- Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London by Anna Bayman
Thomas Dekker (d. 1632) presents a number of different aspects and achievements to later readers and interpreters: as a playwright of sole-authored plays (most famously, The Shoemaker’s Holiday), of collaborative plays (including The Witch of Edmonton), but also as a prolific hack writer. Anna Bayman’s study is of Dekker as a prolific writer but as more than a hack, and as an author whose pamphlets contributed to public and intellectual discourse. Dekker authored a number of pamphlets, chief among them The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), about urban life in the English capital. It is on these pamphlets and their portrayal and commentary on London and its rogues and underworld that Bayman focuses. These too present great variety. Particular study is made of the so-called ‘cony-catching’ pamphlets, or those which recount the antics of London criminals. Equally multi-faceted was Dekker’s own experience of London. Bayman also revisits the usual evidence for suggesting Dekker was London-born, and also considers his contrasting periods of success (including working with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) and failures (such as a lengthy period of imprisonment in King’s Bench). Situating what Dekker said against what happened to him and when he was writing is one aspect of this study.
Bayman suggests that, unlike pamphlets by Robert Greene, which reported and described rogues’ actions in the authorial voice of a concerned magistrate or citizen, Dekker’s pamphlets about rogues were more ‘ambivalent’ (p. 110). She points to technical and grammatical specifics of Dekker’s writing, such as shifts from the third to the first person, or the introduction of dialogue, aspects that cumulatively blurred the authorial voice and therefore the stance that the pamphlets took on the rogues. Bayman goes further, locating in the authorial ambiguities the fact that the underworld [End Page 218] being described was largely fictitious, created to sell pamphlets, and that the pamphlets themselves cheated their readers.
Nonetheless, Bayman identifies in Dekker’s writings some historically plausible aspects of the descriptions of rogues and gangs. Her interpretation follows contours laid out by earlier scholars including Griffith and Shaw, with Shaw in particular having seen Dekker’s hand in a large proportion of the prison literature written in the Jacobean period. Pursuing these points, Bayman argues for Dekker developing the conventions of crime literature due to the emphasis he placed in his works on the implications of crime, namely the threat of prison and the gallows.
Besides the rogues and gulls (liberal, cheating characters), Bayman considers other themes suggested by evidence in the pamphlets, leading her, for instance, to a fresh interpretation of Dekker’s religion, as. Bayman departs from earlier interpretations that suggested Dekker’s faith might be reconstructed as Calvinist, pointing out that selective quotation of disparate references about being chosen or predestined can be misleading. She instead points to the rarity of direct comments or doctrinal positions in any of Dekker’s pamphlets. In works such as Dekker his Dreame of 1620, Bayman even finds ‘thorny’ doctrinal points, ideas she suggests were provocative at the time in the wake of the Synod of Dort and the emerging and publicly discussed disagreements in English theology.
As is clear from such observations, Bayman interprets Dekker’s pamphlets (and his plays as well) as responsive to their immediate context. She further suggests that the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot drew from Dekker a more ‘bellicose’ anti-Catholic set of sentiments and observations than had been previously apparent in his writings. At a deeper level, she positions Dekker the pamphleteer as a writer responsive to trends and tropes of his own time, locating him as part of a circle that also included Ben Jonson and whose members were appreciative of the rhetoric about peace that was part of James I’s reign, rather than the chivalric and militaristic tone of nostalgia that characterised Elizabeth’s. The culture of pamphleteering in...