the writings of Dekker and the scattered records or indications of his
unprosperous though not unlaborious career: but there are manifest and
manifold signs of an honest and earnest regard for justice and fair
dealing, as well as of an inexhaustible compassion for suffering, an
indestructible persistency of pity, which found characteristic
expression in the most celebrated of his plays. There is a great gulf
between it and the first of Victor Hugo's tragedies: yet the instinct of
either poet is the same, as surely as their common motive is the
redemption of a fallen woman by the influence of twin-born love and
shame. Of all Dekker's works, "The Honest Whore" comes nearest to some
reasonable degree of unity and harmony in conception and construction;
his besetting vice of reckless and sluttish incoherence has here done
less than usual to deform the proportions and deface the impression of
his design. Indeed, the connection of the two serious plots in the first
part is a rare example of dexterous and happy simplicity in composition:
the comic underplot of the patient man and shrewish wife is more loosely
attached by a slighter thread of relation to these two main stories, but
is so amusing in its light and facile play of inventive merriment and
harmless mischief as to need no further excuse. Such an excuse, however,
might otherwise be found in the plea that it gives occasion for the most
beautiful, the most serious, and the most famous passage in all the
writings of its author. The first scene of this first part has always
appeared to me one of the most effective and impressive on our stage:
the interruption of the mock funeral by the one true mourner whose
passion it was intended to deceive into despair is so striking as a mere
incident or theatrical device that the noble and simple style in which
the graver part of the dialogue is written can be no more than worthy of
the subject: whereas in other plays of Dekker's the style is too often
beneath the merit of the subject, and the subject as often below the
value of the style. The subsequent revival of Infelice from her trance
is represented with such vivid and delicate power that the scene, short
and simple as it is, is one of the most fascinating in any play of the
period. In none of these higher and finer parts of the poem can I trace
the touch of any other hand than the principal author's: but the
shopkeeping scenes of the underplot have at least as much of Middleton's
usual quality as of Dekker's; homely and rough-cast as they are, there
is a certain finish or thoroughness about them which is more like the
careful realism of the former than the slovenly naturalism of the
latter. The coarse commonplaces of the sermon on prostitution by which
Bellafront is so readily and surprisingly reclaimed into respectability
give sufficient and superfluous proof that Dekker had nothing of the
severe and fiery inspiration which makes a great satirist or a great
preacher; but when we pass again into a sweeter air than that of the
boudoir or the pulpit, it is the unmistakable note of Dekker's most
fervent and tender mood of melody which enchants us in such verses as
these, spoken by a lover musing on the portrait of a mistress whose
coffin has been borne before him to the semblance of a grave:
Of all the roses grafted on her cheeks,
Of all the graces dancing in her eyes,
Of all the music set upon her tongue,
Of all that was past woman's excellence
In her white bosom, look, a painted board
Circumscribes all!
Is there any other literature, we are tempted to ask ourselves, in which
the writer of these lines, and of many as sweet and perfect in their
inspired simplicity as these, would be rated no higher among his
countrymen than Thomas Dekker?
From the indisputable fact of Middleton's partnership in this play Mr.
Dyce was induced to assume the very questionable inference of his
partnership in the sequel which was licensed for acting five years
later. To me this second part seems so thoroughly of one piece and one
pattern, so apparently the result of one man's invention and
composition, that without more positive evidence I should hesitate to
assign a share in it to any colleague of the poet under whose name it
first appeared. There are far fewer scenes or passages in this than in
the preceding play which suggest or present themselves for quotation or
selection: the tender and splendid and pensive touches of pathetic or
imaginative poetry which we find in the first part, we shall be
disappointed if we seek in the second: its incomparable claim on our
attention is the fact that it contains the single character in all the
voluminous and miscellaneous works of Dekker which gives its creator an
indisputable right to a place of perpetual honor among the imaginative
humorists of England, and therefore among the memorable artists and
creative workmen of the world. Apart from their claim to remembrance as
poets and dramatists of more or less artistic and executive capacity,
Dekker and Middleton are each of them worthy to be remembered as the
inventor or discoverer of a wholly original, interesting, and natural
type of character, as essentially inimitable as it is undeniably
unimitated: the savage humor and cynic passion of De Flores, the genial
passion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, are equally lifelike in
the truthfulness and completeness of their distinct and vivid
presentation. The merit of the play in which the character last named
is a leading figure consists mainly or almost wholly in the presentation
of the three principal persons: the reclaimed harlot, now the faithful
and patient wife of her first seducer; the broken-down, ruffianly,
light-hearted and light-headed libertine who has married her; and the
devoted old father who watches in the disguise of a servant over the
changes of her fortune, the sufferings, risks, and temptations which try
the purity of her penitence and confirm the fortitude of her constancy.
Of these three characters I cannot but think that any dramatist who ever
lived might have felt that he had reason to be proud. It is strange that
Charles Lamb, to whom of all critics and all men the pathetic and
humorous charm of the old man's personality might most confidently have
been expected most cordially to appeal, should have left to Hazlitt and
Leigh Hunt the honor of doing justice to so beautiful a creation--the
crowning evidence to the greatness of Dekker's gifts, his power of moral
imagination and his delicacy of dramatic execution. From the first to
the last word of his part the quaint sweet humor of the character is
sustained with an instinctive skill which would do honor to a far more
careful and a far more famous artist than Dekker. The words with which
he receives the false news of his fallen daughter's death: "Dead? my
last and best peace go with her!"--those which he murmurs to himself on
seeing her again after seventeen years of estrangement: "The mother's
own face, I ha' not forgot that"--prepare the way for the admirable
final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, and his ostentation of
obduracy relaxes into tenderness and tears. "Dost thou beg for him, thou
precious man's meat, thou? has he not beaten thee, kicked thee, trod on
thee? and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? has he not pawned thee
to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust? yet
wouldst have me save him?--What, dost thou hold him? let go his hand: if
thou dost not forsake him, a father's everlasting blessing fall upon
both your heads!" The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection of
exquisite accuracy in expression which must be recognized at once and
remembered forever by any competent reader of this scene is the highest
quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here displayed at its
highest: the more poetic or romantic quality of his genius had already
begun to fade out when this second part of his finest poem was written.
Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the
effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the
humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary
infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps
him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production
of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically
effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to
this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded,
noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate affection was so simply
and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so
lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a
device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should
have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and
her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade
in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and
vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.
But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us
understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of
"Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the demerits of the
two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross,
so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist
with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness
and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest,
was Thomas Heywood. In style and versification the patriotic and
anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of
"The Whore of Babylon" is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited
and fluent, with gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated
action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation
vacuous and vehement. An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a
tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the
"Persae"; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pass by him, remains
alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime
perfection. Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the
task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the
utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing. The Empress of Babylon
is but a poor slipshod ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic
beadle: "non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e passa."
Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays
in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took
part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on
those other three poets. The next play which bears his name alone was
published five years later than the political or historical sketch or
study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a
tolerable if not a creditable piece of work. It is difficult to abstain
from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as
that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, "If this be not
a good Play, the Devil is in it." A worse has seldom discredited the
name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden's delectable
tragedy of "Amboyna," Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," Pope's
elegant comedy of "Three Hours after Marriage," are scarcely more
unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious
in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that
it must have been written against time in a debtor's prison, under the
influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would
have flung at the tapster's head with an accompaniment of such language
as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive
provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law.
I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of
this play I have never come across in all the range of that
excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer
was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller
relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general
workmanship.[1]
[Footnote 1: As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I
give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy
play:
Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find
A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined
To any bendings: lest his youthful brows
Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs
With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste
Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste,
The body feels consumption: good or bad kings
Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs.
Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil
Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.
The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable
for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of
the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes out in
pleasantries like this:
_King_. What are you, and whence come you?
_Rufman_. From Helvetia.
_Spendola_. What hell says he?
_Jovinelli_. Peace; you shall know hot hell [_sic_] time enough.
"I hope here be proofs" that my strictures on the worst work of a poet
whose best work I treasure so heartily, and whose best qualities I rate
so highly, are rather too sparing than too severe.]
This supernatural and "superlunatical" attempt at serious farce or
farcical morality marks the nadir of Dekker's ability as a dramatist.
The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to
the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of "Grim the
Collier of Croydon," which is perhaps more likely to have been the
writer's immediate model than the original story by Machiavelli. The two
remaining plays now extant which bear the single name of Dekker give no
sign of his highest powers, but are tolerable examples of journeyman's
work in the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. "Match Me in London"
is the better play of the two, very fairly constructed after its simple
fashion, and reasonably well written in a smooth and unambitious style:
"The Wonder of a Kingdom" is a light, slight, rough piece of work, in
its contrasts of character as crude and boyish as any of the old
moralities, and in its action as mere a dance of puppets: but it shows
at least that Dekker had regained the faculty of writing decent verse on
occasion. The fine passage quoted by Scott in _The Antiquary_ and taken
by his editors to be a forgery of his own, will be familiar to many
myriads of readers who are never likely to look it up in the original
context. Of two masks called "Britannia's Honor" and "London's Tempe" it
must suffice to say that the former contains a notable specimen of
cockney or canine French which may serve to relieve the conscientious
reader's weariness, and the latter a comic song of blacksmiths at work
which may pass muster at a pinch as a tolerably quaint and lively piece
of rough and ready fancy. But Jonson for the court and Middleton for the
city were far better craftsmen in this line than ever was Dekker at his
best.
Two plays remain for notice in which the part taken by Dekker would be,
I venture to think, unmistakable, even if no external evidence were
extant of his partnership in either. As it is, we know that in the
winter which saw the close of the sixteenth century he was engaged with
the author of "The Parliament of Bees" and the author of "Englishmen for
My Money" in the production of a play called "The Spanish Moor's
Tragedy." More than half a century afterward a tragedy in which a
Spanish Moor is the principal and indeed the only considerable agent was
published, and attributed--of all poets in the world--to Christopher
Marlowe, by a knavish and ignorant bookseller of the period. That
"Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen," was partly founded on a
pamphlet published after Marlowe's death was not a consideration
sufficient to offer any impediment to this imposture. That the hand
which in the year of this play's appearance on the stage gave "Old
Fortunatus" to the world of readers was the hand to which we owe the
finer scenes or passages of "Lust's Dominion," the whole of the opening
scene bears such apparent witness as requires no evidence to support and
would require very conclusive evidence to confute it. The sweet
spontaneous luxury of the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her
paramour out of sullenness has the very ring of Dekker's melody: the
rough and reckless rattle of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a
sudden vehemence of change and energy; the constant repetition or
reiteration of interjections and ejaculations which are evidently
supposed to give an air of passionate realism and tragic nature to the
jingling and jerky dialogue; many little mannerisms too trivial to
specify and too obvious to mistake; the occasional spirit and beauty,
the frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous and uncertain
style; the faults no less than the merits, the merits as plainly as the
faults, attest the presence of his fitful and wilful genius with all the
defects of its qualities and all the weakness of its strength. The
chaotic extravagance of collapse which serves by way of catastrophe to
bring the action headlong to a close is not more puerile in the violence
of its debility than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker;
conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a malcontent or rather to
a lenient reader, the improvisations of inebriety. There is but one
character which stands out in anything of life-like relief; for the
queen and her paramour are but the usual diabolic puppets of the
contemporary tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood in the
part of the honest and hot-headed young prince. This too is very like
Dekker, whose idle and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain a
diffused or divided interest, but except when working hopelessly and
heartlessly against time was likely to fix on some special point, and
give life at least to some single figure.
There is nothing incongruous in his appearance as a playwright in
partnership with Middleton or with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day;
but a stranger association than that of Massinger's name with Dekker's
it would not be easy to conceive. Could either poet have lent the other
something of his own best quality, could Massinger have caught from
Dekker the freshness and spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and
Dekker have learned of Massinger the conscientious excellence and
studious self-respect of his dramatic workmanship, the result must have
been one of the noblest and completest masterpieces of the English
stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful play which we owe to the
alliance of their powers is a proverbial example of incongruous
contrasts and combinations. The opening and the closing scenes were very
properly and very fortunately consigned to the charge of the younger and
sedater poet: so that, whatever discrepancy may disturb the intervening
acts, the grave and sober harmonies of a temperate and serious artist
begin and end the concert in perfect correspondence of consummate
execution. "The first act of 'The Virgin Martyr,'" said Coleridge, "is
as fine an act as I remember in any play." And certainly it would be
impossible to find one in which the business of the scene is more
skilfully and smoothly opened, with more happiness of arrangement, more
dignity and dexterity of touch. But most lovers of poetry would give it
all, and a dozen such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical composition,
for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her
attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure
in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and
its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise
or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines,
homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined
rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep
the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if
not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four
scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two
following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they
have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the
coarser side of the genius whose finer aspect is shown in the sweetest
passages of the poem has never been disputed by any one capable of
learning the rudiments or the accidence of literary criticism. An
admirable novelist and poet who had the misfortune to mistake himself
for a theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to assert that he knew
not on what ground these brutal buffooneries had been assigned to their
unmistakable author; in other words, to acknowledge his ignorance of the
first elements of the subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone
of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when his unwary and
unscrupulous audacity of self-confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to
challenge John Henry Newman to the duel of which the upshot left him
gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament--not
even then did the author of _Hypatia_ display such a daring and
immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as
when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed
himself "aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us
to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is
Dekker's and all the poetry Massinger's." Now the words of Gifford's
note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint
and the angel, are these: "What follows is exquisitely beautiful.... I
am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker." And seeing that no
mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley
rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be
regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by
the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate
citation of evidence.
There are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as
the most shiftless and shameless of slovens or of sluts; but when we
consider the quantity of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle
through with such occasionally admirable and memorable results, we are
once more inclined to reclaim for her a place of honor among her more
generally respectable or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what I
see no reason to suppose, that she was responsible for the dismal
drivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the
surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to
a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas
Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far
below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous
outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive
evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that
a poet must be found guilty of its authorship. And we know that a
pamphlet or novelette of Deloney's called "Thomas of Reading; or, the
Six Worthy Yeomen of the West," was ascribed to Dekker until the actual
author was discovered.[1] Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first
collected edition of Dekker's pamphlets, says in the introduction to
the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should have doubted the
responsibility of Dekker for a poem with which it may perhaps be unfair
to saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic highway as the jaded
Pegasus of Deloney, had he not been detected as the author of another
religious book. But this latter is a book of the finest and rarest
quality--one of its author's most unquestionable claims to immortality
in the affection and admiration of all but the most unworthy readers;
and "Canaan's Calamity" is one of the worst metrical samples extant of
religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to
attest anything, the fact of Dekker's having written one of the most
beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to
disprove than to prove his authorship of one of the feeblest and most
pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse.
[Footnote 1: It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims
on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative,
worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive
simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of
a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of
unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and
abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would
now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.]