéder
un certain rôle dans la composition de I.iii., de I.iv., de II.iii. et de
V.ii."
Peter B. Murray, after counting some contractions, felt most confident of
Webster's authorship of I.ii, II.ii, III.ii, III.iii, IV.i, and V.ii. And Sanford
Sternlicht's thorough comparison of the play's imagery with that of the
three
undoubted Webster plays persuaded him that five scenes (I.i, I.ii, II.ii,
III.iii,
and IV.i) "belong fully and strongly to Webster," and that three others
(IV.ii.1-44, V.i, and V.ii) show signs of his hand.
Lucas, Lagarde, Murray, and Sternlicht exhibit a fair measure of
agreement. Yet none offers compelling evidence, and the problem remains
intractable. Arguments from diction and imagery are, as Lucas was well
aware, of dubious value, when the whole artistic impulse of Appius
and
Virginia is towards a far more chaste dramaturgy than that which
served
Webster in his Italian tragedies. Though Lagarde, unlike Murray, gives an
accurate and fairly full tabulation of the linguistic forms in Appius
and
Virginia, Lucrece is his sole source of comparative
material for
Heywood. There is still much to be done along this line of enquiry. My
purpose in this article is twofold: to provide, through bibliographical and,
in
particular, compositorial analysis of the 1654 Quarto of
Appius, a
sold basis for examination of those orthographical and linguistic minutiae
which may aid author identification, and to undertake a more
comprehensive
examination of this sort of
evidence than has been reported up till now.
The Quarto of 1654: Printer and Compositors
The sole Quarto of Appius and Virginia survives in no
fewer than
five issues, with successive cancels replacing the original title leaf (Greg,
Bibliography, II, 733). The first issue, of which Greg records
two
copies, was printed for Richard Marriot, to whom it had been entered in the
Stationers' Register on 13 May 1654, and is dated 1654, as is the second,
of
which there are eight copies; the third, extant in a unique copy in the
Library
of Congress, is dated 1655; the fourth, of which there are eight copies, is
dated 1659 and was printed for Humphrey Moseley, to whom the rights had
been transferred on 11 June 1659; and the fifth, of which there are four
copies, is as late as 1679. The collation is A1
B-H4 I4
(—I4), the text beginning on B1 and ending on I3.
The printer, hitherto unidentified, was almost certainly Thomas
Maxey
(active 1637-1657), whose name as printer is on the title page of at least
seven of Marriot's publications in the period 1651-1655,[2] including Isaak Walton's
The Complete
Angler (1653, and second edition 1655), Sir Henry Wotton's
Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651, and second edition 1654), and
John
Donne's Essays in Divinity (1651).
There is little about the Appius Quarto that might serve
readily
to identify its printer—only an arrangement of nine unusual fleurons
on the
title page and a double row of small acorn-like ornamental types, of a very
common kind, above the head title on B1. Both these forms of
ornamentation are, however, found several times in Reliquiae
Wottonianae (1654, Wing W 3649) on A3, A5, B1, E2, F7, H1,
and
many other pages; in Edward Sparke's Scintillula Altaris,
printed by
Maxey (1652, Wing S 4807) on A3. A4v, A5v, A6v, A7, B2, C1, and
other
pages; and in Essays in Divinity (1651, Wing D 1861) on
A1, A2,
and K11v; and the more distinctive appears in The Complete
Angler
(1653, Wing W 661) on A5; The Complete Angler (1655,
Wing W
662) on Q11; Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651, Wing W 3648)
on a1,
b1, A1, D1, F4, I5, and P4; and Sir Thomas Overbury's
Observations
upon the Provinces United (1651, Wing O 609), also printed by
Maxey,
on A4.
Moreover, the Appius fleuron is used on A2v of the
Quarto of
Henry Glapthorne's Revenge for Honour, which has a
publishing
history similar to that of Appius, appearing in three issues,
two of
1654 "for Richard Marriot," and a third of 1659 "for Humphrey Moseley"
(Greg, Bibliography, II, 730). In the second issue, surviving
in a
single copy in the Pforzheimer Library, a leaf containing an Epistle
Dedicatory has been inserted after the title. Greg notes: "While there is no
proof that the leaf belongs to the book, there seems no reason to doubt it.
According to the Pforzheimer Catalogue the printer of the leaf was Thomas
Maxey (1647-57), but the printer of the play is not known." Greg does not
say on what basis the Pforzheimer Catalogue assigned the printing of the
second issue's additional leaf to Maxey, but that he was in fact the printer
of
the whole play is strongly suggested by the type ornamentation that the
Quarto has in common with Scintillula
Altaris (1652), The Complete Angler (both 1653 and
1655), and
the other books printed by Maxey. Compare, for example, A2 of
Revenge for Honour with A2, A8, and B1 of the first edition
of
The Complete Angler (1653), and with A2 and B1 of the
second
edition (1655). Or compare the opening A2v-A3 of Revenge for
Honour with the opening 2C1v-2C2 of Scintillula
Altaris. The
habit of dividing a row of ornamental types by colons links Revenge
for
Honour with the books known to have been printed by Maxey. In
Revenge for Honour, as in Appius and
Virginia, only two
leaves per gathering are signed, always in the form 'B', 'B2', without
stops,
and in neither play are lines of verse capitalized. Both Quartos seem to use
the same fount of type, of which twenty lines measure approximately 81-82
mm.[3] Thomas Maxey is, then, the
probable printer of both Revenge for Honour and
Appius and
Virginia.
Analysis of the headlines in the Appius Quarto reveals
that a
single skeleton was used for inner and outer formes of sheets B-E. This
skeleton also machined both formes of G and the outer formes of H and I.
However, a second
skeleton was introduced to machine both formes of F and the inner formes
of
H and I.
[4] Tabulation makes the
sequence
clear:
|
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
OUTER: |
I |
I |
I |
I |
II |
I |
I |
I |
INNER: |
I |
I |
I |
I |
II |
I |
II |
II |
This skeleton pattern implies an undisturbed relationship between
composition and presswork over the first four sheets, but suggests that the
first forme of F may have been prepared for the press before the second
forme of E had been released. It would not be surprising to find some
change
in the compositorial pattern in sheet F.
A hint towards differentiation of compositors is given by the spellings
of
those useful test words do and go. On some
pages the
spellings do and go are preferred, on others
doe and
goe. Pages exhibiting a decisive preference for
do and
go are C1, C2, C4v, D4, E1, F2, F3, F4, G2v, G3, G3v,
and I4v; and
for doe and goe B2v, C3v, D1, D1v, E2v, E3,
E3v, E4, and
E4v.[5] When the twelve
do/go
pages are carefully compared with the nine doe/goe pages,
further
differences emerge, and these all prove statistically significant beyond the
one per cent level, when tested by Yates's chi-square.[6] Table 1 presents these results:
Table 1
12 do/go pages |
|
9 doe/goe pages |
(Compositor A) |
(Compositor B) |
do/go
|
39 |
do/go
|
1 |
doe/goe
|
0 |
doe/goe
|
31 |
I'l
|
15 |
I'l
|
0 |
I'le
|
1 |
I'le/Ile
|
10 |
-ness
|
10 |
-ness
|
0 |
-nesse
|
4 |
-nesse
|
8 |
-l
|
22 |
-l
|
1 |
-ll
|
0 |
-ll
|
22 |
Figures for
-l and
-ll endings exclude
monosyllabic words
(
shall,
will,
well,
still, and so on), of which the
modern spelling predominates throughout, but the
do / go
speller,
whom I have labelled Compositor A, nevertheless uses the
-l
ending
in a monosyllable 9 times in his twelve pages, whereas the
doe /
goe
speller (Compositor B) never uses it. Compositor A's
I'le
spelling
occurs on a page (F4) on which
I'l also appears. Compositor
B's
anomalous single
-l spelling is in the last word of a full line,
and is
outweighed on the page (E2v) by four
-ll endings.
Compositor B's
uncharacteristic
do spelling is also in a full line, and there are
eight
doe / goe spellings on the same page (E3v).
From Table 1 we may safely conclude that at least two compositors
set
the text and that the spellings listed there will serve to distinguish
them.
When the whole text is examined in the light of these key words,
almost
every page affords unequivocal evidence (presented in full in Table 2 at the
end of this article) of one or other compositor's handiwork. The overall
pattern suggests that the doubtful pages in sheet B are probably Compositor
B's, those in F-H probably Compositor A's. The change at F in the
relationship between composition and presswork, tentatively inferred from
the skeleton pattern, is confirmed by Table 2, which shows Compositor A,
who had shared equally with Compositor B the setting of sheets C and D,
and also set the first two pages of sheet E, now taking over as sole
typesetter. Presumably presswork was lagging behind composition, perhaps
because the press was partly occupied with some other job, so that
Compositor A could comfortably keep ahead of the press on his own.
Some confirmation of the proposed compositorial divisions is
provided
by the setting of words immediately following speech prefixes. Compositor
A often fails to set adequate spacing between prefix and text. Compositor
B
is more consistent. There is doubtless subjectivity in my criterion of
"adequacy" here, but on A's thirty-five unquestioned pages I count fifty-six
instances of deficient spacing between prefix and text, whereas B's nineteen
unquestioned pages afford only five. B1, B4, and B4v are all perfect in this
respect, while F1, F2v, G4v, and H3v have two, two, one, and two
examples
of inadequate spacing. So my tentative assignment of the doubtful pages in
sheet B to Compositor B, and of those in sheets F-H to Compositor A
receives some support from this evidence.
Compositor A always sets speech prefixes for Marcus Clodius as
Clod. (36 times), except for one Clo. in a full
line on D4: the
pertinent pages are D2v, D4, D4v, F1, F1v, F2, F2v, F3, G1, G1v, I1,
I2v,
and I3. Compositor B never sets Clod., but employs a great
variety
of other prefixes for Clodius. He begins with two instances of
Marcus.
Cl. on B1v, sets Marcus twice on B2-B2v, changes
on B3v from
Cl. to Clodius. (twice) and M.
Clodius. (3 times),
continuing to use M. Clodius. three times on B4. Then he
follows
one Clodius. on C2 with Clo. twice on C2 and
three times on
C3, reverting to M. Clodius. (twice) and
Clodius. (6 times)
on D2. In E2v-E4v he sets a single Clo. at the top of E3, but
otherwise wavers between Clodius. (15 times) and
Clodi. (5
times). The difference between the two men is striking:
Speech Prefixes for Marcus Clodius
|
Clod.
|
other forms |
Compositor A: |
36 |
1 |
Compositor B: |
0 |
48 |
Three tentative attributions are thus further confirmed—B4 to
Compositor
B, and F1 and F2v to Compositor A.
The Manuscript Copy for Q
What sort of manuscript served as copy for the Quarto of
Appius? R. G. Howarth claims: "Obviously the text was
prepared for
the press, though no title-page (with a motto, in Webster's usual fashion)
and
no dedication or preliminary address have been drawn up"
(PQ, 46,
137). Nor is there any Dramatis Personae, such as heads
The
Duchess of Malfi and The Devil's Law Case. That the
manuscript
had been "prepared for the press" is not obvious to me, though it is divided
into acts, not scenes, with the formula Actus Primus Scena
Prima,
and so on, and each act but the last (followed by FINIS) ends
with an
Explicit. The explicit, used by Heywood in his autographs of
The
Escapes of Jupiter and The Captives, reappears in the
Quartos of
several of his plays—The Iron Age (both parts),
The Wise
Woman of Hogsdon, and The Fair Maid of the West
(both
parts); but it can also be found ending Acts II and
III of Webster's The Devil's Law Case.
The text is comparatively clean, requiring few substantive
emendations,
and the speech prefixes give little cause for complaint, though Lucas
plausibly transfers five words from Numitor to Appius at F4v, IV.i.61, and
there is ambiguity in the frequent abbreviations for Virginius and Virginia,
both usually Virg. in the Quarto, even when present in the
same
scene. Corbulo, so named in the speech prefixes at the opening of II.i and
III.i (C2, C2v, D4v, E1), abbreviated to Corb. in III.iv (F3,
F3v, F4),
is Clown. or Clow. in III.ii (E2v, E3, E3v).
The Quarto's one
Cl. and seven Clo. speech prefixes for Marcus
Clodius could
cause confusion with the Clown, but Compositor B may have been solely
responsible for the abbreviations. Lucas adds a score of exit directions and
supplements a few entries, while on F1v Enter Valerius is a
minor
error, as it is Sertorius who has been called for on E4v and who is
dismissed
on F2v. So prompt-book
provenance seems unlikely. On C1v the stage direction has Virginius enter
where Virginia is required, but this error may well have been the
compositor's.
In the Quarto minor characters are often designated by a number:
1.
Cozen., 2. Cozen., 1. Petitioner.,
2. Petit., 1.
Serving., 2. Serving. (for servingmen), for example.
In three
scenes numbers alone are used: in II.ii "six Souldiers" are given numerals
as
speech prefixes (22 times); in III.ii two of "foure Lictors" speak alternately
with the numerals 1 and 2 (10 speeches); and in IV.ii "two Souldiers" are
indicated in the same way (19 speeches). The use of unqualified numerals
as
speech prefixes is not a feature of either Webster's or Heywood's
undoubted
plays as they have come down to us, though
in
The Duchess of Malfi, especially, Webster has a great
many
prefixes of the type in which a numeral precedes a generic title—for
two
servingmen, four officers, two pilgrims, and four madmen; and Heywood
also has many in his autographs of
The Captives and
The Escapes
of Jupiter, and in other plays. The unaccompanied numerals occur
in
scenes of
Appius that will be shown to be wholly or largely
Webster's. Their presence suggests foul papers copy.
Perhaps pointing to the same conclusion is the fact that fifteen
prefixes in
Appius are assigned to Omnes, twelve in II.ii,
one in II.i, one
in IV.i, and one in IV.ii. Some of the speeches go far beyond simple
exclamations of a united rabble, and in performance they would obviously
need to be allocated to individuals among those assembled, rather than
uttered in chorus. The designation Omnes is an author's
conventional
shorthand, common enough in dramatic texts of the time. Neither Heywood
nor Webster is elsewhere given to such frequent use of collective speech
prefixes, and Heywood normally prefers All when he does
use them,
though there are three examples of Omnes in The
English
Traveller and two in Webster's The White Devil. II.ii
is the first
scene in which a sizable group of soldiers must be incorporated into the
dialogue and action: hence the special need for the group prefixes
here.
Many of the entry directions seem authorial, most notably:
Enter
Virginius with his knife, that and his arms stript up to the elbowes all
bloudy;
coming into the midst of the souldiers, he makes a stand. (H1)
There is a
descriptive tinge to several: Appius enters melancholly on B3,
as
does the Clowne, meaning the character named Corbulo in
speech
prefixes, on F3. Iulius enters troubled on D2. Corbulo, called
Clown again, enters whispering Virginia, after her M.
Clodius
with presents on C2: Clodius's entry here is inconsistent with the
direction some twenty-five lines later, Enter Clodius and
Musicians,
which Lucas modifies to Clodius comes forward, with
Musicians,
supposing that Clodius "should lurk in the background" (III, 250). On F4
Virginius and Virginia each enter like a slave, and on H1
the first
mutinous Souldier enters in haste. On I1 Enter
Appius, and
Marcus Clodius, fettered and
gyved. Numbers of minor characters entering are precisely specified
except on B4, where the stage direction ends with &c,
C2v
(Musicians), and D2v (Lictors). On B2v
Enter a Servant,
whispers Icilius in the eare, spread over three lines against the
right-hand
margin, begins at least a line too late and is moved up by Lucas.
Another feature of the Quarto that tells against a theatrical origin for
the
printer's copy is the tendency in some scenes for short speeches that
continue
a line of verse to occupy the same line as the preceding speech ending. As
Greg explained, "In all manuscripts intended for stage use every speech
begins a fresh line of writing, irrespective of the metrical division. The
habit
of writing speakers' names in the middle of a line would be distracting for
prompt purposes, and may be taken to indicate a purely literary intention
in
the writer. The speakers' names are in the margin, and the beginning of
speeches are not indented as is usual in print, but a short horizontal rule is
drawn separating the speeches."
[7]
The
untheatrical setting out of some short speeches in the Quarto
[8] is unlikely to be a printing-house
strategy for
the saving of space, because it occurs in the stints of both compositors and
in
various positions on the pages, which are seldom unduly crowded.
Moreover, the practice is characteristic of Webster in all three of his
unaided
plays, and in
Appius it is confined to scenes in which there
are other
strong indications of Webster's authorship, as I shall show.
On the other hand, of the few directions for action that are set to the
right of the page, one looks very like a book-keeper's annotation: on H3v
Wine, against the right-hand margin, comes ten short
speeches before
Virginius actually calls "Wilt a, wilt a give me some Wine?" The direction
A Shout on I2 might be from the same source.
The evidence suggests to me authorial papers, which may have
received
some attention from the prompter.
Linguistic Discriminators between Webster and
Heywood
Attempts to determine the authorship of Appius and
Virginia are
complicated by ignorance over its date of composition. Metrical and
stylistic
considerations have led most commentators to conclude that
"Appius
lies at one end or other of Webster's development" (Lucas, III, 122), but
there is no agreement over which end: it has been dated 1603-4 at the one
extreme, 1626-34 at the other. Bentley finds the evidence of earlier scholars
"at best inadequate, often absurd, and frequently tied to arguments for
hypothetical collaborators," but judges that "the period from 1624 to
Webster's death seems to have slightly more to be said for it than have the
other dates offered" (V, 1246). Lucas favoured 1625-7 as the most likely
date of composition, and 1624 is the year under which it is entered in the
Schoenbaum-Harbage Annals. In view of the paucity of hard
evidence on the matter, however, Heywood and Webster characteristics that
fail to differentiate between the
dramatists throughout the first quarter of the seventeenth century are of
little
legitimate use.
Another complicating factor is doubt over the extent of Webster's
participation in the plays in which he is alleged to have collaborated, such
as
Anything for a Quiet Life, The Fair Maid of the
Inn, and
A Cure for a Cuckold—and again there are problems
of
chronology. Could we be certain of his shares in these plays, a wider range
of data concerning his stylistic and sub-stylistic characteristics would be
available to us, and we might better be able to gauge and understand the
changes in his art. But only the early collaborations with Dekker,
Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho
(1605), can
be apportioned between the parties with any precision or confidence.
[9]
In pursuit of "linguistic" features that may serve to distinguish
between
Webster and Heywood, I have examined the three plays of Webster's
undoubted sole authorship and fifteen plays known to be the unaided work
of Heywood, including The Captives and The Escapes
of
Jupiter, extant in manuscripts generally agreed to be autograph. The
minutiae studied were those that Cyrus Hoy, David J. Lake, and others
have
shown to fall into patterns discriminating neatly between the various
Jacobean and Caroline dramatists—colloquial contractions such as
'em, I've, e'en,
ha', i'th'; linguistic
preferences for ye, you, or 'ee,
hath or
has; exclamations, oaths, and other expletives; affirmative
particles
(Ay, Yes, or Yea); connectives
such as among
or amongst, betwixt or between,
while or
whilst; and habits in the setting out, spelling, and
punctuation of the text.[10]
In many of these respects the two authors are closely alike. Neither
makes liberal use of a wide range of contractions and both eschew
has and does in favour of the formal
hath and
doth,[11] except that
Webster
favours has and
does in
The Devil's Law Case: we cannot know
whether the
change reflects chronology (
The White Devil is usually dated
1612,
The Duchess of Malfi 1614, and
The Devil's Law
Case 1617),
or was made in the interests of decorum, the colloquial forms being felt
more
appropriate to tragi-comedy than to tragedy. Another possible explanation
would look to the probable origins of the texts. John Russell Brown judged
that
The White Devil was printed from the author's own
papers, that
The Duchess of Malfi was printed from a transcript, probably
in the
hand of Ralph Crane, and that while for
The Devil's Law
Case the
indications were slight and inconclusive, they appeared to point to a literary
rather than a theatrical manuscript.
[12]
Although Webster and Heywood avoid various forms common in the work
of other dramatists —and these forms are absent from
Appius—both men are rather fond of aphetic
forms, such as
'fore and
'gainst, which occur
several times in
Appius; and even the exclamation
Ha!, a
recognized favourite
of Webster's, is of very little value in discriminating his writing from that
of
Heywood, who uses it quite often in several plays. Murray (
A Study
of
John Webster, p. 38) asserts that instances of
'tis in
Heywood's
work are "relatively few," but in
The Captives,
The
English
Traveller, and
The Fair Maid of the West,
Part
II
Heywood uses
'tis with a Websterian liberality, and in some
other
plays his rate of use is not significantly lower than Webster's.
Among the more striking idiosyncracies of Heywood's autographs,
the
only one to survive into several printed texts is the spelling
Ey for the
affirmative Ay (I in most dramatists), but its
appearance in a
Quarto as late as 1654 would be most surprising, and it is in fact absent
from
Appius.[13]
The main features of Webster's linguistic pattern were noted by Hoy.
Remarking that, apart from the switch to has and
does in
The Devil's Law Case, the linguistic practices evident in
Webster's
plays comprise a pattern that is "extremely consistent," Hoy showed that,
though Webster avoids most contractions, "his use of i'th',
o'th' (which often occurs in his work as a'th'),
and 's
for his in each of his three unaided plays far exceeds the
occurrence
of these forms in any single play of such other dramatists whose unaided
work I have examined as Fletcher, Massinger, Field, and Ford."[14] Heywood makes little use of
i'th',
o'th', or 's for his. The two
dramatists also differ in
their preferences over connectives, one or two expletives are favoured by
one man but not the other, and there are a few pseudo-bibliographical
markers. Figures for some discriminators that prove
relevant to Appius and Virginia are presented in Table 3 at
the end of
this article. I have omitted good discriminators between Webster and
Heywood that fail to appear in Appius, such as the locution
Gramercy, which turns up in almost all Heywood's plays but
is never
used by Webster.

The forms listed in Table 3 vary in their power to discriminate.
Heywood
uses more contractions in i'th', o'th', and
to th' towards
the end of his career, to which period Appius is perhaps most
likely
to belong, but the rate of occurrence in his plays always falls far short of
Webster's. Most of Heywood's to th' contractions are merely
variants
of the use, which he favours, of th' before a vowel; only five
examples in The Captives and three within the two parts of
The
Fair Maid of the West are the genuine to th'
contraction before a
consonant, which is the type employed by Webster. For't
appears
with Websterian frequency in 2 Fair Maid but none of
Heywood's
other plays, though Webster's use is itself variable. A few examples of
i'th', o'th', to th', and
for't in a scene of
Appius would be perfectly compatible with Heywood's
authorship.
Far more distinctive is Webster's
liking for of't, which is completely absent from the Heywood
plays.
Though I have not entered figures in the table, Webster's partiality for
enclitic 't contractions generally is much greater than
Heywood's, and
his range is wider, including many more examples of 't
appended to a
verb—proclaim't, swear't,
bring't, whisper't,
and the like. Heywood usually restricts himself to the more common
't contractions, such as is't, in't,
do't,
to't. The total numbers of enclictic 't
contractions in Webster's
plays, according to my rather quick counts, are: The White
Devil 68,
The Duchess of Malfi 102, The Devil's Law
Case 76. There
are only four Heywood plays in which the total falls outside the range 5-25;
in 1 Fair Maid, 2 Fair Maid, and The
Captives it is
about 50, and in The English Traveller about 60. Again, in
three of
the four later Heywood plays
the figures are high and the rate of use Websterian. Clearly the number and
type of 't contractions in a scene of Appius can
be used only
as slight supporting evidence. The most obvious discrepancy between
Heywood and Webster in their use of contractions concerns 's
for
his: any instance of this type of contraction in
Appius must
constitute strong evidence for Webster's hand.
The connectives ought to supply useful testimony. Whereas Heywood
greatly prefers betwixt (83 times) to between
(22),[15] and whilst (150
times) to while
(10), Webster employs between exclusively (28 times), and
prefers
while (19 times) to whilst (6). Though in
The White
Devil and The Duchess of Malfi Webster shares
Heywood's
preference for amongst over among, in
The Devil's Law
Case this preference is reversed. Thus while,
among, and
between will, with varying decisiveness, point to Webster,
whilst and betwixt to Heywood.
A further pointer to Webster's authorship has not been tabulated. In
The White Devil he adopts the classical and Jonsonian
practice of
using small capitals for speech prefixes and setting them within the line
when
a new speech continues a line of verse. In The Duchess of
Malfi and
The Devil's Law Case small capitals are replaced by
lower-case italic
(the names beginning with a capital, of course), but speeches continuing a
line of verse still often begin within the line. This practice is entirely alien
to
the Heywood
autographs; it occurs sporadically in the Quartos of
The Royal King
and
the Loyal Subject and
The English Traveller, and a
few times in
The Rape of Lucrece,
The Golden Age, and
(on a single
page)
The Silver Age, but it is not otherwise a feature of
Heywood's
plays.
Linguistic Evidence in APPIUS AND VIRGINIA
1654
Table 4 (at the end of this article) presents the incidence per scene of
the
discriminators mentioned so far. As Heywood favours no contractions
avoided by Webster, Webster markers predominate, and their absence from
certain scenes must be an important part of the evidence for Heywood's
hand. As far as Table 4 goes, the surest signs of Webster's presence are in
II.ii, III.ii, and IV.i, with II.iii, the very short III.iii, IV.ii, and V.i also
offering something of value; in V.ii a solitary Webster marker,
stop's
for stop his, occurs in the third speech from the end of the
play. The
frequent occurrence of betwixt and whilst
confirms that
Webster is not the sole author of the play, and is consistent with Heywood's
responsibility for much that scholars have assigned him. The divisions
suggested by Table 4 are quite independent of the compositorial stints. For
example, of the eighteen speech prefixes set within the line, ten belong to
Compositor A's pages,
eight to B's. All but one of them (one of the two on E3) prefix a speech
that
continues a line of verse. However, it will be convenient to discuss the
evidence of Table 4 section by section.
I.i—II.i: There is very little bibliographical or
linguistic trace of
Webster in the first Act or in II.i. The five instances of the less distinctive
Webster contractions, and two 't contractions, within 514
lines of the
first five scenes, contrast markedly with the nine Webster contractions,
including the highly distinctive of't, from's,
and in's,
and four 't contractions, within 250 lines of II.ii, and the
change is
accompanied by a shift from Heywood's connectives (3
betwixt, 3
whilst) in the first 514 lines to Webster's (3
while, 1
among) in II.ii. Yet every scholar who has divided the play
between
the two dramatists assigns Webster I.i, and even Rupert Brooke nominated
this as one of the two scenes that Webster might have revised, while Lucas,
Lagarde, and Sternlicht all give Webster I.ii. There are passages in I.i that
certainly seem to me more in Webster's than in Heywood's manner:
My Lord, my Lord, you dally with your wits.
I have seen children oft eat sweet-meats thus,
As fearfull to devoure them:
You are wise, and play the modest courtier right,
To make so many bits of your delight. (I.i.19-23)
I have heard of cunning footmen that have worne
Shooes made of lead some ten dayes 'fore a race
To give them nimble and more active feet:
So great men should, that aspire eminent place,
Load themselves with excuse and faint denyall,
That they with more speed may performe the trial. (I.i.55-60)
In the first of the above passages, lines 20-21 are in fact repeated from
The Duchess of Malfi, I.i.533-534. I would tentatively
suggest that
Heywood may have begun copying out the play, and that the first five
scenes
of the printer's manuscript copy were in his handwriting. Thereafter the
handwriting of the authorial papers may have alternated with dominant
authorship. In some scenes the work of the two dramatists would appear to
be thoroughly mixed.
[16] The short I.ii
does
carry at least an orthographical hint of Webster's presence in the two
instances of
to th' followed by a consonant. As we have seen,
this
type of contraction is confined to
The Captives and 2
Fair
Maid among Heywood's plays, and used in them only eight times
altogether, but it is common in Webster's work; and of the first five scenes
I.ii is the only one without any indications of Heywood.
There are some oddities about II.i. Hath and
doth
predominate throughout the play, except in this scene where, besides one
hath, occur two examples of has and one of
does
(C2v-C3). There is one more has in IV.ii (G4). The opening
of II.i
between Corbulo and Virginia seems to be Heywood's; it is there that
hath appears. The two instances of has and one
of
does are within the encounter between Clodius and Virginia
in the
second part of the scene. Lucas notes that metrically "it is peculiar owing
to
its high percentage of feminine endings and quite unlike anything else in the
play" (III, 141). He perhaps exaggerates its metrical eccentricity: there are
patches of verse elsewhere with many feminine endings, including the
monosyllabic endings found here. But it is interesting that the encounter
between Virginia and Clodius is introduced with the stage direction that
Lucas found difficult to reconcile with that which opens
the scene. Moreover, this episode has a heavy concentration of
Clo.
speech prefixes for Clodius: five of seven Quarto instances congregate here;
Clodius is first given his full name, but is Clo. in his five
other
speeches in this scene. It is just possible that the Clodius-Virginia
encounter,
which is graced by two songs, is a relic of some third writer's participation.
It
may have been specially added to accommodate the musicians.
II.ii-II.iii: As noted above, II.ii is unmistakably
Websterian, with
a steady stream of his linguistic markers. Even the two instances of
to
th' are significant, each being followed by a consonant. So too is the
instance in II.iii, where the evidence for Webster is sparse, but is countered
by nothing pointing to Heywood. The contraction At's=at his
on D2
is an especially clear pointer to Webster. Moreover, the contraction
to'ave, which I have found in neither Webster nor Heywood,
links the
strongly Websterian II.ii (D1, Compositor
B) with the less Websterian II.iii (D4v, Compositor A). Another possible
trace of Webster in II.iii is the spelling
I'ld for
I
should on
D3v; this occurs several times in
The Duchess of Malfi
(where it may
be Crane's, though
you'ld and
yee'ld appear
in
The White
Devil, C3v and G4), but not in Heywood's plays.
III.i: Here the absence of Webster markers suggests
Heywood's
hand, and the single occurrence of whilst tends to confirm it.
The
't contraction in this scene is the very common
is't, which
could as well be Heywood's as Webster's.
III.ii-III.iii: Act III, scene ii exhibits a wealth of diverse
indications of Webster, including eight examples of i'th', two
of
's, one of yon's, two of for't, the
Websterian
colloquialisms look you and by my life, and the
connective
while. The 't contractions are quite varied,
including
fear't, defer't, hear't, and
obtain't. Supporting
this evidence is a variation in the naming of Corbulo. In the first twenty
lines
of II.i (C2) and the first seventeen lines of III.i (D4v-E1) he is
Corbulo. in speech prefixes, and in III.iv (F3-F4) his prefixes
are
abbreviated to Corb. Table 4 supports the generally held view
that
II.i, III.i, and III.iv are Heywood's scenes. When Corbulo speaks in III.ii,
in
contrast, he is Clown. or Clow. (E2v-E3v).
Admittedly,
pages E2v-E3 were set by Compositor B, while all but one of the
Corbulo. pages were set by Compositor A, but
B did set Corbula. (sic) in II.i at the top of
C2v. The
difference in naming is probably authorial, rather than compositorial,
Webster not caring about this minor character's name. It seems to me
obvious enough that the Clown of III.ii has a markedly more satirical,
Websterian vein than the amiable punster of the other scenes.
In the very short III.iii deliver't and i'th'
point to Webster,
and perhaps outweigh the single Heywood marker,
tush.
III.iv: The return to the name Corbulo is almost the
only clue to
the authorship of this scene. There is nothing to suggest Webster; the one
instance of for't could easily be Heywood's.
IV.i-IV.ii: The Websterian markers in IV.i are not
particularly
frequent: i'th' three times, to th' before a
consonant, and the
expletive by my life. The 't contractions are of
the kind that
Heywood might have used. However the six speeches beginning within the
line associate this scene with the markedly Websterian II.ii and III.ii, and
the
formality of this trial scene might have inhibited the use of many contracted
forms.
One further link between presumptively Websterian scenes is the
exclamation by the gods (10 times) or O the
gods (4 times) or
variant (4 times). This represents a rather perfunctory contribution to the
Roman flavour of a play decorously devoid of the more colourful Jacobean
expletives. The scenes in which evocations of "the gods" appear are II.ii (7
examples), III.ii (3), IV.i (5), IV.ii (1), and V.i (2). So this is another
feature
of IV.i connecting it with II.ii and III.ii.
Uncertain signs of Webster in IV.ii are limited to the opening and
closing
lines. The scene begins with a dialogue between two soldiers, in which
'tween occurs as well as betwixt, and there are
three 't
contractions suggestive
of Webster—
see't,
hav't, and
know't. Some thirty
lines from the end of the scene occurs
for't, and the last
seven lines
have
while and
Be't.
V.i-V.ii: The final Act is scarcely more Websterian
than the first
in its linguistic forms. The connectives are Heywoodian. The sprinkling of
Websterisms in V.i are not among his most distinctive, but
i'th', a
couple of uses of to th' before a consonant, two instances of
for't, and the colloquialism in sooth combine
to make
Webster's participation in the scene probable. Mixed authorship seems to
be
indicated. In V.ii the sole sign of Webster, but a clear one, is
Stop's
sixteen lines from the end.
Conclusion
To summarize: The original Quarto of Appius and
Virginia was
probably printed by Thomas Maxey. Henry Glapthorne's Revenge
for
Honour can be identified as likely to have been another product of
his
shop. The stints of two compositors in Appius can be
distinguished
with some precision and confidence, and the division is consistent with the
skeleton pattern. When linguistic and bibliographical discriminators, derived
from study of Webster's three unaided plays and fifteen plays by Heywood,
are applied to Appius and Virginia, substantial evidence of
Webster's
hand is found in II.ii, III.ii, and IV.i, and less persuasive evidence in I.ii,
II.iii,
III.iii, IV.ii, V.i, and the very end of V.ii. The data concerning authorship
are
not appreciably affected by contrasting compositorial preferences. It is clear
that Webster is not the sole author of the play. The data presented here
cannot demonstrate that the second playwright is Heywood, who has no
really
distinctive linguistic preferences, so that his hand manifests itself in the
absence of Webster's forms rather than in features uniquely his own, but
they
are consistent with Heywood's authorship and part-authorship of several
scenes.
Lucas (III, 137) lists twenty-two words in Appius that
are typical
of Heywood's latinate diction. These are distributed thus: I.iii (2), I.iv (4),
II.i (1), II.iii (2), III.i (1), IV.i (1), IV.ii (3), V.ii (8). Thus the scenes that
are
most strongly Websterian on the linguistic and bibliographical evidence,
II.ii,
III.ii, and IV.i, contain only one such word in 1012 lines, leaving
twenty-one
within the remaining 1579 lines. The three Heywoodian words in IV.ii,
which I have claimed to be at least partly Webster's (pointers to his hand
accumulate within the first and last forty lines or so), are confined to a
short
passage, lines 79-102. It cannot be coincidental that Heywood's diction is
prevalent in portions of the text free from Webster's linguistic traces.
Appius and Virginia is, then, a joint composition. We
cannot
know whether Heywood and Webster worked in collaboration, or one
dramatist revised the other's play. But the final product is an interesting
illustration of a phenomenon that has been observed in other Elizabethan
and
Jacobean plays of dual or multiple authorship—the partial
submerging of
the more idiosyncratic traits of markedly different dramatists as they
contribute to a worthwhile drama with its own distinctive quality. Heywood
is an unsophisticated dealer in broad humour and in emotional and moral
blacks and
whites, "a facile and sometimes felicitous purveyor of goods to the popular
taste," as T. S. Eliot described him (
Elizabethan Essays
[1934], p.
102). He is also jingoistic, and has the popular writer's talent for offering
titillation and orthodox piety at the same time. His best play,
A
Woman
Killed with Kindness, is a competent bourgeois melodrama,
pregnant
with potential ironies and subtleties which a Middleton, for example, would
have exploited to the full, but of which Heywood seems blithely unaware.
In
Appius his essential simple-mindedness, which is not without
its
positive aspects, moderates his cerebral partner's tortuous art. As Lucas
remarked (III, 146), under the influence of Heywood and with his help, "a
better brain than Heywood's has here produced a work that at times seems
to
revert to the manner of a quarter of a century before, when its part-model,
Julius Caesar, first appeared on a stage that had not yet lost
its sense
of directness and
simplicity."
Notes