Now, too, we find Dekker in collaboration with Webster, in the plays Westward Ho, Northward Ho, and Sir Thomas Wyatt. Of these, the first two are lively comedies of intrigue, affording many striking pictures of contemporary life, grossly realistic often, but not more so than is usual in comedies of the time. In Northward Ho the social diversions of the Greenshields and the Mayberrys are amusingly contrived, and there are passages in Westward Ho of a higher and poetic kind, as in the passage (Act iv., Sc. ii.) quoted by Mr. J. A. Symonds in his essay on Dekker: —
“Go let Music
Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence
Through all this building, that her sphery soul
May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms,
Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed.”
The speeches of the earl in this play contain other rare imaginative touches, in strange contrast with the reckless farcical tenour of the piece generally. Sir Thomas Wyatt is less satisfactory, a medley of absurd printer’s errors adding to the confusion of what was probably a confused work at best. Marston’s protest, as to the unfairness of taking seriously and critically plays which were hastily and carelessly written to meet the demand of the hour, must be remembered in judging plays like this. In addition to the plays which their authors revised and set forth with their deliberate imprimatur, many were written without any idea of publication; the playwrights looked upon them merely as a sort of journalism, which they did not wish to have judged by permanent artistic standards. It would be waste of time to deliberate over the exact share to be alloted to Dekker and Webster in these three plays. It will be noted, however, in the two comedies, that certain of the characters, as the Welsh captain and Hans in Northward Ho, speak in a dialect suspiciously like that of the dialect parts in Dekker’s other plays.
For the next two or three years Dekker appears to have occupied himself again chiefly with prose. In 1608 appeared The Bellman of London, which is a sort of unconventional cyclopedia of thieving and vagabondage, containing much curious information about the shady side of Elizabethan life. Its importance in relation to Dekker’s fondness for the same subject-maker in his plays, however, is somewhat lessened when we discover that the work is partly appropriated from a book first published about forty years before, in 1567, entitled A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabonds; by Thomas Harman. The Bellman of London seems to have been successful; for it was followed the next year by a second book of the same kind, Lanthorn and Candle-light; or, The Bellman’s Second Night Walk: also in part taken from Harman. In 1609 The Gull’s Horn-book, which has already been referred to, was published, — by far the most important and interesting of all Dekker’s prose works. Its value will be apparent from the passages already quoted, but to anyone who wishes to realise intimately the everyday life of the time, and its relation to Dekker’s own environment, the book is simply indispensable. The initial conception, like most of Dekker’s conceptions, was not original. The idea of it is taken from a Dutch book which Dekker had thought of translating into English verse, but, finding difficulties in the way, he decided instead to write a new prose work on the same lines. The earlier parts of the book are the least reliable, as here Dekker made free use of the Dutch original; but from Chap. iv., “How a Gallant should behave Himself in Paul’s Walk,” onwards, the book is probably as true as it is humorously realistic in its descriptions, forming a delightful prose complement to the plays. The rest of Dekker’s prose works, interesting as they are in themselves, have not enough bearing upon the plays to warrant me in any lengthy examination of them. Between the two “Bellman” books appeared The Dead Term; or, Westminster’s Complaint for Long Vacations and Short Terms, which, amid some extravagance, contains a great deal in the way of description of London life, which is picturesque and historically valuable. In 1609 two other works followed or preceded The Gull’s Horn-book. The most valuable of the two is entitled, Work for Armourers; or, the Peace is Broken, which contains some suggestive autobiographical references to Dekker’s delight in history, to the hard lot of poetry and the drama, and to many other matters, interesting, personally, in approaching its main fancifully treated thesis of the struggle between Poverty and Money. The Raven’s Almanack, the second of the two, is chiefly a budget of stories, with “A Song sung by an Old Woman in a Meadow,” which has something of Dekker’s rougher lyrical quality in it.
In 1611 Dekker and Middleton came together again, and wrote conjointly The Roaring Girl, a vigorous comedy, whose heroine, Moll Cutpurse, goes about in the guise of a gallant, and wreaks summary vengeance upon offenders. In spite of her aggressive masculinity, she is somehow made in her way really attractive. Some of the scenes, as those in the “Sempster’s” shop, and those in which the Gallipots and Tiltyards go duck-hunting, are full of contemporary colour. The Mayoralty Pageant of 1612 has already been mentioned. In that year also appeared an absurd semi-allegorical dramatic fantasy by Dekker, founded upon Machiavelli’s “Belphegor,” — If this be not a Good Play the Devil is in it, in which Devils, Zanies, Friars, Dancing Girls, and other human and superhuman elements are wrought into a curious medley of utter nonsense with real humour and fancy. From 1613 to 1616, Oldys informs us that Dekker was in prison again. An interesting and pathetic letter exists from him to Alleyne, who must have acted generously towards him throughout; the letter is dated “King’s Bench, Sept. 12, 1616.” It is significant that in the first year of his re-imprisonment, he issued a very remarkable book of prayers, entitled The Four Birds of Noah’s Ark, to the profound eloquence and power of devotional expression in which, as in “A Prayer for a Soldier,” Mr. Swinburne has paid a well-deserved tribute. With A Strange Horse-Race, published also in 1613, were included the singular piece of humour,— “The Devil’s last Will and Testament,” and another prose fantasy, “The Bankrupt’s Banquet.” A much more notable work is Dekker his Dream, which is mainly in verse. It is a rough and unpolished piece of work, most interesting autobiographically, but full of vigorous and sometimes very imaginative descriptions, and with occasional fine passages, as two lines, taken almost at random, will testify: —
“Each man was both the lion and the prey,
And every corn-field an Aceldema.”
Dekker did not emerge again as a playwright until 1622, when he appears with still another collaborator, the last man whom one would have expected him to work with, — Massinger. They wrote together The Virgin Martyr, which is, as might be expected, a patchwork of incongruous qualities. Dekker probably supplied both the weakest and the strongest parts of the play, the atrocious humorous passages, equally with the exquisitely tender scene, for instance, between Dorothea, the Virgin Martyr, and Angelo, “a good spirit, serving Dorothea in the habit of a Page.” This is the scene which won from Charles Lamb in his “Specimens of the Elizabethan Dramatists,” his unbounded tribute to Dekker’s genius; and as the scene can be turned to there, I need not repeat it here, as I should otherwise be inclined to do.
There is no record of the next five years of Dekker’s life. In 1628 and 1629 he again wrote the Mayoralty pageants under title Britannia’s Honour, and London’s Tempe, which at best contain glimpses of his true quality. In 1631, Match Me in London, a comedy of court intrigue in civic life, has something of his real genius again. It was in the dedicatory note of this play, to “The Noble Lover, and deservedly beloved, of the Muses, Ludovick Carlisle, Esquire, Gentleman of the Bows, and Groom of the King and Queen’s Privy-Chamber,” that Dekker so pathetically referred to his voice, “Decaying with my Age.” But comparatively with some of the second-rate pieces of ten, and even twenty years before, there is little sign of decay. Match Me in London shows, it is true, the prose side of Dekker’s dramatic faculty, rather than its side of poetic exuberance; but the piece is as full of Dekker’s old picturesque realism and genial humanity, as ever. The street and shop scenes, supposed to be placed chiefly in Seville, might just as well be in London: Dekker transfers the ‘Counter’ there withou
t hesitation, and except for occasional doubtful attempts at Spanish local colour, the whole play is as native as anything Dekker has done. The plot turns chiefly upon the attempt of the King to corrupt Tormiella, one of the brightest and most taking of all Dekker’s heroines, whose guileless fidelity to her husband is delicately portrayed. The usual sub-plot in which Don John, the King’s brother, conspires for the throne, is less inconsequent than most of Dekker’s supplementary plots, and the whole comedy is managed with a higher sense of dramatic form than Dekker often showed. Match Me in London, as being entirely Dekker’s own composition, certainly deserves to rank with his half-dozen best plays, and I am sorry that it was not possible to find room for it in this edition, although the same ground has already been partly covered in his other comedies.
I confess I find it hard to understand how anyone can seriously prefer The Wonder of a Kingdom, which appeared some few years later, to Match Me in London, as Mr. J. A. Symonds has done. In the former we find Dekker for once working without any real pervading humanity; there are touches of his usual heartiness in it, but as a whole it is a heartless production — more a cold study of motives and passions than a sympathetic re-creation of them in forms of art. It was highly appropriate, indeed, that Dekker long before had been chosen as a champion to meet Ben Jonson, for the two men mark very clearly two types of poet and artist. Jonson in his plays worked largely from the mere curiosity about men’s passions and motives, he wrought conceptions which sprang too often from an analytical interest, rather than the emotional human impulse which drives the poet to reflect men’s strifes and destinies for simple love’s sake. With Dekker it was different. Without perhaps consciously realising it, he worked mainly from this impulse of the heart, putting himself passionately into all that he characterised, in his exuberant, careless way. For once, however, in The Wonder of a Kingdom, he seems to have laid aside something of his natural kindliness. The episode of old Lord Vanni’s intrigue with Alphonsina is repulsive, unvisited as it is by even ordinary comedy retribution. It is only fair to allow, however, that Dekker’s kindlier quality crops up in some scenes of the play, and Hazlitt’s testimony to Gentili, “that truly ideal character of a magnificent patron,” may be set against the comment of the German critic, Dr. Schmidt, who has said very truly,— “That the youthful fire which fills Fortunatus is in this drama extinguished.”
Although the two remaining plays which Dekker wrote with Ford, The Sun’s Darling and The Witch of Edmonton, were not published till 1656 and 1658 respectively, they were certainly written and performed long before Match Me in London, probably helping to fill up the five blank years following that in which The Virgin Martyr appeared. The Sun’s Darling is a charming conception, inadequately wrought out, but nevertheless full of facile and exuberant poetic quality. The lyrics, especially, the best of which are undoubtedly Dekker’s, are so fresh and full of impulse that one inclines to think that they date back to the first half of his life. Some of these have found their way, infrequently, into the anthologies, as that beginning, “What bird so sings, yet so does wail,” and again the delightful country song, in which one can forgive the mixture of musk-roses and daffodils, haymaking and hunting, lambs and partridges, in defiance of all rustic tradition, for the sake of its catching tune: —
“Hay-makers, rakers, reapers and mowers,
Wait on your Summer Queen.
Dress up with musk-rose her eglantine bowers,
Daffodils strew the green....”
The hero of this Moral Masque, as the authors term it, — Raybright, “The Sun’s Darling,” is shown in progression through the seasons under the Sun’s guidance, which he perverts in his restless pursuit of sensuous pleasure. All these scenes are full of suggestions of beauty, but they are imperfectly realised. Exquisite passages occur, however, as in the scene where Spring, Health, Youth, and Delight appear to Raybright, and Spring, wooing him in vain, proffers him the bay-tree: —
“That tree shall now be thine, about it sit
All the old poets, with fresh laurel crowned,
Singing in verse the praise of chastity.”
When it is too late, Raybright, filled with love for the Spring, is seized with remorse: so in turn all the seasons pass by, while Humour and Folly lead him always astray. The Sun’s peroration in addressing Raybright at the end of his foiled career is a solemn and profound, if rather fanciful, summing-up of life. Altogether The Sun’s Darling forms a valuable later complement to Old Fortunatus, and it is only to be regretted that its authors did not bestow upon it the longer, patient labour which would have made it worthy of its conception.
The Witch of Edmonton, the second play in which Ford and Dekker worked conjointly, is so utterly different to The Sun’s Darling that one finds it difficult to believe that the same hands can have been concerned in its production. Possibly the initial conception was Rowley’s, and though it would not be easy to differentiate his exact share in any special scene or passage, there is a considerable residuum which marks itself off as unlike the work of Dekker or Ford. Dekker’s share is more apparent. The scenes where Cuddy Banks and his fellow villagers disport themselves, some of those where the Witch herself appears, and again those of Susan’s love and sorrow, have by general critical consent been awarded to him. Part of the severer tragedy in the terrible hallucination of Mother Sawyer, however, which has generally been considered Dekker’s, I fancy bears the stamp of Ford. In his essay on Ford, Mr. Swinburne has essayed a comparison of the parts due severally to Dekker and to Ford, which is too important to be overlooked. He would assign the part of Mother Sawyer chiefly to Dekker. “In all this part of the play I trace the hand of Dekker; his intimate and familiar sense of wretchedness, his great and gentle spirit of compassion for the poor and suffering with whom his own lot in life was so often cast, in prison and out.” The part of Susan also, he allots to Dekker; and of the scene where Frank Thorney’s guilt is discovered, he remarks suggestively: “The interview of Frank with the disguised Winifred in this scene may be compared by the student of dramatic style with the parting of the same characters at the close; the one has all the poignant simplicity of Dekker, the other all the majestic energy of Ford.”
The dates of publication of the two last plays bring us far beyond the time of Dekker’s death, of which, however, we have no record at all. None of his prose works reach so late a period; the last is A Rod for Runaways, published in 1625. Collier, who always made his evidence go as far as possible, himself admits that there is no further trace of him after 1638, the year when Milton wrote Lycidas, the year when Scotland was ominously signing the Covenant. In the further oncoming of the Civil War, Dekker disappears altogether, as uncertainly as he first entered the scene.
In summing up this strange life and its dramatic outcome, it is easily seen what is to be said on the adverse side. Dekker had, let us admit, great defects. He was the type of the prodigal in literature, — the kindhearted, irresponsible poet whom we all know, and love, and pardon seventy times seven. But it is sad to think that with a little of the common talent which every successful man of affairs counts as part of his daily equipment, he might have left a different record. He never attained the serious conception of himself and his dignity as a worker which every poet, every artist must have, who would take effect proportionate to his genius. He never seemed to become conscious in any enduring way of his artistic function, and he constantly threw aside, under pressure of the moment, those standards of excellence which none knew better than he how to estimate. But after all has been said, he remains, by his faults as well as by his faculties, one of the most individual, one of the most suggestive, figures of the whole Elizabethan circle. Because of the breath of simple humanity in them, his works leave a sense of brightness and human encouragement whose charm lingers when many more careful monuments of literary effort are forgotten. His artistic sincerity has resulted in a picture of life as he saw it, unequalled for its sentiment, for its living spirit of tears and laughter, as well
as for its outspoken truth. His homely realism brings before us all the pleasant everyday bustle of the Elizabethan streets — the craftsmen and prentices, the citizens at their shop doors, the gallants in the Middle Aisle of St. Paul’s. The general feeling is that of a summer’s morning in the pleasant Cheapside of those days — more like the street of a little market-town than the Cheapside of to-day — where in the clear sunny air the alert cry of the prentices, “What do you lack?” rings out cheerily, and each small incident of the common life is touched with vivid colour. And if the night follows, dark and haunted by grim passions and sorrows, and the King’s Bench waits for poor poets not far away, this poet who had known the night and the prison only too well! sang so undauntedly, that the terrors of them fell away at the sound.
As he had this faith in the happy issue out of his own troubles, so Dekker looked unflinchingly as a poet upon the grim and dark side of human life, seeing it to emerge presently, bright in the higher vision of earth and Heaven. Much that at first seems gratuitously obscene and terrible in his dramatic presentation may in this way be accepted with the same vigorous apprehension of the comedy and tragedy of life, which he himself showed. The whole justification of his lifework, indeed, is to be found in these words of his, from the dedicatory epistle to His Dream, which we may well take as his parting behest:— “So in these of mine, though the Devil be in the one, God is in the other: nay in both. What I send you, may perhaps seem bitter, yet it is wholesome; your best physic is not a julep; sweet sauces leave rotten bodies. There is a Hell named in our Creed, and a Heaven, and the Hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.”
Complete Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker Page 271