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Thomas Dekker, the Restoration of St. Paul's, and J. P. Collier, the Forger
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
This article concerns two seventeenth-century poems that have not been printed before except for brief extracts. They occupy pages 26–36 in a commonplace book in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C., known as MS.V.a.160 (formerly MS.452.1). The poems are there attributed to Thomas Dekker, one of the better-known Jacobean dramatists, author of The Shoemakers' Holiday and other middle-class comedies, and of a large number of pamphlets of ‘London life’ which are of great interest to the student of colloquial speech in the Jacobean period. Though the commonplace book includes other interesting material, my discussion will confine itself to the two Dekker items, their import and their claim to genuineness, with one slight exception only. The exception is a version of a little-known epitaph attributed, though not very persuasively, to Shakespeare, which I cite in a footnote since it has apparently not been printed for over a hundred years. Of the two Dekker poems, the second one is a bawdy song which probably refers to a special popular entertainment of the day.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1963
References
1 I wish to express my appreciation to the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library for permission to print the two poems, to Dr. Giles Dawson, its curator, for examining carefully the manuscript, and to him, to Mr. John Crow and Professor Millar MacLure for helpful advice.
2 The epitaph entitled ‘Shakespeare and the King’ was printed by Collier in his Life of Shakespeare, 1858, p. 171. Probably because of its association with Collier, the epitaph is not mentioned in E. K. Chambers' William Shakespeare nor in J. Q. Adams' article, ‘Shakespeare as a Writer of Epitaphs’, in Manly Anniversary Studies, 1923, pp. 78-89. But the verses occur in more than one seventeenth-century commonplace book, are therefore genuine, and should therefore perhaps be taken as seriously (or lightly?) as those inscribed on Shakespeare's gravestone. If they were written by Shakespeare, they will not detract from our respect for his greatness; if they were not, they provide further evidence of the peculiar tendency in the decades after Shakespeare's death to attribute such trivia to the master. In our commonplace book, they occur on p. 2:
Crownes haue theyr compasse, length of days theyr date,
Triumphs' theyr tombe, felicity her fate,
Of naught but earth, can earth make vs ptaker
But knowledge makes a king most like his maker.
The same verses occur on p. 131 of Folger MS. 2073.4, m the following form:
Crownes have their compasse length of dayes their date
Triumphs their tombs felicity her fate
Of more then earth cann earth make none ptaker
But knowledge makes the King most like his maker.
They are there headed ‘Shakespeare upon the King’. One may wonder whether James would have been happy with such a tribute, or whether the verses were merely invented after James had partaken again of ‘earth’ in 1625. Trivia, but intriguing trivia surely.
3 The extracts occur on pp. 46-47. The same volume contains the notorious ballad on The Tempest and plenty of other forgeries, but also the notes by Simon Forman on productions of Shakespearean plays at the Globe in 1611. Though the genuineness of these notes has been questioned, they have in recent years been found to be genuine by such scholars as W. W. Greg, Giles Dawson, and J. H. P. Pafford.
4 I have checked with two leading Dekker scholars, the late Professor F. P. Wilson and Professor Fredson Bowers, neither of whom was aware of the manuscript.
5 It was bought as lot 906 by Halliwell-Phillips at the 1884 Collier sale for £15.10.0.
6 The now well-known MS.V.a.339, also in the Folger Library. The ballads have fooled many readers, and even Ault included some in his anthology of Elizabethan poetry.
7 Dr. Dawson tells me that ‘ (i) the ink of this book is quite different from any that I have ever met in what I might call the Collier forgery canon; (ii) the evidence as to Collier's forging hands is too extensive and too solid to be all wrong, and it would all have to be thrown out if the book or any part of it were accepted as his’ (private letter).
8 Same private letter as above.
9 Mr. John Crow concurs with me in this; not a word betrays anything but seventeenth-century authorship of this poem.
10 I do not know of any other poem by this writer in any Folger commonplace book. A certain Stephen Bradwell, ‘son and heir of Stephen Bradwell, of London, Esq.’, was admitted to Gray's Inn on March 3, 1606-07 ( Foster, J., The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1889, p. 115 Google Scholar); another matriculated as a fellow commoner from King's College, Cambridge, at Easter, 1610 (see Venn, A., Alumni Cantabrigiensis, 1922, pt. 1, 1, 203 Google Scholar).
11 See Venn, pt. 1, II, 104.
12 Middle Temple Records, II. 495, 602, and 615.
13 Hovenden, R. (ed.), The Register of St. James, Clerkenwell. Burials 1551-1665. Harleian Soc. Publ., 1891, IV, 206.Google Scholar
14 ‘Three Notes on Thomas Dekker’, MLR xv (1920), 82-85.
15 ‘Thomas Dekker: Burial Places’, N&Q CLXXVII (1939), 157.
16 Sig. A2V. There are several other references to his old age in his late works, e.g., ‘Old as I am’ (Wanes, Warres, Warres, 1628, sig. B2V), ‘I haue beene a Priest in APOLLO's Temple, many yeares, my voyce is decaying with my age’ (Match me in London, 1631, sig. A2—Stationer's Register: Nov. 1630).
17 See DNB for the younger Matthew Day.
18 By Ashmole himself, of course, in MSS. Ash. 1123, 1126 (now Western MSS. 7400, 7403). Extensive quotations from ‘Matthew Day's Books’ in these manuscripts are found in Tight, R. R. and Davis, J. E., Annals of Windsor, 1858, vols. I and II.Google Scholar
19 Among older historical sources, the following have been consulted: Dugdale, William Sir, The History of Pauls Cathedral in London, 1658 Google Scholar; Heylyn, P., Cyprianus Anglicus, 1671 Google Scholar; and Rushworth, , Historical Collections, 1721, II, 88–93.Google Scholar I have also depended on the following more recent studies: Simpkinson, C. H., Life and Times of William Laud, 1894 Google Scholar; Cook, G. H., Old St. Paul's Cathedral, 1955 Google Scholar; Matthews, W. R. and Atkins, W. M., A History of St. Paul's Cathedral, 1957 Google Scholar; MacLure, M., The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642, 1958.Google Scholar DNB includes an article on Sir Paul Pindar by W. Wroth.
20 Dugdale, p. 137 (mispaged as 157).
21 Cook, p. 81.
22 Dugdale, p. 138 (mispaged as 158).
23 Ibid., p. 140 (mispaged as 160).
24 Ibid., p. 140. Dugdale's report is followed almost word for word by Heylyn, p. 210.
25 Ibid., p. 139.
26 See n. 19 above.
27 The passage is quoted and its doubtful authenticity discussed in Lucyle Hook, “The Curtain”, SQ xiii No. 4 (Autumn 1962), p. 502; see especially her notes 10 and 11.
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