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Keep the Widow Waking is a lostJacobean play, significant chiefly for the light it throws on the complexities of collaborative authorship in English Renaissance drama.
A Late Murder of the Son Upon the Mother, or Keep the Widow Waking was atragedy licensed by theMaster of the Revels (the Court official in charge of regulating drama) in September1624, as the work ofJohn Ford andJohn Webster ("Written by Forde, and Webster," the record states).[1] Such an entry in the Revels accounts is generally accepted by scholars as strong evidence of authorship. In the case of this play, however, documents relating to a lawsuit are preserved in the Public Records Office in London—documents that include testimony byThomas Dekker thatKeep the Widow Waking was actually written by Dekker, Ford, Webster, andWilliam Rowley.
This cluster of dramatists was known to have been working together in the early 1620s. Webster and Rowley would writeA Cure for a Cuckold a year later (1625); andThe Spanish Gypsy (1623) was perhaps written by Dekker, Ford, and Rowley.The Witch of Edmonton dates from1621; the first published text of that play (1658) states that it was written by Dekker, Ford, Rowley, "&c." Scholars have generally ignored the "et cetera" and treated the play as the work of Ford, Dekker, and Rowley; yet the example ofKeep the Widow Waking suggests that the "&c." should perhaps not be dismissed lightly.
It has been suggested thatWit Without Money, written byJohn Fletcher, is an antecedent of this play[2] and may have influenced it.
