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Updated: June 26, 2025
'Poetaster' , by Ben Jonson. 2. 'Satiromastix' , by Thomas Dekker. 3. 'Malcontent' , by John Marston. 4. 'Volpone' , by Ben Jonson. 5. 'Eastward Hoe' , by Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Marston. In 'The Poetaster' Ben Jonson makes his chief attack upon Dekker and Shakspere. In 'Satiromastix, Dekker defends himself against that attack.
His chief plays are The Lover's Melancholy , 'Tis Pity, The Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice , Perkin Warbeck , The Lady's Trial , and Fancies Chaste and Noble . He also collaborated with Dekker and Rowley in The Witch of Edmonton . F. has a high position as a dramatist, though rather for general intellectual power and austere beauty of thought than for strictly dramatic qualities.
Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas, without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychological analyses of great Italian tales of crime. The same, in a less degree, is true of Middleton and Dekker. Massinger makes a story of the Sforza family the subject of one of his best plays.
They are supported moreover by Dekker and Ford's play, The Witch of Edmonton, which appeared within a year. Goodcole refers to the "ballets" written about this case. The Boy of Bilson: or A True Discovery of the Late Notorious Impostures of Certaine Romish Priests in their pretended Exorcisme, or expulsion of the Divell out of a young Boy, named William Perry.... London, 1622.
One comes to regard as literature things that had no kind of literary value for their first audiences; to apply the same seriousness of judgment and the same tests to the pamphlets of Nash and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and Bacon. One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the important from the trivial which is one of the functions of a sound literary taste.
Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great "concealed poet" "of high position," who can "bring out original plays of his own," and yet "takes the works of others," say of "sporting Kyd," or of Dekker and Chettle, and such poor devils, TAKES them as a Yankee pirate-publisher takes my rhymes, and "rewrites and transforms them." How is he to manage these shabby dealings?
The two best, if the reader would obtain his own idea of Heywood's undoubted ability, are A Woman killed with Kindness, a pathetic story of domestic life, and The Fair Maid of the West, a melodrama with plenty of fighting of the popular kind. Dekker is in pleasing contrast with most of the dramatists of the time.
The tradition that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love an order which produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor" whether true or false, proves his repute as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman, and above all in Ben Jonson.
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