Dekker, however, is one of those authors whose personal effect tends to outgo the purely artistic one. He has the rare gift of putting heart into everything he says, and because of this abounding heartiness of his, it is hard to measure him by the absolute standards of criticism. Indeed, after the endless shortcomings and disappointments of his verse and prose have been estimated and written against him, he remains, after all has been set down, still the same lovable, elusive being, a man of genius, a child of nature. For this reason, it is disappointing that so little is to be actually known of his life. As one reads his plays, and marks the strong individuality shown in them, the desire to know how he adjusted himself to the everyday life, and took its little defeats and encouragements, springs very strongly. It is the natural interest that one takes in men of his cordial humanity, and it is disappointing to be balked of its satisfaction.
The outline of Dekker’s life is indeed singularly blank. We do not know exactly when he was born, or where; there is scarcely any clue to the important period of his youth, and his early struggles as a poet and playwright; we do not even know when he died. A few further entries in Henslowe’s Diary, whose value an uneasy sense of J. Payne Collier’s editorial methods tends to depreciate, and a few incidental references in Dekker’s own works, chiefly in the dedications and introductions to his plays, form the whole of the exact record which we have to rely upon.
In the dedication to Match Me in London, perhaps the most interesting of all the plays by him not included in this volume, which was published in 1631, he says, sadly enough, “I have been a Priest in Apollo’s Temple many years, my voice is decaying with my Age, yet yours being clear and above mine shall much honour me, if you but listen to my old tunes.” Again in 1637, in the dedicatory epistle of his prose tract, English Villainies Seven Several Times Pressed to Death, he refers more definitely to his “three-score years.” Sixty years back from 1637 gives us 1577, but as Collier[1] tells us that he was married before 1594, and as we know that he had already won recognition as a young playwright in 1597, it will be well to read the term “three-score years” pretty freely, as meaning generally the term between sixty and seventy, and to put down the date of his birth at about the year 1569-70, or even a little earlier.
There is less uncertainty about his birthplace: various references in his prose tracts prove pretty certainly that he was born in London, as seems so fit in one of the most devoted of those poets who have celebrated the English capital. “O thou beautifullest daughter of two united Monarchies!” he cries, in his Seven Deadly Sins of London; “from thy womb received I my being, from thy breasts my nourishment.” This is confirmed by similar passages in the Dead Term, The Rod for Runaways, and other of the prose pamphlets. The particular spot in London where he was born is not however to be learnt, although Collier surmises that he was born in Southwark. The name itself,—whether Dekker or Decker, suggests a Dutch origin, which is further corroborated by the curious knowledge shown in the plays and prose tracts of Dutch people and Dutch books, to say nothing of the frequent Dutch realism of Dekker’s dramatic method. Dr. Grosart, whose indefatigable energy of research was probably never exercised to so little purpose in the case of any author, discovered on the title-page of one copy of the civic “Entertainment” by Dekker, Troia-Nova-Triumphans, or London Triumphing, the words “Merchant-Tailor” written opposite his name, as if by one who had known him. From this we may again conjecture that his father was a tailor, and that possibly the boy went to Merchant Tailor’s School, and was intended for that trade. The intimate knowledge of the daily routine of tailors’ and shoemakers’ shops displayed in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and other of the plays, bear every evidence of being drawn from actual experience. It is not a very wild imagination, therefore, to imagine that the boy Dekker may have been apprenticed in the ordinary way as a shoemaker or tailor, making escape from the craftsman’s life as his poetic ambition grew hot, and at last inevitable, in its hazardous issue upon the path of a playwright and man of letters.
It is only by free inference from his works that we can possibly fill up the early part of his life, until, in 1597, as already noted, we find him committed to the life of an author and playwright, and tasting, no doubt, of its sweets, as in the early part of 1598 he had a sharp foretaste of its bitterness. Much of the description in his plays casts a vivid light upon this wild life of the playhouse and tavern which he, with other young poets of the extraordinary decade terminating the sixteenth century must have lived. Some of the scenes in The Honest Whore, and again in Satiromastix and other of the lesser known comedies, are full of this interest; and luminous passages also occur in the plays of his various collaborators. In some of his own prose works, especially in his singular guide to the gallant’s life in Elizabethan London, The Gull’s Horn Book, Dekker has indirectly supplied a still more realistic account of the life lived by the young bloods who frequented the playhouses and taverns. From this inimitable book one gathers much curious detail for the picture of Dekker’s daily surroundings. In Chapter V., which is headed, “How a Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary,” the young hero of the period is advised to repair to the “ordinary,” or eating-house, so early as “some half-hour after eleven; for then you shall find most of your fashion-mongers planted in the room waiting for meat.” Amongst the types of gallant to whom Dekker gives special advice as to behaviour at the ordinary, is the poet:—
“If you be a Poet,” he says, “and come into the Ordinary; though it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet; order yourself thus. Observe no man; doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion, pulling out your gloves, to have some Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them.... Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of another man’s, that is somewhat better; I would counsel you then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: ‘Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend.’ And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, or else that you dare not take it upon you for fear of the sharpness it carries with it.”
At dinner, directions are given in the same vein of irony, as to the manner of eating and so forth; and after dinner, among other occupations and diversions proposed for the afternoon figures the play. The next chapter is devoted accordingly to expounding “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse.” From the point of view of Dekker’s dramatic work, this is naturally the most interesting part of the book. It gives us a vivid idea of the associations which would colour his thoughts as, the dinner hour over, the stream of gallants, ’prentices and so forth, issued from the ordinaries, the fashionable promenade in the Middle Aisle of St. Paul’s, and elsewhere, and wended their way at afternoon to the play. Dekker, it is quite evident, speaks feelingly, remembering his own troubles, in these ironical counsellings to the “Gull,” who in his seat on the stage seems to have acted as a sort of irresponsible chorus, hindering rather than aiding the understanding of the play, however, and resented equally by the playwright and the playgoers in pit or gallery. “Whither,” proceeds the Horn Book,—
“Whither therefore the gatherers of the public, or private Playhouse stand to receive the afternoon’s rent; let our Gallant having paid it, presently advance himself up to the Throne of the stage; I mean not into the lord’s room, which is now but the stage’s suburbs; no, ... but on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea, and under the state of Cambyses himself, must our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance, be planted valiantly, because impudently, beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality.” Here it continues—“By sitting on the stage, you may, without travelling for it, at the very next door ask whose play it is; and, by that Quest of Inquiry, the law warrants you to avoid much mistaking; if you know not the author, you may rail against him, and peradventure so behave yourself, that you may enforce the author to know you.”
The refinements of torture to which the Elizabethan playwright was subject under this arrangement, must indeed have been infinite. Dekker further enlarges with the piteous irony of a long-suffering experience:—
“It shall crown you with rich commendation, to laugh aloud in the middest of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest tragedy; and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high, that all the house may ring of it.”