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Thomas Dekker the dramatist--there are records of several
contemporaries with this name--was born in London about 1570,
but no details of his family relations or of his education are
known. The first record of his work is a payment to him in January,
1598, as a member of Henslowe's group of dramatists. For the
next six years he was actively engaged in playwriting, chiefly
under Henslowe, first for the Admiral's men and later for Worcester's,
and he continued to write plays sporadically during the remainder
of a comparitively long life. From early in the seventeenth century,
however, he devoted most of his time to the composition of prose
pamphlets, which are among the best records of London life in
his day. The most important are The Bellman of London
(1608) and The Gull's Hornbook (1609). In spite of his
prolific literary output, Dekker lived a life of hardship as
a result of debt. He borrowed money of Henslowe in 1598 to secure
his release from prison, and in 1619 he had been in prison some
years. He may have been the Thomas Dekker who was buried in 1632;
he was certainly dead by 1640 or 1641.
In his connection with Henslowe, Dekker had a hand in over
forty plays, only a few of which survive. The Shoemaker's
Holiday and Old Fortunatus he wrote alone, but most
of his work was done in collaboration with Henslowe's writers,
chiefly with Drayton, Chettle, and Wilson, but not infrequently
with Jonson, Day, Haughton, Munday,
Heywood, Middleton, and Webster. The
group exploited many fields--the classics, romance of many periods,
history, especially English chronicles, and, to a considerable
extent, contemporary life. Thus the French civil wars of the
period were stretched to four plays, at least two plays were
domestic tragedies, and several apparently dealt with the lower
levels of English life. Of the individual plays extent, Old
Fortunatus, printed in 1600, is Dekker's best romance. Patient
Grissel, written with Chettle and Haughton in 1598 in the
spirit of the domestic play, inaugerated a vogue of the patient
wife. In 1601 Dekker was drawn into the stage quarrel and acquitted
himself well in Satiromastix, a reply to Jonson's Poetaster.
The Honest Whore of 1604 is the first of a series of dramatic
studies in which contact of London gallants with the rising merchant
class is depicted. The more realistic Westward Ho and
Northward Ho, written with Webster, followed soon after,
and The Roaring Girl, in which he collaborated with Middleton,
about 1610. Among the later plays, The Virgin Martyr,
written with Massinger about 1620, and The Witch of Edmonton,
with Ford and Rowley about 1621, are
masterly tragedies. Appropriately Dekker also made his contributions
to the great civic pageants in London.
Dekker and the group of writers to which he belonged represent
the culmination of Elizabethan drama proper. The literary decade
extending from the first known publication of work by Lyly and
Peele in 1584 to the death of Kyd shows
the dramatists utilizing a wide range of story and history and
developing not only a variety of characters from both the real
and the supernatural world, but also a variety of structural
devices and styles. For a period of a little over a decade from
the middle of the nineties, the early literary drama continued
with even grater imaginative ferver and range of style, as illustrated
in the work of Shakespeare. Significant
new forces, however, were producing a more searching and realistic
interpretation of character and a more critical attitude to structure
and style. In these respects the drama of this decade prepares
for the early Stuart drama or indeed merges with it, for the
later work of most of the men represented here is at times for
Jacobean than Elizabethan. In Dekker the reaction is indicated
not so much by the loss of the romantic or idealizing tendency
of the age as by the centering of it on contemporary life, as
a result no doubt of the growing wealth and splendor of courts
and cities and of man's new adventures in travel, exploration,
and war. With old elements of romance Dekker blends new ones
of commerce in the portrayal of the merchant class. Primarily,
however, he reflects the infinite Elizabethan zest of life, even
in realistic scenes.
The Shoemaker's Holiday is first mentioned by Henslowe
under date of July 15, 1599, evidently having been written during
the preceding six weeks. A court performance was secured for
it on the night of January 1, 1600, and it was printed in the
same year by Valentine Sims. Other quartos appeared in 1610,
1618, 1624, 1631, and 1657, each one being a reprint of its immediate
predecessor. The plot of The Shoemaker's Holiday is derived
from the three shoemaker stories that make up the first part
of Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft (1598). The last story,
"Simon Eyre," which furnished Dekker with most of his
material for the play, is Deloney's romanticized account of a
historical figure, who rose from the position of upholsterer
and draper (in Delaney, shoemaker) to become a wealthy lord mayor
of London (1445-46). To the other two stories Dekker is indebted
for suggestions for characters. He may also have made use of
popular ballads for the incident of Ralph, Jane, and Hammon.
The first part of The Honest Whore was printed by Valentine
Sims in 1604 (other editions appeared in 1605, 1615, 1616, and
1635), and the second part by Elizabeth Allde in 1630, with the
original subtitle considerably expanded: "With the humors
of the patient man, the impatient wife; the honest whore, persuaded
by strong arguments to turn courtesan again; her brave refuting
those arguments; and lastly, the comical passages of an Italian
Bridewell, where the scene ends." Although the title pages
of both plays give Dekker alone as the author, from a passage
in Henslowe's diary it appears that Middleton collaborated with
him on the first part. Middleton's exact part in the play cannot
be determined, but modern scholars are inclined to agree with
Dyce that his "share is comparitively small." The source
of the plots and characters has never been discovered. It is
probable that the plays are compounded of characters whom Dekker
had known in the London streets and of stuff of his own imagination,
with the use, however, of some conventional motives, especially
in the story of Hippolito.
†This article was originally published
in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays Ed. Charles Read Baskervill.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. 553-54.
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