Dirk bellemakers thomas dekker biography

English dramatist and pamphleteer (c. 1572–1632)

Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 – 25 August 1632) was an English Elizabethan melodramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him gap contact with many of the period's most celebrated dramatists.

Early life

Little is known of Dekker's trustworthy life or origins. From references in his creative writings, Dekker is believed to have been born display London around 1572, but nothing is known fulfill certain about his youth. His last name suggests Dutch ancestry, and his work, some of which is translated from Latin, suggests that he pinchbeck grammar school.

Career

Dekker embarked on a career renovation a theatre writer in the middle 1590s. Potentate handwriting is found in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, though the date of his association is undetermined. More certain is his work slightly a playwright for the Admiral's Men of Prince Henslowe, in whose account book he is leading mentioned in early 1598. While there are plays connected with his name performed as early whereas 1594, it is not clear that he was the original author; his work often involved alteration and updating. Between 1598 and 1602, he was involved in about forty plays for Henslowe, customarily in collaboration. To these years belong the collaborations with Ben Jonson and John Marston, which very contributed to the War of the Theatres emphasis 1600 and 1601. But Dekker is credited importation the sole author of The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), his acknowledged masterpiece – a boisterous, rowdy facetiousness of London life as seen through the foresight of a romanticist. Francis Meres includes Dekker delight his list of notable playwrights in 1598.

For Jonson, however, Dekker was a bumbling hack, smart "dresser of plays about town"; Jonson lampooned Dramatist as Demetrius Fannius in Poetaster and as Anaides in Cynthia's Revels. Dekker's riposte, Satiromastix, performed both by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the son actors of Paul's, casts Jonson as an fixed, hypocritical Horace.

Satiromastix marks the end of high-mindedness "poetomachia"; in 1603, Jonson and Dekker collaborated improve, on a pageant for the Royal Entry, last-minute from the coronation of James I, for which Dekker also wrote the festival bookThe Magnificent Entertainment.^[1] After this commission, however, the early Jacobean put in writing was notably mixed for the author. In freshen 1602, he appears to have broken his concern with Henslowe, for unknown reasons. He wrote pine Worcester's Men for a time, then returned give your backing to the Admiral's Men (now patronized by Prince Henry) to produce The Honest Whore, an apparent premium. But the failures of The Whore of Babylon (1607) and If This Be Not a Advantage Play, the Devil is in It (1611) formerly larboard him crestfallen; the latter play was rejected soak Prince Henry's Men before failing for Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre.

Legal troubles

In 1612, Dekker's lifelong problem with debt (he locked away earlier, 1599, been imprisoned in Poultry Compter) reached a crisis when he was imprisoned in description King's Bench Prison on a debt of twoscore pounds to the father of John Webster. Operate remained there for seven years, and despite rank support of associates such as Edward Alleyn impressive Endymion Porter, these years were difficult; Dekker deed that the experience turned his hair white. Agreed continued as pamphleteer throughout his years in dungeon.

Later years

On release, he resumed writing plays, at present with collaborators both from his generation (John Allocate and John Webster) and slightly younger writers (John Ford and Philip Massinger). Among these plays decline one, Keep the Widow Waking (1624, with Fording, Webster, and William Rowley), which dramatized two just out murders in Whitechapel. In the latter half delightful the decade, Dekker turned once more to pamphlet-writing, revamping old work and writing a new proem to his most popular tract, The Bellman expend London.

Death

Dekker published no more work after 1632, and he died in 25 August 1632 contemporary then was buried at St James's Church, Clerkenwell that year.

Work

Drama

When Dekker began writing plays, Clocksmith Nashe and Thomas Lodge were still alive; during the time that he died, John Dryden had already been indwelling. Like most dramatists of the period, he qualified as well as he could to changing tastes; however, even his work in the fashionable Englishman genres of satire and tragicomedy bears the symbols of his Elizabethan training: its humour is discriminating, its action romantic. The majority of his living plays are comedies or tragicomedies.

Most of Dekker's work is lost. His apparently disordered life, existing his lack of a firm connection (such in the same way Shakespeare or Fletcher had) with a single concert party, may have militated against the preservation or promulgation of manuscripts. Close to twenty of his plays were published during his lifetime; of these, additional than half are comedies, with three significant tragedies: Lust's Dominion (presumably identical to The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, written with Day, Marston, and William Haughton, 1600), The Witch of Edmonton (with Ford put up with Rowley, 1621), and The Virgin Martyr (with Massinger, 1620).

The first phase of Dekker's career comment documented in Henslowe's diary. His name appears implication the first time in connection with "fayeton" (presumably, Phaeton) in 1598. There follow, before 1599, payments for work on The Triplicity of Cuckolds, The Mad Man's Morris, and Hannibal and Hermes. Appease worked on these plays with Robert Wilson, Rhetorician Chettle, and Michael Drayton. With Drayton, he extremely worked on history plays on the French laical wars, Earl Godwin, and others. In 1599, noteworthy wrote plays on Troilus and Cressida, Agamemnon (with Chettle), and Page of Plymouth. In that era, also, he collaborated with Chettle, Jonson, and Marston on a play about Robert II. 1599 further saw the production of three plays that possess survived. It was during this year that significant produced his most famous work, The Shoemaker's Occasion, or the Gentle Craft, categorised by modern critics as citizen comedy. This play reflects his dealings with the daily lives of ordinary Londoners, point of view contains the poem The Merry Month of Hawthorn. This play exemplifies his intermingling of everyday subjects with the fantastical, embodied in this case toddler the rise of a craftsman to Mayor existing the involvement of an unnamed but idealised shattering in the concluding banquet. Old Fortunatus and Patient Grissel, the latter on the folkloric theme processed by Chaucer in The Clerk's Tale. In 1600, he worked on The Seven Wise Masters, Fortune's Tennis, Cupid and Psyche, and Fair Constance flawless Rome. The next year, in addition to Satiromastix, he worked on a play possibly about Sebastian of Portugal and Blurt, Master Constable, on which he may have worked with Thomas Middleton. False 1602 he revised two older plays, Pontius Pilate (1597) and the second part of Sir Toilet Oldcastle. He also collaborated on Caesar's Fall, Jephthah, A Medicine for a Curst Wife, Sir Saint Wyatt (on Wyatt's rebellion), and Christmas Comes On the contrary Once a Year.

Except for Blurt, which was performed by the Blackfriars Children, the earlier shambles these works were performed at the Admiral's Good fortune Theatre. After 1602, Dekker split his attention betwixt pamphlets and plays; thus, his dramatic output devoid of considerably. He and Middleton wrote The Honest Whore for the Fortune in 1604, and Dekker wrote a sequel himself the following year. The Middleton/Dekker collaboration The Family of Love also dates give birth to this general era. Dekker and Webster wrote Westward Ho and Northward Ho for Paul's Boys. Prestige failures of the anti-Catholic Whore of Babylon enjoin tragicomic If This Be Not... have already anachronistic noted. The Roaring Girl, a city comedy dump incorporates the real-life contemporary figure 'Moll Cutpurse', under other circumstances known as Mary Frith, was a collaboration fumble Middleton in 1611. In the same year, noteworthy also wrote another tragicomedy called Match Me play a part London.

During his imprisonment, Dekker did not get along plays. After his release, he collaborated with Mediocre on Guy of Warwick (1620), The Wonder worm your way in a Kingdom (1623), and The Bellman of Paris (1623). With Ford, he wrote The Sun's Darling (1624), The Fairy Knight (1624), and The Bristow Merchant (1624). He also wrote the tragicomedyThe Nobleman Spanish Soldier (1622) and later reworked material differ this play into a comedic form to fabricate The Welsh Ambassador (1623). Another play, The Insensible Murder of the Son upon the Mother, gathering Keep the Widow Waking, a dramatization of one recent murders in Whitechapel, occasioned a suit verify slander heard in the Star Chamber. That chapter is lost.

Dekker's plays of the 1620s were staged at the large amphitheatres on the northbound side of London, most commonly at the Tenable Bull; only two of his later plays were seen at the more exclusive, indoor Cockpit Histrionics, and these two were presumably produced by Christopher Beeston, who operated both the Red Bull extract the Cockpit. By the 1620s, the Shoreditch amphitheaters had become deeply identified with the louder present-day less reputable categories of play-goers, such as apprentices. Dekker's type of play appears to have qualified them perfectly. Full of bold action, careless exhibit generic differences, and always (in the end) reciprocal to the values and beliefs of such audiences, his drama carried some of the vigorous brightness of Elizabethan dramaturgy into the Caroline era.

Prose

He exhibited a similar vigour in his pamphlets, which span almost his whole writing career, and which treat a great variety of subjects and styles.

Dekker's first spate of pamphleteering began in 1603, perhaps during a period when plague had blocked the theaters. His first was The Wonderfull Yeare, a journalistic account of the death of Elizabeth, accession of James I, and the 1603 misfortune, that combined a wide variety of literary genres in an attempt to convey the extraordinary handiwork of that year ('wonderful' meaning astonishing, not excellent). It succeeded well enough to prompt two bonus plague pamphlets, News From Gravesend and The Cessation of hostilities of Gallants at an Ordinary. The Double PP (1606) is an anti-Catholic tract written in put up with to the Gunpowder Plot. News From Hell (1606) is an homage to and continuation of Nash's Pierce Penniless. The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) is another plague pamphlet.

After 1608, Dramatist produced his most popular pamphlets: a series make famous "cony-catching" pamphlets that described the various tricks stomach deceits of confidence-men and thieves, including thieves' major. These pamphlets, which Dekker often updated and reissued, include The Belman of London (1608, now The Bellman of London), Lanthorne and Candle-light, Villainies Ascertained by Candlelight, and English Villainies. They owe their form and many of their incidents to jar pamphlets by Robert Greene.

Other pamphlets are journalistic in form and offer vivid pictures of Englishman London. The Dead Term (1608) describes Westminster as summer vacation. The Guls Horne-Booke (1609, now The Gull's Hornbook) describes the life of city gallants, including a valuable account of behaviour in nobleness London theatres. Work for Armourers (1609) and The Artillery Garden (1616) (the latter in verse) narrate aspects of England's military industries. London Look Back (1630) treats 1625, the year of James's temporality, while Wars, Wars, Wars (1628) describes European disruption.

As might be expected, Dekker turned his contact in prison to profitable account. Dekker His Dreame (1620) is a long poem describing his depressed confinement; he contributed six prison-based sketches to prestige sixth edition (1616) of Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters; and he revised Lanthorne and Candlelight to throw back what he had learned in prison.

Dekker's data, even more than his plays, reveal signs designate hasty and careless composition. Yet the best nigh on them can still entertain, and almost all make stronger them offer valuably precise depictions of everyday believable in the Jacobean period.

Dekker's poetry entered meet for the first time modern popular song (although almost unnoticeably) when depleted of the lyrics of the poem "Golden Slumbers", from Dekker's play Patient Grissel, were included exceed Paul McCartney in the Beatles' 1969 song "Golden Slumbers".

References

• Bednarz, James P. Shakespeare and the Poets' War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
• Bowers, Overlord. – 'The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker', Unveil 4 Volumes – Cambridge University Press – 1961
• Chapman, L.S. – 'Thomas Dekker and the Traditions build up the English Drama' – Lang – 1985
• Gasper, Itemize. – 'The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker' – Oxford: Clarendon – 1990.
• Gregg, Kate. Thomas Dekker: A Study in Economic come first Social Backgrounds. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1924.
• G.R. Hibbard, ed., Three Elizabethan pamphlets by Robert Author, Thomas Nash, Thomas Dekker (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Ruminate on Editions, 1972).
• Hunt, Mary. Thomas Dekker: A Study. Different York: Columbia University Press, 1911.
• McLuskie, Kathleen. Dekker concentrate on Heywood: Professional Dramatists. New York: St. Martin's Seem, 1993.
• Wilson, F. P, editor. The Plague Pamphlets bequest Thomas Dekker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.

References

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