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

Authors

Larry S. Champion, North Carolina State University

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

Evaluating Thomas Dekker as a 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 a 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 a comedy and tragedy (as the lost The Late Murder in Whitechapel in described) - Dekker produced all types in a 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.⁴ Dekker himself is called in assembly-line dramatist⁵ with an "idle, shambling, shifty way of writing"⁶ or - as Ben Jonson would have it - "a dresser of plays about the town here" (Poetaster, III.iv.320).

Recommended Citation

Champion, Larry S. (1982) "Westward-Northward: Structural Development in Dekker's Ho Plays," Comparative Drama: Vol. 16: Iss. 3, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol16/iss3/4