Day’s Mad Pranks of Merry Mall of the Bankside (S. R. 7 Aug. 1610) was probably a pamphlet (cf. Dekker, The Roaring Girl). Bullen, Introd. 11, thinks the Guy Earl of Warwick (1661), printed as ‘by B. J.’, too bad to be Day and Dekker’s Life and Death of Guy of Warwick (S. R. 15 Jan. 1620). On 30 July 1623 Herbert licensed a Bellman of Paris by Day and Dekker for the Prince’s (Herbert, 24). The Maiden’s Holiday by Marlowe (q.v.) and Day (S. R. 8 April 1654) appears in Warburton’s list of burnt plays (3 Library, ii. 231) as Marlowe’s.
For other ascriptions to Day see The Maid’s Metamorphosis and Parnassus in ch. xxiv.
THOMAS DEKKER (c. 1572–c. 1632).
Thomas Dekker was of London origin, but though the name occurs in Southwark, Cripplegate, and Bishopsgate records, neither his parentage nor his marriage, if he was married, can be definitely traced. He was not unlettered, but nothing is known of his education, and the conjecture that he trailed a pike in the Netherlands is merely based on his acquaintance with war and with Dutch. The Epistle to his English Villanies, with its reference to ‘my three score years’, first appeared in the edition of 1632; he was therefore born about 1572. He first emerges, in Henslowe’s diary, as a playwright for the Admiral’s in 1598, and may very well have been working for them during 1594–8, a period for which Henslowe records plays only and not authors. The further conjecture of Fleay, i. 119, that this employment went as far back as 1588–91 is hazardous, and in fact led Fleay to put his birth-date as far back as 1567. It was based on the fact that the German repertories of 1620 and 1626 contain traces of his work, and on Fleay’s erroneous belief (cf. ch. xiv) that all the plays in these repertories were taken to Germany by Robert Browne as early as 1592. But it is smiled upon by Greg (Henslowe, ii. 256) as regards The Virgin Martyr alone. Between 1598 and 1602 Dekker wrote busily, and as a rule in collaboration, first for the Admiral’s at the Rose and Fortune, and afterwards for Worcester’s at the Rose. He had a hand in some forty-four plays, of which, in anything like their original form, only half a dozen survive. Satiromastix, written for the Chamberlain’s men and the Paul’s boys in 1601, shows that his activities were not limited to the Henslowe companies. This intervention in the Poetomachia led Jonson to portray him as Demetrius Fannius ‘the dresser of plays’ in The Poetaster; that he is also Thersites in Troilus and Cressida is a not very plausible conjecture. Long after, in 1619, Jonson classed him among the ‘rogues’ (Laing, 4). In 1604, however, he shared with Jonson the responsibility for the London devices at James’s coronation entry. About this time began his career as a writer of popular pamphlets, in which he proved the most effective successor of Thomas Nashe. These, and in particular The Gull’s Hornbook (1609), are full of touches drawn from his experience as a dramatist. Nor did he wholly desert the stage, collaborating with Middleton for the Prince’s and with Webster for Paul’s, and writing also, apparently alone, for the Queen’s. In 1612 he devised the Lord Mayor’s pageant. In 1613 he fell upon evil days. He had always been impecunious, and Henslowe (i. 83, 101, 161) had lent him money to discharge him from the Counter in 1598 and from an arrest by the Chamberlain’s in 1599. Now he fell into the King’s Bench for debt, and apparently lay there until 1619. The relationship of his later work to that of Ford, Massinger, Day, and others, lies rather beyond the scope of this inquiry, but in view of the persistent attempts to find early elements in all his plays, I have made my list comprehensive. He is not traceable after 1632, and is probably the Thomas Decker, householder, buried at St. James’s, Clerkenwell, on 25 Aug. 1632. A Clerkenwell recusant of this name is recorded in 1626 and 1628 (Middlesex County Records, iii. 12, 19).
Collections
1873. [R. H. Shepherd], The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. 4 vols. (Pearson Reprints). [Contains 15 plays and 4 Entertainments.]
1884–6. A. B. Grosart, The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. 5 vols. (Huth Library). [Contains nearly all the pamphlets, with Patient Grissell. A better edition of The Gull’s Hornbook is that by R. B. McKerrow (1904); a chapter is in App. H.]
1887. E. Rhys, Thomas Dekker (Mermaid Series). [Contains The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 1, 2 The Honest Whore, Old Fortunatus, The Witch of Edmonton.]
Dissertations: M. L. Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study (1911, Columbia Studies in English); W. Bang, Dekker-Studien (1900, E. S. xxviii. 208); F. E. Pierce, The Collaboration of Webster with Dekker (1909, Yale Studies, xxxvii) and The Collaboration of Dekker and Ford (1912, Anglia, xxxvi, 141, 289); E. E. Stoll, John Webster (1905), ch. ii, and The Influence of Jonson on Dekker (1906, M. L. N. xxi. 20); R. Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (1916); F. P. Wilson, Three Notes on Thomas Dekker (1920, M. L. R. xv. 82).
PLAYS