the early critics who first discovered these commonalities took them as evidence that beaumont and fletcher had a hand in the authorship of "the birth of merlin". this view, however, has not been accepted by the consensus of scholars and critics, since apart from the cited common passages, there is no evidence of beaumont's or fletcher's authorship in the play. the common passages appear to be best explained as the type of borrowings sometimes found in works of the era (the borrowings from thomas north's translation of plutarch's "parallel lives" in shakespeare's "antony and cleopatra", for example) that have no bearing on questions of authorship. though the dates of authorship for both plays are uncertain, it seems likely that "cupid's revenge" is the earlier work, and that the author or authors of "merlin" were influenced by the beaumont-fletcher play.