Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/307

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and another; The Unfortunate General, with Hathway, Smith, and a third; and the unfinished Shore, with Chettle.

Of the above only The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and a note of Cox of Collumpton (cf. ch. xiii, s.v. Admiral's) survive; for speculations as to others see Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas (Cupid and Psyche), Marlowe, Lust's Dominion (Spanish Moor's Tragedy), Yarington, Two Lamentable Tragedies (Thomas Merry), and the anonymous Edward IV (Shore) and Fair Maid of Bristol (Bristow Tragedy).

Henslowe's correspondence (Henslowe Papers, 56, 127) contains notes from Day and others about some of the Admiral's plays and a few lines which may be from The Conquest of the Indies.

Day's Mad Pranks of Merry Mall of the Bankside (S. R. 7 Aug. 1610) was probably a pamphlet (cf. Dekker, The Roaring Girl). Bullen, Introd. 11, thinks the Guy Earl of Warwick (1661), printed as 'by B. J.', too bad to be Day and Dekker's Life and Death of Guy of Warwick (S. R. 15 Jan. 1620). On 30 July 1623 Herbert licensed a Bellman of Paris by Day and Dekker for the Prince's (Herbert, 24). The Maiden's Holiday by Marlowe (q.v.) and Day (S. R. 8 April 1654) appears in Warburton's list of burnt plays (3 Library, ii. 231) as Marlowe's.

For other ascriptions to Day see The Maid's Metamorphosis and Parnassus in ch. xxiv.


THOMAS DEKKER (c. 1572-c. 1632).

Thomas Dekker was of London origin, but though the name occurs in Southwark, Cripplegate, and Bishopsgate records, neither his parentage nor his marriage, if he was married, can be definitely traced. He was not unlettered, but nothing is known of his education, and the conjecture that he trailed a pike in the Netherlands is merely based on his acquaintance with war and with Dutch. The Epistle to his English Villanies, with its reference to 'my three score years', first appeared in the edition of 1632; he was therefore born about 1572. He first emerges, in Henslowe's diary, as a playwright for the Admiral's in 1598, and may very well have been working for them during 1594-8, a period for which Henslowe records plays only and not authors. The further conjecture of Fleay, i. 119, that this employment went as far back as 1588-91 is hazardous, and in fact led Fleay to put his birth-date as far back as 1567. It was based on the fact that the German repertories of 1620 and 1626 contain traces of his work, and on Fleay's erroneous belief (cf. ch. xiv) that all the plays in these repertories were taken to Germany by Robert Browne as early as 1592. But it is smiled upon by Greg (Henslowe, ii. 256) as regards The Virgin Martyr alone. Between 1598 and 1602 Dekker wrote busily, and as a rule in collaboration, first for the Admiral's at the Rose and Fortune, and afterwards for Worcester's at the Rose. He had a hand in some forty-four plays, of which, in anything like their original form, only half a dozen survive. Satiromastix, written for the Chamberlain's men and the Paul's boys in 1601, shows that his activities were not limited to the Henslowe companies. This