This comic play about various suitors’ attempts to win a rich widow was first published in 1652 by Humphrey Moseley with a title-page that declared it to have been written by ‘Ben: Johnson’, ‘John Fletcher’, and ‘Tho: Middleton’. The quarto also included an ‘Address to the Reader’ by the actor Alexander Gough which describes it as a ‘lively piece, drawn by the art of Johnson, Fletcher, and Middleton’ (A2). In the later seventeenth century, Anthony à Wood, the English antiquary, took this attribution at face value, noting that Jonson ‘also had a hand in a com. called, The Widow’ (Wood, 1691-2, 1.509). In the nineteenth century, John Payne Collier saw Jonson’s influence throughout the whole of Act 4 on the basis of stylistic similarities with other Jonson plays (Dodsley, eds. Reed, Gilchrist, and Collier, 1825-7, 12.264ff.). Nevertheless, the balance of contemporary scholarship comes down decidedly on the belief that Middleton alone was the author.

The authorship case for The Widow has most recently been discussed by Gary Taylor, who suggests the play was written around 1615 or 1616 and proposes that it be ‘added to the core of twelve “undisputed and unaided” Middleton plays’ (Taylor and Lavagnino, eds., 2007, 382, 85). Taylor notes that one seventeenth-century owner of the quarto crossed out Jonson and Fletcher’s names and added the word ‘alone’ after Middleton’s, and that a second, different quarto bears the manuscript addition, ‘Tho: Middleton’, also in a manner that appears to deny the authorship of both Jonson and Fletcher. Moreover, lists of plays compiled in 1656 attribute the play solely to Middleton, as does a list produced in 1661 (Taylor, 379). Taylor suggests that Jonson and Fletcher’s names were included on the 1652 title-page because of their fame as playwrights during the Interregnum: Jonson’s works were published in folio in 1640 and Fletcher’s in 1647. In contrast, Taylor notes, ‘no new play attached to Middleton had been published since 1630’ and, ‘in the intervening 22 years, only a single play quarto – the 1640 reprint of Mad World – had carried his name’. In other words, it benefitted Humphrey Moseley, the play’s publisher, to advertise The Widow as a play written, in part at least, by the more popular Jonson and Fletcher.

On balance, the connection of Jonson’s name with The Widow seems to be entirely unsubstantial. The attribution to Middleton is borne out not only by Taylor’s scholarship on the matter, but by modern computer analysis. Michael Witmore’s study of 320 early modern plays using Docuscope, a computer-aided system of linguistic analysis, places The Widow in close proximity to other Middleton plays, reading it as most generically and stylistically similar to The Mayor of Queenborough and Anything for a Quiet Life, and placing it in a cluster of plays that includes A Trick to Catch an Old One, A Mad World My Masters, Michaelmas Term, No Wit No Help Like a Woman’s, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, More Dissemblers Besides Women, Women Beware Women, and The Fair Quarrel (for the diagram, see Hope and Witmore, 2010, 388). The evidence strongly suggests that Taylor is correct to include The Widow in Middleton’s corpus alone. Nevertheless, the appearance of Jonson’s name on the 1652 quarto’s title-page tells us a great deal about his posthumous reputation as a popular playwright and as a man whose writing was compatible with the royalist agenda prosecuted in the 1650s by the publisher, Moseley.