Wit at Several Weapons
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Wit at Several Weapons is a seventeenth-century comedy of problematic date and authorship. In its own century, the play appeared in print only in the two Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679; yet modern scholarship has determined that the Wit at Several Weapons is a collaboration between Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, written some three decades before publication.
In addition to the play's appearance in both folios, its belated entry in the Stationers' Register on June 29, 1660 also assigns it to Beaumont and Fletcher. The Epilogue to the play in the folios refers to a limited Fletcherian role in the play's authorship: "...if he but writ / An act, or two...." Yet the play itself indicates that Fletcher's contribution may be more minor than that; Fletcher's highly characteristic pattern of linguistic preferences (ye for you, 'em for them, etc.) is lacking in the play. David Lake confirms the presence of Middleton and Rowley that earlier scholars like Cyrus Hoy had detected. Where other critics had dated the play anywhere from 1609 to 1620, Lake favors a date in the later part of 1613 based on topical allusions.[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Lake, pp. 198-200.
[edit] References
- Lake, David J. The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
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