Webster as a collaborator in three plays in 1602all now lost-but the number of other authors mentioned with him would seem to imply that he had but little hand in these works. 1

Now if we could point out with reasonable definiteness about what were the parts of Webster and Dekker in their collaborated plays, the results would be valuable from several different points of view. In the first place, we should have the scientific satisfaction of settling a matter of fact, and the happy consciousness of giving each writer his due. In the second place, we should gain a glimpse into Webster's intellectual life during his stage of growth. And thirdly, we should throw some light upon the range and limitations of Webster as an author. If Webster wrote the first and third scenes of Act II in Westward Ho, or the parts of Captain Jenkins and Hans Van Belch in Northward Ho, then he showed an element of pleasant humor and manysidedness which is not indicated anywhere else. If he did not write these and similar scenes in a play where he had a special opportunity to write them, then we shall be strengthened in our old belief that he was an author of great power, but limited range.

The object of this thesis will be to divide the three collaborated plays of Webster and Dekker, and to point out as accurately as possible what seems to be the share of each. In doing this, I shall discuss the two citizen-comedies first, and then take up Sir Thomas Wyatt in a chapter by itself.

Some time ago Mr. F. G. Fleay, in his Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (2. 269–271), gave his opinion as to the proper division of acts and scenes. He assigned the last two acts of Westward Ho and 1 John Webster, by E. E. Stoll, p. 12.

the Doll scenes in Northward Ho to Dekker, and all the rest of the two plays to Webster. For his division of Northward Ho he gave no reasons whatever. His division of Westward Ho was based on two discrepancies in the play. The first of these is that during Acts I-III the time of the action is referred to as midsummer, and during Acts IV and V the characters speak as if the time were late in the fall, and the weather were frosty. The second discrepancy is that Mrs. Tenterhook is called Moll in the early part of the play, and Clare in Act V. Mr. Fleay is right in saying that these discrepancies exist; but I think he is mistaken in attaching so much importance to them, especially when—as Mr. Stoll has already pointed out, and as we shall show more fully later the whole evidence of style and subject-matter is overwhelmingly against his conclusions. These comedies were probably written in haste, and Dekker was one of the most careless writers of a careless age. These discrepancies, consequently, could easily be explained on some other basis than that of different authorship.

In 1905 Mr. E. E. Stoll published a book entitled John Webster, which contains a lengthy and valuable discussion of these plays. Mr. Stoll makes no attempt to point out the part of either author definitely, but contends that Dekker wrote nearly the whole of both plays, and that Webster's part is both slight and indeterminate.1 These conclusions-which flatly contradict those of Mr. Fleay-are based on similarities of incident and general atmosphere. Though his arguments are not wholly conclusive, much of the material which he presents is of unquestionable value, and will be incorporated into this thesis in its proper place, with due credit to Mr. Stoll.

1 John Webster, by E. E. Stoll, pp. 62-79.

Such seems to be the state of the question at present. Now in the following pages we will take up a number of different tests which can be applied to these plays, and which will be found to agree surprisingly with one another in their conclusions. The first, which I have called the three-syllable Latin wordtest, is, I believe, my own discovery. The second, or parallel-passage test, is old in principle, but has never been worked out in detail for these plays. The other tests have already been taken up by previous students; but I shall try to summarize their work in systematic fashion, together with various additions of my own. Due credit to every one from whom I borrow will be given in the foot-notes.

CHAPTER II.

THE THREE-SYLLABLE LATIN WORD-TEST.

If we compare two representative passages, one from Webster and one from Dekker, we become conscious of a difference in their expression which is partly a matter of vocabulary, and partly in the prose at least a matter of rhythm. On close analysis, we find that this is largely due to the use of words of Greek or Latin derivation which contain three or more syllables; such words, for example, as confusion, opinion, politic, immediately, satisfy, remember, misery. Dekker almost always uses these words sparingly, whereas Webster steadily employs a great number of them. So persistently does Webster adhere to a high percentage of these words, and Dekker to a low percentage, from scene to scene and from play to play, that it becomes a marked characteristic of the style of each, and offers a means for distinguishing the work of one from that of the other.

Now if we turn to the citizen-comedies, we find that five or six scenes in these two plays employ a large number of these words, as Webster does, while all the other scenes have proportionately a much smaller number of these words, as is the case with Dekker. This fact is certainly significant.

In order to put this test on a scientific basis, and free it from the rambling guesswork of vague impressionism, I have tried to reduce the percentage of these three-syllable Greek and Latin words in different scenes to a common standard, so that they could be

mathematically compared and tabulated. This required a little practical machinery. It is obviously unfair to compare them by the number of words to a page. In a scene which is partly in verse and partly in prose, with broken fragments of lines and wide gaps between the speeches, it is evident that one page may contain three times as much solid matter as another. Therefore the first thing to do, in order to get a fair basis for comparison, is to reduce the whole scene in question to solid prose lines; that is, to find how many lines it would contain if it were printed as one solid block of prose, without breaks at the ends of metrical lines, without gaps between speeches, and without stage-directions. Then the whole number of three-syllable words (of Greek or Latin derivation) divided by the number of solid prose lines equals the ratio of these words to a line. For instance, if a scene contains 100 solid lines and 22 of the aforementioned words, its word-average would be .220. If the length of the prose line, which is the standard of measure, is carefully kept the same, this gives the fairest and most accurate kind of test. I have taken as my standard of measure a solid prose line in Dyce's edition of Webster, and where I have had to use plays in other editions with longer or shorter lines, I have carefully reduced them to this standard.1 Consequently, when I say in the following tables that a certain scene contains 100 solid lines, 20 words, and has a word-average of .200, I mean that it would contain 100 lines if printed as one solid block of

1 In computing these tables, I have assumed the following as equivalent values: