Thomas Dekker; a study

Front matter

CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 1924 100 210 982

Cornell University Library

Preface

This study, tentative and incomplete as it is, would have no reason for existence if there had been any previous attempt to give a unified account of Dekker's life and personality, and if much of the criticism of the man and w^riter had not been distorted by an imperfect chronology or a partial knovi^ledge of the facts. The object, then, has been to collect scattered material, including that furnished by Dekker himself, which has been much neglected, to arrange that material in chronological order, and to arrive at an understanding of the man. If the endeavor to understand has been colored by personal feeling, the reader is entreated to remember that a happy comradeship of three years is bound to leave some trace behind.

My indebtedness to scholars in the field of Elizabethan literature requires a word. The best outline of Dekker's life is to be found in the " Dictionary of National Biography " by A. H. Bullen, which in most respects agrees with that of Fleay. Memoirs of varying value are prefixed to Shepherd's edition of Dekker's " Dramatic Works," to Grosart's edition of the " Non-dramatic Works," and to the Mermaid edition of the " Best Plays." The plays are discussed in all extended accounts of the Elizabethan drama, especially by Ward, who implicitly and explicitly ranks them low, and by Schelling in the somewhat scattered fashion required by his scheme. The growing tendency towards appreciation is marked in the " Cambridge History of English Literature " by an admirable article on a portion of Dekker's prose and by a sympathetic account of his life and plays, the latter however not overburdened with facts. Swinburne's essay, with all its need of shading and positive deduction, remains the best comprehensive view of Dekker's writings. Much gratitude is also due to students of special aspects of Dekker's work, notably to Mr. C. H. Herford and Mr. R. A. Small ; nor should the names of Mr. E. E. Stoll and Mr. F. E. Pierce be forgotten. Mr. Greg's edition of " Henslowe's Diary," text and commentary, has been very helpful.

But my deepest obligations are to Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike, of Columbia University, to whom I owe, besides mention of the subject, much assistance, generously given and infinitely stimulating, whether by way of criticism or suggestion, and whose methods, gained first from his writings and afterwards in the lecture room, I have tried to follow, however inadequately.

I desire also to express my cordial thanks to Professor Charles M. Hathaway, Jr., of the United States Naval Academy, who kindly read the manuscript, and from his special knowledge of Dekker gave me the benefit of many a helpful criticism; to Dr. E. H. Wright, of Columbia University, who carefully read my study; and to Dr. Carl Van Doren, also of Columbia University, who secured some valuable Dekker material from the British Museum that would otherwise have been inaccessible.

M. L. H.

New York City, August 10, 1911.

Contents

Chapter Pagb

I. Introduction i

The point of view. Dekker in part his own biographer. His trustworthiness. His Grove of Bay Trees a record of enthusiasms. His affection for Nash. His early intellectual environment.

CHAPTER I Introduction

We do not know the month, possibly not the year, in which Thomas Dekker was born; we know still less about the date when he died ; and we are not certain that he was ever married. But we know many facts more important than these.

We know, for instance, that he was a man of letters, who lived by his pen and in no other way, a consistent follower of the Muses, "pure maids but poor ones,"^ as he says in his punning fashion. As early as 1604 he gaily spoke of himself as one "whose crest is a pen and inkhorn;"^ and five or six years later, in another epistle, after dividing writers into two classes, those whose books are not worth so much brown paper, and those who, " being free of Wit's merchant-venturers," make, for gain only, some five or six voyages to the press every new moon, and who " spit nothing but ink and speak nothing but poem," he continues : " I would keep company with neither of these two mad-men if I could avoid them, yet I take the last to be the wisest and less dangerous : for sithence all the arrows that men shoot in the world fly to two marks only, either pleasure or profit, he is not much to be condemned that, having no more acres to live upon than those that lie in his head, is every hour hammering out one piece or other out of this rusty Iron age, sithence the golden and silver globes of the

•" Epis.-Ded., A Knight's Conjuring, ed. E, F. Rimbault, Spen. Soc. Pub., Vol. 5- ^Epis.-Ded., The Wonderful Year, G., I, 76.

2 1 world are so locked up that a scholar can hardly be suffered to behold them."*

Again, we know, with few intervals, what Dekker, the man of letters, was doing from January, 1598, down to 1632, when, in a merry little song of appreciation, we hear his voice for the last time.

We know, besides, certain definite facts about the inner life of the man: what he liked and disliked, what he loved and hated; for his essentially lyrical temperament constantly repeats its utterances in personal prose and in dramatic verse, and when specific thoughts and emotions come constantly to the surface, their opposites never, we may assume that they were "permanent. Some of them are well known: his pity for maimed soldiers, for poor scholars, for the victims of usurers ; his horror of cruelty; the democracy of his outlook that at times included even women in its scope. We likewise know his love of books and music, his liking for law, and his passion for poetry and religion.

We often know his mood at the time of writing or printing, for to most of his prose pieces and to some of his plays are prefixed dedications or prefaces or both, which, though frequently veiled under whimsical language, are full of personality, and are, besides, often of special significance when taken in connection with the known facts of his life — a trustworthy record, for they show anger when we know from other sources that he had reason to feel anger ; depression and pain, when we know, again from other sources, that the circumstances of his life might well arouse these emotions; fatigue and boredom, when he might naturally have had such feelings. We may therefore be sure that his more usual note of gayety and buoyancy is an honest expression of joy in life and work, and equally sure that his religious faith was just what he affirms it to be. However silent other dramatists may be upon the question of the destiny of the soul, Dekker makes his position perfectly clear in both prose and verse. He writes in a typical passage :

' Epis.-Ded., Lanthorn and Candlelight, G., Ill, 178—179.

" You see, therefore, how dreadful a fellow Death is, making fools even of wise men, and cowards of the most valiant ; yea, in such a base slavery hath it bound men's senses that they have no power to look higher than their own roofs, but seems by their Turkish and barbarous actions to believe that there is no felicity after this life, and' that, like beasts, their souls ■ shall perish with their bodies."*

This religion did not fail him in the one tragic period of his life, and it is present in most of his works, from the young austerity of " Fortunatus " to the wise and sweet humanity — when all the world was bigoted — of "The Witch of Edmonton." Whatever his life may have been and however much his writings may have conceded to low popular tastes, he believed always that it was base to do evil, and, in a half-pagan age, that there was a happy future for the innocent and good. To him religion and poetry were the main facts of life — a creed that never shows the way to wealth although it may to a sort of beatitude. Curiously enough, Whipple, who was much impressed by Dekker's " wretchedness," felt forced to apply to him, fittingly as I think, his own words spoken of Fortunatus, " all felicity up to the brims."

In the contemporary records of Elizabethan literature, the name of Dekker does not appear until January, 1598, but our certain knowledge of some of his experiences and ideals goes back to earlier days. During those stirring years of England when to glory of adventure and glory of war was added the thrill of new shaping forces in literature, he was young and keenly sensitive to what was going on about him, both to the outburst of love for country and queen that followed the defeat of the Armada, and to the dramatic influences that between 1587 and 1598 were transforming the traditions of the stage; and he was alive to the new melodies then in the air. They were the same forces and melodies that at about the same time were influencing Shakespere, older than Dekker, but not, like the younger man, born and brought up in London where they were exhibited and felt earliest. His enthusiasms may easily be gathered from allusion, reference, and imitation in his plays, but on one occasion he spoke out directly. In

*The Wondeiiul Year, G., I, 145.

i6o7 he wrote "A Knight's Conjuring," altered from his " News from Hell," published the preceding year, a sequel to Nash's "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil." Among the changes is an added chapter on the abode of the blest, " fortunatae insulae." From this I quote almost the whole of the passage about the bay-trees, partly for the purpose just indicated and partly to show, at the outset, Dekker's attitude, constant and life-long, towards poetry. It was written when he was approximately thirty-five years old.

" Beyond' all these places is there a grove, which stands by itself like an island ; for a stream that makes music in the running clasps it round about like a hoop girdle of crystal: laurels grow so thick on all the banks of it that lightning itself, if it came thither, hath no power to pierce through them. It seems, without, a desolate and unfrequented wood, for those within are retired into themselves, but from them came forth such harmonious sounds that birds build nests only in the trees there to teach tunes to their young ones prettily. This is called the Grove of Bay trees, and to this consort-room resort none but the children of Phoebus, poets and musicians : the one creates the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voice and makes it speak music. When these happy spirits sit asunder, their bodies are like so many stars, and when they join together in several troops, they show like so many heavenly constellations. (Full of pleasant bowers and quaint arbours is all this walk. In one of which, old Chaucer, reverend for priority, blithe in cheer, buxom in his speeches and benign in his haviour, is circled round with all the makers or poets of his time, their hands leaning on one another's shoulders, and their eyes fixed seriously upon his, whilst their ears are all tied to his tongue by the golden chains of his numbers ; for here, like Evander's mother, they spake all in verse ; no Attic eloquence is so sweet : their language is so pleasing to the gods that they utter their oracles in none other.

" Grave Spenser was no sooner entered into this chapel of Apollo but these elder fathers of the divine fury gave him a. laurel and sung his welcome : Chaucer called him his son and placed him at his right hand. All of them, at a sign given by the whole choir of the muses that brought him thither, closing up their lips in silence and tuning all their ears for attention, to hear him sing out the rest of his Faerie Queene's praises.

" In another company sat learned Watson, industrious Kyd, ingenious Atchlow, and, though he had been a player moulded out of their pens, yet because he had been their lover and a register to the Muses, inimitable Bentley: these were likewise carousing to one another at the holy well, some of them singing paeans to Apollo, some of them hymns to the rest of the gods, whilst Marlowe, Greene, and Peele had got under the shades of a large vine, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their college, still haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here upon earth : for Nash inveighed bitterly, as he had wont to do, against dry-fisted patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they had given his muse that cherishment which she most worthily deserved, he had been fed to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and sugar and not so desperately have ventured his life and shortened his days by keeping company with pickle herrings. ... He had no sooner spoken this, but in comes Chettle sweating and blowing by reason of his fatness; to welcome whom, because he was of old acquaintance, all rose up and fell presently on their knees, to drink a health to all the lovers of Helicon: in doing which they made such a mad noise that all this conjuring, which is past, being but a dream, I suddenly started up, and am now awake.""

There are three groups, it will be noticed; the first painted with a hand that is reverent yet true, the second with less sympathy, the third in so intimate and genial a way as to make one feel that here the writer is on familiar ground.

Dekker, then, loved Chaucer; indeed Qiaucer is one of the few English poets quoted by him, for into his " Strange Horse Race" he brings the Frankhn's description of winter in modernized dress/ and he elsewhere refers to Chaucer's Kentish connection/ and to the " Canterbury Tales. "^ And he loved Chaucer's son, "grave Spenser," so rich in the affection of his contemporaries. He had already shown his admiration for " The Faerie Queene " by borrowing its nomenclature in the drama that celebrates the greatness of Elizabeth, and it is possible that from the same source he learned some of the sweetness of his poetry.

The members of the second group are not important, so far as we know, in Dekker's history, not even Kyd, for although, like other playwrights, he frequently quotes "Jeronimo, go by," and sometimes alludes to the older " Hamlet," his genius did not greatly occupy itself with violence, ghosts, or bloodshed, and his only revenge tragedy, left unfinished, could have had nothing of the Kydian type about it. The rest of the group may have been added as a sort of tribute to the memory of Nash, who in his writings affectionately mentions all three."

°A Knight's Conjuring, 74-77.

''A Rod for Runaways, G., IV, 302, margin.

» Northward Ho, P., Ill, 52.

'See Rimbault's notes on A Knight's Conjuring, 98-99.,

Very different is the case with the third group, every member of which contributed something to Dekker's style or subject matter. Chettle may be an exception, yet with him the external relationship was probably the closest of all, for they collaborated for some five years; Chettle later wrote a well-known verse about his affection for the younger man;" and the latter once borrowed money to help release his friend from imprisonment.^^ This third group possesses a homogeneousness exhibited by neither of the others. Whether Dekker knew the men in the flesh or not, he had seen their plays and read their prose, and had found much that was congenial. Looking at the group from this point of view, one misses the name of Lyly ; but to the bohemians Lyly had never belonged, either in his tastes or in the circumstances of his life; and besides, it may well be that at the time of writing Dekker had not heard of his death, which took place after years of comparative obscurity, in November, 1606. Dekker seldom mentions or alludes to any of his works : " Mother Bombie " once or twice," " Love's Metamorphosis " in " Patient Grissill " ;" and " Arcadian and Euphuized gentlewomen " in " The Gull's Hornbook."^* This is the more strange because Lyly's influence upon his first known play is so powerful as to result in imitation, and it helped to fix permanently the characterization and the style of some of his most delightful comedy. Possibly, though this seems doubtful, that influence was already so pervasive when Dekker began to write that he did not recognize its origin. It is not necessary, however, to account for Lyly's absence from those happy spirits, for Dekker was not consciously drawing up a list of " the authors that have influenced me."

Although Dekker's creed was too stern to allow his unreservedly admitting to those Elysian fields any class except babes who had lived too briefly to learn sin of their parents, it did not keep him from giving to Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and

" The Witch of Edmonton, P., IV, 404.

Nash, very comfortable places there. Of the group of four, Marlowe, as might be expected, was by far the most important to Dekker; and though " Tamburlaine " is mentioned in his/ works more often perhaps than any other play and some of its details are copied in his dramas, yet " Doctor Faustus " more deeply impressed itself upon his religious nature. A very wonderful day it must have been when the younger poet heard for the first time the inspired apostrophe to Helena and listened to the heart-wringing despair of a soul lost while " Christ's blood streamed in the firmament." All his life Dekker was greatly concerned with the struggle between good and evil. In " The Honest Whore," it is the right and wrong impulses in the human heart, humanly swayed by other personalities ; but in " Old Fortunatus " it takes the Marlowe form ; so also in " The Virgin Martyr," and, to some extent, in "If It be not Good."^^ Of course Dekker, like every other dramatist after Marlowe, felt the liberating power of his verse, but though he was moved to emulate it at times, his happiest work came to be distinguished by a simplicity and clarity very unlike Marlowe's sonorous periods.

Very different it was, too, from Peek's " luxury and allurement of words," yet who but Peele remotely suggested the melody of such a passage as this?

" There can I shew thee The ball of gold that set all Troy on, fire ; There shalt thou see the scarf of Cupid's mother Snatcht from the soft moist ivory of her arm, To wrap about Adonis' wounded thigh ; There shalt thou see a wheel of Titan's car Which dropt from heaven when Phaeton fired the world : I'll give thee (if thou wilt) two silver doves Composed by magic to divide the air, Who, as they fly, shall clap their silver wings, And give strange music to the elements; I'll give thee else the fan of Proserpine, Which in reward for a sweet Thracian song The black-brow'd Empress threw to Orpheus, Being come to fetch Eurydice from hell."^"

" See discussion of the plays in question.

"Old Fortunatus, P., I, no.

Possibly Dekker felt the witchery of Peek's "Old Wives' Tale," both the genial homeliness of the opening scene and some of the details. If Peele used the echo dialogue in his folk-lore play, so does Dekker in his own folk-lore plays, " Old Fortunatus " and " If It be not Good ; " and to Peek's Golden Head from whose beard gold may be combed corresponds Dekker's Golden Head in " If It be not Good," that sheds from its " brows and hair " a golden shower, although one is of fairy origin and the other of infernal. Greene too used magic, but perhaps Dekker was more interested in his gentle and faithful women, so true to life in many ways as to constitute a novelty on the English stage of that early time ; for between Margaret, the keeper's lass of Fressingfield, engaged with her creambowls and occupied in "running cheeses," and Jane waiting upon customers in her shop, the stage offers no heroine whose humble occupation is so much a part of her attractiveness.

Whether the prose of Greene^' or Nash more strongly influenced Dekker's pamphlets, it would be hard to say. " News from Hell " was written in imitation of Nash, and it was from Nash that he derived the fantastic style in which too many of the prefaces and dedications were composed, although no man then living could at will put his ideas into clearer, more direct, and more idiomatic prose ; this gift appears in " The Bachelor's Banquet " and " The Wonderful Year," written some time before " News from Hell." But Dekker had a special admiration for Nash, both as man and as writer. In " A Knight's Conjuring," he describes him as " a mad Greek that had drunk of the holy water and was full of the divine fury."^^ In " News from Hell," he affirms that the book was written " even out of my love to Pierce Pennykss because he hath been always a companion to scholars ; "^^ and a little farther on is found the well-known tribute :

" And thou into whose soul, if ever there were a Pythagorean metempsychosis, the raptures of that fiery and inconfinable Italian spirit were boun-

" Greene's lost Exhortation of London unto her Children suggests an interesting comparison with Dekker's London pamphlets. "^ 13- " G., II, 94-9S.

teously and boundlessly infused, thou sometimes Secretary to Pierce Penniless and Master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious, T. Nash : from whose abundant pen honey flowed to thy friends and mortal aconite to thy enemies : thou that madest the Doctor a flat Dunce, and beat' St him at his two tall sundry weapons, poetry and oratory : sharpest satire, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with me a while, till she hath caroused to me in her own wonted full measures of wit that my plump brains may swell and burst into bitter invectives against the Lieutenant of Limbo if he cashier Pierce Penniless with dead' pay."^

Dekker further showed his interest in "T. Nash" by continuing in " The Gull's Hornbook " and in " Satiromastix " the controversy as to the relative merits of long and short hair waged between Nash and Richard Harvey ,^^ and by versifying in his "Canaan's Calamity" a subject that Nash had written upon.^^ Perhaps, too, his stinging description of Samuel Rowlands as likely to be " taken for a Beadle of Bridewell "^' arose from his knowledge of a literary theft practised by Rowlands upon Nash. Middleton, who also loved Nash, refers distinctly to something of the sort in " Father Hubbard's Tale."^*

It has seemed desirable to dwell upon these enthusiasms of Dekker's youth. How happy we might be if Shakespere had left behind anything so intimate and self-revealing! There were other influences — Shakespere included — ^but they were among the living in 1607. There were also fashions in prose and poetry prevailing in Dekker's youth that he never showed any inclination to follow : the euphuistic novel, the sonnet sequence of feigned love, the long and dreary poem of passion, and the " snarling satire."

The poets of the third group, except Chettle, were producing their best work between 1587 and 1593, and Marlowe's

^ See R. A. Small, Stage-Quarrel, 124.

" See Bullen's Middleton, VIII, 62-63, for the text and for BuUen's note which incorporates Malone's suggestion as to " that humorous theft."

When Dekker speaks of Nash's " keeping company with pickle herrings," he surely is not referring to the banquet that killed Greene, as Dyce queries and Rimbault affirms, but to the brilliant pamphlet entitled Lenten Stuff, in which Nash pays such eloquent tribute to the red herring of Yarmouth.

complete output falls between those narrow limits. Dekker, as a Londoner, early experienced the delights of contemporary drama. In that little city of some 125,000 inhabitants, genius must have elbowed genius. He may have seen "grave Spenser," and whether or not he was acquainted with the other poets and playwrights, it could not have been difficult for him to get glimpses of them at. the theatres, or at the ordinary or the tavern to which they resorted, or at the stationers' stalls where the new books might be seen and handled. It seems certain that he knew Nash, who was, it might be added, nearest his own age, and who, in 1597, was working upon his share in " The Isle of Dogs " for the manager for whom Dekker was writing by January of the following year and very likely earlier. Judging only from Dekker's own utterances in prose and verse, we shall hardly go wrong, then, if we think of him, at about 1593 or 1594, as that happiest of mortals, a poet, young and conscious of his powers, curious and reverent of genius in others, proud of his country and the tongue it spoke,

" Whose language now dare more than any can,"^

idealistic in his scorn for wealth and his ardor for wisdom and poetry, and endowed with a gay humor that must have served, later at least, as a sort of screen between a gentle nature and the sharp points of mere existence. And he had the peculiar happiness of living in a world that, in spite of much brutality and coarseness, was all hunger and thirst after the fulness of life, all passion for beauty and poetical expression.

^ See below, p. 84, for the whole ode.

CHAPTER II Early Life

According to his own testimony, Thomas Dekker was born and brought up in London. F^O thou beautifullest daughter of two united monarchies," he cried in 1606, " from thy womb received I my being, from thy breasts my nourishment " ;^ and, nineteen years later, "O London! thou mother of my Hfe, nurse of my being, a hard-hearted son might I be counted if here I should not dissolve all into tears, to hear thee pouring forth thy passionate condolements.'y But this ardent son of London hardly needed to proclaim his loyalty in such specific terms :'six^ of his prose works are directly concerned with the . great city, — its sufferings, its vices, it glories, its manners, and its monuments ; and about half of his extant plays make Lon- ' don the real scene of action, with details of shops and apprentices, streets and public buildings — the sort of loyalty, the sort of local color that one acquires most easily in youthj Curiously, too, his most extended passage in praise of the country* was written to heighten the contrast when he discovered that sin might flourish more easily outside the city than within. One° of the pamphlets is little more than a fervent dialogue of reciprocal praise and blame between London and Westminster, in which the latter often affectionately apostrophises her elder : " O my dearest playfellow " ;' " O thou darling of Great Britain, thy princes call thee their treasurer, and thou

^Induction, The Seven Deadly Sins, G., II, 13.

' A Rod for Runaways, G., IV, 285.

' The Wonderful Year, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Jests to Make You Merry — the greater part, The Dead Term, The Gull's Hornbook, A Rod for Runaways.

* See the opening pages of The Bellman of London, G., III.

= The Dead Term, G., IV.

art so " ;^ " Thou provident mistress over so many families " ;' "O thou the best and only huswife of this island";* "O thou charitable reliever and receiver of distressed strangers."^" The date of Dekker's birth is not as certain as the place, but the available evidence points to 1572. He was "old" in 1628:

" For my heart danceth sprightly when I see (Old as I am) our English gallantry.'"^

In 163 1 he wrote, "I have been a priest in Apollo's temple many years ; my voice is decaying with my age."^^ He is more specific in the dedication prefixed to " English Villanies : " " This is no sermon but an epistle-dedicatory, which dedicates those discoveries and my three-score years devotedly yours in my best service." Now " English Villanies " was the new title given in 1632 to the seventh edition of a popular rogue-book first published as "Lanthorn and Candlelight";^' in 1638 another edition was brought out under the title of 1632. The 1632 edition is very rare ; not even Fleay had seen a copy of it, and the quotation is extracted from the 1638 edition ; but he is doubtless right in assuming that the dedication was added^'* when the title was changed — ^in 1632. In any case 1638 is plainly out of the question, for that would make Dekker about twenty years old when in 1598 he was ranked by Meres as among those most excellent in tragedy. Dekker's habit, sometimes unpoetically exercised,^* of giving the exact figures in specific cases makes it practically certain to me that the " threescore " is here to be taken on its face value. A slight piece of contemporary evidence hitherto unnoticed in this connection makes it clear that he was born later than 1570, but probably