The Double Marriage - Authorship

Authorship

Scholars have been able to differentiate the respective contributions of Fletcher and Massinger in the play. Cyrus Hoy, in his wide-ranging survey of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, provided this breakdown, which resembles the verdicts of earlier critics:

Massinger — Act I; Act III, scene 1; Act IV, 2; Act V, 3 and 4;

Fletcher — Act II; Act III, scenes 2 and 3; Avt IV, 1, 3, and 4; Act V, scenes 1 and 2.

The authorship division is unsurprising for the two collaborators; it resembles their shares in The Spanish Curate, in which Massinger handled the main plot and Fletcher the subplot. There is no distinct subplot in The Double Marriage; in this play, Fletcher took primary responsibility for the "underworld" elements about the pirates, and Massinger the "overworld" of the royal court of Naples, as is typical of him. (Massinger as collaborator — as with Nathan Field in The Fatal Dowry, and with Thomas Dekker in The Virgin Martyr — tended to handle "upper-crust" materials: kings and dukes; royal courts and law courts; aristocrats, noble families, and great houses. He relied on his co-workers for materials involving lower classes, the common people, the beau monde of fashion, and criminals and clowns and similar elements. The Double Marriage conforms to this pattern.) It appears that Massinger revised the play after Fletcher's death; Fletcher's characteristic preference for ye instead of you was toned down in Massinger's revision.