The Boundaries of John Marston's Dramatic Canon.
Freebury-Jones, Darren ; Tarlinskaja, Marina ; Dahl, Marcus 等
The Boundaries of John Marston's Dramatic Canon.
The Uncertain Boundaries of John Marston's Dramatic Corpus:
In recent decades, authorship attribution scholars have been able
to broaden our knowledge of early modern oeuvres through analyses of
versification habits; preferences for particular morphological,
syntactic, and orthographic forms; authors' favored contractions,
colloquialisms, and interjections; and parallelisms of thought and
language (recurrent collocations). Although there is often much
disagreement in the field of modern attribution studies, all major
scholars agree that a strong case can be made when various approaches,
based on these fundamental elements of an author's individual
style, support each other.
Scholarly attention in early modern authorship studies has been
largely focused on Shakespeare. However, in recent years there has been
new interest in other dramatists of the period, exemplified by
forthcoming editions of the works of writers such as John Marston (c.
1576-1634). (1) Ascertaining the boundaries of an author's canon is
important for so-called "complete works," and this process is
complex. In the cases of many early modern plays that found their way
into print, the companies were more concerned to advertise themselves
than their authors. Internal evidence sometimes contradicts title-page
evidence, or contemporary ascriptions in play lists, as in the case of
The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), (2) which was ascribed to Cyril
Tourneur by Edward Archer in 1656, but is now generally assigned to
Thomas Middleton. Many plays of the period were written by teams of
authors, or were revised by other authorial hands. Some surviving texts
are of poor quality, and are thus not necessarily indicative of a
dramatist's stylistic habits. Such individual features are
sometimes obfuscated by the hands of scribes, compositors, and so forth.
John Marston's dramatic corpus consists of nine plays of
uncontested authorship. His sole-authored plays are as follows: Antonio
and Mellida (1599); Antonio's Revenge (1600); Jack Drum's
Entertainment (1600); What You Will (1601); The Malcontent (1603);
Parasitaster (1605); The Dutch Courtesan (1604); and The Wonder of Women
(1605). There are also two uncontested "collaborative" Marston
plays: John Webster revised The Malcontent, and Marston wrote Eastward
Ho (1605) with Ben Jonson and George Chapman. However, the boundaries of
Marston's dramatic canon are uncertain, which might account, in
part, for his unjustified critical neglect. We should remember that it
is the so-called "minor" playwrights who consolidated the
trends of the period. Marston was a fascinating and controversial
playwright, poet, pamphleteer, and writer of aristocratic
entertainments. We hope that the following study of his extant dramatic
corpus will enable researchers to gain new insights into his impact on
early modern drama. We examine four plays of uncertain authorship which
have been associated with Marston: Lust's Dominion (1600);
Histriomastix (1602); The Family of Love (1607); and The Insatiate
Countess (1610). This study surveys the internal evidence for
Marston's hand in these texts and develops theories on the
divisions of authorship in collaborative works. We begin by outlining
the attribution history of each of these four plays below.
Lust's Dominion
Lust's Dominion; Or, the Lascivious Queen is a revenge
tragedy, printed in 1657. Gustav Cross made a case for Marston's
having had a hand in the play in 1958. (3) He argued that the play
exhibited Marston's idiosyncratic vocabulary and could be
identified with The Spanish Moor's Tragedy--for which Philip
Henslowe paid Thomas Dekker, John Day, and William Haughton in 1600--and
that it was also the unnamed tragedy for which Henslowe paid Marston in
September 1599. (4) In 1980, Cyrus Hoy agreed that Lust's Dominion
and The Spanish Moor's Tragedy were the same play, but that Marston
began a revision of an older play for Henslowe in 1599, which was
continued by Dekker, Haughton, and Day the following year. (5) He
suggested that "There are traces of Marston and Dekker in both
scenes of Act 1 [...] Traces of Marston and Dekker continue through
II.ii, but it seems to me that the quality of the scene changes with the
entrance of the friars and the Queen Mother," and that "There
are traces of Marston in IV.iii and IV.iv, and--more markedly--at sundry
points through Act V." (6) In 2001, Charles Cathcart argued that
the play originated with Marston, was revised by Dekker, Haughton, and
Day, and perhaps went through a subsequent limited revision, most likely
in 1606. (7)
Histriomastix
Histriomastix, or the Player Whipped was entered into the
Stationers' Register on 31 October 1610, and was published by
Thomas Thorpe that same year. The anonymous play was first linked to
Marston by Richard Simpson in 1878. (8) Simpson suggested that Marston
had revised an older, lost text, a theory with which R. A. Small and E.
K. Chambers agreed. (9) Other scholars, including Frederick Gard Fleay,
(10) Alvin B. Kernan, (11) and George L. Geckle, (12) argued for
Marston's sole authorship. In 1981, David J. Lake provided
linguistic evidence claiming that Marston had "a main finger"
in the play, and proposed Dekker as a possible collaborator. (13)
Marston's involvement, either as co-author or reviser, more or less
became orthodoxy until Roslyn Lander Knutson contended in 2001 that the
play does not belong in Marston's canon. (14) Knutson's
arguments have since been challenged by James R Bednarz, (15) John
Peachman, (16) and Cathcart. (17)
The Family of Love
The Family of Love was entered into the Stationers' Register
on 12 October 1607 and was published the following year in quarto form
by John Helmes. This city comedy was performed by the Children of the
King's Revels. Edward Archer ascribed the comedy to Thomas
Middleton in 1656, (18) and the play was included in Middleton's
oeuvre by Alexander Dyce, in 1840, (19) and by A. H. Bullen in 1885.
(20) Gerald J. Eberle contended in 1948 that the play was written by
Dekker and Middleton. (21) George R. Price argued in 1969 that neither
dramatist was responsible for the play. (22) In 1975, Lake concluded
that the play contains the hands of Middleton, Dekker, and Lording
Barry. (23) In 1999, MacDonald P. Jackson, Gary Taylor, and Paul
Mulholland convincingly dislodged the ascription to Middleton and argued
that Lording Barry was sole author. (24) They concluded that "If,
as the 1608 edition explicitly tells us, The Family of Love had a single
author, Lording Barry is the obvious candidate, on the basis of both
external and internal evidence." (25) However, Cathcart, writing in
2008, proposed that Marston "is likely to have been an original
composer of the play." (26)
The Insatiate Countess
The Insatiate Countess was first published in quarto by Thomas
Archer in 1613; the title page announced Marston as the author. However,
one copy of the 1613 quarto contains a cancel leaf attributing the play
to William Barksted and Lewis Machin, while a third quarto, published by
Hugh Perrie in 1631, assigns the play to Marston. Shortly afterwards,
Perrie provided an alternative title page, which mentions Barksted as
the author. These divergences in title page attributions have been
followed by polarization in authorship attribution studies: Lake
concluded in 1981 that the play was non-Marstonian. (27) Conversely,
Giorgio Melchiori argued in 1984 that there was strong evidence for
"the existence of a first draft by Marston, extending to the first
part of the comic plot and to the whole of the tragic one, but limited,
after Act I, to certain passages and scenes." (28) He elaborated
that "Marston devised the plot and underplot of the play, wrote a
first draft of Act I, part of II.i, some speeches and outlines of the
rest, particularly Il.ii, Il.iv and, to a lesser extent, III.iv, IV.ii
and V.i." (29) Cathcart has more recently argued that the play was
"written in or soon after 1601, probably during the time of
Marston's connection with the Children of Paul's [....] its
first published text reflects a version prepared with a view to
performance at the Whitefriars by the Children of the King's
Revels," and that "Barksted and Machin treated the
playscript" for "The Whitefriars performances." (30)
Methodologies
We examine Marston's acknowledged sole-authored stage plays in
order to identify authorial markers. We also compare results for
collaborative plays, such as Eastward Ho, and plays that were revised or
augmented by other playwrights, such as The Malcontent, with the four
contested texts. This enables us to ascertain whether these
"dubious" texts correlate with the stylistic patterns for
plays in which Marston's hand can be found. Our tests involve the
following markers: spelling preferences; vocabulary; collocations
(including synonyms and words belonging to the same semantic and
associative groups); and versification features. Some of our methods are
computational, while others involve manual analyses of versification and
of old spelling texts drawn from ProQuest. (31) We also make use of the
search functions available for the database Early English Books Online,
or EEBO, (32) within the appropriate time period 1590-1610. Marston had
ceased writing plays after he was ordained deacon in September 1609.
Vocabulary
"O" and "Oh" Spelling Distinctions
Several attribution scholars have examined the spelling distinction
between "Oh" and "O" in texts of disputed
authorship. For example, Jackson has shown that Shakespeare displays an
"overwhelming preponderance of O spellings," which
distinguishes his hand in collaborative texts from Middleton's, who
"strongly preferred the spelling Oh." (33) Such forms of
analysis are of some use when examining texts that were printed from
autograph copies, but we should remember that "there are various
kinds of hands which have contributed to the existence of each text: the
poet/playwright, the scribe, the compositor, the editor, the prompter,
perhaps various actors." (34) However, examinations of spelling
distinctions can provide useful supplementary evidence.
We tested Marston's uncontested sole-authored plays and found
that the dramatist seems to have overwhelmingly preferred the spelling
"O":
The only anomaly is Jack Drum's Entertainment. Given that
seven out of eight plays display an overwhelming preference for
"O", we can be confident that this marker is of some use. If
we compare Marston's disputed and collaborative/revised plays, we
find some interesting ratios:
The most striking play in this list is Lust's Dominion: it is
unlike any text in which Marston's hand can be found. The four
examples of "O" spellings are concentrated in the last two
scenes of the play: V.v and V.vi. The Family of Love accords with other
Marston texts in its preference for "O," but Lording Barry
also displays this preference in his Ram Alley (1608), which has a ratio
of 24:2. (35)
"Whilst" and "While" Preferences
Lake highlighted the fact that Marston overwhelmingly preferred
"whilst" to "while." (36) As Jackson puts it,
Marston "used 'whilst' thirty-five times in his pageants,
masques, and poems, without ever using 'while'. Every writer
makes a multitude of such choices, which form a kind of personal
signature." (37) However, by our count, there are nine instances of
"while" in Marston's unassisted plays. We present the
ratios in these texts below:
The similitude of some of these ratios is striking, and suggests
that this test can help us to identify Marston's hand in texts of
uncertain authorship. Many of the ratios in Table 4 differ from
Marston's uncontested/unaided texts:
The high count for "while" in Histriomastix could be the
result of either revision or non-Marstonian authorship. It is worth
noting, however, that the count for "while" is even higher in
Eastward Ho. Both Chapman and Jonson preferred "while" in
their dramatic works, which may point towards Marston's hand in
I.i, III.ii, and IV.i of that play. This distribution largely accords
with the divisions of authorship proposed by Percy Simpson in 1932 and
C. G. Petter in 1973. (38) The high count for "while" in
Histriomastix does not tally with Lake's suggestion that Marston
collaborated with Dekker on that play. (39) The overall preference for
"whilst" in Lust's Dominion is not strong evidence for
Marston's hand, for Dekker "nearly always writes whilst,"
(40) and Haughton and Day also seem to have preferred
"whilst." The ratio for The Family of Love does not support an
ascription to Marston, but does accord with the ratio for Lording
Barry's Ram Alley: 4:14.
It is difficult to make anything of our findings for The Insatiate
Countess, given that we have little or nothing of Barksted and
Machin's unassisted works to test, although Barksted preferred
"whilst" in his extant poems. We should remember that, in the
cases of Barksted, Machin, Haughton, and Lording Barry, "small
sample size means smaller power." (41) Act I of this play has an
equal ratio (1:1) of "whilst" and "while"; the sole
appearance of "whilst" in this act could point to
Marston's hand.
"Amongst" and "Among" Preferences
We found that Marston almost never used "amongst":
It is therefore surprising to discover that "amongst"
features in every act of Histriomastix except act II and act V (the sole
occurrence of "among" features in act IV). In Lust's
Dominion, "amongst" can be found in III.iv, III.vi, and V.vi
(notably, Day overwhelmingly prefers "amongst" in his
unassisted plays). The sole example of Marston's preferred form,
"among," occurs in V.i. The Family of Love does not display a
marked predilection for either form--it contains two more instances of
"among" than "amongst"--while Lording Barry's
Ram Alley has three instances of "amongst" and one of
"among." The Insatiate Countess is comparable to Marston, but
some of these figures are very low and thus provide tentative evidence
(Barksted displays a partiality for "amongst" in his poems).
Possibly due to Webster's hand, the augmented version of The
Malcontent contains more instances of "amongst" than any other
play in Marston's undoubted canon, (see Table 6).
"Betwixt" and "Between" Preferences
Lake pointed out in 1975 that "Marston hardly ever uses"
the connective "between." (42) Our findings validate
Lake's observation, for there are sixteen instances of
"betwixt" in the uncontested/sole-authored plays but only two
instances of "between", (see Table 7).
Again, as Table 8 shows, Histriomastix does not correlate with
Marston; nor does The Insatiate Countess, although Marston's
preferred form can be found in I.i, III.i, and IV.i. The sole example of
"between" is found in III.v of Lust's Dominion. Dekker
preferred "between"; Haughton's Englishmen for My Money
(1598) exhibits no preference; while Day preferred "betwixt."
Lording Barry uses "betwixt" on six occasions in Ram Alley,
but never "between":
"em" and "Them" Preferences
Ashley H. Thorndike, (43) A. C. Partridge, (44) Hoy, (45) and Lake,
(46) have been able to differentiate dramatists through their
preferences for either "them" or "em". We discovered
that Marston consistently preferred "them" throughout his
dramatic career:
The contested and collaborative/revised plays largely accord with
Marston's accepted plays (see Table 10). It is notable that
Lust's Dominion has more examples of "em" than all of the
uncontested Marston texts combined, and it is possibly significant that
these clipped forms occur in III.vi, IV.v, and V.iii, for Day and Dekker
employed "em" at a much higher rate than Marston, while
Haughton did not use "em." Our findings thus suggest that Day
or Dekker were responsible for these scenes. Moreover, although the
ratio for The Family of Love correlates with other Marston texts, we
have found an almost identical number for "them" in
Barry's Ram Alley, which has a ratio of 2:47, (47) The distribution
of these forms could help us to rule Marston out as an authorship
candidate for certain scenes of Lust's Dominion, while our findings
for The Family of Love do not rule Marston out, but do not rule Lording
Barry out either. The Insatiate Countess contains far too many clipped
forms to assign the whole play to Marston, which suggests that
substantial material was written by Barksted and/or Machin. (see Table
10).
In terms of the overall preferences examined above, Histriomastix,
The Family of Love, and The Insatiate Countess comply with
Marston's sole-authored texts in three out of five instances,
whereas Lust's Dominion accords in just two out of five instances.
The first three plays could be, at least in part, by Marston, while the
latter play seems unlikely.
Exclamatory Noises (Interjections)
Marston displays a fondness for what George K. Hunter referred to
as "exclamatory noises," such as "pah" and
"whop." (48) We examined Marston's undoubted
sole-authored plays for exclamations, interjections, and oaths, and
identified the following markers: "fa," "faugh,"
"fie," "fut," "la," "pah,"
"pew," "pish," "puh," "sfoot,"
"sheart," "slid," "slud,"
"tush," "tut," "um," "whogh,"
and "whop." (49) See Table 11:
Some of these items are rare, but many of them are common in drama
of the period. The purpose of this test is to provide an overall
comparison (irrespective of rarity) between the use of exclamations,
interjections, and oaths in Marston's undoubted sole-authored
plays, and then to compare these findings to Marston's disputed and
putatively collaborative/revised plays (see Table 12).
The Insatiate Countess contains fewer Marstonian exclamations than
any of his acknowledged plays--"fie" occurs in the first two
acts of the play, and "tut" is found in act [GAMMA]V. The six
instances of "fie" in The Family of Love (distributed
throughout the play, with the exception of act II) are of interest, for
this exclamation is not found in Lording Barry's Ram Alley.
However, as noted by Taylor, Jackson, and Mulholland (although their
count of sixteen is erroneous, for they included three abbreviated
speech prefixes), the number for "tut" is in accordance with
Barry's play which has a total of twelve. (50)
The exclamation "pish" occurs in I.i and I.iv of
Lust's Dominion. Haughton never used "pish," but it
occurs in Day's Law Tricks, or Who Would Have Thought It? (1604)
and Dekker's 2 Honest Whore (1605). "Puh" features in a
number of Dekker plays, but not Haughton or Day's; this could point
towards Dekker or Marston's hands in II.ii, IV.ii, and IV.iii of
Lust's Dominion. Dekker used "sheart" in his
sole-authored plays, whereas Haughton and Day did not; this oath occurs
in I.ii, II.iv, and III.iv of Lust's Dominion. The two occurrences
of "tut" are found in III.v and V.vi. Both Haughton and Day
used "tut," while it is rare in Dekker's corpus, and does
not occur in his unassisted plays. Thus, Dekker, Day, and Haughton might
have written Lust's Dominion, while Marston probably did not
contribute to it. (51)
Suffixes: Latinate Termination -ate
Marston is notorious for his "affected diction," and his
"indiscriminate use of Latinate terminations, especially words
ending in -ate." (52) Reproducing Frederick Erastus Pierce's
"three-syllable Latin word test," (53) we searched
Marston's uncontested plays for polysyllabic words ending in -ate.
We adjusted our raw counts to the overall word count of each text. Table
13 lists the occurrence of -ate every x words, (see Table 13).
Now look at Table 14.
Lust's Dominion is well outside the range for plays in which
Marston's hand can incontestably be found (one -ate suffix per
742-1518 words). Pierce pointed out in 1909 that "Dekker almost
always uses" words of Latin origin "sparingly," (54) so a
low count for -ate accords with a theory of Dekker's being the main
hand in that play. Conversely, Histriomastix is commensurate with
Marston's practice, with a rate of one -ate suffix every 845 words.
The Insatiate Countess has a higher frequency than any Marston text,
while The Family of Love corresponds to some of Marston's later
plays. Lording Barry's use of the suffix -ate in his Ram Alley is
quite unlike Marston: Barry averages one -ate every 3358 words in that
play. The plays that definitely contain Marston' s hand, The
Malcontent (augmented) and Eastward Ho, are within the range for
sole-authored Marston texts, despite containing non-Marstonian material.
On the basis of the -ate test, Histriomastix and The Family of Love
resemble Marston's style, Lust's Dominion does not, and The
Insatiate Countess falls outside of Marston's usual range, but is
similar to Jack Drum's Entertainment.
Most Frequent Word Spelling Distinctions
We compared a list of the most frequent fifty words using the
software programs Wordstar and QDA Miner, (56) selecting Marston texts
plus texts from the canons of Dekker, Jonson, and Day. Global mean
figures for all the top occurring non-character frequent words were
compared to the top fifty global mean occurring words. We compared a
separate list for those words in Marston only, and then compared the top
ten words for their respective commonalities. This enabled us to tell
which words from the common Marston list differed from the global group
common words, therefore helping us to determine "Marston-like"
spelling.
Table 15 shows the top ten Marston key words. Marston texts favor
"foole" over "fool" and "onely" over
"only," but contrastingly "he" over "hee";
"lord" over "lorde"; and "be" over
"bee." However, there is little consistency of the
"e" usage.
Marston seems to use "nay" in every play attributed to
him, and the reasonably high number (15) in The Family of Love fits his
overall pattern. Marston uses the word "sir" in every play
attributed to him except The Wonder of Women. Lust's Dominion has
the next lowest count, and therefore does not resemble Marston in this
respect. Histriomastix stands out as the only play attributed to Marston
with no instances of "ha" in the text. Lust's Dominion
and The Family of Love stand out for having only instances of
"fool" and no instances of "foole." These two plays
also favor the non-Marstonian "think" over "thinke."
We should bear in mind that textual evidence of spelling preferences
based on printed texts may often be due to the printer/typesetter etc.
(57) Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Lust's Dominion and The
Family of Love least resemble Marston's preferences out of the four
contested texts analyzed here, (see Table 15).
Collocations
We employed the anti-plagiarism software Plagiarism in order to
compare the four contested plays with the undoubted Marston canon, as
well as the plays of authorial candidates. (58) This software can be set
to highlight any specified collocation length within a pair of
electronic documents, from two words upwards, and can also identify
approximate matching utterances (e.g., some sequences might differ
slightly in their syntactical arrangement or spelling). We limited our
searches to sequences consisting of at least three words (known as
trigrams in Corpus Linguistics). A search that admitted twoword units
would reveal a higher number of matches, whereas a search limited to
large phrasal structures might filter out significant findings. This
generated a list of 8092 phrases, which was then run through a program
which compared all those matches with the texts in the rest of a
database of 49 early modern author groups. The last step was to compare
those matches which only occur in the Marston core canon and each of the
candidate texts but nowhere else. This produced lists of results (one
for each candidate text) including a percentage for each of the texts
(the number of rare matches, divided by the number of words). Our
results demonstrated that Lording Barry's Ram Alley (the
implications of which will be explored below) and Histriomastix share
the most rare matches with Marston's uncontested plays, whereas
Lust's Dominion and The Family of Love share the least number of
rare shared phrases:
We ran a concurrent batch of tests using WCopyfind (developed by
Lou Bloomfield, Professor of Physics). (59) We tested both old spelling
texts, drawn from ProQuest, as well as normalized texts, (60) for
accurate results, and determined the rarity of these matches using the
database Early English Books Online, or EEBO. This time we counted
matches that only occur within each targeted text and the acknowledged
plays of authorial candidates first performed during the period
1590-1610. Collaborative texts were omitted.
Whereas the first round of tests was quantitative, this round
focussed primarily on the qualitative aspects of shared phrases. We
should bear Muriel St. Clare Byrne's caveats in mind when examining
collocations. In 1932, Byrne demonstrated that authorship attribution
scholars who wish to make valid ascriptions, on the basis of parallel
phrases, must adhere to the following criteria: parallels may be due to
plagiarism, either conscious, unconscious, or coincidental, rather than
common authorship; mere verbal parallelism is of little value in
comparison to parallelism of thought coupled with some verbal
parallelism; and mere accumulation of parallels is of no significance.
(61)
Lust's Dominion
We began by testing Marston, Dekker, Day, and Haughton's
sole-authored plays against Lust's Dominion. We recorded every
shared trigram-plus and then checked each matching utterance against all
plays performed during 1590-1610 for uniqueness (see Table 17).
The results are not promising for Marston: in comparison to Dekker,
Haughton, and Day, there are few matches indicative of common
authorship, despite the fact that his uncontested sole-authored canon is
larger than the other candidates' unassisted plays. Marston's
eight uncontested sole-authored plays share 29 unique phrases with
Lust's Dominion; Dekker's five unassisted plays of the period
1590-1610 (Old Fortunatus, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Satiromastix, 2
Honest Whore, and The Whore of Babylon) share 39 phrases; Day's
four sole-authored plays (Law Tricks, The Isle of Gulls, Humour Out of
Breath, and The Parliament of Bees) share 19 unique phrases; and
Haughton's Englishmen for My Money shares 12 trigrams-plus. The
evidence for a three-way collaboration between Dekker, Day, and Haughton
seems strong, with Dekker as "the controlling hand throughout, for
there are many touches suggestive of his revision of his
collaborators' work." (62)
Nonetheless, it is worth citing some matches with Marston, despite
the fact that they seem to be the result of influence, rather than
authorship. For instance, the match, "And since I lived for her,
for her I'll die," (63) with "And since I cannot live
with him I die," (64) is noteworthy. The triple, "And since
I," embraces "live" and "I die," placed in
almost identical positions in the pentameter line. Both lines contain
pronouns and provide a thought parallel. In Lust's Dominion, the
King delivers this line following the news that Maria is dead, while
Mellida's line is in response to the fallacious report that Antonio
has drowned. Additionally, we have discovered another thought parallel,
coupled with verbal parallelism, between these lines and Antonio's
Revenge, through attentive reading. At the conclusion of Marston's
tragedy, the revenger vows to remain faithful to his dead lover:
"She lives in me, with her my love is dead" (AR, V.vi.42). It
could be argued that the repetition of this formula in Marston's
play increases the likelihood of appropriation; furthermore, such
combinations of thought and language are rare in Lust's Dominion.
Our analysis indicates that Haughton's contributions are
minimal but that his hand can be found in act II, III.v, and V.iv of
Lust's Dominion. For instance, in II.v, Eleazar, upon hearing of
Mendoza and the Prince's escape, says,
Winds leave your two and thirty palaces,
And meeting all in one, join all your might,
To give them speedy and a prosperous flight.
(LD, II.v.)
We find the same distinct collocation of words and ideas in
Pisaro's speech in Englishmen for My Money:
But come what will, no wind can come amiss,
For two-and-thirty winds that rules the seas
And blows about this airy region,
Thirty-two ships have I to equal them. (65)
In V.iv, Philip, chained by the neck along with Mendoza, the Queen
Mother, and Hortenzo, states, "Yet can I laugh in my extremest
pangs" (LD, V.iv.). This gives us another distinct collocation
match with the Portuguese moneylender Pisaro, as he devises a complot to
entrap his daughters in marriage: "Tickled with extreme joy, laugh
in my face" (EM, vii.7).
Dekker's hand is evident throughout much of the play; the
verbal fabric of act I, in particular, is infused with his phrasing.
Some of these unique matches give us an insight into the
dramatist's word associations, such as, "Thou cri'dst,
away, away, and frown'dst upon me" (LD, I.i.), with
"Away, away, and meet me presently," (66) while others exhibit
complex collocations of words and ideas, such as Alvero's
declarative, "Death's frozen hand holds Royal Philip's
heart" (I.ii.), which parallels Ampedo's dying words in Old
Fortunatus (1599): "I faint, Death's frozen hand / Congeals
life's little river in my breast" (OF, Vii. 168-69). We might
also compare Eleazar's line, "And make all Spain a
bonfire" (LD, I.ii.), with "and make all de court and country
burn" (OF, IV.iii.60-61). Many of these matching utterances embrace
additional words serving the same syntactical and/or semantic functions.
But Dekker was also apt to repeat long, contiguous strings of identical
words, as we can see in the shared seven-word unit below:
Why, this is as it should be. He once gone (LD, II.v.) why this is
as it should be. (OF, III.i.181)
Our tests also highlight distinctive parallels of thought and
language in the fourth act of Lust's Dominion. For example, in IV.v
the First Soldier states that "my legs are not of the biggest"
(LD, IV.v.). We find the same thought process in The Shoemaker's
Holiday (1599), when Margery tells Hodge that "thou knowest the
length of my foot. As it is none of the biggest." (67) Day's
hand is somewhat harder to identify, for many of the unique shared
phrases are fairly trivial, such as the trigram, "was the
villain," which can be found in the Queen Mother's line,
"Spaniards, this was the villain" (V.vi.), and the following
line in Humour Out of Breath (1607): "My lord, Hortensio was the
villain." (68) Nonetheless, these repeated phrases tend to cluster
in scenes for which the linguistic patterns accord with a theory of
Day's authorship, rather than Dekker, Haughton, or indeed Marston.
Histriomastix
We discovered 29 unique (in the period 1590-1610) trigrams-plus
shared between acknowledged Marston plays and Histriomastix. We can
compare this figure to an undoubted text relatively close in date
(according to Martin Wiggins's chronology), What You Will, which
shares 46 unique trigrams-plus with the remainder of Marston's
sole-authored canon. The large majority of these parallel phrases in
What You Will are three and four-word units, but Marston sometimes
recycled larger chunks of speech, as we can see below:
That casts out beams as ardent as those flakes
Which singed the world by rash-brain'd Phaethon (69)
ardent as those flames that singed the world by heedless Phaeton. (70)
Although Histriomastix has a lower count for unique matches than
What You Will, the matching phrases seem to indicate a single
dramatist's phrasal lexicon, with several unobtrusive matches, as
well as longer strings of words, which reveal parallels of thought as
well as language. We might note that the phrase, "remember to
forget," (71) in act IV of Histriomastix, can also be found in
Antonio and Mellida (A&M, IV.i.125) (72) and What You Will (WYW,
III.i.4-5). As John Peachman puts it: "That the phrase appears
twice in Marston's acknowledged works is suggestive." (73) In
act IV of Histriomastix, the merchant Velure's metaphorical phrase,
"Should stand and lick the pavement with his knee" (Hist,
IV.i.), provides a verbal match with The Malcontent, when Mendoza
imagines "petitionary vassals licking the pavement with their
slavish knees" (Male, I.v.28-29). We find another distinctive image
in the following act: "Spit on thy bosom; vowing here by
heaven" (Hist., V.i.). This line matches the following speech in
Antonio's Revenge, delivered by Pandulpho:
I'll skip from earth into the arms of heaven,
And from triumphal arch of blessedness
Spit on thy frothy breast.
(AR, II.ii.81-83)
We should also note the following line in act V of Histriomastix,
"but then there's a thing call'd Action" (Hist.,
V.i.), which recalls Marston's parody of the third 1602 addition to
Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1587): "There is a thing
called scourging Nemesis" (AR, IV.iii.125). This passage also
affords us another match with Antonio's Revenge, as we can see in
the lines: "O 'twill be rare" (Hist., V.i) and "O,
'twill be rare, and all unsuspected done" (AR, II.i. 18). In
the final act of Histriomastix, Perpetuana says, "From Poverty to
Famine, worse and worse" (Hist, VI.i.), which is followed by
Filissella's rhyming line: "The scourge of Pride, and
Heaven's detested curse" (VI.i.). We find the same association
of rhyming words in The Malcontent, when Malevole says: "But fame
ne'er heals, still rankles worse and worse; / Such is of
uncontrolled lust the curse" (Male, II.v. 148-49). The collocation,
"worse and worse," with the determiner "the," the
preposition "of," and the noun "curse," is
accompanied by abstract nouns with negative connotations in both
examples. Such combinations of thought and language are most apparent in
the final three acts of the play.
The Family of Love
According to our WCopyfind test results, verbal links between The
Family of Love and Marston exceed what we might expect for an authentic
Marston text. There are 59 unique links in total (18 of these parallel
phrases cluster in act II; followed by 12 in act IV; 10 in act V; 10 in
act III; 7 in act I; and 2 in the epilogue). When Doctor Glister states,
"that's the fittest place, for by the break of day," (74)
he is echoing a line from Marston's Antonio and Mellida: "Upon
his shoulders; that's the fittest place for it" (A&M,
III.ii.242). Lipsalve's line, "A plague upon him for a
Glister" (FL, III.vi.), closely parallels the moment Malevole
assures Pietro that "heaven will send a plague upon him for a
rogue" (Male, IV.iv.25). A particularly interesting collocation
occurs in Maria's line, "the cincture of mine arms" (FL,
III.vii.), which echoes Jack Drum's Entertainment: "the
cincture of a faithful arm," (75) while Gerardine's
exclamation, "O monstrous! this is a foul blot" (FL, V.iii.),
provides a striking parallel with Mulligrub's line in The Dutch
Courtesan: "O monstrous! this is a lie." (76)
Cathcart is therefore undoubtedly correct in highlighting links
between The Family of Love and Marston's hand. (77) However, as
noted above, we also discovered dense verbal relations between Lording
Barry's Ram Alley and Marston's corpus, which suggests that
matches between these texts could be due to plagiarism. Indeed, Lording
Barry, who was a pirate (and perhaps, as our findings suggest, a
literary pirate also), has been accused of "shameless
plagiarism." (78) But, to the best of our knowledge, no scholar has
pointed out the extent to which Barry seems to have absorbed
Marston's phraseology, although Brian Gibbons, writing in 1968,
noted Barry's "parody in the manner of early Marston,"
(79) an observation echoed by Simon Shepherd over a decade later. (80)
The verbal evidence therefore suggests that either Marston had a hand in
both Ram Alley and The Family of Love, or, more likely in our view, that
Barry was an inveterate borrower who knew Marston's works
intimately and was able to weave Marston's phraseology into his own
passages.
Despite the significant number of matches with Marston, we have
traced Lording Barry's peculiar combinations of words and thoughts
throughout The Family of Love. We found 21 unique verbal links (there
are 6 matches in act I; 3 in act II; 2 in act III; 1 in act IV; and 9 in
act V) between this play and Ram Alley. Some of these shared phrases are
long, contiguous sequences, as we can see in Purge's line,
"short tale to make, I got her ring" (FL, V.iii.), which
parallels (we might note the reference to a female character,
"her" and "daughter," in both lines). Throat's
speech, "Short tale to make, I fingered have your daughter."
(81) However, the large majority of these shared utterances are
discontinuous and suggest a single author's word associations. For
example, the declarative, "I have known the natures of divers of
these gallants" (FL, I.i.), shares the units, "I have,"
and "of these gallants," with "I have done that for many
of these gallants" (RA, I.ii.37), while Master Dryfat's line,
"pity the state of a poor gentleman" (FL, I.iii.), shares a
distinct collocation with William Smallshanks's imploration to
Taffeta: "Dear widow, pity the state of a young, / Poor, yet proper
gentleman" (RA, V.i.62-63). It seems that the line, "I gave it
to the relief of the distressed Geneva" (FL, Viii.), could derive
from the same author's mental repertoire of words and ideas as:
"To gather relief for the distressed Geneva" (RA, .V.iii.285).
The numerous word strings co-occurring with Marston's dramatic
efforts in both The Family of Love and Ram Alley could therefore be
indicative of imitation.
The Insatiate Countess
There are 48 unique verbal links between The Insatiate Countess and
Marston's acknowledged corpus: 7 can be traced in act I; 11 in act
II; 8 in act III; 10 in act IV; and 12 in act V. The distribution of
these parallels suggests that Marston had completed much of the play
before it was, tentatively, revised by Barksted and Machin. Our findings
suggest that Barksted had a main hand in the beginning and the end of
the play. To offer just a couple of examples, Roberto's simile,
"like beauty in a cloud," (82) parallels Barksted's
second poem, Hiren, or The Fair Greek (1611): "Let not thy sunne of
beauty in a cloud," (83) while the line, "Nature's
step-children rather her disease" (IC, I.i. 124), is identical to:
"Natures step-children, rather her disease" (Hiren, 1. 520).
The final speech of the play is probably all Barksted's, as is
suggested by the Duke's image, "With thousand torches ushering
the way" (IC, V.ii.231), which duplicates a line in Mirrha the
Mother of Adonis (1607): "with thousand torches ushering the
way" (Mirrha, 1. 194). Evidently, Barksted had a habit of repeating
lines and images more or less verbatim. He seems to have been
responsible for framing the play, and almost certainly touched up
dialogue and added scenes/passages elsewhere.
Verbal links with Marston range from seemingly unexceptional
phrases to long sequences of words. For example, phrases such as 'I
am your vowed' (followed by a noun), in the line, "I am your
vowed enemy" (IC, I.i. 199), and "I am your vowed
servant" (DC, II.ii. 140), are so unremarkable that they are
unlikely to have been plagiarized. In act II we find some of the
strongest evidence for Marston's individuality: Abigail's
line, "Well sir, your visor gives you colour for what you say"
(IC, II.i.98), shares a distinct combination of thought and language
with Rossaline's dialogue in Antonio and Mellida: "good colour
for what he speaks" (A&M, V.ii.61). Here we see an identical
word sequence embracing the comparable lexical choices "say"
and "speaks." Similarly, it seems that Isabella's lines,
"My husband's not the man I would have had. / O my new
thoughts to this brave sprightly lord" (IC, II.iii.45-46), derive
from the same author's idiosyncratic lexicon of collocations as:
"you should have had my thought for a penny" (A&M,
II.i.74-75). There is substantial evidence for Marston's hand in
IV.iv, as we can see in verbal parallelisms such as, "That is as
spotless as the eye of heav'n" (IC, IV.iv.28), and "Hast
thou a love as spotless as the brow / Of clearest heaven" (AR,
I.v.41-42). There are also several long collocations shared between
Marston's acknowledged plays and passages in act V. For example,
Marston seems to have recalled the Ghost of Andrugio's line in
Antonio's Revenge, "Blest be thy hand, I taste the joys of
heaven" (V.v.36), when he composed Isabella's conversation
with Sago: "Blessed be thy hand: I sacrifice a kiss" (IC,
V.i.77). Isabella, like Andrugio's spirit, associates this
five-word unit with the notion of "vengeance" (V.i.78).
Similarly, the line, "Oh husband, I little thought to see you in
this taking" (IC, V.ii.41), echoes Mistress Mulligrub's
lamentation: "O husband! I little thought you should have come to
think on God" (DC, V.iii.82-83), while Claridiana's
declarative, "Flesh and blood cannot endure it" (IC,
V.ii.57-58), closely parallels Jack Drum's Entertainment:
"flesh and blood cannot endure your countenance" (JD, IV.i.).
Our evidence suggests that Marston's hand is more prominent in the
extant text than previous scholars have supposed.
Versification Features for the Purpose of Authorship
Versification analysis is a good tool for attribution, especially
if the text is long enough; unlike verbal tests, it cannot attribute a
single line. One of the most important parameters in versification
analyses is the distribution of "pauses" in the lines of the
texts. "Pauses" and "strong syntactic breaks" are
not synonymous: Ants Oras, the pioneer in researching the placement of
"pauses" in Renaissance plays, relied on punctuation in his
analysis. (84) He studied hundreds of texts, mostly dramas, counting
punctuation: "pauses" were identified with commas and other
punctuation marks as well as places where lines are divided between
characters. The disadvantage of this method is the reliance on the
literacy of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scribes, prompters,
and actors. Marina Tarlinskaja's approach relies on syntax. (85)
The advantages are objectivity and uniformity of the approach, the
disadvantage is the painstaking manual work. Tarlinskaja's
versification analysis is not limited to syntactic breaks, but this and
other parameters of versification research as applied to Marston's
plays will be described below.
Ants Oras's Methodology Applied to Our Material
Oras studied the positions that "pauses" occur in the
verse lines to answer questions of periodization and authorship. The
number of "pauses" after syllables 1-9 was calculated as a
percentage from the total number of all "pauses" after every
syllable of the line. (86) Oras recorded patterns for several
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists "formed by all the pauses
indicated by internal punctuation," which he termed A-patterns;
"pauses shown by punctuation marks other than commas"
(B-patterns); and all "breaks within the pentameter line dividing
speeches by different characters" (C-patterns). (87) We reproduce
Oras's results for A-patterns (all punctuation marks in pentameter
lines). The remarkable similarities in patterns for same-author plays
examined by Oras suggest that punctuation marks, be they authorial or
compositorial (Oras examined the earliest editions available for each
play), "keep within the rhythmical climate of the time," (88)
and are useful for identifying a dramatist's individual prosodic
characteristics. (89) Using Oras's approach, we examined the
"pause" patterns for Marston's unaided texts and found
that, with the exception of some vacillation in positions 5 and 6,
Marston was consistent in his placement of "pauses" throughout
his career. All of these plays exhibit a major peak after position 4,
followed by a minor peak after 6. (90)
We also examined act I of Lust's Dominion, in accordance with
Hoy's hypothesis that Marston "seems mainly to have concerned
himself with the beginning" of the play, (91) as well as A-patterns
for the three other contested texts (Oras examined C-patterns for The
Family of Love in just twenty lines of verse):
Histriomastix is consistent with the patterns found for unaided
Marston plays. Position 1 is slightly higher than the dramatist's
sole-authored efforts, and syllabic positions 4 and 6 are slightly low,
but overall the "pause" profile fits. The Insatiate Countess
also suggests the "special physiognomy" of Marston's
hand, (92) although positions 5 and 6 are slightly elevated.
On the other hand, the results contradict the argument that Marston
was involved in the composition of act I of Lust's Dominion:
"pauses" after positions 3 and 7 are too high for Marston;
"pauses" after position 4 too low for any of the
dramatist's plays; and the dominant peak after position 6 is unlike
Marston. On the basis of these data, it is hard to imagine that
Marston's hand can be found in these scenes. The punctuation
placement seem to validate H. D. Sykes's argument that these scenes
were "clearly written by one hand" and bear "the
unmistakeable stamp of Dekker." (93) We agree with Algernon Charles
Swinburne that "The sweet spontaneous luxury of the lines in which
the queen strives to seduce her paramour out of sullenness has the very
ring of Dekker's melody." (94) Significantly, the large
majority of Dekker's plays, including The Shoemaker's Holiday
and Old Fortunatus, also display a peak after position 6, as we might
expect at the period of writing; conversely, Day's The Isle of
Gulls (1606) and Humour Out of Breath display peaks after position 4.
(95) The evidence for Dekker's sole authorship of act I of
Lust's Dominion is compelling. (96)
The "pause" profile for The Family of Love shows some
correlations with Marston. The percentage for position 1 is identical to
that found for The Dutch Courtesan; the percentage for
"pauses" after the second syllable is very close to The Wonder
of Women; and the percentage after syllable 4 accords with Marston. But
there are also some differences: the percentage of "pauses"
after positions 3 and 7 are too low for Marston. Moreover, the
dramatist(s) responsible for this play employed "pauses" after
position 6 far more frequently than Marston, whose style remains in the
pre-1600 versification mode. Having just one Lording Barry play for
comparison problematizes analysis of this kind, but the profile for Ram
Alley roughly corresponds to that found for The Family of Love: a high
peak at position 4, closely followed by position 6. Our tests do not
rule Marston out for the authorship of The Family of Love, but they do
not rule Barry out either.
Marina Tarlinskaja's Methodology Applied to Our Material
Tarlinskaja's versification analysis includes 12 parameters.
Here are some of them. Our analysis of syntactic breaks is based solely
on syntax, not on punctuation (cf. with Oras's "pauses").
Analysis based on syntax allows us to disregard punctuation inserted by
copyists and later editors. There are many nuances in syntactic affinity
between adjacent words in a line, but we differentiate only three
degrees: (1) close links, marked by [/], as between a modifier and a
modified noun, or a verb and its direct object, e.g., "the humble
/slave, we desire / increase," (2) medium links that are also
medium breaks, marked [//], as between the subject and the predicate, a
verb and an adverbial modifier of time or place, or adjacent words that
have no immediate syntactic links, e.g., "thy fingers // walk;
alive // that time; My heart // my eye // the freedom / of that
right"; and (3) strong breaks, as between the author's direct
speech, or between a sentence and a clause, or two independent
sentences, e.g., "For shame," /// he cries, /// let go, ///
and let me / go." The links and breaks are calculated as
percentages from the total number of lines. In Elizabethan times, the
most frequent break fell after syllable 4, emphasizing the hemistich
segmentation 4 + 6 syllables. After 1600 the most frequent break began
to fall after syllable 6, or even 7. The line segmentation became 6 + 4
or 7 + 3 (or 7 + 4).
Another parameter of analysis is stressing. The basis of this test
is separation of the abstract metrical scheme from actual stresses in
actual lines of the metrical text, in our case, iambic pentameter. Metre
is a scheme abstracted from many actual texts. It also incorporates a
set of rules that the author is aware of, so he chooses a limited set of
words and word combinations in a particular syntactic arrangement to
follow the rules. For example, "The divine Desdemona" is
permissible for Shakespeare, but "The divine? You said, divine
Desdemona?" is not. The metrical rules are stricter or more
permissive during different periods of English versification and in
different genres. We calculated the percentage of stresses on each
syllabic position of all lines of the text from the total number of
lines. The resulting strings of numbers are called the stress profiles
of the text. It is convenient to tabulate stressing on even
("metrically strong," S) and odd ("metrically weak,"
W) syllabic positions separately. The problem of stressing monosyllables
on S and W is challenging. (97)
We also examined phrasal stressing: a stress on W adjacent to the
stress on S on its left or its right, e.g., "dear LOVE," and
"with TOO much pain." In the first example, the extra-metrical
stress occurs to the left of the stress on S, in the second example, to
the right. The first type of phrasal stressing is conditionally called
proclitic, the second type enclitic. The ratio of enclitic phrases
(calculated per 1000 of the lines) is a good way of differentiating
authorship, e.g., the scenes belonging to Shakespeare and Fletcher in
The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). Among other parameters of analysis are the
types of line endings, syllabic, accentual, and syntactic. Syllabic
types fall into masculine, feminine, dactylic, and very rarely
hyperdactylic. Masculine endings can be stressed and unstressed, and the
unstressed syllable on position 10 may be created by a polysyllabic word
or by a weakly stressed or unstressed monosyllable, such as a
preposition or a conjunction. Feminine endings can be simple
("LOVing") or compound ("LOVE it"). Compound
feminine and dactylic endings can be light and heavy (with a stress on
syllable 11), e.g., "in LOVE too." Syntactically, line endings
can be end-stopped or run-on. Run-on lines are connected to the
following line by a medium or strong link.
Other parameters include the frequency of syllabic suffixes -ed and
-eth; the use of disyllabic variants of suffixes -ion and -ious; the
frequency of pleonastic verb "do" and of grammatical
inversions; the frequency of alliterations; and the use of deviations
from the metre to emphasize the meaning of the situation described in
the line (not unlike onomatopoeia), for example, "Duck with French
nods and apish courtesy" instead of something more
"iambic," like: "Or duck with apish nods."
Syntactic Breaks
In Elizabethan verse before 1600, the most frequent syntactic break
fell after syllabic position 4, while after 1600, in Jacobean plays, the
break fell after syllable 6 and even after 7. The sum of strong links,
medium links/breaks, and strong breaks constitute the total number of
word boundaries (WB) after each syllabic position. For comparison with
Marston's texts we shall look at Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet (1595), Henry V (1599), and King Lear (1605), because
Shakespeare's versification style reflects the general tendencies
of the periods when the plays were composed. Antonio and Mellida was
taken as a sample of Marston's style, (see Table 20).
Surprisingly, Marston's tendency is much like early
Elizabethans, in particular Christopher Marlowe, though all of
Marston's plays were composed close to or after 1600. Marlowe uses
many polysyllabic words, particularly in Tamburlaine the Great (1587);
therefore, though most breaks fall after syllable 4, the peak is not too
high." Shakespeare's plays follow the periods: a peak after
syllable 4 in the early Romeo and Juliet; breaks after 4, 5, and 6 are
almost equal in Henry V, a transitional play; and a peak after syllable
6 in the later King Lear. Breaks in later Shakespeare become more
frequent towards the end of the line. Dekker's The Noble Spanish
Soldier (1622) displays a firm peak of breaks after syllable 6. In
Marston's Antonio and Mellida the major peak of syntactic breaks
falls after syllable 4 in almost a quarter of the lines. The Insatiate
Countess, act I (all) and act V (ending with the execution of the
countess, amounting to 215 lines), though a Jacobean play, is
unquestionably Marstonian, with a peak after syllable 4. Histriomastix
and The Family of Love have high peaks of breaks after syllables 4 and 6
in an almost equal proportion, so this test does not tell us much about
their authorship. Lust's Dominion is completely un-Marstonian with
its major peak of breaks after syllable 6. It reminds us of Dekker, as
has been suggested above.
Stressing (see Table 21)
This test has turned out to be quite revealing. Antonio and Mellida
and Histriomastix display, similarly to Tamburlaine, a wave-like
tendency of stressing on S: the "dips" are on syllables 2, 6,
and 10. The Family of Love and particularly The Insatiate Countess, both
acts analyzed, also resemble Marston's style, with a
"dip" on 6, but the stressing on syllable 10 is higher and on
8 lower than in Marston's earlier plays, because there are fewer
polysyllables at the end of its lines, such as long names of personages
(Antonio and Mellida) and Romance borrowings (Histriomastix), and more
verse lines scattered among long passages of prose and non-iambic verse,
so ends of iambic pentameter lines need to be made more marked by a
stress.
A missing stress on syllable 6 is often accompanied by grammatical
symmetry, expressed most often in two attributive phrases. In
Histriomastix, symmetrical rhythmical-syntactic lines, or
"cliches" as M. L. Gasparov termed them, (100) constitute
13.5% of all lines with an omitted stress on 6, e.g., "Then sacred
knowledge by divinest things" (Hist., I.i); "All other pity is
but foolish pride" (III.i.); and "Th'impatient spirit of
the wretched sort" (III.i.).
The same types of lines are obvious in The Insatiate Countess:
"Of Dian's bowstring in some shady wood" (IC, I.i.329);
"Some little airing of his noble guest" (I.i.417). Here too
Marston followed earlier playwrights. There are symmetrical
rhythmical-syntactic patterns also of other types.
Other Features of Versification Analysis
To determine the authorship of a play it helps to calculate the
ratio of proclitic and enclitic phrases; syllabic suffixes -ed and -eth;
pleonastic verbs "do"; grammatical inversions; the disyllabic
form of the suffix -ion; and the frequency of rhythmical deviations from
the metre used to emphasize the meaning of the situation described in
the line ("rhythmical italics"). Marston's line endings
are predominantly masculine in all plays but The Insatiate Countess, the
latest play: 17.3 and 19.2%, among them compound feminine, mostly light,
but in three lines--heavy. Run-on lines are particularly numerous in
Antonio and Mellida and The Family of Love (21.5 and 29.2%). (see Table
22).
Marston's plays contain numerous stresses on W: the indices of
proclitic phrases are in mid-300s in Histriomastix and The Insatiate
Countess, lower in The Family of Love, higher in Antonio and Mellida,
and much higher in Lust's Dominion: over 500 per 1000 lines (cf.
with Dekker). The ratios of enclitics are within the same range, except
for The Insatiate Countess act V: much lower. The ratio of pleonastic
"do" is relatively low, the two exceptions being The Family of
Love and Lust's Dominion: twice as many cases of pleonastic
"do" than in the rest of "Marston's" plays
compared. A difference exists in the ratio of syllabic -ed and
disyllabic -ion: Lust's Dominion, exactly like Dekker's The
Noble Spanish Soldier, has no syllabic -ed at all, and very few
disyllabic variants of -ion, again, like Dekker's play. The Family
of Love falls within Marston's margins, and The Insatiate Countess
act V reminds us of Antonio and Mellida, Marston's much earlier
play. Shakespeare's partiality for pleonastic "do,"
compared to Marston and other playwrights, is well known. Marston was
fond of making polysyllabic words even longer: in addition to the cases
of words with disyllabic -ion, we find "phy-si-ci-an,"
"mar-ri-age," "for-be-a-rance," and
"ven-ge-ance." Rhythmical italics are particularly frequent in
Antonio and Mellida and The Insatiate Countess, plays about love and
death. Examples include: "Cropped by her hand" (IC, V.i.63);
"Mixed in his fear" (V.i.171); and "down with my ashes
sink" (V.ii.218), all from act V of The Insatiate Countess.
Overall Conclusions:
Out of the four "dubious" plays examined in this essay,
Histriomastix and The Insatiate Countess can still be attributed to
Marston with confidence, though both plays seem to contain
non-Marstonian material, probably as later alterations. As we have seen,
Marston's acknowledged works are characterized by the striking
consistency with which he employs "whilst" over
"while," "among" over "amongst," and
"betwixt" over "between." Histriomastix diverges in
many respects, but the play evinces some affinities with Marston in
terms of Latinate diction. Furthermore, the versification
characteristics of Histriomastix, e.g., its stress profile, support our
attribution of the play to early Marston. Evidence for Marston's
involvement is also supported by recurrent collocations: these suggest a
single author's idiolect, as opposed to influence, imitation, or
plagiarism. Richard Simpson's hypothesis that Marston revised an
older version of the play written by George Peele seems unsustainable,
(101) and we are not convinced that Dekker was co-author. (102) We
suggest that the play was originally composed by Marston, but that at
some point the text might have been "lightly overwritten by another
hand." (103) We feel that the evidence is sufficient enough to not
"release Marston from responsibility for Histrio-Mastix and declare
the author of Histrio-Mastix once again to be unknown." (104)
Our findings for The Insatiate Countess largely agree with
Melchiori's arguments for Marston's contributions, but we have
also detected lexical evidence for his hand in II.iii; IV.i and IV.iv;
and some speeches in act V (V.i and V.ii), which might explain why we
find "Marston's initial choice" of character names in
V.ii. (105) Our findings suggest that Barksted, and not "some hack
writer," was largely responsible for the last scene of the play,
(106) while our verbal evidence corroborates with Wiggins's
observation that act I seems "to have been worked over by
Barksted." (107) Our versification analysis, however, attributes
act I to Marston alone, as well as the sample from act V.
Lust's Dominion and The Family of Love suggest Marston's
influence, but we consider it unlikely that Marston actually had a hand
in these texts. Dekker seems to have compiled his co-authors'
sections of Lust's Dominion for a final copy of the whole play,
frequently touching up dialogue and linking passages and scenes in an
effort to achieve unity. (108) Haughton was largely responsible for the
scenes featuring the friars, Crab and Cole, (109) whereas Day seems to
have helped with the portions in which Maria encounters Oberon and the
fairies, and some martial scenes at the end of act III and the beginning
of act IV; parts of act V also seem to contain islets of Day. It is
testament to H. Dugdale Sykes's formidable skills as an
attributionist that our modern methods largely accord with his divisions
of authorship, expounded more than a century ago. (110) Sykes drew upon
remarkably extensive reading-based judgements that are lacking in many
recent number-specific studies. We feel that, on the basis of our tests
for vocabulary, prosody, and parallels of thought and language, there is
little or no room for a fourth authorial hand in this play, and thus we
tentatively rule Marston out as a serious candidate.
The Family of Love more closely resembles Marston than the other
primary authorship candidate, Lording Barry, in terms of our counts for
the connective "between," the exclamations "ha,"
"la," and "fie," and the Latinate termination -ate.
However, there is no way of testing this play against the stylistic
variation for Barry texts, given that we have just one play for
comparison. As Taylor, Mulholland, and Jackson put it, "some of
Barry's own preferences could have shifted between 1605 (the
earliest possible date for completion of Family) and 1610 (the latest
possible date for completion of Ram Alley)." (111) Furthermore, The
Family of Love is akin to Barry in terms of the play's preference
for "while" over "whilst," and the high counts for
"amongst" and "tut," while spelling preferences do
not correspond with Marston's accepted stage plays. Additionally,
versification analysis does not suggest Marston's profile. The
abundance of verbal links with Marston, spread throughout his dramatic
corpus, could easily have persuaded us that Marston contributed to the
play, were it not for the fact that Barry's Ram Alley also has
dense verbal relations with Marston's oeuvre, indicative of close
imitation. We suggest that the dramatic relationship between Marston and
Barry should be explored further, and hope that other scholars can build
upon our findings, as well as the theories expounded in Cathcart's
monograph. (112) Our results therefore suggest that the author of The
Family of Love was "highly influenced by Marston's own
writings," (113) and that its author was probably Lording Barry.
The overall results of our analyses prove the usefulness of diverse
approaches to authorship, when unlike tests give support to each other.
Notes
(1.) This article derives from a report entitled "Examining
the Boundaries of John Marston's Dramatic Canon," which was
submitted to Martin Butler and Matthew Steggle January 24, 2017. The
authors wish to thank Butler and Steggle for the opportunity to examine
Marston's corpus as part of The Oxford Marston project.
(2.) We have used Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson's
British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014-15) for the dates of first performances.
(3.) Gustav Cross, "The Authorship of Lust's
Dominion," Studies in Philology 55 (1958): 39-61.
(4.) See also Dodsley's A Select Collection of Old Plays, ed.
J. P. Collier, 3d ed., 12 vols. (London: Septimus Prowett, 1825),
II.311.
(5.) Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in
The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).
(6.) Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries, 68-69.
(7.) Charles Cathcart, "Lust's Dominion; Or, the
Lascivious Queen: Authorship, Date, and Revision," The Review of
English Studies, 52.207 (2001): 360-75.
(8.) Richard Simpson, The School of Shakespeare, 3 vols. (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1878), II.1-89.
(9.) R. A. Small, The Stage Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and the
So-called Poetasters (Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1899), 67-90; E. K.
Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1923), IV.17-19.
(10.) F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 2
vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891), 11.69-72.
(11.) Alvin B. Kernan, "John Marston's Play
Histriomastix," Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (1958): 134-50.
(12.) George L. Geckle, "John Marston's Histriomastix and
the Golden Age," Comparative Drama 6 (1972): 205-22.
(13.) David J. Lake, ''Histriomastix: Linguistic Evidence
for Authorship," Notes and Queries, 226 (1981): 148-52, esp. 152.
(14.) Roslyn Lander Knutson, "Histrio-mastix: Not by John
Marston," Studies in Philology, 98, no. 3 (2001): 359-77.
(15.) James P. Bednarz, "Writing and Revenge: John
Marston's Histriomastix," Comparative Drama 36 (2002): 21-51.
(16.) John Peachman, "Previously Unrecorded Verbal Parallels
Between Histriomastix and the Acknowledged Works of John Marston,"
Notes and Queries 51 (2004): 304-6. Available online at
http://guyofwarwick.blogspot.co.Uk/p/previously-unrecorded-verbal-parallels.html [accessed 30 September 2016].
(17.) Charles Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008): 8-13.
(18.) Gerald J. Eberle, "Dekker's Part in The Familie of
Love" in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, eds. James G.
McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington, DC:
Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948): 723.
(19.) The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Alexander Dyce, 5 vols.
(London: Edward Lumley, 1840): II.
(20.) The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols.
(Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885): III.
(21.) Eberle, "Dekker's Part," 726.
(22.) George R. Price, Thomas Dekker (New York: Twayne, 1969):
177-78.
(23.) David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton''s
Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975): 91-108.
(24.) Gary Taylor, Paul Mulholland, and MacDonald P. Jackson,
"Thomas Middleton, Lording Barry, and The Family of Love," The
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 93, no. 2 (1999):
213-41.
(25.) Taylor, Mulholland, and Jackson, "Thomas Middleton,
Lording Barry," 227.
(26.) Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, 79.
(27.) David J. Lake, "The Insatiate Countess: Linguistic
Evidence for Authorship," Notes and Queries, 28 (1981): 166-70.
(28.) Giorgio Melchiori, "Introduction," in The Insatiate
Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984): 1-50, esp. 12.
(29.) The Insatiate Countess, ed. Melchiori, 16.
(30.) Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, 59-60. Michael
Scott has also argued for an earlier date for the original play. Michael
Scott, "Marston's Early Contribution to The Insatiate
Countess" Notes and Queries, 222 (1977): 116-17.
(31.) Available online at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk [accessed 13
June 2017].
(32.) Available online at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home [accessed
13 June 2017].
(33.) MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and
Shakespeare (Salzburg: Jacobean Studies, 1979): 214-15.
(34.) Marcus Dahl, "Authors of the Mind," Journal of
Early Modern Studies 5 (2016): 157-73, esp. 157.
(35.) The augmented version of The Malcontent has the highest rate
of occurrence for "O" interjections in Marston's canon,
which could be due to additions and revisions made by Marston and John
Webster (although Webster's dramatic works show no marked
preference for either form). For a useful account of the divisions of
authorship in this play, see David J. Lake, "Webster's
Additions to The Malcontent: Linguistic Evidence," Notes and
Queries 226 (1981): 153-58.
(36.) Lake, Middleton's Plays, 211.
(37.) MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test
Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 5.
(38.) Eastward Ho, in The Works of Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford
and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932): IV;
"Introduction," in Eastward Ho!, ed. C. G. Petter (London:
Ernest Benn, 1973): xiii-xlviii.
(39.) Lake, "Histriomastix: Linguistic Evidence," 148-52.
(40.) Lake, Middleton's Plays, 50.
(41.) John P. A. Ioannidis, "Why Most Published Research
Findings Are False," PLoS Medicine, 2, no. 8 (2005). Available
online at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 [accessed 13 June 2017].
(42.) Lake, Middleton's Plays, 46.
(43.) Ashley H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher
on Shakespeare (Worcester, MA: Wood, 1901): 24.
(44.) A. C. Partridge, The Problem of Henry VIII Reopened
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Orthography in
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (London: Arnold, 1964).
(45.) Cyrus Hoy, "The Shares of Fletcher and his collaborators
in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (1)," Studies in Bibliography 8
(1956): 129-46.
(46.) Lake, Middleton's Plays, 281.
(47.) Interestingly, there are eighteen instances of the form
"hem" in The Family of Love, which we do not find in
Barry's Ram Alley or any of Marston's unaided plays.
(48.) George K. Hunter, "Introduction," in Antonio and
Mellida, ed. George K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1965): ix-xxi, esp. xix.
(49.) We count consecutive repetitions of such forms as single
instances, so "fie, fie" would count as one example, rather
than two, and so forth.
(50.) Taylor, Mulholland, and Jackson, "Thomas Middleton,
Lording Barry," 228-29.
(51.) Notably, the co-occurrence of "fa" and
"pish" in I.i of Eastward Ho provides additional evidence for
Marston's hand in that scene.
(52.) Brian Vickers, "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare:
Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002): 226.
(53.) F. E. Pierce, The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker (New
York: Henry Holt, 1909).
(54.) Pierce, Webster and Dekker, 5.
(55.) Available online at
https://provalisresearch.com/products/content-analysis-software/
[accessed 7 July 2017].
(56.) Available online at
https://provalisresearch.com/products/qualitative-data-analysis-software/ [accessed 7 July 2017].
(57.) Notably, the manuscript masque text The Entertainment at
Ashby (1607) has zero instances of many of the seeming Marstonian
preferences, and instead has instances of non-Marstonian words such as
"he," "lorde," "only," and
"think." However, the manuscript is only partly autograph.
(58.) Available online at
http://pl-giarism.software.informer.eom/0.9/ [accessed 10 October 2016].
(59.) Available online at
http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/z-wordpress/software/wcopyfind/[accessed 13 June 2017].
(60.) Available online at https://shc.earlyprint.Org/shc/home.html#
[accessed 13 June 2017].
(61.) Muriel St. Clare Byrne, "Bibliographic Clues in
Collaborate Plays," Library 13 (1932): 21-48, esp. 24. See also
Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author: A Historical Study of Five
Collaborative Plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 58.
(62.) H. Dugdale Sykes, Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (New York:
Routledge, 1924): 107.
(63.) Lust's Dominion, III.iii, in Mary Ellen Cacheado,
Lust's Dominion (or the Lascivious Queen), A Tragedy (MA
dissertation: Sheffield Hallam University, 2005). Available online at
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/renplays/lustsdominion.htm [accessed
30 October 2016]. All further references are to this edition, which does
not contain line numbers, and will be given parenthetically.
(64.) John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, IV.iii.97, ed. Reavley
Gair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). All further
references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.
(65.) William Haughton, Englishmen for My Money, i.6-9, in Natalie
C. J. Aldred, "A Critical Edition of William Haughton's
Englishmen for My Money; or, a Woman Will Have Her Will" (Doctoral
thesis: University of Birmingham, 2010). Available online at
http://etheses.bham.ac.Uk/1638/2/Aldred11PhD2.pdf [accessed 30 October
2016]. All further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(66.) Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus, V.ii.55, in Old Fortunatus, A
Play Written by Thomas Dekker, ed. Oliphant Smeaton (London: J. M. Dent,
1904). All further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(67.) Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, x.31-32, eds. R.
L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1979).
(68.) John Day, Humour Out of Breath, V.i., in Humour Out of
Breath; A Comedy, Written by John Day, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips
(London: printed for the Percy library, 1860).
(69.) John Marston, What You Will, IV.i.195-96, in The Works of
John Marston, ed. A. H. Bullen, 3 vols. (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1887), II.
All further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(70.) John Marston, The Malcontent, I.v.44-45, ed. George K. Hunter
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). All further references
are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.
(71.) Histriomastix, IV.i., ed. John S. Farmer (Amersham: Tudor
Facsimile Texts, 1912). All further references are to this edition,
which does not include line numbers, and will be given parenthetically.
(72.) John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, IV.i.125, ed. George K.
Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). All further
references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.
(73.) http://guyofwarwick.blogspot.co.Uk/p/previously-unrecorded-verbal-parallels.html
(74.) The Family of Love, II.iv, in The Works of Thomas Middleton,
ed. Alexander Dyce, 5 vols. (London: Edward Lumley, 1840), II. All
further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(75.) Jack Drum's Entertainment, II.i., ed. John S. Farmer
(Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912). All further references are to
this edition and will be given parenthetically.
(76.) John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, II.iii.69, in The Works of
John Marston, ed. A. H. Bullen, 3 vols. (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1887), II.
All further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(77.) Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, 79-155.
(78.) Robert Duncan Fraser, "Lording Barry: Dramatist,
Pirate--and Dramatis Persona?," A Quarterly Journal of Short
Articles, Notes and Reviews, 28, no. 2 (2015): 74-78. Available online
at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282520520_Lording_Barry_Dramatist_Pirate-and_Dramatis_Persona [accessed 10 October 2016].
(79.) Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays
by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), 151.
(80.) The Family of Love, ed. Simon Shepherd (Nottingham:
Nottingham Drama Texts, 1979), p. iii.
(81.) Ram Alley, IV.iv.95, in Robert Duncan Fraser, "Ram
Alley, or Merry Tricks (Lording Barry, 1611): A Critical Edition"
(Doctoral thesis: Sussex University, 2013). Available online at
http://sro.sussex.ac.Uk/47147/l/Fraser%2C_Robert_Duncan.pdf. All further
references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.
(82.) John Marston and Others, The Insatiate Countess, I.i. 12, in
Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies, ed. Martin Wiggins (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998). All further references are to this edition and
will be given parenthetically.
(83.) William Barksted, Hiren and The Fair Greek, 1. 87, in
Occasional Issues of Unique or Very Rare Books, ed. Alexander B.
Grosart, 17 vols. (Manchester: printed privately, 1876), III. All
further references are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically.
(84.) Ants Oras, Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama:
An Experiment in Prosody (Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
1960).
(85.) Marina Tarlinskaja,
"Rhythm-Morphology-Syntax-Rhythm," Style, 18, no. 1 (1984):
1-26.
(86.) Oras, Pause Patterns, pp. 1-2.
(87.) Ibid.,3.
(88.) Ibid., 3.
(89.) Following Oras, we have examined the earliest editions of
these plays available. These texts are drawn from the database
Literature OnLine, or LION (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk). There is always
some small margin of error in analyses of this kind, but we have been
utterly consistent in our counts, and any errors are thus unlikely to
affect the overall patterns.
(90.) Oras also produced frequency polygons for these plays. See
Oras, Pause Patterns, 42.
(91.) Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries, 69.
(92.) Oras, Pause Patterns, 23.
(93.) Sykes, Sidelights, 100.
(94.) Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Age of Shakespeare (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1908), 84-85.
(95.) Oras, Pause Patterns, 53-55.
(96.) It is perhaps worth mentioning that the word
"golden" occurs on four occasions in this play, three of which
cluster in act I (the other instance occurs in II.iii). Brian Vickers
has substantiated previous scholars' observations that Dekker
displays a notable "fondness for the adjective 'golden'
[...] which occurs a remarkable 163 times in twenty-six sole and
co-authored plays." The Collected Works of John Ford, ed. Brian
Vickers, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 11.172.
(97.) Our approach is explained in detail in Marina Tarlinskaja,
English Verse: Theory and History (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1976);
Shakespeare and the Versification of Elizabethan Drama 1561-1642
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
(98.) Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier.
(99.) See "Table B.3", in Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare and
the Versification.
(100.) M. L. Gasparov, Metr i smysl. Ob odnom iz mekhanizmov kul
'turnoj pamyati [Metre and meaning. About one mechanism of the
cultural memory] (Moscow: RGGU, 1999).
(101.) See Simpson, The School of Shakespeare, II.10-12, II.14.
(102.) See Lake, "Histriomastix: Linguistic Evidence,"
152.
(103.) Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, 10.
(104.) Knutson, "Histrio-mastix: Not by John Marston,"
377.
(105.) The Insatiate Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, 16.
(106.) Ibid.
(107.) Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama
1533-1642: A Catalogue: Volume VI: 1609-1616 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 43.
(108.) In the case of Keep the Widow Waking (1624), Dekker seems to
have been "the principal agent in the making of the play and was
entrusted with its execution." Charles Jasper Sisson, Lost Plays of
Shakespeare's Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936),
114. The same can be said of Lust's Dominion.
(109.) Dekker probably also had a hand in these scenes; for
instance, the exclamation, "humh," which is unique to Dekker,
co-occurs with II.iii, and follows Haughton's passages featuring
the friars.
(110.) Sykes, Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama, 106-1.
(111.) Taylor, Mulholland, and Jackson, "Thomas Middleton,
Lording Barry," 227.
(112.) Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, 79-155.
(113.) Ibid., 89.
TABLE 1
Play O Oh
Antonio and Mellida 93 9
Antonio's Revenge 103 1
Jack Drum's Entertainment 42 55
What You Will 84 1
The Malcontent 104 3
Parasitaster 75 17
The Dutch Courtesan 101 5
The Wonder of Women 78 0
TABLE 2
Play O Oh
Lust's Dominion 4 79
Histriomastix 48 0
The Malcontent (augmented) 127 1
Eastward Ho 56 0
The Family of Love 52 1
The Insatiate Countess 52 6
TABLE 3
Play Whilst While
Antonio and Mellida 9 1
Antonio's Revenge 9 3
Jack Drum's Entertainment 6 1
What You Will 9 1
The Malcontent 15 0
Parasitaster 6 1
The Dutch Courtesan 6 1
The Wonder of Women 18 1
TABLE 4
Play Whilst While
Lust's Dominion 8 5
Histriomastix 10 7
The Malcontent (augmented) 18 1
Eastward Ho 4 12
The Family of Love 4 9
The Insatiate Countess 1 8
TABLE 5
Play Amongst Among
Antonio and Mellida 0 1
Antonio's Revenge 0 1
Jack Drum's Entertainment 0 2
What You Will 0 1
The Malcontent 0 1
Parasitaster 0 3
The Dutch Courtesan 0 0
The Wonder of Women 1 3
TABLE 6
Play Amongst Among
Lust's Dominion 3 1
Histriomastix 6 1
The Malcontent (augmented) 5 2
Eastward Ho 1 5
The Family of Love 6 8
The Insatiate Countess 0 1
TABLE 7
Play Betwixt Between
Antonio and Mellida 1 0
Antonio's Revenge 3 0
Jack Drum's Entertainment 1 0
What You Will 2 0
The Malcontent 2 0
Parasitaster 2 1
The Dutch Courtesan 5 0
The Wonder of Women 0 1
TABLE 8
Play Betwixt Between
Lust's Dominion 0 1
Histriomastix 0 2
The Malcontent (augmented) 3 1
Eastward Ho 5 0
The Family of Love 1 3
The Insatiate Countess 3 7
TABLE 9
Play 'em Them
Antonio and Mellida 0 24
Antonio's Revenge 0 16
Jack Drum's Entertainment 0 15
What You Will 0 35
The Malcontent 0 14
Parasitaster 1 45
The Dutch Courtesan 1 24
The Wonder of Women 0 14
TABLE 10
Play 'em Them
Lust's Dominion 4 63
Histriomastix 0 44
The Malcontent (augmented) 0 35
Eastward Ho 0 24
The Family of Love 0 49
The Insatiate Countess 13 44
TABLE 11
Play Exclamatory Noises
Antonio and Mellida "fa" (1) "faugh" (2) "fut" (3) "pew" (1) "pish" (4)
"sfoot" (1) "slid" (2) "slight" (1) "slud" (2)
"tush" (1) "tut" (1) "whogh" (1) "whop" (1)
Antonio's Revenge "faugh" (1) "fie" (4) "fut" (4) "pish" (5) "tush"
(3) "tut" (2)
Jack Drum's "fie" (4) "la" (2) "pish" (2) "tush" (4) "tut" (4)
Entertainment "fie" (7) "fut" (10) "la" (7) "pew" (1) "pish" (4)
What You Will "puh" (1) "slid" (3) "tut" (4) "whop" (1)
The Malcontent "fie" (1) "la" (2) "pew" (1) "pish" (2) "tush" (1)
"tut" (2) "urn" (1)
Parasitaster "fie" (5) "pish" (5) "tush" (1) "um" (1)
The Dutch Courtesan "faugh" (1) "fie" (7) "la" (1) "pah" (2) "pish" (2)
The Wonder of Women "fie" (2) "pish" (1) "tush" (1) "um" (1)
TABLE 12
Play Exclamatory Noises
Lust's Dominion "pish" (2) "puh" (3) "sheart" (5) "tut" (2)
Histriomastix "fie" (3) "slid" (3) "tush" (1)
The Malcontent "la" (5) "pew" (2) "pish" (2) "slid" (1) "tush"
(augmented) (1) "tut" (1)
Eastward Ho "fa" (1) "fie" (5) "la" (2) "pish" (1) "sfoot"
(5) "slid" (1)
The Family of Love "fie" (6) "tut" (13)
The Insatiate Countess "fie" (2) "tut" (1)
TABLE 13
Play Overall Word Count -ate
Antonio and Mellida 15900 1060
Antonio's Revenge 16612 874
Jack Drum's Entertainment 17809 742
What You Will 18547 1030
The Malcontent 15994 800
Parasitaster 24727 916
The Dutch Courtesan 19730 1518
The Wonder of Women 14642 1464
TABLE 14
Play Overall Word Count -ate
Lust's Dominion 22147 1846
Histriomastix 14362 845
The Malcontent (augmented) 22024 918
Eastward Ho 25832 861
The Family of Love 22155 1384
The Insatiate Countess 21873 729
TABLE 15
Play Foole Fool Free Ha Hee He Lord Lorde
Antonio 10 0 0 27 10 61 24 0
and Mellida
Antonio's 33 0 3 27 4 85 27 0
Revenge
Dutch Courtesan 13 0 3 58 17 121 291
Parasitaster 42 0 7 59 55 133 57 1
Histriomastix 4 0 1 0 7 18 24 0
Jack Drum 29 0 4 46 25 97 9 2
Insatiate 4 0 4 5 30 80 89 0
Countess
What You Will 32 0 2 52 44 99 9 0
Wonder of Women 2 0 10 15 7 57 17 0
Lust's Dominion 0 5 12 25 11 94 59 0
Family of Love 0 7 7 13 0 63 4 0
Play Nay Onely Only Sir Thinke Think Bee Be
Antonio 16 5 3 22 13 4 0 11
and Mellida
Antonio's 9 11 6 27 13 1 2 88
Revenge
Dutch Courtesan 41 36 6 124 25 3 18 143
Parasitaster 53 89 17 85 37 4 48 150
Histriomastix 10 5 0 45 5 0 11 89
Jack Drum 20 8 2 124 14 5 6 110
Insatiate 13 11 0 31 40 1 0 169
Countess
What You Will 39 11 3 43 9 2 30 104
Wonder of Women 8 20 4 0 18 6 13 67
Lust's Dominion 8 2 2 4 2 10 2 135
Family of Love 15 0 18 57 0 25 0 187
TABLE 16
Play Number of Matches as % of Word Count
Histriomastix 0.00098
Ram Alley 0.000899
The Insatiate Countess 0.000646
Lust's Dominion 0.0006
The Family of Love 0.000495
TABLE 17
Scene Marston Unique Dekker Unique Day Unique Haughton Unique
Matches Matches Matches Matches
I.i 1 4 2 0
I.ii 1 2 0 0
I.iii 1 5 2 0
I.iv 1 0 0 1
Hi 2 2 1 1
II.ii 1 0 1 1
II.iii 0 1 0 0
II.iv 1 1 0 0
II.v 1 2 0 1
II.vi 0 0 0 0
III.i 2 1 0 0
III.ii 0 1 1 0
III.iii 3 0 0 0
III.iv 3 3 0 0
III.v 1 0 0 2
III.vi 0 0 3 0
IV.i 0 0 1 0
IV.ii 1 1 0 1
IV.iii 2 1 1 0
IV.iv 1 2 0 0
IV.v 3 4 1 1
V.i 0 3 3 0
V.ii 0 1 1 0
V.iii 2 1 0 1
V.iv 1 1 0 1
V.v 0 3 1 1
V.vi 1 0 1 1
Totals 29 39 19 12
TABLE 18
Play 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Antonio and 6.8 10.2 4.4 25.3 18.0 20.1 7.0 5.9 2.3
Mellida 1-2
Jack Drum's 4.0 8.1 4.9 31.9 21.5 20.0 7.1 1.8 0.7
Entertainment
What You Will 2.9 9.4 5.5 26.4 19.9 19.6 8.2 5.5 2.7
The Malcontent 5.0 10.2 4.1 31.4 10.9 23.2 7.1 6.3 1.8
Parasitaster 1.4 4.9 3.5 36.7 17.9 22.6 7.4 4.9 0.7
The Dutch 2.7 8.5 2.4 27.9 14.8 23.0 12.4 7.3 0.9
Courtesan
The Wonder 2.4 6.9 3.3 31.8 15.6 21.4 9.4 6.7 2.4
of Women
TABLE 19
Play 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Lust's 4.1 8.9 6.5 19.1 15.0 26.4 13.4 5.7 0.8
Dominion
(Act I)
Histriomastix 7.3 9.7 5.5 24.9 19.4 18.4 10.7 3.2 0.9
The Family 2.7 6.8 0.9 35.2 14.2 30.1 5.5 4.6 0
of Love
The Insatiate 2.6 7.0 4.0 25.9 22.0 24.3 9.8 3.2 1.2
Countess
TABLE 20
Strong Syntactic Breaks after Syllables 2-9
Play 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Tamburlaine 6.5 2.2 12.0 6.7 4.6 2.0 1.7 0.2
1 (1587)
Antonio 11.5 4.5 23.5 16.8 14.6 7.7 4.7 2.4
(1599)
Histriomastix 7.7 4.4 10.8 10.1 9.4 5.4 1.9 0.7
(1599)
Lust's 7.8 4.1 13.0 12.6 23.8 11.5 5.9 1.1
Dominion
(1600)
The Family 5.7 1.1 22.2 10.4 23.6 3.2 4.6 0.0
of Love (1607)
Countess 6.6 2.3 18.8 8.8 11.0 3.7 2.2 0.7
(1610) Act 1
Countess 6.0 5.4 20.7 12.3 14.3 6.9 3.7 1.0
Act 5
Romeo 10.2 4.8 25.7 13.0 14.0 4.4 3.4 1.6
(1595)
Henry 6.6 3.2 14.3 11.1 13.5 6.8 2.8 1.0
V (1599)
King Lear 8.2 4.8 18.2 15.2 27.7 15.4 8.9 3.7
(1605)
Dekker, 7.2 4.2 14.4 12.8 23.2 16.8 8.0 2.6
Soldier (98)
(1622)
TABLE 21
Stressing on Positions 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 (in % of all Lines; Minima
Underlined)
2 4 6 8 10
Tamburlaine 1 70.2 86.9 66.3 79.0 77.2
Antonio and 75.6 92.1 70.6 86.9 81.8
Mellida
Lust's 72.1 83.8 74.2 74.9 86.2
Dominion
Histriomastix 77.8 87.9 76.5 81.1 79.9
The Family 86.4 91.4 78.1 83.5 91.4
of Love
Countess 63.6 87.5 63.6 76.5 85.7
Act I
Countess 69.5 87.2 66.0 77.8 82.3
Act V
Romeo 66.7 87.2 68.3 73.6 88.5
Henry V 63.5 81.7 70.8 71.9 86.8
King Lear 69.9 82.0 77.6 67.8 95.7
Dekker, 68.1 84.5 80.4 73.6 90.6
Soldier
TABLE 22 Additional Features, per 1000 Lines
Procl. Encl. Pleon. Syllabic Disyllab. Gramm.
'do' -ed, -eth -ion, -ious invers.
Tamburlaine 1 161.4 11.1 10.1 38.0 13.4 27.5
Antonio 446.3 75.1 16.7 45.9 13.6 10.4
Histriomastix 343.5 57.8 19.8 19.8 17.8 25.7
Lust's 508.8 56.5 31.8 0.0 3.5 21.2
Family 309.0 32.1 39.4 21.5 7.1 21.5
Countess Act I 330.9 55.1 14.7 11.0 11.0 33.1
Countess Act V 305.4 20.0 29.5 29.5 10.0 39.4
Romeo 370.3 49.6 36.3 23.5 3.7 12.8
Henry V 322.9 33.4 40.1 26.7 13.9 37.3
King Lear 363.7 39.4 35.8 11.8 1.6 36.4
Dekker, Soldier 457.8 96.4 18.1 0.0 6.0 30.3
Rhythm- Alliter.
meaning
Tamburlaine 1 70.6 237.5
Antonio 100.1 137.6
Histriomastix 64.3 177.2
Lust's 95.4 144.9
Family 35.8 111.1
Countess Act I 154.6 117.6
Countess Act V 98.5 113.3
Romeo 62.2 121.4
Henry V 138.6 206.6
King Lear 116.1 161.8
Dekker, Soldier 84.3 101.1
COPYRIGHT 2018 Associated University Presses
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2018 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.