Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/563

 i2s.vn.DEc.n,i92o.j NOTES AND QUERIES.

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attitude towards the queen was due to a morbid hatred of womankind, he had set himself to cure him of his perversity. Ob- serving that he was of a jealous disposition, he had cunningly mingled with suggestions of the Queen's unchastity praises of her beauty, thus rousing his royal master to a due appreciation of her perfections. Having satisfied himself that nothing but a con- viction of the Queen's unfaithfulness could ever again estrange the King from her, he had directed suspicion towards Petruchi merely in order to demonstate the ground- lessness of any imputations against her honour. Matters thus being satisfactorily explained, the Queen forgives the King and all ends happily.

The humbler love-affairs of the widow Salassa and Velasco, the Queen's general, form the subject of the underplot, and a seasoning of not very agreeable comedy is provided by Bufo, a Captain, and Pynto, an astronomer, belonging to the King's party.

Prof. Bang gives many good reasons for assigning ' The Queen ' to Ford, and Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, who has made a special study of this dramatist's work, confirms this verdict.* There can be no doubt that they are right. The artificiality of the plot, the cadence of the verse, the elevated rhetoric and marked tendency to hyperbole in the serious portion of the drama, the mirthless vulgarity of the prose scenes, all point to Ford. But merely to affirm this is not to prove that the play is Ford's, and to Mr. Sherman's statement that to those familiar with his works "corroborative testimony of vocabulary, parallel passages, &c. is super- fluous," I would respectfully demur. If Ford wrote * The Queen ' his authorship should be deducible from its vocabulary and from a comparison of its language with that which we know to be his, and I propose here to show that its authenticity can be established by this method in so conclusive a fashion that those possessing no more than an ordinary reader's acquaintance with Ford will be able to recognize that its claim to a place amongst his dramatic works is unquestionable.

Though some of the evidence that follow; has not escaped the attention of Professo: Bang, I have thought it better to conduc my investigation independently of his, anc accordingly my notes on the play owe nothing to those appended to his reprint.

A careful study of Ford's independent dramas soon satisfied me that a valuablejaid to the identification of his work in those written by him in collaboration with Dekker was afforded by his predilection for certain words, the most noteworthy being " antic as noun and adjective), "bosom " (noun nd verb), "bounty" and "bounties," 'chronicle," "crave," "destiny," "nimble," 'partake," "proffer," (verb and noun) r 'sift" (to subject to a searching te*st) r 'thrive," "thrift" and "thrifty." 'Bosom" "bounty" and "thrive" are Loubtless common words. But in his seven acknowledged plays Ford has "bosom " n.o- ewer than 42 times, or an average of six ,imes in each play : " bounty " and " boun- ies " 33 times, "thrive," "thrift" and 'thrifty" (together) 31 times. The other words in this list, though they appear less ften, are yet used with abnormal frequency, ranging from 1 7 times in the case of " antic to 9 times in that of "sift." All but two " nimble " and " partake ") are to be found n ' The Queen ' " bosom " and " bounty " 4 times each, "crave" 5 times, "antic," 'chronicle," "destiny" and "thrive" rwice, "thrift," "proffer," and "sift," once. Of these words "antic " and "sift " are perhaps the most distinctive. "Antic " appears in this play, both as an adjective (1205)* ;

I'll sooner dig a dungeon in a molehill, And hide my crown there, that both fools and

children

May trample o'er my royalty, than ever Lay it beneath an antic woman's feet.

and as a noun (1500) ;

...... spit on, revil'd, challeng'd. provok'd by fools,

boys, antics, cowards.

"Sift" is used by the author of 'The Queen ' exactly in Ford's way (1418) ; You dare not sift the honour of my faith By any strange injunction, etc. Compare 'The Lover's Melancholy,' IV. i*- 15b ;

If I have us'd a woman's skill to sift The constancy of your protested love and 'The Fancies,' III. ii. 133b; So shall we sift her love and his opinion.

Enfield.

in Modern Language Notes (Baltimore), vol. xxiii.
 * See his article (' A New Play by John Ford*

(To be continued.)

to the numbers of the lines in Prof. Bang's reprintj other references are to page and column of Hartley Coleridge's edition of 'The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford,' published by George Rout- ledge and Sons.
 * In the case of ' The Queen ' my references are