CHALLENGING THE HOMILETIC TRADITION: THE DOMESTIC DRAMA OF THOMAS DEKKER, 1599-1621 By VIVIANA COMENSOLI B.A.(Hons.), Simon Fraser University, 1975 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 1979 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept, this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 1984 (js) Viviana Comensoli, 1984 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 DE-6 (3/81) ABSTRACT The dissertation reappraises Thomas Dekker's dramatic achievement through an examination of his contribution to the development of Elizabethan-Jacobean domestic drama. Dekker's alterations and modifications of two essential features of early English domestic drama—the homiletic pattern of sin, punishment, and repentance, which the genre inherited from the morality tradition, and the glorification of the cult of domesticity—attest to a complex moral and dramatic vision which critics have generally ignored. In Patient Grissil, his earliest extant domestic play, which portrays ambivalently the vicissitudes of marital and family life, Dekker combines an allegorical superstructure with a realistic setting. The tension between homiletic and realistic impulses is also at the heart of The Honest Whore. In Part I, although Dekker provides a trenchant portrait of the afflicted domus, the play's satirical tone clashes oddly with the homiletic schemes. In Part II, however, the marriage code is presented amid intricate plotting and a complex ethical design in which orthodox homiletic paradigms such as the patient wife, the testing of the wife's virtue, and the prodigal husband's reformation are consistently undermined through irony and paradox. Taken as a whole, these three plays reveal Dekker's growing cynicism toward the tidy moral and dramatic schemes of their analogues, and of the ii treatises and domestic-conduct books from which domestic dramas took their plots. Dekker's skillful exploitation of homiletic motifs extends to the comic vision of The Roaring Girl. The play sustains a central tension between the domus and the city, and offers a bold portrait of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, who scorns marriage, preferring the openness of the city to the confinement of the household. In Dekker's domestic tragedy, The Witch of Edmonton, written shortly after his lengthy imprisonment for debt, the comic optimism that informs The Roaring Girl yields to bitter tones and to the defeat by a repressive society of those protagonists who openly challenge the values imbedded in the marriage code. The conclusion surveys the development of domestic drama since the Renaissance, and shows how Dekker anticipates the domestic plays of modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O'Neill. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. THE ELIZABETHAN-JACOBEAN DOMESTIC PLAY 12 I 12 II 40 NOTES TO CHAPTER I 45 CHAPTER II. PATIENT GRISSIL 53 I 53 II 59 III 73 IV 81 NOTES TO CHAPTER II 86 CHAPTER III. THE HONEST WHORE, I 90 NOTES TO CHAPTER III 131 CHAPTER IV. THE HONEST WHORE, II 137 I 141 II 154 III 163 IV 174 V 182 NOTES TO CHAPTER IV 188 iv Page CHAPTER V. THE ROARING GIRL 193 I 193 II 201 III 217 IV 224 NOTES TO CHAPTER V 241 CHAPTER VI. THE WITCH OF EDMONTON 249 I 249 II 257 III 281 NOTES TO CHAPTER VI 295 CONCLUSION 299 NOTES TO CONCLUSION 315 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 318 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my gratitude to those who assisted in shaping this work. Professors Errol Durbach and Joel H. Kaplan have, as members of my dissertation committee, been attentive, inspiring, and supportive. I am especially grateful to Professor Katherine S. Stockholder whose careful supervision and expert counsel have been leavening and enduring influences. I would also like to thank Elaine Auerbach who graciously assisted in the proofreading, and Shannon Tenove who typed the manuscript. vi INTRODUCTION Critical appraisal of Thomas Dekker's plays has often been negative and frequently apologetic; even enthusiastic critics usually deem it necessary to qualify their praise. Harold Toliver voices a common sentiment when he writes: "Dekker will not likely share the lot of rediscovered minor figures" as he "had the misfortune of being overmatched by Jonson in satire and overshadowed by Shakespeare in romantic comedy."^" While Dekker's realistic sketches of London life and his sympathetic portraits of socially unfortunate characters are often praised, the persistent charges levelled against him are his piety, his congenial humor, and his allegedly simple moral vision. Conspicuously lacking is a comprehensive assessment of Dekker's unconventional, passionate, and frequently bitter indictment of easy moral and dramatic solutions. One reason for the absence of such a study of Dekker's plays has been the overriding critical concern with The Shoemaker's Holiday, one of Dekker's earliest unaided works and the one which most easily lends itself to charges of lighthearted treatment of the events of everyday life. The play is the most anthologized of Dekker's works, and critical evaluations of it appear regularly amid sporadic remarks about the merits of other plays, particulary The Honest Whore, II which Hazelton 1 Spencer in 1933 claimed was "Dekker's masterpiece," and whose superb dramatic design is equal to the best plays of Dekker's contemporaries. Recent British productions of The Witch of Edmonton and The Roaring Girl will perhaps spark new interest in Dekker's complex dramaturgy, just as recently there has arisen considerable interest in Dekker's career as a pamphlet writer. In his re-assessment of Dekker's craftsmanship as a prose writer, E.D. Pendry has shown that much of Dekker's work "has great survival-value" and deserves to be reconsidered for our age: Dekker is "a grown-up writer who feels pain, and can turn upon it with a • . sneer; despair, bravado and indignation give an edge to much of his wit. There was for him no easy road to a faith in human goodness.I believe this also holds true for Dekker the dramatist. Dekker experimented with a variety of dramatic genres, namely, citizen comedy, dramatic allegory, the history play, romantic comedy, and domestic drama. The largest group of extant plays, the domestic dramas, reveals a striking homogeneity of theme and purpose as well as a sustained and persistent challenge of social and moral assumptions. These plays attest to Dekker's enormous contribution to the formation of a specifically English dramatic form which originated toward the end of the sixteenth century. Four major strands compose the genre: the "new" murder play; the homiletic structure which the plays inherited from the morality tradition; the concern with middle-class values 2 concomitant with the presentation of the commoner as hero; and most importantly, the dramatization of marital or family conflict staged primarily within the domus. Although Dekker, like the best writers of domestic plays, often aimed at the edification of the large citizen audiences of the public theatres, and while the thrust of his domestic plays is the drama of everyday life, the relationship between audience expectation, social-historical influences, and dramatic conflict in these works is more subtle and complex than has been suggested. While the consideration of any genre or model based on certain principles of composition must include its relevance to the audiences and writers of its time, a more useful way to begin approaching a genre as dynamic as early English domestic drama is from the writer's perspective, that is, as a traditional pattern or model interacting with the work as it evolves. The finished product will result from a combination of the dramatist's personal experience and the models he inherits. The interaction between an author's experience and pre-existing structures suggests that no one work will embody completely all the features of a given model. "A genre," writes Claudio Guillen, "has stable features, but it also changes, as a precise influence on the work in progress, with the writer, the nation, and the period." At the same time, we will detect in the work an urge toward an established pattern. A genre, in this sense, •7 is a "problem-solving model" that establishes a dialectic 3 between the artist and the evolving work. The task of the reader consists in formulating an approximate position of influence within the coordinates of the genre. One way to effect this formulation is to examine the relationship between social and ethical influences and the general field of literary conventions from which the writer draws. The "new" work thus becomes "both a deviant from the norm . Q and a process of communication referring to the norm." In this context domestic drama may be viewed as a group of related works that fluctuates around a norm with respect to certain characteristics. Rather than view the genre in terms of ruling formulas, it is best to see it as a "system" or a body of plays that must be understood in relation to one another. I will therefore consider Dekker's domestic drama as a "family" of plays which shares a number of similar characteristics and impulses, the essential features of which each play exploits in a different manner and with different intensity.