"The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a Magdalen redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its earthly close; she marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, she plays the Patient Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an old serving-man. There is abundance of the inevitable ribaldry.
In a play devoted to "Patient Grissil," that ideal of the dramatists, occurs the lovely lyric "Art thou poor, Yet hast thou golden slumbers"; in "Old Fortunatus" (in the story of the Magical Purse) is "Fortune's kind, cry holiday": other pretty songs occur in "The Sun's Darling" (Ford and Dekker).
"Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise of audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. There are fine tirades of imaginative blank verse in "Fortunatus". Dekker admired a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or needing no conversion, as most of his fraternity and as Fielding did. But Fortune, if she sometimes "cried holiday" to Dekker, was never "kind". He is best remembered for his songs and for the words
the best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
When Lamb tells us that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything": when Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement, and an exquisite simplicity of expression," we wish to search for his privately reprinted works in prose, and the solitary edition of his plays.
But on the other hand we are told that his "Satiromastix" is not too severely called "a preposterous medley": that his "besetting vice" is "reckless and sluttish incoherence"; that one play can be best explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor's prison; that "there are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens and of sluts." Dekker wrote several pamphlets, which, in a sort, resemble some minor work of Daniel de Foe.
Middleton.
Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was "a base fellow," he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is unknown (1570?), as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; by 1602 he was working at plays in which five or six other men collaborated. Probably they settled on a plot, or rather on two plots, upper and under, and each author wrote an act: a little ready money came in, but the dramas must have been "in the veniable part of things lost". Middleton frequently worked with Dekker, also with Rowley. They are usually thought to have mainly contributed the noisy and incoherent underplots, but Dekker's admirers credit him with the dénouement of "The Old Law" (Middleton, Massinger, Dekker).
Mr. Bullen finds this passage the drollest of things droll. There can be no doubt that it must have evoked hearty laughter on the stage.