Kirkman may have thought had. It is not necessary. Kirkman was one of the wildest of the Restoration publishers. The fact that he was publishing one play as by Webster and Rowley might quite likely lead him to put their names on the title-page of its twin. Anyhow he has no authority. We do not know who did or who did not write The Thracian Wonder.

Monuments of Honour is a quite ordinary city triumph, there is nothing remarkable or important about it. It was published in 1624 as by "John Webster, merchant taylor." "John Webster" was a common enough name, and there is no proof that this one is our author. The Latin tag on the title-page, which also ends the preface to The White Devil, was in common use. There is only the probability that no other John Webster would have been distinguished enough in literature to have been chosen to write this. The guilds generally liked to get hold of some fairly accomplished literary man for such a purpose. Neither the verse nor the invention of this pageant affirms the authorship of Webster. But there is also nothing to contradict it.

APPENDIX C.-SIR THOMAS WYATT

"THE FAMOUS HISTORY OF SIR THOMAS WYATT"

Date.

The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt. With the Coronation of Queen Mary and the Coming In of King Philip. Written by Thomas Dickers and John Webster, was printed in 1607.1 In October, 1602, Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and Webster were paid, in all, £8 for Part I. of Lady Jane or The Overthrow of Rebels; and Dekker was paid, in earnest, 5s. for Part II. (Smith and Chettle may have received small amounts for this, also.) All this was on behalf of Worcester's Men, who passed under the patronage of Queen Anne in 1603. As the 1607 Quarto of Sir Thomas Wyatt says it was played by the Queen's Majesty's Servants, and as the authors are the same, there is no reason to doubt that Dyce was right in supposing that Sir Thomas Wyatt consists of fragments of both parts of Lady Jane. Dr. Stoll thinks perhaps we have only Part I., as The Coronation of Queen Mary and The Coming In of King Philip are only promised and not given. Dr. Greg suggests that the cut version of Part I. ends and Part II. begins, 1V. Greg. Henslowe's Diary, Pt. ii. pp. 232, 3. There was another edition in 1612.

with Mary's audience (p. 193, column 2; Scene 10). Professor Schelling makes the credible suggestion that the censor had cut out a great deal; especially, no doubt, the Coming In of King Philip. As it stands, the play is extraordinarily short. In any case, the date is 1602. It must have been played at "The Rose"; and, as there are two editions, it was probably revived.

Sources.

The source of Sir Thomas Wyatt—that is, of the two parts of Lady Jane-is Holinshed; and, as far as we know, nothing else.1

Collaboration.

Opinions have differed as to the respective amounts contributed by Dekker and Webster. Dr. Stoll, arguing from metre, sentiment, style, phrases, and the general nature of the play, can find Dekker everywhere, Webster nowhere. Dr. Greg gives Webster rather more than half, mostly the first half. Mr. Pierce 2 says that Webster wrote "most of Scenes 2, 5, 6, 10, 14, and 16, although some of these scenes were certainly retouched by Dekker, and all of them may have been." I shall discuss Mr. Pierce's method of assigning scenes more closely in the Appendix on Westward Ho and Northward Ho. In the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt none of his metrical tests seems to me to have any validity.

1 V. Stoll, p. 45.

2 The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker. I use his division into scenes, which is the same as Fleay's.

They depend, like Dr. Stoll's, on the assumption that Webster's metrical characteristics were the same in 1602 as in 1610 or 1620-an assumption Mr. Pierce himself confesses to be absurd. It must be recognised that we have only three plays on which we can base our generalisations about Webster's metre, two slowlywritten Italian tragedies of about 1610 or 1612 and a tragi-comedy of 1620. In Sir Thomas Wyatt Webster was writing a different kind of play, together with a lot of other people, probably in a great hurry; and it is likely he was immature. To take the statistics for rhyme in The Duchess of Malfi and the other plays and use them, as proving that Webster uses rhyme less than Dekker, to apportion the scenes in Sir Thomas Wyatt, is a glaring example of that statistical blindness and inert stupidity that has continually spoilt the use of the very valuable metrical tables that have been prepared for Elizabethan Drama. The evidence that metre gives in Sir Thomas Wyatt can only be of the vaguest description.

So, too, with characters. The reason why there are certain kinds of character and incident in any of these three partnership plays, is not that Dekker wrote them. It is that they are that kind of play. If Webster wrote a citizen's-wife-gallant play, he must have introduced citizens' wives and gallants, even if he did not do so in an Italian tragedy. On page 2 of his book Mr. Pierce claims that his study is useful as throwing light on Webster's range as an author. “If Webster wrote the parts of Captain Jenkins and

Hans Van Belch in Northward Ho, then he showed an element of pleasant humour and manysidedness which is not indicated anywhere else." In Chapter VII., dealing with "The Character and Atmosphere-Test," he quotes with approval, as proof of what is and what is not Dekker's, Dr. Stoll on these characters. "Manifestly Dekker's too are the Dutch Drawer and Merchant, and the Welsh Captain. A Dutch Hans had already appeared in the Shoemaker . . . and Captain Jenkins is the counterpart of Sir Vaughan ap Rees in Satiro-Mastix." That is to say, these characters of common types are Dekker's, because Dekker uses similar ones elsewhere, and not Webster's because Webster doesn't. You start out to see if Webster, having written only in a certain style elsewhere, wrote in another style here. You conclude that he has not written in this other style here, because he has written only in a certain style elsewhere!

Considerations of style (in the narrower sense of literary individuality) and vocabulary are more convincing. The only one of Mr. Pierce's tests that has any value in the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt—except, of course, the parallel-passages, taken with cautionis his three-syllable-Latin-word one.1 A large proportion of Latin words, and any other characteristic we recognise clearly as one of the later Webster's, do tend to prove his presence in a scene-though their absence does not disprove it. These slight indications of style, if they had arisen and become unconscious so early, 1 See the Appendix on Westward Ho and Northward Ho.