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''Wit at Several Weapons'' is a seventeenth-century comedy of problematic date and authorship. ==Authorship and Date== 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 29 June 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.〔Lake, pp. 198–200.〕 Lake's analysis of the play's internal evidence yielded the following division of shares of authorship:〔Lake, pp. 211–14.〕 ::Middleton — Act I, scene 1; Act II, 1; Act III; Act IV; ::Rowley — Act I, scene 2; Act II, 2–4; Act V. The overall division is one typical of Middleton/Rowley collaborations, in which Middleton took primary responsibility for the main plot, and Rowley for the comic subplot. References in the text indicate that the clown character Pompey Doodle is a fat clown, a kind of part that Rowley repeatedly wrote for himself to play. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wit at Several Weapons」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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