The Fair Maid of the Inn was attributed to John Fletcher by Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, when he issued a licence for the play in January 1626 (Bawcutt, 1996a, 162). The play was not published until 1647, when it appeared in the folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s works. Nevertheless, several scholars have suggested that it might have been finished by Jonson after Fletcher’s death in August 1625. F. G. Fleay, for example, proposed that ‘Fletcher wrote i.3, ii.1, iii.2, iv.1; Massinger i.1, 2, and revised v.3’, while ‘the rest of the play’ was by Jonson (Fleay, 1891, 1.222). De Winter shared Fleay’s opinion that Jonson wrote the comic material, while A. W. Ward conceded initially that the ‘abundance of allusions to contemporary fashions and follies [were] to some degree in the manner of Jonson’ (Winter, 1905, xxxi-xxxii; Ward, 1875, 2.232). Later, he reassessed his position, concluding that he was ‘not prepared without further evidence to accept the theory of Jonson’s collaboration’ (Ward, 1899, 737). The weakness of these views is that they are all impressionistic.

Over the years, other playwrights have been associated with the play: cases have been made proposing authorial contributions from Philip Massinger, John Ford, John Webster, and William Rowley (see Oliphant, 1927, 463-72; Sykes, 1924, 140-58). Cyrus Hoy suggests that Fletcher’s contribution to the play was minor, preferring to see it as the work of Webster, Massinger, and Ford (Hoy, 1960, 77), while Fredson Bowers’s edition makes no mention of Jonson and assumes the play was the work of Massinger, Webster, and Ford (Bowers, 1966-96, 10.555ff).

In sum, then, Jonson’s contribution to the play is conceivable but not likely. Like The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of the Inn would benefit from further study and, perhaps, from the application of new, computer-based, stylistic analysis.