Westward-Northward: Structural Development in Dekker’s Ho Plays

Abstract

Evaluating Thomas Dekker as dramatist is an extremely difficult task because his work is so diverse in kind and quality and because so much of it was written in collaboration. According to the Harbage-Schoenbaum count in Annals of English Drama, Dekker had hand in at least fifty-three plays and pageants, of which twenty-six are extant. Of thirty-two comedies, seventeen are extant, and probably only four were written without collaboration. Romantic comedy, satire, citizen comedy, tragicomedy, even comedy and tragedy (as the lost The Late Murder in Whitechapel is described) Dekker produced all types in professional career spanning more than thirty years. And his work is woefully uneven. If occasionally it ranks with the masterpieces of Elizabethan drama, 1 to use A. H. Bullen's words, it more frequently is branded as loose and disorderly,2 careless of form,3 and morally inconsistent^ Dekker himself is called an assembly-line dramatist5 with an idle, shambling, shifty way of writing^ or as Ben Jonson would have it a dresser of plays about the town here (Poetaster, III.iv.320). Because of this very quantity and because he did on occasion produce significant dramatic achievements, Dekker offers interesting evidence, especially structural, of the development of comedy in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. His extant romantic comedies to 1605, for example, illustrate remarkably varied stages of the genre. Old Fortunatas and Patient Grissil lack cohesion, the one confusing mixture of adventure and magic spread over two generations, the other markedly superior in its interweaving of plots but unsuccessful in provid-

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