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.