No More Learning

He did not serve a youthful apprenticeship to the
theatrical art, and he never learnt to think in any character but
his own.
We gather from one of his early poems (Euthymiae Raptus)
that Chapman was born in or near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and,
from the title-page of his Homer, that his birth year was 1559.
It is frequently said that he studied at both universities, but there
is no certain evidence that he was at either. Wood asserts that
he spent some time at Oxford, in 1574 or thereabouts, 'where he
was most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic
or philosophy,' and that he left without taking a degree. Of his
personal affairs for the next twenty years, we know nothing. It
is not improbable that he travelled, and a passage in one of his
poems suggests that, like Jonson, he may have served in the
Netherlands. As a man of letters, his first appearance, apparently,


## p. 30 (#48) ##############################################

30
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
was made in a volume of poetry, The Shadow of Night, when
he was thirty-five. From this time, he was busy as poet and
dramatist until 1614, and seems to have achieved reputation and
gained distinguished friends, though he gathered little wealth.
Meres speaks of him in 1598 as a renowned scholar, tragedian
and comedian. We know that he found a patron in the earl of
Essex, and that, after the earl's execution in 1601, he was befriended
by prince Henry, to whom he was appointed 'server in ordinary. '
The prince encouraged him in his work of translating Homer, and
appears to have promised him a pension; but he died in 1612, and
Chapman received no further royal favours.
To all times future this time's mark extend,
Homer no patron found, nor Chapman friend.
In 1605, he had shared with Marston and Jonson the displeasure
of the authorities for the satire in Eastward Hoe on the Scottish
king's needy followers, and had suffered imprisonment. Again, in
1608, he narrowly escaped punishment for an unhappy reference to
the French queen in The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Duke of Byron, which roused the indignation of the French
ambassador. From 1614, Chapman appeared less frequently as an
author, and he died in no very prosperous circumstances in 1634.
He was buried in St Giles's in the Fields (Habington, in his Castara,
speaks of his tomb as without the church), and a monument by
his friend Inigo Jones, to whom he had dedicated his translation
of Musaeus, was then erected to his memory, as 'a Christian
Philosopher and Homericall Poett. '
It is difficult to escape the conviction that Minto was correct in
his identification of Chapman with the ‘rival poet' of Shakespeare's
Sonnets ; and it has been argued with great force and ingenuity?
that the rivalry here indicated may be traced elsewhere in the
work of both authors, and that the note of anger in the strain
of invective which frequently appears in Chapman's poems and
prefaces, hitherto interpreted in his favour as the natural scorn of
a great artist for inferior work, was the outcome of bitter personal
resentment at the success of the unlettered Shakespeare and was
directly aimed at him. According to this view, The Amorous Zodiac,
in the 1595 volume of poems, is the poem indicated by Shake-
speare in his twenty-first sonnet; Holofernes, in Love's Labour's
Lost, is a satirical portrait of Chapman in reply to his malevolent
attacks, and Troilus and Cressida an elaborate castigation of
1
1 Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, by Arthur Acheson, 1903.


## p. 31 (#49) ##############################################

31
Quality of Chapman's Poetry
Chapman's extravagant laudation of Homer, his praise of Greek
ideals and his contempt of all poets who were not his equals in
scholarship. Though not proven, the thesis cannot be lightly
dismissed.
We are told that Chapman was a student of the classics who
made little progress in philosophy; but his earliest works exhibit
him rather as a metaphysician in verse than as a disciple of the
canons of ancient art. Passages in The Shadow of Night (1594)
and in Ovid's Banquet of Sauce, containing A coronet for his
Mistress Philosophy, The amorous Zodiac and other poems (1595),
may be praised with justice; but they will never be widely
read. In the dedication of the second volume, he disclaims
all ambition to please the vulgar—'The profane multitude I
hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching
spirits, whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred. '
Yet, even among ‘searching spirits,' some reluctance to return to
poems in the main so warped and obscure as these may well
be found. Better work was to come. In his continuation of
Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman not unworthily
completed an incomparable fragment, and, in The Tears of
Peace (1609), dedicated to his young patron, prince Henry, he
reaches his happiest moods as an original poet. By Andromache
Liberata (1614), he added nothing to his reputation. The subject
was an unfortunate one—the marriage of the earl of Somerset
and Frances Howard, the divorced lady Essex—and was treated
in so enigmatic a manner as to make necessary a subsequent
prose justification of its aims and intentions. Distinction of mind
and intellectual vigour are apparent in all Chapman's work; but,
though he may occasionally soar, he never sings, and his finest
verses possess gnomic and didactic, rather than lyric, quality.
When it emerges from the entanglements amid which the current
of his reflections is usually split, his poetry can be as limpid as it
is stately. But not often do we hear such music as when he tells
us that Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse
Renews the golden world and holds through all
The holy laws of homely Pastoral,
Where flowers and founts and nymphs and semi-gods
And all the Graces find their old abodes.
Though Chapman was well known as a dramatist in 1598, only
two plays by his hand are extant which were produced before
that date-The Blinde begger of Alexandria (printed 1598) and
An Humerous dayes Myrth (printed 1599), probably the play


## p. 32 (#50) ##############################################

32
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
mentioned by Henslowe as The comodey of Umers in 1597. Both
are comedies; but neither deserves any particular notice, though
the first appears to have been successful on the stage, and the
second contains one or two characters drawn with some cleverness
and spirit. Al Fooles (printed 1605), another comedy, was first
produced under the title The World runs on Wheels, and displays
a surprising advance in dramatic technique. The plot, partly
borrowed from Terence, is ingenious and excellent, and makes
a good framework for a satirical sketch of humours developed
through amusing situations in the manner of Jonson. As a writer
of comedy, here, and in Eastward Hoe (to be noticed later), where,
however, he had collaborators, Chapman appears to the greatest
advantage. When dealing with lighter themes, he condescended,
though with apologies, to write an uninflated style; and, however
he may himself have preferred the heightened and fantastic rhetoric
of his tragedies, they are indisputably inferior in construction
and far less natural in tone than the dramas he affected to
despise.
For four or five years after the opening of the seventeenth
century, Chapman, doubtless because he was occupied with the
continuation of his translation of Homer, contributed nothing to
dramatic literature. By 1605, he had, evidently, resumed his
connection with the theatre; for two plays were printed in the
following year—The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur D'Olive.
In the first of these, Chapman threw his chief strength into a
romantic love episode introduced into the comic scheme of the
play, and succeeded in imparting to it an intensity and sweetness
foreign to his character and talent. Monsieur D'Olive opens
strongly; but the main plot is subsequently obscured by the
shifting of the centre of interest to the character who gives his
name to the piece. This cleverly conceived and diverting town
gull, whose wit and coolness in a trying situation are pleasantly
rendered, at once spoils the play as a work of art and keeps it
alive as an entertainment. Later in his career, Chapman wrote
two more comedies-May-Day (printed 1611), shown by Stiefel
to be an adaptation of the Allesandro of Allesandro Piccolomini,
and The Widdowes Teares (printed 1612) and took part with
Shirley in a third, The Ball (printed 1639). The last named owes
little to Chapman', and neither of the others rises to anything
approaching excellence. The Widdowes Teares, the idea of which
is borrowed from Petronius, is not altogether wanting in power and
1 Cf. post, chap. VIII.
9


## p. 33 (#51) ##############################################

Chapman's Historic Tragedies
33
has some characteristic passages, but entirely fails to arouse interest
in its characters or admiration for the contrivance of the action.
His translations apart, Chapman's fame rests upon his tragedies
founded on French history, of which Bussy D'Ambois (printed
1607) and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613)
have always and rightly received most attention. The subjects
here chosen were singularly adapted to display the qualities of
his genius, never impressive save on an elevated stage. Bussy
D'Ambois was by far the most successful of his dramas, its popu-
larity being due, in part, to its revival of recent history, in part to
the character and career of the chief figure, formed by nature for
an invincible hero of romance, and in part to the glowing rhetoric
which certainly rises in places to pure and impassioned poetry.
Some entries in Henslowe suggest that Bussy D'Ambois, and not
Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, as Collier thought, may have been
the play for which payments were made in 15981; but, if we assign
to it so early a date as this, we must allow a revision after the
death of Elizabeth, who is spoken of as the 'old Queene. ' The
sources of this drama have not been precisely determined-De
Thou's Historiae sui temporis and Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques,
from which it was supposed that the author derived his inci-
dents, were not published in 1607—and Chapman, therefore,
must have had recourse to contemporary accounts. The part
of Bussy was acted by Nathaniel Field. A revised version of
the play by Thomas D'Urfey was produced on the stage of the
Theatre Royal in 1691. For The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
and the tragedies The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Drike of Byron (printed 1608), he drew directly from a trans-
lation of Serres's Inventaire Général de THistoire de France
by Edward Grimeston, published in 1607%. Grimeston supple-
mented Serres, whose narrative ends in 1598, from Matthieu's
Histoire de France and other contemporary writers.
In his first tragedy, the court of Henry III is employed as a
frame for the full length portrait of the brilliant adventurer, Bussy,
whose love affair with Tamyra, countess of Montsorry, betrayal
to her husband and last stand when encircled by his enemies,
make an admirable drama of the heroic and melodramatic type.
It is successful in a style thoroughly Elizabethan (the antithesis of
the classic), in which violent scenes and extravagant rhetoric
1 Cf. Greg's Henslowe's Diary, part 11, pp. 198, 199, and Henslowe Papers, p. 120,
note.
2 Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. by Boas, F. S. , 1905.
E L VI. CH. II.
3


## p. 34 (#52) ##############################################

34 Chapman, Marston, Dekker
a
mingle with profound reflection and magnificent outbursts of
poetry—a strange compound of the fantastic and forbidding with
the noblest and most inspiring elements in art. Dryden, in his
famous depreciation of this play, went too far:
I have ometimes wondered in the reading (he said] what has become of
those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the
theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I
had been cozened with a jelly; nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered
no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in gigantic
words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles;
the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense ;
or, at best, a scantling of wit, which lay gasping for life, and groaning
beneath a heap of rubbish. A famous modern poet used to sacrifice every
year a Statius to Virgil's manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a
D'Ambois annually to the memory of Jonson.
We have here a typical example of Restoration feeling and criti-
cism. Chapman exhibits in excess precisely those Elizabethan
qualities which a later age found Gothic and barbaric. The faults
of the romantic school are all present in an exaggerated degree.
But Dryden overlooked the fiery energy, the imaginative splendours
and rich suggestiveness of phrase and imagery which were its glory,
and beside which the undeniable excellences of his own age of
literature seem the cold and lifeless offspring of uninspired labour.
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613), written after an
interval during which Chapman had produced his Byron tragedies,
though inferior as a drama for the stage, is stronger in its reflective
passages and contains by far the most interesting and profound
of Chapman's character studies. This is Clermont d'Ambois, a
brother of the dead Bussy invented by the dramatist, who is incited
by Bussy's ghost, as Hamlet is by his father's spirit, to under-
take the mission of revenge. Clermont, the senecal man,' who, like
Hamlet, is of a speculative habit of mind and disinclined towards
violence, only after delays accomplishes his task, and, in the end,
dies by his own hand. The Revenge is suffused with memories
of Shakespeare's play, to which, undoubtedly, it owes its plan and
many of its episodes, while Clermont's philosophy is largely drawn
from Epictetus. It is somewhat remarkable that this drama, the
interest of which is centred in a true philosopher moving amid the
intrigues and violences of a renascence court, makes him the
faithful follower of the infamous duke of Guise, whose portrait,
as given us here, is no less flattering than it is unhistorical-a
piece of perversity certainly not calculated to commend the play
to reformation England.


## p. 35 (#53) ##############################################

Tit
Other Plays by Chapman 35
If high intellectual interest and authentic eloquence sufficed to
constitute a dramatic masterpiece, The Conspiracie, And Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France might give Chapman
rank among great playwrights. But we have here rather ‘a small
epic in ten books or acts' than a drama. The verse runs more
smoothly, however, than in the Bussy plays, the poetry is less pestered
with the cloudy turbulence of his ‘full and heightened style,' and
nowhere does Chapman win more completely upon his reader.
In his next tragedy, Caesar and Pompey (printed 1631), he turned
from contemporary to classical history, and, standing on scholar's
ground, might have been expected to derive powerful inspiration
from his theme, but the design is feebly handled, and he fails, as
before, to communicate movement to the action or vitality to the
dramatis personal. Only the oratorical passages, especially those
placed in the mouth of Cato, can be read with much pleasure.
The remaining plays of Chapman were not published during
EUR his lifetime. In Chabot Admirall of France (printed 1639), for
which materials were drawn from Pasquier's Les Recherches de la
France, he had the assistance of Shirley, and it seems fruitless
to attempt the task of partitioning their respective contributions.
Revenge for Honour (printed 1654), an eastern tale of which the
scene is laid in Arabia, may have been written by Chapman; but the
play is by no means in his usual manner, and it is difficult to believe
that, in his old age, he could have assimilated the style of the later
dramatists. (A play printed for the same publisher and entitled The
me Paraside, a Revenge for Honour was entered in the register (1653)
as by Henry Glapthorne. ) Neither play possesses any great dis-
e tinction, though some critics have found in the variety of incident
and portraiture in the last named drama reason for assigning to it
ik
a high place among Chapman's works. It is certainly superior to
Alphonsus Emperour of Germany (printed 1654), also ascribed to
Chapman on more slender grounds. The intimate knowledge of
the German language and German life displayed by the author has
been variously explained. Either Chapman spent some time in
Germany, or he was assisted by some unknown writer intimately
acquainted with the language and customs of that country. There
ti remains the possibility that he had no hand in it. Zeal for
Chapman's reputation might easily be better expended than in the
attempt to prove this play his. Sir Gyles Goosecappe (printed 1606),
an anonymous play, has been ascribed to Chapman or a disciple
by several critics, on internal evidence of method and manner.
Two of his plays, never printed, were destroyed in manuscript by
Te
3-2


## p. 36 (#54) ##############################################

36
,
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
а
Warburton's cook, The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son, and
Fatal Love, a French tragedy. Jonson told Drummond that 'next
himself, only Fletcher and Chapman,' both of whom ‘he loved,'
'could make a masque. ' Only one such composition by Chapman
is extant, The memorable Masque of the two honourable Houses
or Innes of Court; the Middle Temple, and Lyncolnes Inne,
performed at Whitehall in 1614. Probably he wrote others; the
merits of this piece afford insufficient warrant for Jonson’s com-
pliment. While it would be absurd to deny the presence of
masculine force and fervid poetry in Chapman's best tragedies,
it would be mere irony to claim for him fine sensibility or delicate
discrimination in the portrayal of character. He is not great either
in invention or construction, and, though his work abounds in
wise sayings, moral apophthegms and high pitched sentiments, and
though the talent for observation is not absent, there is an invincible
coarseness in his fibre. The comedies show all men either as
deceivers or deceived; his tragic heroes are often little more than
the embodiment of physical energy and tenacious will; pathos he
never attains; and he seems to have been incapable or undesirous
of painting the portrait of a lovable woman. Chapman's immense
pretensions and determination to storm Parnassus hardly win our
allegiance. Nor need we pay homage to his scholarship, though
reputed as vast. He was overburdened not so much by the
weight of his learning as by a mistaken sense of its importance
and authority. Approach him first by way of his original poems
and dramas, and it will not easily prove practicable to find the
measure of the man. Like Milton writing in prose, he is using, as
it were, his left hand. But approach him first under the spell of
Homer, who was 'angel to him, star and fate,' when both genius and
character are sublimated, and he will be known for what he is.
In Chapman's view, Homer was not only emperor among the poets,
he was the greatest of men and philosophers. 'Of all books extant
in all kinds, Homer is the first and best . . . out of him, according to
our most grave and judicial Plutarch, are all Arts deduced, con-
firmed, or illustrated. ' At this shrine, he burns continual incense,
and he would seem to have conceived himself as directly inspired
by the spirit of his great original. It was impossible, indeed, that,
out of the Elizabethan age, should issue a version of Homer
marked by the Homeric qualities of simplicity and directness, nor
does Chapman so much translate Homer as reproduce his narrative
with a certain divine ardour. He describes it as 'an absurd affec-
a
tation in the interpretation of any author to turn him word for


## p. 37 (#55) ##############################################

Chapman's Homer.
Marston
37
In
IN
IL
word,' and disclaimed in his own case any such intention. In
Chapman, the bright equable stream, that reflected sun and stars
and open heaven, dashes through the chasms and ravines of a
mountain country. The stately breadth and sweeping curve and
quiet eddy are lost, but speed and volume and majesty remain.
The famous version deserves its famel.
"Our Homer-Lucan,' as Daniel styled him, did not appear as a
translator till he was nearly forty years old. The first instalment
of his labours, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere (I and II
and viI to XI), was published in 1598, and dedicated to the earl of
Essex. In 1609 were published the first twelve books, dedicated to
prince Henry, and the completed Niad, without date (books I
and I having been re-written) about 1611. It appears from his
own statement that he wrote the last twelve books in fifteen weeks.
The metre, a fourteen-syllabled riming couplet, one of the oldest
English measures, was a sixteenth century favourite, and had been
employed in a translation of ten books of Homer, from a French
version, in 1581, by Arthur Hall. Chapman's Achilles Shield,
'translated out of' the eighteenth book, in the heroic couplet,
and prefaced by an epistle attacking Scaliger, was also published
in 1598. The first twelve books of the Odyssey in the heroic
couplet appeared in 1614, with a dedication to the earl of Somerset,
and the second twelve within another year. The Works and Days
of Hesiod were next undertaken and completed in 1618. In 1616,
both the Iliad and the Odyssey were issued in a folio entitled The
Whole Workes of Homer, Prince of Poets, and, with Batrachomyo-
machia, the Hymns and the Epigrams in 1624, the first complete
translation of Homer into English was made, and the author could
say, 'The work that I was born to do is done. '
Like the pyramid of Caius Cestius, it was planned as 'a refuge
for his memory'; to Homer's keeping Chapman committed his
name and fame. And to Homer he owes his reputation, as to his
long companionship with Homer he owed his chief happiness in
life. In the presence of that mighty shade, he forgot his quarrel
with the world, the cloud of anger that sat upon his brow dispersed
and his soul had peace.
3
ot
John Marston, a man of good Shropshire family and son
of John Marston, a member of the Middle Temple, was probably
born, and certainly educated, in Coventry. Italian blood on
his mother's side (she was the daughter of an Italian physician,
1 See, for further remarks on Chapman's Homer, vol. iv, chap. 1, pp. 21, 22.


## p. 38 (#56) ##############################################

38
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
9
Andrew Guarsi) helps us to understand some features of his genius
and character which distinguished him among his fellows and made
him at the same time a typical representative of his age. He was
admitted to Brasenose college, Oxford, and graduated in 1593.
Marston began his literary career as a satirist, changed his muse
and entered the dramatic field in the last year of the sixteenth
century, but deserted the theatre for the church in 1607. He was
presented to the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, and married
the daughter of a clergyman, William Wilkes, chaplain to James I.
Ben Jonson sarcastically observed to Drummond that ‘Marston
wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law bis
comedies. ' A collected but incomplete edition of his plays was
published in his lifetime by William Sheares (1633), who speaks of
him as ‘now in his Autumn and declining age,' and 'far distant
from this place,' but claims for him a position among the best
poets of his time. He made no demands of his own upon the atten-
tion of posterity. When he died in 1634, he was buried beside
his father in the Temple church, 'under the stone,' says Wood,
'which hath written on it Oblivioni Sacrum. ' Marston was thus
faithful to the sentiment which, in derision of the ambition of
most poets, induced him, in his earlier life, to dedicate his works to
forgetfulness.
Let others pray
For ever their faire poems flourish may;
But as for mee, hungry Oblivion
Devour me quick, accept my orizon.
In any estimate of Marston, it ought to be remembered that he
suffered from no illusions-
Farre worthier lines, in silence of thy state,
Doe sleep securely, free from love or hate.
And, again, 'He that thinks worse of my rimes than myselfe, I
scorn him, for hee cannot: he that thinks better is a foole. ' As
man of letters, Marston embarked at once upon a troubled sea
of noises and hoarse disputes. ' In 1598, he published two volumes,
The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, And Certain Satires,
and, later, The Scourge of Villanie, dedicated to his most esteemed
and best beloved Selfe,' crossing blades with Hall, who, with some
arrogance, had claimed the title of father of English satire:
I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist.
This unedifying duel has been dealt with in a previous chapter


## p. 39 (#57) ##############################################

Marston's Controversies
39
of the present work, and need not detain us here! Marston had now
achieved something of a reputation. He is mentioned by Meres, in
his Palladis Tamia (1598), among the chief English satirists, and,
in The Returne from Pernassus (acted in 1601), he is addressed by
the title 'Kinsayder,' under which he had written a note in The
Scourge of Villanie. Here, his portrait is boldly drawn as
'a ruffian in his style,' who ‘backs a proper steed' and 'cuts, thrusts
and foins at whomsoever he meets. ' No sooner had he joined the
ranks of the dramatists than he set about him in the same
deliberately aggressive fashion, ‘his shield hung ever in the lists. '
In the famous 'war of the theatres,' a war in which most of the
dramatists of the day were involved, Marston's name is unceasingly
prominent. He aimed an occasional shaft at Shakespeare, as in
the parody (in The Scourge of Villanie)
A man, a man, a Kingdom for a man,
or the line in The Malcontent
Illo, ho, ho, ho! arte there, old Truepenny?
>
but his chief violence was directed against Jonson. 'He had many
quarrels with Marston,' said Jonson, of himself, to Drummond, 'beat
him and took his pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him;
the beginning of them were that Marston represented him on
the stage. ' Jonson represents himself as patiently sustaining the
'petulant styles' of his enemies 'on every stage' for three years,
and, at last, unwillingly forced into rejoinder. It is sometimes
argued—on slender evidence, however that Marston's first attack
on Jonson was made not in a play but in The Scourge of Villanie,
under the name “judicial Torquatus. But Jonson, at least as
'
early as 1598, had expressed some of his literary judgments upon
the stage. Daniel, in his opinion, “a good honest man, but no poet,'
had been publicly ridiculed in Every Man in His Humour, and
the noble parts which Jonson assigned to himself—Asper in Every
Man out of His Humour, Crites in Cynthia's Revels, Horace in
Poetaster—no less than his unflattering portraits of enemies, natur-
ally provoked and suggested reprisals. We need not wonder that
he was facetiously saluted by Dekker in his three or four suites
of names,' 'Asper, Criticus, Quintus, Horatius, Flaccus. ' Theatre-
goers familiar with the characteristics, literary and personal, of
the popular dramatists were, probably, amused by these personal
rivalries, assaults and counter assaults, and pleasure to the
* Cf. ante, vol. 1v, chap. XVI, pp. 331, 332; and bibl. p. 517.


## p. 40 (#58) ##############################################

40
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
audience brought profit to the authors. So, at least, we gather
from Jonson's remarks in Poetaster:
What they have done 'gainst me,
I am not moved with: if it gave them meat,
Or got them clothes, 'tis well: that was their end.
Only amongst them, I am sorry for
Some better natures, by the rest so drawn
To run in that vile line.
In 1599, a play was performed at court, probably by the boys
of Paul's, which carried on the practice of staging contemporary
authors, and, in the personage of Chrisoganus, ‘Master Pedant'and
'translating scholler,' who is advised, 'goe, get you clothes,' the
audience of the day probably recognised the most learned of the
dramatic circle, Jonson, who 'excelled in a translation, and was
famous no less for his scholarship than for his shabby garments.
This play, Histrio-Mastix, based on an earlier drama, possibly
by Chapman, was directed against adult players, perhaps with
special reference to the Chamberlain's company, and authors
who wrote for it, of whom Jonson was one, and the evidence is
strongly in favour of Marston's responsibility for the greater share
in its production. Jonson, when, for the first time, he attacks
Marston in Every Man out of His Humour, selects for derision
words used in this play as well as in Marston's Scourge of Villanie,
and, in the opinion of some critics, presented him as Carlo
Buffone, 'a most fiend like disposition,' 'a public scurrilous and
profane jester . . . who will swill up more sack at a sitting than
would make all the guard a posset. ' We are told that he will
sooner lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy
things to excite laughter. ' The identification, however, is far from
certain, and Carlo may have been intended for a certain Charles
Chester, a familiar city character. Attempts have been made to
identify various other characters in the play with well known con-
temporaries of Jonson-Fastidious Brisk with Daniel, Fungose
with Lodge and Sordido with Henslowe—but with more ingenuity
than success. So far, Dekker had not been in the battle.
Before
this date, he and Jonson had been collaborators and may have
been friends. Some critics have thought Emulo a portrait of
Jonson; but nothing could be more inapplicable to that sturdy
shabby scholar than a description such as this-
My brisk spangled baby will come into a stationer's shop, call for a stool
and a cushion, and then asking for some Greek poet, to him he falls, and
then he grumbles God knows what, but I'll be sworn he knows not so much
as one character of the tongue.


## p. 41 (#59) ##############################################

41
►
Marston's Quarrel with Jonson
In Jacke Drums Entertainment, an anonymous play performed in
1600 by the children of Paul's, in which Brabant Senior, ‘the cen-
surer,' is probably a portrait of Jonson, and Sir Edward Fortune
may be intended for Edward Alleyn, there is again evidence of
Marston's hand, his rhodomontade and fustian vocabulary, and
these are ridiculed in Poetaster. “The new poet Mellidus' was
.
probably a representation of the author himself. Jonson had
already returned to the charge in Cynthia's Revels, where Dekker
has been thought to be staged for the first time as Anaides, and
where, most probably, Marston is pilloried as Hedon:
The one a light voluptuous reveller,
The other a strange arrogating puff,
Both impudent and arrogant enough.
Both are represented as engaged in a plot against Crites, who, they
agree to give out, is a plagiary, 'all he does is dictated from other
men,' and 'the time and place where he stole it' is known. Anaides
is described as one 'who will censure or discourse of anything, but
as absurdly as you would wish. His fashion is not to take know-
ledge of him that is beneath him in clothes. He never drinks
below the salt. ' He has a voice like the opening of some justice's
gate or a postboy's horn, “a great proficient in all the illiberal
sciences. ' 'He will blaspheme in his shirt. The oaths which he
vomits at one supper would maintain a town of garrison in good
swearing a twelve month. ' We hear from him that, in argument
with Crites, “because I could not construe an author I quoted at
first sight, he went away and laughed at me. ' Anaides revenges
himself by describing Crites as smelling of 'lamp-oil with studying
by candle-light. ' The Amorphus of this play may be Anthony
Munday, who 'walks most commonly with a clove or pick-tooth in
his mouth,' and is ‘more affected than a dozen waiting women. ' He
will 'usurp all the talk, ten constables are not so tedious,' and he
has been 'fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five
ladies, all nobly, if not princely descended. ' The epilogue to
Cynthia's Revels connects this play with Marston's Antonio and
Mellida. The actor who pronounced it had injunction from the
author
I'll only speak what I have heard him say:
By God, tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.
The epilogue to Antonio and Mellida enters armed and remarks:
'I stand not as a peremptory challenger of desert, either for him
that composed the Comedy, or for us that acted it; but as a
most submissive suppliant for both. To the armed epilogue of


## p. 42 (#60) ##############################################

42
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
Marston's play succeeded the armed prologue of Poetaster (1601),
Jonson's most elaborate attack upon his detractors, where
Marston is Crispinus, Dekker Demetrius. Hedon, in Cynthia's
Revels is supposed, by some critics, to be Dekker; but it seems more
probable that as 'a dresser of plays about the town here,' 'one of
the most overflowing rank wits in Rome,' he appears for the first
time upon the stage as Demetrius. Poetaster doubtless presents
other portraits of contemporaries; Virgil, a complimentary picture,
may have been intended either for Shakespeare or Chapman. The
pill which Caesar permits Horace to administer to Crispinus
forces him to disgorge a number of Marston's fustian words, which
offended Jonson's taste; and both he and Demetrius are sworn
never again 'to malign, traduce or detract the person or writings
of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or any other eminent man. ' The
reply to Poetaster was entrusted by the aggrieved fellowship to
Dekker, and his Satiro-mastix was produced in 1601.
It seems
certain that Jonson knew of the intention to reply to Poetaster,
and that Dekker was to share in it, for the part of Demetrius
looks like an afterthought. He is introduced as a stranger in the
third act ‘hired to abuse Horace, and brings him in a play. The
controversy is carried on by the author of Satiro-mastix in a light,
pleasant and facetious vein. Dekker cleverly introduces some of
Jonson's own characters, and even improves that of the swaggerer
Tucca, and, while this play falls far short of Poetaster in
construction, its mockery is more genial, its humour more subtle
and sparkling and the management of the whole is marked by a
delightful air of irresponsibility. Jonson is charged with having
‘arraigned two poets against all law and conscience. ' There are
a number of jocose references to his personal appearance, his
scholar's pride, his slow methods of composition, his early trade as
a bricklayer, his military service in the Netherlands, the duel in
which he killed his adversary. The ‘humourous poet'is ‘untrussed,
and condemned to wear a crown of nettles. He is no longer to
swear he will hang himself if he thinks any man could write as
well as he, nor to enter the gallery when his comedies are per-
formed, and there make vile and bad faces at every line to make
men have an eye to him and make the players afraid.
Besides, you must forsweare to venter on the stage, when your play is ended,
and to exchange curtezies, and complements with Gallants in the Lordes
roomes, to make all the house rise up in Armes, and to cry that's Horace,
that's he, that's he, that's he, that pennes and purges Humours and
diseases.


## p. 43 (#61) ##############################################

Ena of Marston's Quarrel with Jonson 43
And, again, 'when your plays are misse-likt at Court, you shall
not crye Mew like a Pusse-cat, and say you are glad you write out
of the Courtier's Element. ' 'We come,' says Crispinus, 'like your
Phisitions, to purge
Your sicke and daungerous minde of her disease. '
In yet another play was Jonson made the target of satirical
jest, Marston's What You Will, probably written (1601) before
Poetaster and revised later. But, while some investigators identify
Jonson with Lampatho and Marston with Quadratus, others re-
verse the portraits. The evidence is somewhat conflicting; yet,
if Marston intended anything but general satire, it would harmo-
nise with all we know of him that he should here introduce his
old nom de plume of Kinsayder, and thus present himself as
Lampatho. He engages in a hectoring match with Quadratus,
who abuses him as 'a ragged satirist, ‘an envy-starved cur,'
'a libertine'; but Marston, who' presented his poetry to Detraction,'
was indifferent to abuse, and prepared to invent and discharge it
against himself with the same zest that he hurled it at others.
Then do but rail at me-
No greater honour craves my poesy.
With this play the famous poetomachia comes to an end. In the
same year, we find Marston collaborating with Jonson in Love's
Martyr, and, with Chapman and Jonson, three years later, in
Eastward Hoe. He also dedicated to Jonson his Malcontent-
Benjamino Jonsonio poetae elegantissimo, gravissimo, amico suo,
candido et cordato—and, in an equally generous strain, praised
his Sejanus in 1605—
For never English shall, or hath before
Spoke fuller graced.
The chief interest today of this ancient literary logomachy,
waged on the boards of the Elizabethan theatre, lies in the
personalities which assist us to envisage men with whose works
we are familiar, and the attempt to identify in the plays the
authors represented finds its justification in our natural curiosity
to know these celebrities in their habits as they lived. Here, as
elsewhere, we are baffled by the elusive personality of Shakespeare,
for of the man in whom our interest is deepest no certain identi-
fication is possible, and the most plausible critical conjectures
lack convincing quality. Wellbred in Every Man in His Humour
may be Shakespeare, so may Posthast in Histrio-Mastix, Amorphus


## p. 44 (#62) ##############################################

44
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
in Cynthia's Revels, Planet in Jacke Drums Entertainment, Ovid
or Virgil in Poetaster, William Rufus, 'learning's True Maecenas,
poesy's king,' in Satiro-mastix. But for the passage in the anony-
mous Returne from Pernassus (1601) we might be spared all
speculation with respect to the part played by him in the theatrical
wars and conclude that he was never at any time found in either
camp. Yet the speech of Kemp to Burbage in that play draws
conjectures like a magnet and is encrusted with speculation.
Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer
Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and
Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and
Ben Jonson too. And that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up
Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespere hath given him a
purge that made him beray his credit.
The 'purge' has been held to be the play of Troilus and Cressida,
which would make the characters Thersites and Ajax Marston
and Jonson. But, until we understand Troilus and Cressida
better, it is wise, perhaps, to regard the 'purge'as nothing more
than Shakespeare's triumph as a popular dramatist over the ablest
and most celebrated of his contemporaries. Yet, if Shakespeare
eludes us, we learn some interesting particulars about others of
the dramatic group. Marston's hair (he is Rufus) and thin legs
are a subject of continual mirth; if he desire to be a poet, he
is advised to change his hair’; ‘he is proud of his gentle birth,'
'a gentleman parcel-poet,' 'your legs do sufficiently show you are
a gentleman born, sir; for a man borne upon little legs is always
a gentleman born. ' Of Jonson we hear that, as Drummond also
tells us, he was a great lover and praiser of himself—Thou lovest
none,' says Tucca, ‘neither wisemen nor fools but thyself';
Demetrius speaks of his 'arrogancy and his impudence in com-
mending his own things'; we hear of his shabby clothes—that
Judas yonder that walks in rug'; his 'rocky face,' 'a very bad
face for a soldier,' a face 'puncht full of oylet-holes like the cover
of a warming pan,'
the most ungodly face . . . it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple,
when 'tis bruised. It's better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my
heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i' th' nose, and talks and
rants . . . like the poor fellow under Ludgate . . . its cake and pudding to me
to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets,
his slowness in composition, “Will he bee fifteene weekes about
this Cockatrice's egge too? ' Other identifications are very pre-
carious. Of Daniel, if Fastidious Brisk and Hedon be Daniel,


## p. 45 (#63) ##############################################

a
Marston as a Tragic Poet. Antonio & Mellida 45
as some suppose, we are told that he will 'creep and wriggle into
acquaintance with all the brave gallants about the town,' 'a light
voluptuous reveller,' a 'rhyme-given’ rascal who utters ‘sonnets
by the gross,' and will 'overflow you half a score or a dozen at
a sitting,''a neat, spruce, affecting courtier, one that wears clothes
well, and in fashion ; practiseth by his glass, how to salute,' who
'believes rich apparel hath strange virtues' and 'had three suits in
one year made three great ladies in love' with him,
has a rich wrought waistcoat to entertain his visitants in, with a cap almost
suitable. His curtain and bedding are thought to be his own; his bathing
tub is not suspected. He loves to have a fencer, a pedant and a musician
seen in his lodging &-mornings.
While some of the satire in these descriptions may have been
ill natured, it is hard to believe that much of it was more
than stage exaggeration of the good humoured banter which
passed between rivals at their actual meetings in tavern or
ordinary.
Marston's dramatic activity was confined to about eight years
in a lifetime of fifty-eight.
We may take it that the reference in Henslowe's diary to
a 'new poet' Maxton or Mastone, in 1599, referred to the author
of Antonio and Mellida, his first play, acted in 1600. The first
part deals with 'the comic crosses of true love,' the second,
Antonios Revenge, with a world of vice and passion. Here, as
elsewhere, Marston displays at moments a flash of tragic grandeur,
but as often falls away into bombast and mere verbal gesticulation.
It is impossible to deny to him in tragedy something of Marlowe's
passion and Webster's solemn splendour, yet, whether through haste,
or carelessness, or deficiency in taste, he is unable to maintain the
heights to which he occasionally attains. Scenes and passages,
such as Lamb selected, do not unfairly represent his power, but,
when read as a whole, the dramas from which they are taken
prove disappointing. Furious or monstrous characters, like duke
Piero in the play under notice,or Isabella in The Insatiate Countesse,
artificial rhetoric and the absence of reasonable construction, may not
have alienated the sympathies of spectators who delighted in The
Spanish Tragedie, but they distress and repel the modern reader.
The source of Antonio and Mellida-probably an Italian story-
is not known, but the drama belongs to the well known 'blood
and thunder' species, and irresistibly reminds us of Kyd's famous
play and, necessarily, also of Hamlet. In the second part,
we have the familiar ghost who clamours for revenge, the
6


## p. 46 (#64) ##############################################

46
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
device of the dumb-show and the horrors of mutilation as
well as death, repeated from The Spanish Tragedie. It is clear
that Marston was a student of Seneca and knew Shakespeare's
work, for there are quotations from Thyestes and reminiscences
of Richard II and Richard III. Marston's first play, which was
produced when he was twenty-four, bears all the signs of youth
and must be described as a patchwork of such violent scenes
as delighted the groundlings, entirely destitute of unity or skill
in characterisation.
A marked advance is apparent in The Malcontent. Of this
comedy, there exist two editions of 1604, one of which ascribes
the authorship of the play to Webster and the augmentations
to Marston. That it is chiefly Marston's work is clear, how-
ever, from the preface, in which he expresses regret that scenes
invented merely to be spoken should be printed for readers,
but concludes that the least hurt he can receive is to do himself
the wrong. Here, again, we have an Italian story, of which the
source is unknown; but we are once more reminded of Hamlet
in the person of the hero, and of Richard III in the villain
Mendozo. The malcontent, a banished duke, returns in disguise
to his former court. Like Hamlet's, ' his own soule is at variance
within herselfe,' and, under the guise of a mad humour, he
contrives to speak the bitterest home traths. The situation has
great possibilities, of which, perhaps, the fullest advantage is
hardly taken; but Marston had already learnt important lessons
in stagecraft and the delineation of character. In the cynical
hero, we find depicted a type of mind somewhat akin to that
of the author, and the humour of the piece is of the satirical
variety which he himself appears most to have affected.
The Dutch Courtezan, published in 1605, shows a further advance
in the handling of plot and character. There are scenes both serious
and comic which revive memories of Beatrice and her cousin, and
of Dogberry and the watch, in Much Ado about Nothing; both the
men and women are fairly drawn and contrasted; the secondary
plot—in part borrowed from the last novel in The Palace of
Pleasure—with the knavish tricks of Cockledemoy, makes ex-
cellent fooling. The prologue apologises for the 'slight hastie
labours in this easie play' and declares that it was meant not for
instruction but delight. It needs no apology, however, and,
though charged by Antony Nixon (The Black Year, 1606) with
'corrupting English conditions,' only the sourest of moralists
could feel resentment against the author of the comedy, one of


## p. 47 (#65) ##############################################

Eastward Hoe
47
the cleverest and most amusing of its time. It was revived late
in the seventeenth century, with the alterations of Betterton, the
actor, under the title The Revenge, or The Match in Newgate.
The Dutch Courtezan, though a capital play, is surpassed by
Eastward Hoe, but, since the drama was written in conjunction
with Chapman and Jonson, the entire credit for this brilliant
and delightful performance cannot be claimed for Marston. While
it might not be difficult to assign with some confidence certain
scenes to each of these writers, the attempt exactly to apportion
their respective contributions would lead to a succession of un-
verifiable conjectures. All must share in the praise due to it,
as all were partakers in the misfortune to which it led. It was
written shortly after the accession of James I to the throne of
England, and contained sarcastic references to the multitude of
needy Scottish adventurers who came south with their king, and
many of whom successfully claimed place and fortune. Stage jesting
at the expense of Scottish men and manners had been complained
of to lord Burghley by the English agent at the Edinburgh court
in 1598, and it had now become possible to deal with it. Attention
was called by Sir James Graham, who may himself have been
glanced at in the play, to a passage in the third act, in which
captain Seagull remarks
But as for them (the Scots] there are no greater friends to Englishmen
and England, when they are out on't, in the world, than they are. And for
my part, I would a hundred thousand of 'hem were there, for we are all one
countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of
them there than we do here.
The consequences of the mild freedom of comment which the
dramatists here allowed themselves was related by Ben Jonson
to Drummond
He was dilated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something
against the Scots, in a play Eastward Hoe, and voluntarily imprisoned him-
self with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them. The
report was, that they should then (have) had their ears cut and noses. After
their delivery, he banqueted all his friends; there was Camden, Selden and
others; at the midst of the feast his old mother dranke to him, and shew him
a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed
in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and
that she was no churle, she told, she minded first to have drunk of it herself.
Some copies of the play, of which several editions appeared in
1605, omit the matter complained of, and other slight variations
are to be found in the extant copies. A version by Tate was
acted in 1685 under the title Cuckold's Haven, or An Alderman


## p. 48 (#66) ##############################################

48
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
no Conjurer. As a picture of city life, Eastward Hoe has no
superior in our dramatic history. The old goldsmith Touchstone,
with his wife and daughters, and the idle and the industrious
apprentice, form an admirable and life-like group, which instantly
engages interest and attention. The reckless and extravagant
Sir Petronel Flush, burning to repair his fortunes and escape his
creditors by a treasure seeking voyage to Virginia, and ravished by
Seagull's account of its wealth, declares
I tell thee, golde is more plentiful there than copper is with us . . . all the
chaines with which they chaine up their streets are massie gold; all the
prisoners they take are feterd in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go
forth on holydayes and gather 'hem by the sea-shore.
This adventurer, with his companions, gives the authors an
admirable opportunity for depicting the shifty society of the city
which lives by its wits, and a vivid contrast is thus furnished to the
household of the honest tradesman. The plot is complicated by
intrigue, and well managed, the action has a lively movement and
the conclusion contrives to reconcile us to ourselves and to human
nature. Few Elizabethan comedies can be praised so unreservedly
as this.
6
'Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read ; remember the
life of these things consists in action,' remarks the author in
the preface to his play entitled Parasitaster, Or The Fawne
(printed in two editions 1606), and certainly, though no doubt
fairly successful on the stage, this drama has no great literary
merit. The chief character, duke Hercules, appears in disguise at
the court of Urbino, whither he has sent his son as an ambassador
of love, and the situation reminds us of The Malcontent. The
heroine, Dulcimel, is of the type already portrayed in Crispinella
(The Dutch Courtezan) and Rossaline in Antonio and Mellida,
the gay, sparkling and vivacious damsel, who holds her own in the
company of men. In Beatrice, the sister of Crispinella, and in
Mildred (Eastward Hoe) we have another of Marston's favourite
types of feminine character, the good, simple girl, modest and
affectionate. Marston is not rich in female types, and if we add,
to those mentioned, the strong-willed passionate woman who
appears in some of his tragedies, we exhaust his range. The story
is taken from the third novel of the third day of The Decameron;
but the idea is an old one and had already been employed by
Terence in his Adelphi.
In The Fawne, Marston had promised shortly 'to present a
tragedy which should boldly abide the most curious perusal. ' But


## p. 49 (#67) ##############################################

Sophonisba. The Insatiate Countesse 49
the tragedy, when it came, certainly belied the author's promise.
The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonisba is the
crudest of Marston's performances. The story, told by Livy and
other historians, has been frequently dramatised—in English by
Lee (1706) and Thomson (1730); in French by Corneille (1663),
and in German by various hands. Sophonisba herself is rendered
not without force and skill, but, for the rest, the play is a singularly
feeble attempt to do justice to a powerful tragic theme. The
witch Erichto and the scenes in which she appears are almost
ludicrous in their failure to produce the intended impression of
mystery and horror. It is difficult to understand how the author
could have believed the piece to possess any literary quality; it is
easy to see that he has overleaped the limits of his power.
Marston's last play, The Insatiate Countesse (printed 1613),
does not appear in the 1633 edition of his works, and in an extant
copy of 1631 its authorship is assigned to William Barkstead. It
is generally, and, no doubt, correctly, assumed that this was the
actor William Barkstead, author of two poems-Mirrha, the
Mother of Adonis (1617) and Hiren, or the Faire Greeke (1611).
Two of the best lines in the play are found in the first named
poem-
Night, like a masque, is entered heaven's great hall
With thousand torches ushering the way.
Of tragedies assigned to Marston, this contains the most interesting
work, but much of it, clearly, is by another hand. The text is
corrupt, and it seems probable that Marston devised the plot
(taken from the fourth and fifteenth novels of Bandello and
reproduced in The Palace of Pleasure), that he wrote the first
draft and that the play was then completed by Barkstead, and
finally printed without revision from a stage copy. Marston, evi-
dently, was attracted by Shakespeare, and Shakespeare reverberates
through this play. It echoes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth,
Richard II and Henry IV; but some of these echoes may be due
to the player Barkstead's unconscious memories. The subject of
the drama—the unbridled passions of Isabella, countess of Swevia,
and her dealings with her many lovers—is too remote from nature
and modern life to command our sympathy; but there are scenes
which it is impossible to read without a thrill of admiration.
Webster alone has excelled them in their own kind, while passing
through the same dark region of things violent and forbidding,
lust, cruelty, madness and death. A Latin pageant for the visit of
king Christian of Denmark to England in 1606 and an entertainment
4
E. L. VI.
CH. II.


## p. 50 (#68) ##############################################

50
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
for a visit of the countess of Derby to her son-in-law, lord
Huntingdon, complete the list of Marston's extant works, unless,
with Collier, we attribute to him the amusing Mountebank's
Masque, performed in 1616.
The texture of Marston's genius was singularly unequal, and he
constantly promises more than he performs. In comedy only can
it be truly said that he achieved success, yet in his more ambitious
and less successful work there resides an arresting quality. When
we are about to condemn unreservedly, he flashes into unexpected
splendour; when we lay down the book, his characters refuse to be
altogether dismissed into the limbo of forgotten things. Marston,
as he himself tells us, was powerfully ‘enticed with the delights of
poetry,' and confesses that, above better desert,' he was 'fortunate
in these stage pleasings. ' As a young man, he essayed what all
young men of talent were essaying, the highest reaches of a most
difficult art. Nor was his measure of success inconsiderable, for
we are told by Wood that he was ‘in great renown for his wit and
ingenuity in 1606. Yet it was at this time, while still a young
man and on the very threshold of fame, that he resolutely turned
away to take up the unexciting routine of parish business. Too
little notice has been taken of this remarkable renunciation, and
Marston's character too much obscured by the unrelieved emphasis
laid upon the heady violences of his satirical youth and his extrava-
gances of diction and humour in the theatrical wars. He outgrew
these affectations and absurdities; but, at the same time, he out-
grew the passion for distinction. There seems no good reason to
doubt the sincerity of his own statements,- of men of my own
addiction I love most, pitie some, hate none'; 'I have ever more
endeavoured to know myself than be known of others'-and,
without hesitation, we may ascribe his neglect of his ‘unfenced
reputation, and his retirement from the pursuit of fame, to bis
having deliberately 'esteemed felicity a more solid contentment,'
and readily responded to the summons, when life's current ran
less turbulently, of ‘his bosom friend, good Epictetus,' to the quiet
meadows and sober pleasures of philosophy.
Thomas Dekker, in whose case, as in that of many of his con-
temporaries, we possess no certain record of the facts of his life,
was born and bred in London—thou beautifullest daughter of the
two united Monarchies ! from thy womb received I my being ;
from thy breasts my nourishment. ' He spoke of himself as 'old'
in 1628, of his three score years,' a vague phrase, in 1637; and we


## p. 51 (#69) ##############################################

Biographical Data concerning Dekker 51
may take it he was born, or not long in the world, in the year
1570. The first mention of Dekker, as author of a book called
Phaeton, appears in Henglowe's diary in 1597, and his name
appears again in 1599, when he is associated with Chettle, an
experienced playwright, in the production of a play entitled
Troilus and Cressida. In the same year, he received various
payments for other pieces of work. And, though the popular
narrative poem Canaan's Calamitie(1598), signed T. D. , is, probably,
Deloney's and not Dekker's, it is evident that he was early involved
in the multifarious literary activities to which his life appears to
have been devoted without cessation. Of his parentage and edu-
cation, we know nothing, but it is improbable that he was ever a
student at either of the universities. Since the theatre of the time
offered the only remunerative career to poetical talents, to the
theatre Dekker betook himself; but his energies, stimulated by ne-
cessity, overflowed into other channels. Plays, pageants, pamphlets
,
followed each other with amazing rapidity. Yet, despite all his
labours, early in life he made acquaintance with the misfortunes
which dog the steps of poverty. In 1598, Henslowe provided forty
shillings to secure his release from the 'Counter in the Poultrey,'
and we are told by Oldys that he was in prison from 1613 to 1616,
and how much longer he could not tell. ' It has been conjectured,
not without probability, that his phrase 'the Bed in which seven
years I lay Dreaming' (Dekker his Dreame, 1620) has reference to
this unhappy period. Some letters to Alleyn which have been
preserved prove that he was several times befriended by that
open-handed actor. For the rest, we know that Dekker was married
before 1594, and that his last book was printed in 1637. Here the
story ends; but, if the details of his private life, like those of Shake-
speare, are hidden in the cloud, his work, like Shakespeare's,
offers an ample field for the study of the author's personality.
Many of his writings of which the titles survive have been lost,
and others, doubtless, have perished with them; yet so much
remains that, even in the absence of personal knowledge of the
man, it is possible to estimate his genius and character with
unusual precision. To the mental energy and literary facility of
Defoe, he added the unpractical temperament, the genial kindliness,
the happy heart of Goldsmith. Of the Elizabethan playwrights,
excluding Shakespeare, he is not the greatest, but he is the most
lovable, not the most learned but the most sympathetic; he was not
the most skilful craftsman among them, but he possessed the most
natural vein of inspiration. Dekker was a rogue,' said Jonson;
4-2


## p. 52 (#70) ##############################################

52
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
but we are not prepared to believe it of so sweet and so good-
humoured a disposition as his. There is no such mirror of con-
temporary Elizabethan and Jacobean life and ways as is offered us
in the works of Dekker? In his natural sympathies and in his
choice of subjects, he clings more closely to his own country than
any dramatist of his age. No writer since Chaucer, with whom
Dekker may fruitfully be compared, has painted so many essentially
English pictures of men and manners in so natural and realistic a
style. In his first extant play, the comedy entitled The Sho-
makers Holiday (printed 1600), his admirable talent and charac-
teristic interests are displayed. The rise in fortune of the jovial
and honest shoemaker, Simon Eyre, gives the poet opportunity
to depict the life of the London he knew-rich in shifting
scenes of love, intrigue, commerce and domestic doings. The
canvas is crowded with portraits of tradesmen, apprentices, alder-
men, courtiers, their wives, daughters and sweethearts, a motley
procession surging through the streets, each elbowing the other
in shop and tavern. No dramatist of the day supplies so vivid
and humorous a spectacle of the city world which lay around
him—the world for which his plays were written-as Dekker. In
the same year was printed The Pleasant Comedie of old Fortuna-
tus, a drama in which the poet in Dekker emerges rather than the
observing humorist. As in the well known fifteenth century
romance, Fortunatus meets lady Fortune, and, of her gifts—'wisdom,
strength, health, beauty, long life and riches'-a choice among which
is offered him, he selects riches, and receives a purse which is never
empty however much may be withdrawn from it. His travels
after his unwise choice, and his unhappy fåte, with that of his sons,
make up the story of the play. The theme is simple, the con-
struction somewhat rambling; but much of the poetry is exquisite.