Oh happy Fathers and Mothers, that are sure you haue so many Saints entertained aboue, before they could haue time to offend their Maker. You weepe for them when you follow them to their Graues, but you should rather call it a Tryumph, for they then are going to a Coelestiall Coronation. If you but looke vpon your Childrens cloathes, you call them to mind, and then, beat your breasts, and teare your hayre, but remember, they are cloathed in the roabes of immortality. When you but talke of your little darlings, you tell how beautifull they were, how well-fauoured, how forward: but now, where they are, all the beauty of the world is vglinesse to that sweetnesse which they possesse: They haue faces and formes Angelicall, and are Play-fellowes and Companions with none but blessed Creatures.
Be glad therefore, that they are ridde from the miseries of the World; that Time neuer layd foule hands on them; they are free from want, hunger, thirst, diseases, cold, heat, weeping and wayling, and all other Calamities, which euen rocke vs in our Cradles; they are well and happy, we left behind them, miserable.
As therefore here you are counselled, to beare the absence of your little-ones with patience, so comfort you others, with this, that both their Children and yours, are gone to that high Starre-Chamber Office, where their names are entred into the Booke of Life.
Now albeit in so many set Battailes of the Pestilence in yeares before, and in the light skyrmislies of this Summer, so many haue falne: Yet (blessed be Heauen) wee are a populous Nation still; we haue Peace and Plenty, and all Blessings that Heauen and Earth can bestow vpon a people: sing therefore Hymnes vnto the Almighty IEHOVAH; send vp Sacrifices of Feare, Loue and Obedience to him: Cry to him, as DAVID did, when he numbred his people, and euery one say, I haue sinned exceedingly, in that I haue done: therefore now LORD I beseech thee, take away the Trespasse of thy Seruant, for I haue done very foolishly, And then, though there dye of the people from Dan euen to Beer-sheba, seauenty thousand men, in three dayes: yet when the Angell, is stretching out his hand vpon Ierusalem to Destroy it, The LORD will repent him of the Euill, and say to the Angell that destroyeth the people;It is sufficient, Hold now thine hand. And then the blacke Warder shall be throwne downe to part Death and our Kingdome from falling into so terrible a Combat.
But art thou in feare of an Arrest, now that Writs are gone out (from the Kings-Bench Office of Heauen,) to Attach seuerall Mens Bodies! Art thou in doubt to be laid vp! In danger to be imprisoned in thy Graue! Hath sicknesse knock’d at thy doore! Does she sit on thy Beds side! Hath Infection blowne vpon thee with her Contagious, noysome and stinking breath! Hath the Pestilence, (Now in this present drooping, and sick-wing’d season) Printed her nayles within thy Flesh, and hast thou tokens sent thee to come away!
Fall on thy knees, Call for Mercy, to helpe thee, Cry out vpon thy sinnes, send for thy Heauenly Physitian, to minister good things to thy Soule, settle thy minde in peace, shake off the world, looke vp at Heauen, Thither is thy Iourney, prepare for no voyage else?
Art thou all-spotted ouer! They are GODS rich Ermines; to Inroabe thee like a King, and to set a Crowne of Glory on thy Head.
Art thou mark’d with Tokens, and hast thou thy Memory! Make vse of that Memory, and seeing those Markes are so set vp, That thine eye may shoote at them and hit them, now draw the last Arrow home, and winne the game of thy euerlasting Saluation.
Remember why those Tokens are sent: To make all the hast thou canst to set forward, for away thou must: Hug them therefore, as thy Louer; Kisse, and bid them welcome, th•nke that sweet Token-sender for his guift, and hauing nothing (which thou canst call thine) to send backe to him, leaue thy Body with some Friend in Trust, and bid thy Soule goe cheerfully on her journey.
Cheerfully indeed, and with all Alacrity, for now thou art trauailing into a farre Country, where all thy Friends are. There, thou shalt meet with thy old Parents, (thy old Father and Mother) ADAM and EVE.
There shalt thou see that great Nauigator of the World (NOAH) who in one ship, carried all the people in the world then liuing. There wilt thou find ABRAHAM and his Sonne ISAAC; Old IACOB, and his twelue Sonnes the Patriarches. MOSES and AARON will there receiue thee into GODS Sanctum Sanctorum; In that glorious Pallace, shalt thou behold, all the Kings of ISRAEL, all the Tribes of IVDA, all the ancient Prophets, all the Apostles, all the Saints and glorious Army of Martyrs, with branches of Palme-trees in their Hands, and golden Starres sticking on their fore-heads.
Nay, there thou shalt see thy Redeemer sitting at the right hand of this Father; There (face to face) shalt thou see GOD himselfe, attended on by Angels Archangels, Principalities, and Powers, Cherubins, and Seraphins; And who would not reioyce, to be setting forward on this blessed Iourney, to the end he may at length come to be a fellow-Citizen, in the Heauenly HIERVSALEM.
All the Kingdomes on the Earth, are not worth the Seeling of that glorious Chamber of Presence, which is in this Court: This is a Kingdome, where there are no changes of Kings; No alterations of State: No losse of Peeres: No Warres: No Reuenges: No Citizens flying for feare of Infection: None dying of Them, that stay, No Women-keepers to rob you of your Goods, nor to hasten you to your End: In this Coelestiall Kingdome, there is true Majestie, True Glory, True Honour, True Beauty, True Peace, True Liberty, True Health: There is all Life, All Happinesse, All Immortality. To this-Kingdome, the King of Heauen and Earth, call vs when it is his Pleasure.
FINIS.
The Criticism
Thomas Dekker by Algernon Charles Swinburne
From ‘The Age of Shakespeare’, 1908
Of all English poets, if not of all poets on, record, Dekker is perhaps the most difficult to classify. The grace and delicacy, the sweetness and spontaneity of his genius are not more obvious and undeniable than the many defects which impair and the crowning deficiency which degrades it. As long, but so long only, as a man retains some due degree of self-respect and respect for the art he serves or the business he follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of respect for any other obligation in the world. François Villon, compared with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson: he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first class of writers for all time. If not in that class, yet high in the class immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among the masters of creative literature. For he was by nature at once a singer and a maker: he had the gift of native music and the birthright of inborn invention. His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets. For gentle grace of inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best by Shakespeare’s self alone. No such combination or alternation of such admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any other quality of kindred genius.
And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur, in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art, the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as Lamb says, Dekker “had poetry enough for anything”; at all events, for anything which can be accomplished by a p
oet endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the one great gift of seriousness, of noble ambition, of self-confidence rooted in self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable place among the immortal writers of his age. But this gift had been so absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by circumstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author’s infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately developed. His “pleasant Comedie of ‘The Gentle Craft,’” first printed three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if rather thin-spun and slight of structure: but the more serious and romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in ostentation and repetition of jocose catch-words after the fashion of mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no signs of the author’s higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker’s which bears the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous passage in which Webster couples together the names of “Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood,” seems explicable when we compare the style of “Old Fortunatus” with the style of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Dekker had as much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely and noble realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of Shakespeare’s, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just when he said of the “frantic Lover” in “Old Fortunatus” that “he talks pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they.” The word “almost” should be supplanted by the word “fully”; and the criticism would then be no less adequate than apt. Sidney himself might have applauded the verses which clothe with living music a passion as fervent and as fiery a fancy as his own. Not even in the rapturous melodies of that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a passage more enchanting than this:
Thou art a traitor to that white and red Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid’s throne) Is my heart’s sovereign: O, when she is dead, This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none. Now Agripyne’s not mine, I vow to be In love with nothing but deformity. O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never Murder men’s hearts, or let them pine like wax, Melting against the sun of thy disdain; Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity; Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne’s, For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface, But thine’s eternal: O Deformity, Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne’s, For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have, But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.
As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical word “destiny” to stand at the end of this line in place of the obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later editors of this passage should hitherto have done so.
Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of passionate fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet’s besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he had set himself — and yet which he had hardly set himself — to run. And if these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution into his fancies. But even from such headlong recklessness as he had already displayed no reader could have anticipated so singular a defiance of all form and order, all coherence and proportion, as is exhibited in his “Satiromastix.” The controversial part of the play is so utterly alien from the romantic part that it is impossible to regard them as component factors of the same original plot. It seems to me unquestionable that Dekker must have conceived the design, and probable that he must have begun the composition, of a serious play on the subject of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of Ben Jonson’s “Poetaster” impelled or instigated him to some immediate attempt at rejoinder; and that being in a feverish hurry to retort the blow inflicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he devised — perhaps between jest and earnest — the preposterously incoherent plan of piecing out his farcical and satirical design by patching and stitching it into his unfinished scheme of tragedy. It may be assumed, and it is much to be hoped, that there never existed another poet capable of imagining — much less of perpetrating — an incongruity so monstrous and so perverse. The explanation so happily suggested by a modern critic that William Rufus is meant for Shakespeare, and that “Lyly is Sir Vaughan ap Rees,” wants only a little further development, on the principle of analogy, to commend itself to every scholar. It is equally obvious that the low-bred and foul-mouthed ruffian Captain Tucca must be meant for Sir Philip Sidney; the vulgar idiot Asinius Bubo for Lord Bacon; the half-witted underling Peter Flash for Sir Walter Raleigh; and the immaculate Celestina, who escapes by stratagem and force of virtue from the villanous designs of Shakespeare, for the lady long since indicated by the perspicacity of a Chalmers as the object of that lawless and desperate passion which found utterance in the sonnets of her unprincipled admirer — Queen Elizabeth. As a previous suggestion of my own, to the effect that George Peele was probably the real author of “Romeo and Juliet,” has had the singular good-fortune to be not merely adopted but appropriated — in serious earnest — by a contemporary student, without — as far as I am aware — a syllable of acknowledgment, I cannot but anticipate a similar acceptance in similar quarters for the modest effort at interpretation now submitted to the judgment of the ingenuous reader.
Gifford is not too severe on the palpable incongruities of Dekker’s preposterous medley: but his impeachment of Dekker as a more virulent and intemperate controversialist than Jonson is not less preposterous than the structure of this play. The nobly gentle and manly verses in which the less fortunate and distinguished poet disclaims and refutes the imputation of envy or malevolence excited by the favor enjoyed by his rival in high quar
ters should have sufficed, in common justice, to protect him from such a charge. There is not a word in Jonson’s satire expressive of anything but savage and unqualified scorn for his humbler antagonist: and the tribute paid by that antagonist to his genius, the appeal to his better nature which concludes the torrent of recrimination, would have won some word of honorable recognition from any but the most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans. That Dekker was unable to hold his own against Jonson when it came to sheer hard hitting — that on the ground or platform of personal satire he was as a light-weight pitted against a heavy-weight — is of course too plain, from the very first round, to require any further demonstration. But it is not less plain that in delicacy and simplicity and sweetness of inspiration the poet who could write the scene in which the bride takes poison (as she believes) from the hand of her father, in presence of her bridegroom, as a refuge from the passion of the king, was as far above Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster qualities of intellect or genius. This most lovely scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for passion distilled in melody, is comparable only with higher work, of rarer composition and poetry more pure, than Jonson’s: it is a very treasure-house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and sweet as flowers. When Dekker writes like this, then truly we seem to see his right hand in the left hand of Shakespeare.
To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker amicably associated in the composition of a joint poem or pageant within the space of a year from the publication of so violent a retort by the latter to so vehement an attack by the former must amuse if it does not astonish the reader least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness to quarrel and the boyish readiness to shake hands which would seem to be implied in so startling a change of relations. In all the huge, costly, wearisome, barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial which welcomed into London the Solomon of Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to follow the ponderous elaboration of report drawn up by these reconciled enemies will remark the solid and sedate merit of Jonson’s best couplets with less pleasure than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker’s lyric notes. Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson’s songs for their finish of style and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to place him in the first class — much less, in the front rank — of lyric poets. He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron; but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as Blake or Shelley. Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this same year of the accession of James— “Patient Grissel”; a romantic tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone before them with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of gesture. His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to reproduce: but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off. Chettle and Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of them something of their colleague’s finer qualities; but the best scenes in the play remind me rather of Dekker’s best early work than of “Robert, Earl of Huntington” or of “Englishmen for My Money.” So much has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant self-excuse. “Italy,” says an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying and impudent gull, “Italy infects you not, but your own diseased spirits. Italy? Out, you froth, you scum! because your soul is mud, and that you have breathed in Italy, you’ll say Italy has denied you: away, you boar: thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest country in the world.”
Complete Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker Page 265