“These have I ruined, and exalted those:
These hands have conquered Spain: these brows fill up
The golden circle of rich Portugal.
Viriat a monarch now, but born a shepherd:
This Primislaus, a Bohemian King,
Last day a carter; this monk Gregory,
Now lifted to the Papal dignity.”
The preceding passage, beginning “Thou shalt be one of Fortune’s minions,” which contains too a direct reference to —
“that great Scythian swain,
Fortune’s best minion, warlike Tamburlaine,”
is still more like Marlowe. Dekker’s verse, it is true, does not march mail-clad like Marlowe’s: it has a plasticity and a suppleness which the other’s “mighty line” lacked, while it fails to achieve the same state and sustained dignity. But after all differences are allowed for, there is much in the blank verse in some parts of Old Fortunatus, which only Marlowe could have inspired.
This is not said with any thought of depreciating Dekker, who has so often been depreciated in order to add to the lustre of others, but because it marks an interesting point in his development as a poet and dramatist. Two things were enough in themselves to prevent his carrying on the tradition of Marlowe: one, and an insuperable one, his faculty of humour; the second, springing from the first, his lack of that sense of his own artistic dignity, failing which his genius never rose to its potential height. Signs of the power to achieve the very highest in poetry are scattered extravagantly all through ‘Old Fortunatus,’ so that one does not wonder at Charles Lamb’s tremendous compliment. There are lines in it which have rarely been surpassed, and there are fewer lapses in the play than is usual with Dekker, in the inspired recklessness of his method. Dekker’s theory of blank verse, in especial, was not a severe one. It admitted of a free interspersion of rhymed lines, and of other dubious modifications of the strict measure. But it is remarkable how successful many of the passages are in spite of these irregularities. Dekker had the privilege of genius, and the faculty of putting into words that rhythmical unction and natural charm which defy the exacter laws of prosody.
Part of the structural defects of the play are due to one of those exigencies to which the Elizabethan playwrights were peculiarly liable. Mr. C. H. Herford, in the book before alluded to, has shewn that Dekker had practically finished the play on the lines of the original fable of Fortunatus, when it was ordered for performance at Court, whereupon further special additions were made with a view to this. Thus, it will be perceived that there are two prologues; while a serious interference with the original lines of the play is shown in the intrusion of Virtue and Vice, in the fashion of a “Masque” or “Triumph,” so as to upset the simple dramatic motive of the supremacy of Fortune. In this way, as Mr. Herford says, the right moral tension of the tragedy gives way to the decorous conventionalities of the Masque. For, the apparent moral effect gained by the triumph of Virtue over Vice and over Fortune is only one of appearance. Dekker had already, according to his wont, moralised the original story, which is innocent of moral intention. For instance, Andelocia, who like Fortunatus is in Dekker’s hands a prodigal upon whom Fortune wreaks a tragic retribution, is in the original romance a hero to the last, using the immoral supremacy afforded by the Purse and Wishing Cap without either moral recoil or material injury to himself.
There are other parts, fine in themselves, but insufficiently related to the main line of the plot, whose inconsequence can not be excused because of any exterior later addition, as for instance, the Orleans episode. It is hard, at the same time, to have to find fault with an intrusion which has resulted so delightfully in itself; and we may best take leave of the play in the tempered eulogy of Mr. J. Addington Symonds, who, after speaking of certain of these defects, goes on to say, “Among the poet’s most perfect achievements, however, are the scenes in which Orleans indulges a lover’s lunacy in a passion of wild fancies. To quote passages would be to murder the effect. Nothing can be imagined finer than the paradoxes of this witty fanatic, in whose opinion the whole world is mad and he the only wise man left; who scorns the scorn of sober folk, extols deformity, and adores the very horns that sprout upon his lady’s brow. The mastery of Dekker is shown throughout this comedy in the flesh and blood reality which he has given to abstractions; even the subordinate characters define each a clearly defined quality. Fortunatus and his sons have a higher degree of reality; while Virtue, Vice, and Fortune, withdrawn from human action and anxiety, survey the world from thrones and feel such passions only as befits immortals. They enter and depart in pomps and pageants to solemn strains of music.... To have conceived the comedy of Old Fortunatus proves Dekker a poet of no common order. A little more firmness in its ground-plan would have made it a masterpiece.”
It may seem that undue attention has been given to these two plays, but in them will be found so characteristic an embodiment of Dekker’s qualities as a playwright, — as a realistic writer of comedy and as a romantic poet, that they serve as an admirable illustration of the whole of his dramatic works. The next play of which we have any record is the famous burlesque upon Ben Jonson, Satiromastix, which was published in 1602. As an artistic whole, this deserves, no doubt, all that has been said against it; Dekker’s awkward fashion of interweaving two more or less inconsequent dramatic motives was never displayed more unfortunately. But as a young poet’s retort upon an unsparing antagonist of Ben Jonson’s autocratic position, the thing is surely not contemptible. The exaggerated reproduction of Jonson’s Captain Tucca, in especial, which has been pointed to as proving a lack of invention on Dekker’s part, was no doubt one of the favourite hits of the piece, an out-Heroding of Herod which could not fail to immensely tickle the playgoers of the day. And the appearance of Horace cleverly got up in imitation of the author of The Poetaster, labouring over an ode by candlelight, must have brought down the house.
“O me thy priest inspire,
For I to thee and thine immortal name,
In — sacred raptures flowing, flowing — swimming, swimming:
In sacred raptures swimming,
Immortal name, game, dame, tame, lame, lame, lame,
———— hath, — shame, proclaim, oh? —
In sacred raptures flowing, will proclaim, not —
O me thy priest inspire!
For I to thee and thine immortal name,
In flowing numbers filled with sprite and flame,
(Good, Good!) In flowing numbers filled with sprite and flame.”
What is remarkable about Dekker’s retort is its perfect good-humour; there is not a trace of vindictiveness in all its satire. Dekker probably took up the cudgels, as beforetime he first entered upon the literary career, more “for the fun of it,” than with any very deliberate or serious intention. Though the episode of Cœlestine has no conceivable reference to the “Untrussing of the Humourous Poet,” it is worth turning to for its own sake. Mr. Swinburne’s conjecture that this part of the play was originally designed for another purpose, and was only used here for want of material to fill out the Jonson burlesque to the required length, is probably the correct one.
The reputation which Dekker won by Satiromastix seems to have been the cause of something of a new departure in the year following its publication; we find him then appearing for the first time as a prose-writer. He had already been engaged in writing Canaan’s Calamity; the Destruction of Jerusalem, in sensational doggrel, — the wretched hack-work of a few hasty hours, no doubt, written for some urgent bookseller, which I am afraid there is no sufficient reason to think with Mr. Swinburne that he did not compose. And now he may be said to have seriously begun his career as a man of letters, as distinct from a playwright, by the publication of an interesting work whose title-page well suggests its contents. The title runs: — The Wonderful Year: “Wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sick of the Plague. At the end of all (like a merry Epilogue to a dull Play) certain tales are cut out in sundry fa
shions of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter’s nights, that lie watching in the dark for us.” Passages in this work show clearly enough that Dekker had the making in him too of a prose writer, if he could only learn to master and rightly direct his faculty of words, but there is no pervading sense of the art of prose in it. Immediately following The Wonderful Year, however, came another prose-work which in its way is perfect. The Bachelor’s Banquet is a delightful satire on the life matrimonial, “pleasantly discoursing the variable humours of women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable deceits.” Here we have Dekker at his best. His facile humour for once served him capably from beginning to end, and the result is a satire of inimitable pleasantry, full of his hearty spontaneity of fun, and all the more effective because, like Satiromastix, it is so devoid of any real offence. As if to offer atonement for having satirised woman-kind at all, it must have been about this time that he collaborated with Haughton and Chettle, in The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissill, with its charming picture of a woman’s ideal patience. As this play is to be given in a later volume, it need not be examined at length here.
And now, in 1604, we come to the work, of all Dekker’s, which most fully and characteristically represents his genius, with its fund of great qualities and great defects — The Honest Whore. The second part of the play, it is true, was not published until many years later, but it will be convenient to take both parts together in considering it here, noting only significant changes in style and so forth. With the play as a whole, Hazlitt’s well-known criticism has become so inseparably identified and forms so incomparable an exposition, that I prefer to give it here instead of commentary of my own, completing it by what further notes seem to be required.
“Old honest Dekker’s Signior Orlando Friscobaldo I shall never forget! I became only of late acquainted with this last-mentioned worthy character! but the bargain between us is, I trust, for life. We sometimes regret that we had not sooner met with characters like this, that seem to raise, revive, and give a new zest to our being.... The execution is, throughout, as exact as the conception is new and masterly. There is the least colour possible used; the pencil drags; the canvas is almost seen through: but then, what precision of outline, what truth and purity of tone, what firmness of hand, what marking of character! The words and answers all along are so true and pertinent, that we seem to see the gestures, and to hear the tone with which they are accompanied. So when Orlando, disguised, says to his daughter, ‘You’ll forgive me,’ and she replies, ‘I am not marble, I forgive you;’ or again, when she introduces him to her husband, saying simply, ‘It is my father,’ there needs no stage-direction to supply the relenting tones of voice or cordial frankness of manner with which these words are spoken. It is as if there were some fine art to chisel thought, and to embody the inmost movements of the mind in every-day actions and familiar speech.
“Simplicity and extravagance of style, homeliness and quaintness, tragedy and comedy, interchangeably set their hands and seals to this admirable production. We find the simplicity of prose with the graces of poetry. The stalk grows out of the ground; but the flowers spread their flaunting leaves in the air. The mixture of levity in the chief character bespeaks the bitterness from which it seeks relief; it is the idle echo of fixed despair, jealous of observation or pity. The sarcasm quivers on the lip, while the tear stands congealed on the eyelid. This ‘tough senior,’ this impracticable old gentleman, softens into a little child; this choke-pear melts in the mouth like marmalade. In spite of his resolute professions of misanthropy, he watches over his daughter with kindly solicitude; plays the careful housewife; broods over her lifeless hopes; nurses the decay of her husband’s fortune, as he had supported her tottering infancy; saves the high-flying Matheo from the gallows more than once, and is twice a father to them. The story has all the romance of private life, all the pathos of bearing up against silent grief, all the tenderness of concealed affection: there is much sorrow patiently borne, and then comes peace.... The manner too in which Infelice, the wife of Hippolito, is made acquainted with her husband’s infidelity, is finely dramatic; and in the scene where she convicts him of his injustice, by taxing herself with incontinence first, and then turning his most galling reproaches to her into upbraidings against his own conduct, she acquits herself with infinite spirit and address. The contrivance by which, in the first part, after being supposed dead, she is restored to life, and married to Hippolito, though perhaps a little far-fetched, is affecting and romantic.”
It must be constantly borne in mind, when reading the two parts of the play, that an interval of twenty-five years separates them, and that Orlando Friscobaldo is the creation of an obviously more matured imagination than are the characters of the earlier part. Indeed, the way in which Bellafront’s casual mention of her father’s name in the earlier part is developed into so masterly a characterisation is very significant. In the period between, Dekker had gone through strange and bitter experience. According to Collier, he married early, and a daughter was baptised in his name as early as 1594, and we can only wonder what dark sorrow he had known, that he came to shape out of himself the inexpressible tragi-comedy of Bellafront’s shame and her father’s love. There is all the difference between youth and age, indeed, in the two parts; and it is impressive to note how a conception, prompted mainly by the humourist’s artistic interest in the first instance, came to be wrought out and carried to the end with such a bitter freight of actuality. In this grim masterpiece, Dekker has used his realistic method with terrible sincerity, and yet, with so cunning a grasp of the nettle of shame that with its sting it yields a fragrance as of the perfect flower of love. The weakest parts of the play are those where Dekker conforms most to conventional dramatic methods, as in the forensic contest between Bellafront and Hippolito, which is dramatically weak, though in passages not ineffective. In Henslowe’s Diary, Middleton is mentioned as a collaborator in the play with Dekker, and there are parts of it which might very well be from his hand. Mr. A. H. Bullen conjectures that the scenes where Bellafront is first discovered in her chamber and again the shop scenes where the gallants try to irritate Candido, are chiefly Middleton’s. Mr. J. Addington Symonds considers also that the play as a whole has “the movement of one of Middleton’s acknowledged plays.” Making due allowance for every assistance of the kind, the essential merit of the whole work is so unmistakeably Dekker’s, however, that the reader may safely leave Middleton out of court in considering the play as a whole, and put it down as Dekker’s to all intents and purposes.
Before the publication of the first part, Dekker had, in 1603, in his Magnificent Entertainment given to King James, inserted some lines of Middleton’s, which proves that they were in contact about the time when the play was being written. After its publication Dekker apparently gave himself up for a while to prose-writing. In 1606, one of his best known pamphlets, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, appeared, which he himself affirmed on the title-page was only a week’s work, “Opus Septem Dierum.” The satire, though here and there forced, and roughly written, is not unimpressive, and contains many passages of vivid imaginative power. The Seven Deadly Sins, or as Dekker has it, “The Names of the Actors in this Old Interlude of Iniquity,” are not at all what one would be likely to expect. The terms by which they are designated are extravagantly metaphorical, and including “Politic Bankruptism,” “Candlelight,” and “Shaving,” and there is a special addendum to say that “Seven may easily play this, but not without a Devil.” Published in the same year, News from Hell, brought by the Devil’s Carrier, which resolves itself into “The Devil’s Answer to Pierce Pennylesse,” is a confused, gruesomely humoresque description of the nether regions, and of a Mephistophelian journey thence to London and other places in the upper world. The Double PP, a rather ungainly satire on the Papists, partly in prose, partly in verse, inspired by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, also appeared in 1606.
The year 1607 shows Dekker at his worst as a playwright. The production
of The Whore of Babylon marks the low-water mark of his unfortunate career. It is a sort of allegory, presenting Elizabeth as Titania, and other national and international topics in a hopelessly cumbrous disguise. As a rule Dekker illuminates even his hastiest productions with some gleam of true humour or imagination, but here there is hardly a redeeming touch of either, or, if one does exist, the dull atmosphere of the whole keeps it hidden from sight. Dekker atoned a little for his sins as a playwright in this year, however, by the issue of an interesting miscellany of prose writings, whose comprehensive title may be quoted in full: — Jests to make you Merry: “With the Conjuring up of Cock Watt (the Walking Spirit of Newgate) to tell tales. Unto which is added the Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner. And a Paradox in Praise of Serjeants. Written by T. D. and George Wilkins.” George Wilkins, says Dr. Grosart, “was in a small way a contemporary playwright;” and it is impossible to say exactly what share he may have had in this strange composition. But some of the little stories among the “Jests” bear very clearly Dekker’s touch, and “The Misery of a Prison and a Prisoner” is unmistakeably the pitiful and bitter expression of his own sorry experiences. In this year was also re-issued under the new title of A Knight’s Conjuring done in Earnest, discovered in Jest, the before-mentioned News from Hell, without anything to show that the book was chiefly a republication. There are some few additions to it, however, including an interesting vision of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Nash in the haunts of Apollo.
Complete Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker Page 270