 The play was first published in quarto in 1662 by the bookseller Francis Kirkman, with a title-page attribution of authorship to Middleton.Yet while Middleton's distinctive style is clearly present in some portions of the text, there are other sections that suggested to some critics the presence of a second hand.The early twentieth-century critic H. Dugdale Sykes was the first person to argue in favour of Webster as the second author.