The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Vol. 2 of 4: Now First Collected With Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author

The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker #2

by Thomas Dekker

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

394 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Thomas Dekker (c.1572 - 1632) was an Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Reviews

[James F]

Thomas Dekker, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. . .in Four Volumes v.2 [1873] 392 pages

A very old and falling-apart book from my garage, this was the next in my reading project of the seventeenth century. It contained the two parts of The Honest Whore, a good if somewhat uneven play and written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton, which I had read long ago but didn't remember much about. In addition, it had two other plays which I had never read; what is probably his worst play, The Whore of Babylon, and Westward Hoe!, a collaboration with John Ford.

The Honest Whore was performed in two parts; one biography makes a big deal of their being written thirty years apart, and of how much more mature the writing of the second part is, but other things I have read say that part two was written the next year but just not published for thirty years. Each play has two interwoven plots, one about Hippolito and Rose (he is trying to marry her despite her father's opposition in the first part, trying to cheat on her in the second part) and one about his friend's mistress, Bellafront, whom Hipppolito converts to be "honest". In both parts, Hippolito is a rather unsympathetic prig, but he is not a hypocrite in the first part.

The Whore of Babylon is a tedious allegory of Queen Elizabeth (Titania the Fairy Queen) and the Catholic Church (the Whore of Babylon); it might have been barely readable as a poem, but there is nothing dramatic in it. Westward Ho! is a play about jealous, miserly and unfaithful husbands and there flirting but ultimately chaste wives; it reminded me of a less humorous imitation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, but with much more scurrilous language and a bawd as a major protagonist. It managed to scandalize even the Renaissance audiences.

[Tom]

Written probably the year after the gunpowder plot and therefore a year or two before Macbeth, Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, a stonk of a play, was a ludicrously big success for the rival company to Shakespeare's, the Prince's Men.

It's an allegorical retelling of the story of the Spanish Armada, where the Empress of Babylon (the Pope, Philip II of Spain, Mary Queen of Scots) plans an invasion of Faerie, and all good honest fairies stay loyal to Titania (Queen Elizabeth) but she is so forgiving of men's weaknesses that secret Babylonists are enabled to get close to her and almost kill her. You know, forgiving in exactly the way Elizabeth wasn't.

I think the play knows this: Titania is so clearly an exaggeration of things that Elizabeth would like to have been remembered by that I think it's ironic, sarcastic, mocking, and the Empress is so Bond-Villainly bad (one would not have been surprised if she had had an evil laugh, mwah mwah mwah) that it's a surprise she doesn't live under a volcano.

The foreign Kings and Cardinals are paper thin baddies (and a bit inept) and are named the real names of Cardinals. And there's a Clown called Plain-dealing who points out to Titania-Elizabeth things that should be evident to everyone.

I'd like to see it, to see if it still works. I have a suspicion it might (sort of like A Game At Chess). It's totally possible I'm wrong.

This is a review of The Honest Whore Part I, a play which reveals exactly how different Jacobean notions of morality were from our own, and I suspect the comedy is built quite heavily on these notions. It's quite clearly not a tragedy (though it veers that way on a couple of occasions) but its three intermingling plots reveal behaviour that (to me, at least) are completely baffling.

1. The Duke of Milan so doesn't want his daughter Infelicae marrying Hippolito that he fakes her death, then tries to have him poisoned. When they turn the tables on him, the Duke tries to attach a Friary-madhouse, but is distracted by a few (comedy?) madmen.
Hippolito then reveals he is already married to Infelicae, and the Duke welcomes him with open arms. What?

2. Candido's wife is so frustrated by her husband's lack of aggression (is this a euphemism for impotence? it doesn't seem to be) that she sets up situations that will anger him. He refuses all of them, so he has him locked up in the above-mentioned madhouse. Why is it not better to have a husband who isn't aggressive? See just about every Jacobean tragedy.

3. The whore of the title, Bellafront, who entertains lots of "amusingly bantery" young men, who are all a bit disgusting, until she falls in love with the grief-stricken Hippolito, in a kind of impossible love situation, until she is finally forcibly married to the man who took her virginity, Mathaeo.

The play reads like a mash up of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure (with which it is roughly contemporaneous), but with more sexist banter about visiting brothels, which is presumably meant to be funny. There's also a lot of stuff about smoking tobacco and gambling, which again probably meant more in 1604.

The play was successful enough to warrant a sequel, so again I am possibly over-judging it. Perhaps it would be hysterical in performance.

[Gill]

My least favourite of the three "Ho!" plays, but good fun for all that. Dekker and Webster worked on this as a team, but alternating sections - sometimes the change shows. Another woman of ill-repute is redeemed when a man is tricked into marrying her. And there are comic Dutch and Welshmen, with bits of Italian and French.

Read as part of the REP online reading of the repertoire of the Jacobean Children's Companies.