Thomas Dekker (playwright)

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Title page of Dekker his Dreame (1620)

Thomas Dekker , also Thomas Decker or Thomas Dekkar , (* around 1572 in London ; † August 25, 1632 there ) was an English playwright .

life and work

Although Dekker was one of the accomplished, prolific writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, according to the current state of research hardly anything is certain about his childhood and adolescence. Dekker's name appears for the first time in the book of the theater manager and manager Philip Henslowe as an author, for whom he was probably forced, due to his debts, to write pieces for the Admiral's Men in rapid succession and sometimes in co-authorship with other authors .

He began to write pieces in the final years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign and made his debut in 1595 with his piece Old Fortunatus or the wishing-cap . In his plays he continued the tradition above all of George Peeles and the University Wits , ie the so-called learned authors who were academically trained at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford , but oriented more closely to the tastes of the bourgeois theater audience. Dekker's dramas are usually structured episodically and contain a mixture of sentimental , folk and farce-like elements.

With his first work Old Fortunatus or the wishing-cap came the artistic breakthrough, so that other comedies were soon staged by him; z. B. Phaeton (1597) or The honest whore (1598).

Title page of the 1610 edition of The Shomakers Holy-day

Dekker's masterpiece is his comedy The shoemaker's holi-day , which is set in the London artisan milieu and combines both realistic and sentimental scenes with patriotic pathos .

From the beginning, Dekker worked in co-authoring with other contemporary theater writers such as Ben Jonson , John Marston , Philip Massinger , Thomas Middleton , William Rowley and John Webster . As a result, the authorship of individual texts can no longer be unequivocally clarified today.

While Dekker mainly rewrote old plays at the beginning of his literary career and worked with other contemporary playwrights, between 1598 and 1602 he wrote eight to nine of his own works and around 25 other plays as a co-author. Dekker's oeuvre, some of which has been lost, is estimated to have more than 110 dramas and masquerades . In addition, he wrote numerous poems and stories as well as pamphlets .

Jonson mocked his colleague Dekker with the figure of Crispinus in his piece Poetaster (1601); But got it from this with his piece Satiromastix (1601/1602), which he wrote together with John Marston , repaid with the same coin in the dispute, which as " the poets' was " or " the war of the theaters " in the Annals of theater history.

Title page of the quarto edition of the first part of The Honest Whore 1604

Dekker later worked primarily with Anthony Munday , Thomas Middleton and John Webster and wrote plays in a wide variety of genres , from tragic comedy to moral comedy. He achieved a greater success with the public especially with his comedy The Honest Whore . While he probably wrote the first part together with Thomas Middleton, the following second part was created under his sole authorship.

As early as 1603 Dekker wrote together with Jonson on the occasion of the coronation celebrations in honor of King James I. The magnificent entertainment given to King James upon his passage through London .

Dekker's more well-known prose works and pamphlets include writings such as The wonderful year (1603), The bellman of London (1608) or The Gull's hornbook or fashions to please all sorts of gulls (1609).

In The Wonderful Year (1603) Dekker addressed the ravages of the plague in the same year; in The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) he dealt with contemporary vices and flaws. With The bellman of London (1608) he wrote a popular criminal and vagabond biography .

Dekker also achieved popularity in 1598 with his poem Canaan's Calamity , in which he took up the subject of the conquest of Jerusalem during the Crusades , which was popular at the time .

Dekker's works are characterized above all by their convincing character design and lively scenes, whereas the structure of his pieces sometimes seems less successful. In his pamphlets there are quite realistic descriptions of contemporary events and customs. the best known of his pamphlets is The Gull's hornbook , which describes a day in the life of a young dude .

After a long period of silence, which Dekker likely spent in the debt prison, he began writing for the stage again, particularly in collaboration with John Ford and William Rowley. As the author or co-author of more than 40 traditional plays that can be attributed to him with a high degree of certainty, Dekker was one of the most productive playwrights of his time. His prose works with their realistic, satirical or comic reports on contemporary events and circumstances made him one of the forerunners or pioneers of modern reporting .

The writer Thomas Dekker died, presumably indebted and impoverished, on August 25, 1632 at the age of about 60. He was buried in the St. James Cemetery in Clerkenwell .

It took another forty years to find an editor for a first complete edition by Thomas Dekker.

Work editions

  • The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart . 5 volumes. London 1884-86. (New edition by Russel & Russel Verlag, New York 1963).
  • The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Edited by Fredson Thayer Bowers. 4 volumes. Cambridge University Press 1953-61. (New edition CUP 2009).
    • 1. - The shoemaker's holiday. Old fortunatus. Patient Grissil. Satiromastix. Sir Thomas Wyatt. ISBN 0-521-21786-5 .
    • 2. - The honest whore. The magnificent entertainment. Westward Ho. Northward Ho. The whore of Babylone. ISBN 0-521-21894-2 .
    • 3. - The roaring girl. If this be not a good play. The devil is in it. Troia nova triumphans. Match me in London. The virgin martyr. The witch of Edmonton. The wonder of a kingdom. ISBN 0-521-22336-9 .
    • 4. - The sun's darling. Britannia's honor. London's tempe. Lust's dominion. The noble spanish soldier. The welsch embassador. ISBN 0-521-22506-X .

literature

  • Doris R. Adler: Thomas Decker. A reference guide. Hall, Boston, Mass. 1983, ISBN 0-8161-8384-8 .
  • Larry S. Champion: Thomas Dekker and the Traditions of English Drama. 2nd edition, Peter Lang Verlag, New York a. a. 1987, ISBN 0-8204-0214-1 .
  • Julia Gasper: The dragon and the dove. The plays of Thomas Decker. Clarendon, Oxford 1990, ISBN 0-19-811758-2 .

music

In 1969 the Beatles recorded the song Golden Slumbers for their LP Abbey Road . The music is by Paul McCartney , the text is taken from a ballad by Dekkers. McCartney had a book of Dekker's works. John Lennon: "That's Paul, apparently from a poem he found in a book, some eighteenth-century book where he just changed the words here and there."

Web links

Commons : Thomas Dekker  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Thomas Dekker  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  2. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  3. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  4. ↑ See Laurenz Volkmann: Dekker, Thomas. In: Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , pp. 155f. See also the information in the Encyclopædia Britannica , available online from Thomas Dekker . Retrieved June 14, 2016.
  5. ↑ See the information in the Encyclopædia Britannica , available online from Thomas Dekker . Retrieved on June 14, 2016. See also Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  6. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  7. ↑ See Laurenz Volkmann: Dekker, Thomas. In: Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 155.
  8. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  9. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 117.
  10. ↑ See the information in the Encyclopædia Britannica , available online from Thomas Dekker . Retrieved June 14, 2016.

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personal data
SURNAME Dekker, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Decker, Thomas; Dekkar, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English playwright
DATE OF BIRTH around 1572
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1632
Place of death London