SOME YEARS AGO I ventured to Gary Taylor that I was not entirely convinced Cyril Tourneur didn’t write The Revenger’s Tragedy. That exercise in audacity earned me a lecture lasting well into the second half of an hour, a lecture interrupted only by an insistent tug at his elbow by Gary’s girlfriend, to whom I am most grateful, although, I suspect, she did not have my rescue foremost in mind.
My conversation with Gary recently came to mind when I was drafting an essay regarding Alcazar’s performance history. I needed in the essay to discuss The Revenger’s Tragedy. I ordinarily identify a play’s author when I first name it. What to do? “Tourneur” would require a footnote explanation when I had no words to spare. And I have not yet been called to the Middleton Rapture. So, heeding the lesson of my misadvised adventure in courage, I opted for supine. I named no author at all, even as I cited for the text MacDonald Jackson’s edition in Taylor and Lavagnino’s complete collection of Middleton’s works. Now I find myself somewhat contrite. If Mutius Scaevola could burn off his right hand for Rome, could I not at least have submitted myself to another lecture?
I’ll try to make amends here. I’ll say why I think, on balance, The Revenger’s Tragedy probably was written by Tourneur. But if you are admiring my courage after all, I’ll be honest with you. I truly hope that the next time Gary sees me he is again accompanied by his girlfriend.
I’ll try to be succinct. The subject has been discussed many times before, and my own additions are modest. I’ll look at the question, as I always do, from the point of view of an experienced trial lawyer, the profession in which I have spent, or perhaps misspent, my life. It isn’t about what I want to believe. It’s about what the evidence shows. That’s a hard lesson for every newbie trial lawyer to learn, but one they must learn if they are to do their jobs properly. If this were a criminal case the standard of proof would be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” By that standard, I promise, no one can say either Tourneur or Middleton. But in civil cases the standard is “more probable than not.” By that standard, I think, Tourneur must be considered the author.
Objective evidence is always the most important. Although it may be misinterpreted, it cannot err. The principal objective evidence of authorship here is contained in two lists of printed play books for sale. The first list was published by Edward Archer in 1656. The second was published by Francis Kirkman in 1661, and revised in 1671. Both lists identify Tourneur as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy. They are not authoritative, however, so their general accuracy must be closely examined.
Archer’s list, as he reasonably clearly indicates, includes two inventories of printed play books available for sale, both his own and that of another bookseller, Robert Pollard. With respect to Pollard’s books Archer evidently took the information supplied by Pollard without analysis and without actually looking at the books themselves. Thus, Archer’s list contains several instances in which alternate titles for the same plays are entered as separate books. And many entries on Archer’s list fail to identify authors even though the authors are named on the title pages of the printed quartos. Pollard, as I take it, failed to indicate that the alternative play names actually represented the same plays, and failed to identify the authors from the title pages. Archer merely incorporated into his list the information that Pollard provided him.
Archer exercised a better standard of care with respect to the books in his own inventory. He seems to have consulted an earlier list of books for sale by Rogers and Ley, and he seems to have looked at his books’ title pages. Those two sources account for the overwhelming majority of play author identifications. Most, but only most, of the identifications in those sources are correct. Archer usually took this information as he found it in those sources. The Revenger’s Tragedy belongs to a relatively small group of plays on Archer’s list for which neither Rogers and Ley nor the surviving quarto title pages name an author, yet Archer identifies an author on his list. The entry is: “Revenger | T [for Tragedy] | Tournour.”
In order to ascertain the likelihood that this identification is correct, we must consider both all other entries in which authors are similarly first identified by Archer and Archer’s incentives in offering author identifications. Archer’s purpose in publishing the list was, of course, to draw patrons to his shop (and Pollard’s), potentially to buy the listed books. Author identifications could not assist in that purpose if prospective patrons would recognize them as inaccurate. True, an inaccurately identified famous author might draw the ignorant, but Archer does not seem to have engaged in any such tactic intentionally. Our specimen is a case in point. Few patrons if any would have been drawn to Archer’s shop by Tourneur’s name.
Thus, we may conclude, Archer sought as best he could and based on the information he had at hand to identify the authors correctly. His possible sources of information for this group of authors are threefold. The author might have been named on the title page of an edition now lost. The name might have been handwritten on an extant quarto’s title page. Or Archer may have acquired independent information. But he did not just guess. He himself identifies no author for almost every play that we still consider to be anonymous, leaving out of course misidentifications adopted from Rogers and Ley or quarto title pages.
Archer may have had personal knowledge regarding late Jacobean and Caroline plays, so to assess his information about The Revenger’s Tragedy we should focus mainly on other Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays. Archer’s information regarding those plays was, for the most part, correct. Assuming that our modern attributions are correct, Archer six times correctly identifies play authors when only the authors’ initials appear on the extant quarto title pages:
Antonio’s Revenge: “John Marston”
Every Man Out of his Humor: “Ben. Johnson”
Fair Maid of the West: “Thomas Haywood”
An Humorous Day’s Mirth: “George Chapman”
A Mad World My Masters: “Thomas Middleton”
The Noble Soldier: “Sam. Rowly”
Of these we should particularly note The Noble Soldier. Samuel Rowley was not a well-known playwright, and his name surely drew few patrons to Archer’s shop. Archer’s aim, again, apparently was to report authors accurately.
More tellingly, Archer for the first time correctly identifies six authors of early plays for whom no information appears on the title pages of the extant quartos:
Campaspe: “John Lilly”
Endymion: “John Lilly”
A Game at Chess: “Thomas Middleton”
Michaelmas Term: “Thomas Middleton”
The Spanish Tragedy: “Tho. Kyte”
Titus Andronicus: “Will. Shakespeare”
A good deal on this list is instructive here. First, Archer is impressively acquainted with what plays actually were written by Middleton. No prior surviving published source names Middleton as the author of A Game at Chess, written in 1624 and for which I have made a slight exception to our usual focus on earlier plays. Little prior external evidence of any kind connects Middleton with Michaelmas Term. Rogers and Ley, often a source for Archer, actually name George Chapman as that play’s author. And, as noted earlier, both quartos of A Mad World My Masters offer as the author only the initials “T.M.” Thus, whatever source of information Archer used regarding Middleton’s authorship of plays, that source was very well informed.
Similarly, with the exception of Titus Andronicus, Archer’s information about the other authors on this list is striking. Lyly is not, I believe, named as the author of either Campaspe or Endymion by any prior surviving published source. Apart from Archer’s list, his authorship of the two plays is supported only by reasonable inferences from external evidence and by internal stylistic evidence. Kyd is identified as the author of The Spanish Tragedy only incidentally and casually by Heywood in the course of An Apology for Actors. Archer probably did not read Apology for Actors in such fine detail as to get his information there. Nor was this any lucky guesswork by Archer or his sources, as the names of neither Lyly nor Kyd could have been picked for the purpose of drawing patrons to Archer’s shop.
Two author attributions on Archer’s list might seem to be errors, but may not be. The list attributes the play “Guise” to John Webster. We might think that the play was Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris. But in fact Webster did write a play “Guise,” as he tells us in his dedication to The Devil’s Law Case. Webster’s play is now lost, as is the quarto edition which Archer presumably was describing. The list attributes the “Iron age, both parts” to Thomas Dekker. The plays presumably were Heywood’s. But Dekker may well have had a hand in them. Much of Heywood’s second part, for example, concerns Agamemnon’s ill-greeted return and Orestes’s subsequent revenge. Dekker and Chettle wrote a play on the same subject, as we know from Henslowe’s Diary.
Now, some actual errors do appear on Archer’s list that cannot be assigned either to Rogers and Ley or to extant quarto title pages. All of those errors may, however, be accounted for based on reasons that do not account for attribution of Revenger’s Tragedy to Tourneur. Three errors in the list seem to result not from errors in Archer’s manuscript, but from mistakes by the print compositor in reading the manuscript. Both Peele’s Arraignment of Paris and Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One are attributed to Shakespeare because the compositor’s eye skipped Archer’s intended alignment of the title and author columns. Archer apparently intended to attribute not Arraignment of Paris, but Arden of Feversham, to Shakespeare, a different sort of error discussed next. The compositor apparently misread the manuscript “Thomas Dekker” as “Thomas Barker” in the attribution of Old Fortunatus.
Several errors on the list arose because either Archer or his sources misinterpreted information reported on the title pages of the quarto prints. Both Thomas Lord Cromwell and The Puritan are misattributed to Shakespeare presumably because their title pages state that the plays are “Written by W.S.” Archer meant to attribute Arden of Feversham to Shakespeare presumably because the title pages reports that the play’s two ruffians are “Blacke-Will and Shakebag.” An opposite error occurs in one of two attributions of Love’s Labor’s Lost. In one entry Archer correctly identifies the play as Shakespeare’s, as do the 1598 and 1631 quartos. But the 1598 quarto’s title page makes it clear that there was an earlier, now lost, edition, which is being “corrected and augmented.” That now lost edition apparently reported only the author’s initials “W.S.” In a second entry for Love’s Labor’s Lost Archer has the author as “Will. Sampson.”
Other information on quarto title pages may have led to similar results. Archer’s list attributes The Merry Devil of Edmonton to Shakespeare presumably because all six quarto editions report that the play was performed by the King’s Company, Shakespeare’s own. Mucedorus is similarly attributed to Shakespeare presumably because all of the many editions from 1610 onward state that the play was performed by the same company. The list attributes The Maid’s Metamorphosis to Lyly, although it probably was not written by him, presumably because the title page reports that it was first performed by the Paul’s Children, as were almost all the plays that undoubtedly were written by Lyly. The play’s title, in addition, resembles that of Lyly’s undoubted Love’s Metamorphosis. Likewise, the similarity of its title to Jonson’s known work also presumably underlay attribution of Every Woman in her Humor to Ben Jonson.
Then we come to The Family of Love. It had long been thought to be an early work of Middleton. It recently has been ostracized in Taylor and Lavagnino’s edition of Middleton’s works on the grounds, as MacDonald Jackson explains in his canon essay, that it does not meet the Middleton mannerisms tests upon which the editors of that edition place so much faith. I have serious doubts, explained below, about the efficacy of those tests conclusively to identify Middleton’s authorship or lack thereof. Let’s assume, nevertheless, that Middleton did not write The Family of Love. In that case, the attribution of the play to him in Archer’s list presumably would have been based on the title page’s information that the play was performed by a children’s company, the Children of the King’s Revels. All of Middleton’s known plays in that early period were similarly written for children’s companies.
Two errors do appear on Archer’s list for which I know of no surviving basis. Both Hoffman and “Hieronimo, both parts” are attributed to Shakespeare. The former undoubtedly is the play for which Henslowe advanced the Lord Admiral’s money to pay Henry Chettle. The latter two probably are The Spanish Tragedy, which the list elsewhere correctly attributes to Kyd, and The First Part of Jeronimo, which seems to have some relationship with The Spanish Tragedy’s now lost prequel, The Spanish Comedy, also presumably by Kyd. In these cases Archer probably was relying on information handwritten on the title pages by overenthusiastic attributors. The plays’ printed title pages identify no authors. But by 1656 Shakespeare was a much admired playwright. Overenthusiasm for attributing plays to him also no doubt partly underlay misattributions to him on the list of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The Puritan, Arden of Feversham, and The Merry Devil of Edmonton.
None of the reasons for the errors on Archer’s list can explain attribution of The Revenger’s Tragedy to Cyril Tourneur. No compositor error is apparent. No author initials, or other information, that might have been misinterpreted appear on the quarto’s title page. And there was of course no then current overenthusiasm to identify plays as written by Cyril Tourneur.
The play’s title does vaguely resemble the title of Tourneur’s sole undisputed play, The Atheist’s Tragedy. It’s hard to imagine, however, that Archer’s sources were motivated by so gossamer a rationale to attribute The Revenger’s Tragedy to him. The title of Every Woman in Her Humor is, by contrast, identical in every respect save gender to the title of a play actually written by Jonson. If the resemblance of its title was a sufficient basis to attribute The Revenger’s Tragedy to Tourneur, we might better expect the play to be attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, who were far better known. They wrote The Maid’s Tragedy. Their authorship of that play is correctly identified on the list. Chapman’s Byron’s Tragedy is also correctly attributed on the list. If not Beaumont and Fletcher, then, why not Chapman? No probable reason could have suggested to Archer’s sources Tourneur, not them, based on similarities of titles.
Next we must consider Kirkman’s 1661 list, as revised in 1671. Middleton partisans such as Jackson assert that Kirkman offers “no independent authority” for Tourneur’s authorship. Rather, Archer’s attribution to Tourneur is merely “uncritically repeated by Kirkman.” Those assertions are incorrect. Kirkman did consult Archer’s list. He repeats some of Archer’s errors, misattributing The Arraignment of Paris to Shakespeare, for example, an error which on Archer’s list seems to have resulted from compositor misreading of Archer’s intended lineation. But Kirkman clearly used additional sources of information, and he critically evaluated Archer’s attributions. Thus his list provides substantially independent authority.
Kirkman’s research allowed him to correct several errors on Archer’s list. On Archer’s list A Trick to Catch the Old One is misattributed to Shakespeare, apparently because of a compositor error similar to that for Arraignment. Kirkman correctly attributes the play to “Tho. Midleton.” Archer’s list names “Thomas Barker” as the author of Old Fortunatus. Kirkman correctly has Dekker. Archer’s list attributes “Hieronimo, both parts” to Shakespeare. Kirkman has no second part and leaves “Hieronymo 1st part” unattributed. Archer once correctly attributes Love’s Labor’s Lost to Shakespeare and once, apparently based upon an incorrect expansion of the initials in a now lost edition, to William Sampson. Kirkman attributes the play only to Shakespeare.
Perhaps most significantly to us, Archer’s list misattributes Every Woman in Her Humor to Jonson. Archer’s source presumably supplied this misinformation because the play’s title closely corresponds with that of a play actually written by Jonson. Kirkman corrects the error; he leaves Every Woman unattributed. Thus, he didn’t retain Archer’s attribution of Revenger’s Tragedy to Tourneur just because its title vaguely resembled that of The Atheist’s Tragedy.
Kirkman shows a fairly good sense of which plays were written by Shakespeare, and which probably were not. He lists the book of the play “Henry the 5th, with the battle of Agencourt,” almost certainly the play we know as The Famous Victories. But he identifies no author for the play, suggesting that he knew this was not Shakespeare’s famous play. He gives subordinate status to plays whose attribution to Shakespeare is doubtful, including misattributions he takes over from Archer. He places plays that appear in the First Folio, and whose authorship is therefore undoubted, at the top of his listings for each letter. Plays whose attributions to Shakespeare are more doubtful appear elsewhere in listings under the letter. Even Pericles is given such subordinate status, presumably because it wasn’t included in the First Folio. Discerning readers of Kirkman’s list could thus distinguish plays genuinely by Shakespeare from those only uncertainly attributed to him.
Kirkman also correctly attributes quite a number of plays that are left unattributed by Archer. Some of these are significant. Kirkman for the first time attributes The Phoenix to Middleton, an attribution now generally accepted, but for which there is no prior evidence. Greene, Harvey and Heywood all allude to Marlowe’s authorship of Tamburlaine, but Kirkman’s attribution of the play to Marlowe is the first time in surviving records that the attribution is made unambiguously. Kirkman similarly for the first time correctly attributes Edward IV and If You Know Not Me to Heywood. No reference to Heywood’s authorship appears in any edition of Edward IV, and only the initials “T.H.” appear under a forepiece in a late edition of If You Know Not Me.
Other instances in which Kirkman names the authors of plays Archer had left unattributed hint at the care of his own additional research. For some such plays Kirkman simply takes the names from the title pages, title pages from books which may have belonged to Pollard, and to which Archer lacked easy access. But in many cases Kirkman extracted the authors’ names from the interiors of the books’ contents, signatures at the ends of the plays or signed dedications, primarily. He correctly attributes one play to Samuel Daniel not because any such information appears in the play’s quarto edition, but because the play appears in two compendiums of Daniel’s works.
Kirkman’s lists contain a few misattributions not found on Archer’s list. Most of those arise for the simple reason that the plays are misattributed on their title pages. In that respect, one bias that was apparent on Archer’s list continues unabated. Plays tend to be misattributed to famous playwrights. Thus, for example, we find Sir John Oldcastle attributed to Shakespeare. It was unattributed by Archer presumably because he did not have access to the quarto edition, which Kirkman did, whose title page names Shakespeare as the author. Lust’s Dominion was not listed at all by Archer. Kirkman, following the title pages of the quarto editions, attributes the play to Marlowe.
Kirkman also attributes Blurt, Master Constable to Middleton himself. Like Family of Love, this play is excluded from Middleton’s canon in the Taylor and Lavagnino edition of the works, but it isn’t clear that Kirkman was wholly wrong. Registered in June 1602, Blurt would have been among Middleton’s earliest plays, and thus may have varied stylistically from his later ones. Perhaps the play was indeed written largely by Dekker, although Bowers excludes it from his Dekker canon, but the possibility would remain that Middleton collaborated with Dekker. We know from Henslowe that the two collaborated on The Patient Man and Honest Whore in 1604. If, however, Kirkman is wrong about Blurt he could have misinferred Middleton’s authorship from the title page’s information that the play was performed by the Children of Paul’s.
All of which then leads us back to the point in question. Kirkman names as the author of “Revengers Tragedy,” “Cyrill Tourneur.” As throughout his lists, Kirkman did not just take this information uncritically from Archer’s list. Archer had identified the play only as “Revenger,” although he had classified it as a “T” for tragedy. Kirkman provides the play’s full name. Archer had identified the author only as “Tournour.” Kirkman adds the author’s first name, and changes the spelling of the patronymic to the form apparently most often used by Tourneur himself. It appears once again, thus, that Kirkman had acquired information independent of Archer’s.
The fact that both Archer and Kirkman identify Tourneur as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy points—rather obviously—to Tourneur. A more subtle aspect of their lists points less obviously, but just as persuasively, to the same conclusion. They do not name Middleton as the author. They both were very well informed regarding the plays that Middleton actually wrote. Archer correctly names Middleton as the author of A Game at Chess and Michaelmas Term based on information which does not come down to us. He correctly names Middleton as the author of A Mad World My Masters based only on the quarto’s initials “T.M.” Kirkman correctly identifies The Phoenix as Middleton’s, again based on information which does not come down to us. He corrects a compositor error on Archer’s list by naming Middleton as the author of A Trick to Catch the Old One.
No plausible reason can explain why, if they had any information suggesting Middleton as The Revenger’s Tragedy’s author, Archer and Kirkman would have substituted Cyril Tourneur’s name. They had every incentive to name Middleton as the author. Middleton remained well known later in the 17th Century. Tourneur was forgotten. I have suggested above that Middleton may have had a hand at least in The Family of Love and Blurt, Master Constable. But let’s assume that those plays have correctly been extirpated from the Middleton canon. If so, Archer and Kirkman nonetheless attributed the plays to Middleton presumably because his name, like Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s, sold books. If The Family of Love and Blurt, Master Constable, then, why not also The Revenger’s Tragedy? The answer seems self-evident. Archer and Kirkman had good reason to believe that the author was not Middleton, but Tourneur.
In addition to the lists of Archer and Kirkham, another piece of external evidence suggests Tourneur, not Middleton. The Revenger’s Tragedy was published in March 1608. (Some variants date the print 1607 and some 1608, and March 24 marked the end of year on the official calendar then still used by the Stationer’s Company.) The title page reports that the play was “sundry times Acted, by the Kings Majesties Servants.” In the preceding years Middleton had been occupied writing city comedies for children’s companies. No contemporary external evidence connects him with the King’s Company, then or later. Restoration quartos assert that two later plays, The Widow and The Mayor of Quinborough, were once acted by the former King’s, but if so we don’t know when or under what circumstances the King’s acquired those plays. Unlike Middleton, Tourneur wrote few plays. But we do know from the Stationer’s Register that he had written a play, The Nobleman, sometime before February 1612. That play was acted at court that month by the King’s Company.
No external evidence supports attribution of The Revenger’s Tragedy to Middleton. We are cited to the fact that Revenger’s Tragedy was registered by George Eld on October 7, 1607, together with A Trick to Catch the Old One. And, to quote Jackson, “the practice of coupling plays on the Stationers’ Register was . . . confined to those with a single author.” This argument fatally misperceives the nature of the Stationers’ Register. The Register’s purpose was to record the exclusive rights of individual stationers to publish the registered copy. The Stationers’ Company did not care whether the registered copy was a play, a sermon, or a manual of instruction. Nor did the Company care who had written the copy. Individual stationers did sometimes record the names of authors, but they did so only as a supplementary means of fixing their rights in the copy. Thus the Company had no special rules concerning either registration of plays or authorship of registered copy. They had only one rule governing Eld’s dual registration. A stationer could register as many copies as he liked at one time, but he still had to pay the standard fee for each copy. The standard license fee was six pence per copy. Eld paid twelve.
Yes, in three or four cases two plays by one author were registered at one time. That fact did not arise from any “confinement” of the Register to such a purpose, however, but from random circumstances unrelated to the purposes of the Register itself. Walter Burre registered his rights to both Sejanus and Volpone on October 3, 1610, for example, simply as a matter of convenience. He had purchased those rights from another stationer in a single transaction. The rights to publish two plays by Lyly, Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, plus two other works, were once held by stationer Thomas Cadman, but apparently had been transferred to William Broome. After Broome’s death, the rights of his widow in those four works apparently were contested, perhaps by Cadman himself. The widow’s rights were confirmed in a decision by the Company’s Court of Assistants, a decision reflected in a registration of all four works on April 12, 1597.
Even a casual perusal of the Register will show that no single author was required for simultaneous registration of multiple copies. A substantial majority of such entries into the Register concern works by different authors. In most of those cases the different authors are actually named in the entries. Other times we know or may reasonably infer that the authors were different people. Here’s a good example: On September 13, 1610, John Wright entered, and paid the twelve pence double fee, for both “The tragicall history of the horrible life and Death of Doctor Ffaustus, written by C.M.” and a sermon, “religious meditations of the Deathe of Christ Jesus.” The sermon’s author isn’t identified, but I’m guessing he wasn’t Marlowe.
Nothing in Eld’s registration suggests that Revenger’s Tragedy and A Trick were written by a single author. The two plays had come to Eld from different sources. His publication of Revenger’s Tragedy states that play was acted by the King’s Company. His publication of A Trick, that it was acted by the Children of Paul’s. Eld just happened to register both plays at the same time.
That takes us to the end of the external and genuinely objective evidence. By the standard of proof in civil cases, “more probable than not,” the evidence says Tourneur. Then we are left to deal with the murky and unfathomable evidence of subjective impression. Without reference to the external evidence, the subjective evidence leaves us, I think, no clear answer.
Many more accomplished readers of plays than I have concluded that one author wrote both The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Atheist’s Tragedy. They have done so on the grounds of styles, themes, sensibilities and methods of verbalization. My book about Kyd’s Hamlet may add further weight to their conclusions. The book will show, I hope, that The Atheist’s Tragedy burlesques Kyd’s play. Tourneur sets out there to flip the important events in Kyd’s play upside down, and to parody Kyd’s pious moralities. The result, although beyond my book’s scope to show, was a tragedy with a macabre and deeply discomforting, but nevertheless very droll, sense of humor. A sensibility some will detect in The Revenger’s Tragedy.
I include under the category of subjective evidence the many studies attributing The Revenger’s Tragedy to Middleton based on statistical analysis of selected mannerisms attributed by the studies’ authors to Middleton. Middleton partisans prefer to classify this evidence as objective. It is not. In every critical respect this evidence depends upon underlying subjective judgments made by the studies’ authors. This isn’t the place fully to deconstruct the methodological flaws in these attribution studies. I want only to touch upon two key points.
My first point concerns the universe of plays used by the studies’ authors to provide the base sample for identifying Middleton mannerisms. Jackson explains how the base universe was arrived at. External contemporary evidence supports attribution of five plays to Middleton: A Game at Chess, Your Five Gallants, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Witch, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Yet the base universe for attribution studies consists not only of those five, but of seven more. One of them, A Mad World My Masters, at least has the initials “T.M.” to back it. The remaining six, More Dissemblers Besides Women, Women Beware Women, No Wit No Help like a Woman’s, The Mayor of Quinborough, Michaelmas Term, and The Phoenix, lack any external contemporary support. They are included in the base universe, Jackson explains, on the grounds that “scholars have accepted [their attributions’] accuracy because of the clear internal connections among all twelve plays.”
Well, no, you can’t do that. Inclusion of the other seven plays in the sample universe based on their internal characteristics is an analytic error which logicians would classify as illicit process. The conclusion, that these seven plays are by Middleton, is incorporated into the major premise that Middleton’s authorship of plays may be determined based on internal mannerisms in the sample universe. Conclusions about Middleton’s authorship based on inference from mannerisms may correctly be drawn only from mannerisms found in the five plays for whose authorship we have solid objective evidence. A practical effect of the analytic error in these studies is significantly to inflate the importance of the mannerisms in common between the objectively supported sample and the spurious additions, and among the spurious additions themselves.
Without the use of illicit process, it might still be possible to admit the seven other plays to the sample universe of plays probably by Middleton based on attributions of the plays to him made in the Restoration. If, however, the seven plays are admitted on that basis, a related problem then arises. The Restoration evidence for Middleton’s authorship of A Mad World My Masters, Michaelmas Term, and The Phoenix comes from attribution of those plays to him in the lists of Archer and Kirkman. (Mad World is also supported by “T.M.” on the 1608 title page, but initials alone, as many “W.S.” examples show, are unreliable evidence.) Archer and Kirkman identify as Middleton’s, in addition, The Family of Love and Blurt, Master Constable. Attribution studies exclude those plays from the sample universe based, yes, on their internal characteristics. That cannot legitimately be done if the sample universe is to be constructed from objective evidence that includes Restoration testimony.
The illicit Procrustean logic of the Middleton attribution studies in these respects seriously undermines the studies’ validity. By including and excluding plays in and from the sample universe based on the plays’ internal mannerisms alone, the studies depend upon a series of dubious assumptions. The studies assume that an author’s style doesn’t change over time with respect to the selected norms. Thus they exclude Blurt from the sample although it would have been among Middleton’s earliest surviving works. They assume that the writer could not or would not vary his style in the selected norms depending upon the circumstances in which he was writing. And they assume that the appearance or non-appearance of the selected norms lay solely within the writer’s control.
All these are dangerous assumptions, especially here. Writing styles of professional writers do in fact change over time based on accumulated experience and evolving environmental cues. Indeed, parallel stylistic studies are often employed to help fix the chronologies of Elizabethan playwrights’ canons. Professional writers do in fact adapt their writing styles to the purposes at hand. Playwrights in particular. They put into the mouths of their characters not the words that they themselves would have spoken, but the words that would have been spoken by the characters. If I am wrong in these respects, can someone please show me a stylistic study proving that Titus Andronicus and The Tempest were written by the same man?
Any notion, lastly, that Elizabethan playwrights controlled their words’ ultimate expression is obviously incorrect. Many agents interceded between the playwrights and the expressions. In the collaborative world of Elizabethan play writing other dramatists may have revised or added to a play. The actors almost certainly added to, deleted, and otherwise changed the playwright’s words. The scribes who transcribed the playwright’s words surely changed the expressions according to their own predilections. And the compositors who set the playwright’s words into print brought to the task their printing house’s house styles. Many of those house styles would have affected expression of the Middletonian mannerisms so cherished by our studies’ authors.
The incorrectness of these assumptions doesn’t just vitiate the Middleton sample universe constructed by our studies’ authors. It also infects the studies’ application of Middleton mannerisms extracted from that universe to target plays. There the assumptions are repeated again. The studies assume that the styles of alternative possible authors did not change over time, that the alternative authors could not or would not have altered their styles in the target plays, and that the authors controlled their words’ ultimate expression. Thus, we are informed, Middletonian mannerisms appear more frequently in The Revenger’s Tragedy than in Tourneur’s undoubted Atheist’s Tragedy. The studies conceive that Tourneur was a playwright incapable of incorporating more characteristically Middletonian mannerisms in one play than another.
That conception is particularly treacherous in Tourneur’s case. We know almost nothing about Tourneur. He was a professional writer in a sense. He apparently spent most of his adult life as secretary to several of the realm’s nobles. Those positions almost certainly required him to draft documents in the voices of his employers. So he was accustomed to varying his personal style with the occasions at hand. He apparently turned to play writing only when he was between secretarial employments. Surely when he did he brought different styles and sensibilities to each individual project. And when he did take up a new play writing project he surely prepared for the project by reading and seeing then popular plays, such as those by Middleton.
We have, in Tourneur’s case, a sample universe of only one undisputed surviving play. We cannot rationally insist that he was bound to repeat the style of that one play in every other play he wrote. If he was, I’ll say again, the author of Titus Andronicus cannot have written The Tempest.
My second principal objection to the Middleton attribution studies concerns the methods by which the test mannerisms have been selected. Essentially all of the studies’ authors are Middleton partisans. They aim to show that Middleton wrote plays and parts of plays otherwise unattributed to him. They explain generally that they selected their test mannerisms because of those mannerisms’ frequency in Middleton plays. But they don’t say what other test mannerisms might have been used instead, and why they were not. The foundational flaw in this procedure should be obvious. No matter how well intentioned, our authors’ selection of mannerisms may have been influenced by their goal. If you were writing those studies, would you select mannerisms that tended to show your man didn’t write or participate in the target plays? Probably not.
In any event, frequency of occurrence in Middleton’s plays is not, standing alone, a valid basis for selection of test mannerisms. Its use will bias results in favor of Middleton’s authorship even apart from bias introduced by the studies’ authors. Simply as a matter of ordinary statistical variation, some plays and parts of plays not actually by Middleton will contain more of the frequent Middletonian mannerisms than the average number of those mannerisms in all plays. If you alight on those plays and parts of plays and say they must have been by Middleton, you will be wrong. If we set aside for the moment all other flaws in these studies, let’s indeed assume that more of the frequent Middletonian mannerisms appear in The Revenger’s Tragedy than in the average Elizabethan play. Does that mean the play was written by Middleton, or does it mean the play was one of those not by Middleton that by ordinary statistical variation must have exceeded the average? Absent the external evidence, we would have no basis to say.
A valid statistical study would not involve any selection of mannerisms. It would examine all mannerisms altogether—all that appear frequently in Middleton’s plays, all that appear infrequently, and, if they are genuine Elizabethan mannerisms, all that never appear. That information would be compared against corresponding information from the target plays. Then we would know the exact extent to which mannerisms adopted by Middleton, infrequently employed by him, and avoided by him altogether, appear and don’t appear, in the target plays. The statistical probability that a target play not by Middleton would in all these respects closely match the profiles of all the plays from a legitimate Middleton sample universe would be slight. As the studies now have it, we are very far from owning that information.
The numbers from the target play should be compared with those of each of the five Middleton plays individually, not with the averages of those five. The Middleton attribution studies do provide statistical information for each play, but they tend to give undue emphasis to averages. Averages disguise variation in individual plays, and you would need to know the degree of variation in order to make an accurate evaluation. Suppose, for example, that the target play closely matched the averages of the five Middleton plays but did not match any one of them. You could not be sure in that case whether the play was by Middleton or whether, as the product of random statistical variation, it merely resembled Middleton’s plays.
Lastly, as a cross-check, the same procedures should be performed on all other plays by the target play’s alternative author, if there is one. If that study also yielded positive results we still would not know whether the play was by Middleton or by the alternative author. With respect to The Revenger’s Tragedy the alternative author’s sample universe consists only of one play. That is not a sample sufficient to yield reliable results, but the procedure should be performed anyway. We would like to know whether The Revenger’s Tragedy contains not only Middletonian mannerisms, but Tourneurian ones as well.
So what do the existing Middleton attribution studies tell us about authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy? They tell us that improperly selected Middletonian mannerisms evoked from a flawed sample universe appear more often in that play than they do in Tourneur’s acknowledged Atheist’s Tragedy. If it was late at night, and I had drunk too much wine, and I was listening to Irish music, I might say that the studies suggest the possibility of Middleton’s authorship. But I would also observe that the studies, at least equally plausibly, suggest that Tourneur was an adaptable playwright. The next morning when I was dealing with my hangover I would not be so charitable.
It is hard to believe, of course, that a play as infinitely fascinating as The Revenger’s Tragedy was written by a man who is to us a cypher. So also that the World’s greatest plays—its greatest literary works—were written by an ill-educated countryman from Stratford. Yet the evidence for Shakespeare is overwhelming. The evidence for Tourneur is not quite so conclusive. Objectively considered, however, it continues to say in its current state that Tourneur probably wrote the play.