SOURCE: Price, George R. “The Authorship and the Manuscript of The Old Law.” Huntington Library Quarterly 16, no. 2 (February 1953): 117-39.

In the following essay, Price discusses what part Rowley, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger each had in writing and revising The Old Law.

A primary question about The Old Law¹ [OL] has always been that of authorship, or more precisely, the nature of the contributions of the collaborators whose names are on the title page. Of the several answers that have been given, the most exhaustive is by E. C. Morris, in an article of fifty years ago.² Morris's conclusion, however, was almost entirely based on analysis of style. It is reasonable to ask that a textual analysis precede the stylistic. In the present article I attempt to set forth the leading textual clues and to correlate them with the stylistic evidence of authorship; for a more complete textual...