Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Nat ional Sun Yat- Sen Universit y] On: 26 February 2012, At : 18: 33 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK English Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ nest 20 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer Chi-fang Sophia Li a a Depart ment of Foreign Languages and Lit erat ure, Nat ional Sun Yat -sen Universit y, Taiwan Available online: 20 Jan 2012 To cite this article: Chi-fang Sophia Li (2012): Inherit ing t he Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer, English St udies, 93:1, 14-42 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 0013838X.2011.638452 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. 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Locating Chaucer in the theatrical life of Dekker, I argue that it is John Stow’s Chaucer legacy outside the academy that significantly shaped the playwright’s theatrical re-imaginings. This is the first attempt to discuss, in full, Dekker’s Chaucer-inspired texts alongside their principal source. I. The Books on the Desk Although he holds a carnation instead of a pen, the man in the mock-Tudor preRaphaelite portrait by Ford Madox Brown is recognisably an Elizabethan playwright. He wears a gorgeous slashed doublet fastened with gilt buttons; the lace in his collar and cuffs is intricate and expensive. However, for my purposes, the playwright is not Thomas Dekker. He is William Shakespeare. But that hardly matters, for I am less interested in the identity of the playwright in the foreground than in the intellectual property, the literary inheritance that stands behind the playwright that makes him a maker: the books shelved in the desk in the background. The names on the spines are just legible: ‘‘Plutarch’s Lives’’, ‘‘Gesta Romanorum’’, ‘‘Boccaccio’’, ‘‘Montaigne’’, and, the single English text among them, ‘‘Chaucer’’.1 Give or take one or two volumes (conspicuously absent for Shakespeare is an Ovid), these were the books that furnished every Elizabethan playwright’s mind and art. Re-imagining this as a portrait of Thomas Dekker, however, I think the desk behind him might hold only one or two necessary books. Or it might indeed be empty, the books not put behind, Chi-fang Sophia Li is Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. Email: c.f.sophia.li@mail.nsysu.edu.tw 1 The ‘‘Portrait of William Shakespeare’’ (1849) by Ford Madox Brown, oil on canvas, 135.6 6 87.5 cm, hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery, UK. I am grateful to Professor Carol Chillington Rutter for checking the names on the spines. ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2011.638452 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 15 closed on the shelf, but located in the foreground, imagined open in the playwright’s working hands. For Dekker, those single volumes would be the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer. The aim of this essay is to offer hard evidence of Dekker’s indebtedness to Chaucer, his greatest literary source, brought continuously into his theatre writing. In this essay I want to lay out the diverse ways that Dekker uses Chaucer: how Dekker reveres him, cites him verbatim, draws from him storytelling techniques, re-imagines him, rewrites him and perhaps theatricalises him. I want to investigate the congenial sympathy constituted between Dekker and Chaucer, arguing that while Shakespeare took ‘‘Ovid’’ out of the academy and ‘‘put him on the popular stage’’,2 Dekker the playwright, noted for his devoted Englishness, took Chaucer out of print culture to explore his copiousness in drama and prose. What Ovid was to Shakespeare, Chaucer was to Dekker. If the ‘‘Metamorphoses constituted the richest storehouse’’ of ‘‘mythology’’ for Shakespeare,3 Chaucer offered Dekker the richest repository of not just Englished tales, but also of storytelling techniques, folk motifs, plots and plotting, characters and stereotypes, situations and scenes, dramatic dialogue and gestures, tropes, jest, humour, and satire: all essentials for Dekker’s theatre writing. From his first Chaucer-inspired project, Troilus and Cressida (1599, a collaboration with Henry Chettle), to his late play, The Wonder of a Kingdom (1631), Dekker repeatedly returned to Chaucer for inspiration. Patient Grissil (1599/1600), 1 & 2 Fair Constance of Rome (1600), the additions to Sir John Oldcastle (1602), The Meeting of Gallants (1604), Westward Ho (1605), Northward Ho (1607), A Knights Conjuring (1607), The Roaring Girl (1611) and A Strange Horse Race (1613) were all indebted to Chaucer.4 II. Chaucer in Print As Ann Thompson observes, almost everyone read Chaucer in the Renaissance,5 not least, perhaps, because he was accessible. John Foxe wrote in the 1570s, ‘‘Chaucers woorkes bee all printed in one volume, and therefore knowen to all men’’ (Ecclesiasticall History, Vol. II, f. 965). For Ascham, he was the ‘‘English Homer’’ (Toxophilus, 1545, sig. E2v); for Spenser, the English Virgil (The Shepherds’ Calendar, ‘‘June’’, 81–96).6 Chaucer anglicised the Roman de la Rose, reformulated medieval folk legends and romances in his native tongue, interpreted Boccaccio, Petrarch and Lollius, and challenged classical authority.7 His complete works constituted the most compact source any Elizabethan playwright could have 2 Bate, 14. Ibid., 12. 4 Texts of Chaucer referenced in this essay are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson. Unless elsewhere indicated, texts of Dekker are cited from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers, and Non-dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by A. B. Grosart. 5 Thompson, 2–3. 6 Brooks-Davies, ed., 107. 7 Cooper, ‘‘The Classical Background,’’ 255, 265. Also see ‘‘Chaucer: Reading’’ in Gray, ed., 86–8. 3 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 16 C. S. Li wished for. As Caroline Spurgeon demonstrated in Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusions 1357–1900 (1925), everyone from John Lydgate to John Webster read and cited Chaucer: Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, John Skelton; Roger Ascham, Thomas Wilson, Gabriel Harvey, Raphael Holinshed, Philip Sidney, George Puttenham; John Lyly, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Marston— and of course, Thomas Dekker and his writing fraternity at the Rose: Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, William Haughton and Thomas Middleton. Using Chaucer, then, Dekker was in excellent—and crowded— company. But as I want to argue, using Chaucer he was doing something singular, something that had to do with his self-asserted Englishness and enthusiasm for writing about London life. In English Chaucer, English Dekker found a congenial mind and mentor.8 Thomas Dekker (c. 1572–1632) lived in an era when Chaucer was easily accessible in print. By 1606, there were fourteen editions of Chaucer’s complete works, and prior to that there were five editions of The Canterbury Tales and three of Troilus and Criseyde.9 Probably, these figures make Chaucer the most published poet in sixteenth-century England. Editions of Chaucer were published by William Caxton (1477), Richard Pynson (1492, 1526), Wynkyn de Worde (1498), and William Thynne (1532, 1542, 1550). Inheriting the ‘‘great tradition’’ of editing Chaucer,10 John Stow in 1561 produced the first Elizabethan complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer, followed thirtyseven years later by Thomas Speght’s edition in 1598,11 which, with the substantial editorial assistance from Stow,12 established itself as the standard Chaucer, reprinted in 1602 and 1687 and not replaced until Urry’s edition in 1721. Published and sold in Westminster, Fleet Street and Paul’s Churchyard, copies of Chaucer were on bookstalls where Dekker’s pamphlets would have been for sale.13 As a youth, Dekker could have read any of the pre-1561 editions of Chaucer, like Shakespeare and Spenser.14 Becoming a professional writer, Dekker could have read Speght’s Chaucer, which, as I am going to argue later, was heavily indebted to Stow. Had Dekker read Wynkyn de Worde’s or Pynson’s Canterbury Tales, he would have seen an engraving of the ‘‘myrie’’ ‘‘Hoost’’ (General Prologue, 757, 747) and the pilgrims sitting at a round table served with food and drink before their storytelling began (Figure 1). 8 Both Minto and Jones-Davies point to what they see as stylistic similarities between Dekker and Chaucer but offer no investigation of their observations. See Minto, 384, and Jones-Davies, Vol. I, 81–2, 94, 100, 134, 135, 166, 178, 222, 223; Vol. II, 7, 16, 18, 20, 38, 43, 46, 47, 122, 130, 143, 193, 207, 305, 326. 9 See the bibliographical records on Early English Books Online (EEBO), http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search 10 Ruggiers, ed. Harris points out that Stow was ‘‘in a direct line of descent from the century’s first great flowering of antiquarianism in the 1530s and 1540s which foreshadowed much of the activity of the final years of the century’’ (28). 11 Stow’s Chaucer (STC 5075–5076); Speght’s Chaucer (STC 5077–5081 and Wing / C3736). 12 Renaissance Chaucer is a subject of canon formation. See Lerer. On Stow’s Chaucer, see Hudson, 53. 13 See Chaucer’s and Dekker’s bibliographical records on EEBO. 14 Hudson, 53. For more detailed discussion on Spenser’s Chaucer, see Miskimin, 247–50. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 17 Figure 1 The Host and the Pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1498). Wynkyn de Worde (1498), STC (2d ed.) / 5085, sigs. A3v, B4v; Pynson (1492), STC (2d ed.) / 5084, sig. E4v; Pynson (1526), STC (2d ed.) / 5086, sig. B4r. Ó British Library Board (G.11578; G.11588; G.11584.3). Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. This woodcut may have furnished Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imagining in The Meeting of Gallants where he portrays a ‘‘fatte’’, ‘‘merrie Corpulent Host’’, who ‘‘telles Tales at the vpper ende of the Table in his Ordinarie’’.15 15 Wilson, ed., 120. Texts of Dekker’s Meeting of Gallants (1604) are cited from The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, edited by F. P. Wilson. In The Meeting of Gallants, a pamphlet written entirely as a dramatic dialogue so that it reads like a theatre script, Dekker imagines a ‘‘merrie Corpulent Host’’ in a London ‘‘Ordinarie’’, telling ‘‘Tales at the vpper ende of the Table’’ (Wilson, ed., 113), just like Chaucer’s ‘‘myrie’’ ‘‘Hooste’’ (I.747, 757) of the Tabard Inn. But where Chaucer’s Harry suggests that the pilgrims should tell two ‘‘short and pleyn’’ ‘‘tales’’ ‘‘To Caunterbury-ward’’ and another two ‘‘homeward’’ (I.790–94), Dekker’s Host does all the storytelling himself, recounting in a single breath four dubiously ‘‘merrie’’ ‘‘Tales’’ of drunkenness. Characteristically, Dekker darkens and moralises this material: his Host talks of drunkards whose seemingly ‘‘dead bodie[s]’’ are of ‘‘little difference’’ to ‘‘Carcasses’’ (Wilson, ed., 130). As Bush points out, Dekker’s moral vision ‘‘is much closer Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 18 C. S. Li Figure 2 The Unicorn Title Page in Stow’s Chaucer (STC 5076). See the date 1560 marked between the unicorn and the coat of arms. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB84667. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. If Dekker read Chaucer in Stow’s 1561 complete Workes, he would have entered the book via Stow’s certain publishing innovations that demonstrate how Chaucer’s reputation in the sixteenth century was being fixed: a title page (a unicorn surmounting the Chaucer family’s coat of arms) (Figure 2, STC 5076) and a to the medieval pictorial tradition of the Dance of Death’’, and ‘‘The Meeting of Gallants carries us back . . . to the Pardoner’s Tale’’, as ‘‘Dekker’s Jacobean imagination is kindled into macabre intensity by the lurid horrors of the whole-sale mortality and corruption’’ (Bush, 41). Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 19 C. S. Li Figure 4 Full-length Chaucer Portrait in CUL MS GG.4.27. By permission of Cambridge University Library. " Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 20 Figure 3 Full-length Chaucer Portrait on the Progeny Leaf (see the right bottom corner for Stow’s monogram), STC 5075, sig. B1r. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB84667. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. This progeny engraving is an exact reproduction of a hand-coloured progeny leaf pasted to Chaucer’s works in CUL MS GG.4.27. This unique monogram is identical with the one below John Stow’s portrait ‘‘found pasted to the back of the title of a copy of the ‘Survey’, edt. 1603’’. See ‘‘John Stowe, The Antiquary of England (With a Portrait).’’ In The Gentleman’s Magazine, January to June n.s.7 (1837): 48–9, and Figure 6 below. Both Kingsford and Beer reproduce Stow’s monogrammed portrait in their work on Stow. See Stow, A Survey of London, title page, and Beer, 8. My research supports Professor Anne Hudson’s earlier finding that Stow ‘‘looked with some attention at the manuscript of Chaucer’s poems, then in the possession of Joseph Holland, now Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27’’ (Hudson, 68). The handcoloured progeny leaf may be supplied by Stow and his fellow antiquarians. See Figure 5. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 21 Figure 5 Stow’s Monogram, ‘‘I.S.’’, at the Right Bottom Corner of the Progeny Page. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB84667. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. I am aware that Thomas Speght claims in ‘‘Chaucer’s Life’’ that the progeny engraving is John Speed’s work. Speght writes, ‘‘Iohn Spede’’ ‘‘annexed’’ ‘‘all such coats of Armes’’ that ‘‘concerne the Chaucers, as he found them . . . at Ewelme and at Wickham’’ (1598, STC 5078, sig. C1r). However, Pearsall in ‘‘Thomas Speght (ca. 1550–?)’’ argues that ‘‘Speght probably took all his information on these genealogical matters from Glover [Robert Glover, 1543/4–1588, Somerset Herald (1571–1588)] and Stow, and can have had no part in any contrivance’’ (50, 281, 295, 300, 301–2). monogrammed ‘‘progeny leaf’’ (Figure 3, STC 5075, sig. B1r) featuring an editorial motif designed to aggrandise what Stow was thereby proposing, Chaucer as England’s national poet. On the progeny leaf a full-length portrait of the poet is surrounded by a strapwork frame that maps genealogy onto specifically English heraldry, links Chaucer not just to his more illustrious relations but to the English Court, and presents him as a national treasure. The four icons at the corner—unicorns surmounting coats of arms and a hand in the act of writing—were also designed to stress Chaucer’s Englishness and writerly talent. Stow’s contribution to Renaissance Chaucer was significant not only because he attempted to establish a Chaucer canon16 and monumentalised the poet in the folio book ‘‘sold and dedicated to Matthew Parker’’ (Archbishop of Canterbury and patron of scholarship),17 but also because Stow’s Chaucer laid a foundation for Speght. In the 1590s when Stow was preparing The Annales of England (1592) and A Survey of London (1598) for publication, he was also providing Speght with ‘‘notes for the apparatus to the 1598 Works’’18 to make anew the 1561 Chaucer in a scholarly fashion. As a scholar,19 Speght knew how to make his edition attractively 16 Stow incorporated some non-Chaucerian texts in the folio. See Hudson. Stow was heavily involved in the Parker circle and the Society of Antiquary. See Gillespie, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1–12, and Harris, 27–36. 18 Gillespie, 1. See also Hudson, 53–70. 19 ‘‘Thomas Speght,’’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 22 C. S. Li accessible. Speght took over the core content of Stow’s Chaucer, reproduced the two illustrations (the unicorn title page and the progeny leaf) in his edition,20 and used Stow’s edition as the ‘‘printer’s copy’’ for the 1598 and 1602 Chaucer.21 The date ‘‘1560’’ marked between the unicorn and the coat of arms is the hard proof of Speght using Stow. The progeny page that bears Stow’s monogram provides further testimony to Stow’s part in Speght’s edition.22 That is, the 1598 Chaucer is a StowSpeght collaboration, a collaboration between citizen antiquarian’s ‘‘paynefull labors’’ and the scholar’s elite branding and ‘‘Methode’’, as Stow recalled it in his Survey of London (Survey, 1598, II, 111). If, instead, Dekker read the 1598 Chaucer, he would have come across not only the core content of Stow’s Chaucer and the two illustrations (which Speght reproduced from Stow), but an additional decoration, a frontispiece in the form of an architectural monument (Figure 7). On the pediment shown in Figure 7, cornucopia, overflowing with fruits and wheat ears, and held by two winged putti, not only symbolise abundance but also suggest Chaucer’s richness of mind, echoing the words in the cartouche: Chavcer: Out of the old fields, as men sayth, Commeth all this new corn, fro[m] yere to yere And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh al this new science that men lere. (originally in The Parliament of Fowls, 22–5) The Latin quotation at the foot of the edifice—‘‘Ouid. Seris venit vsus ab annis’’ from the Metamorphoses—is specifically selected to privilege native Chaucer over classical Ovid: ‘‘Experience comes with riper years’’.23 This frontispiece indicates that Chaucer is no longer shadowed by the old terms, ‘‘English Homer’’ or ‘‘Dante in Inglissh’’. Chaucer is now ‘‘Chavcer’’. In the immediate wake of its publication came four Chaucer-indebted projects on which Dekker collaborated at the Rose: Troilus and Cressida (1599), Patient Grissil (1600), Fair Constance of Rome (1600) and Sir John Oldcastle (1600) and its additions (1602).24 In the 1598 Chaucer, the playwright would have found the preliminary matter, added by the editor, Chaucer’s ‘‘Life’’ 20 See the unicorn title page in 1598, STC 5079, sig. H1v; STC 5077, sig. H1v; STC 5078, sig. G4v; 1602, STC 5080, sig. D4r; STC 5081, sig. D4r; the monogrammed progeny leaf reproduced in 1598, STC 5079, sig. B2r; STC 5077, sig. B2r; 1602, STC 5080, sig. A2r. However, in other editions, Stow’s monogram was removed (1598, STC 5078, sig. B2v; 1687, STC Wing / C3736, frontispiece). 21 See Dane, in which Dane points out that ‘‘the Speght edition of 1598 (SP1) is set from the 1561 edition, the Speght edition of 1602 (SP2), although a reprint of 1598, is to some extent based on the 1561 edition as well’’. Dane further argues, ‘‘the printer’s copy for a great part of the 1602 edition is not simply a copy of the 1561 edition, but the same copy previously marked up to serve as printer’s copy for the 1598 edition. . . . The 1561 and 1598 editions generally correspond line for line’’, 49–63 22 See the 1598 Chaucer, STC 5079, sig. B2v; STC 5077, sig. B2v; and the 1602 Chaucer, STC 5080, sig. A2v. 23 I am indebted to Dr Susan Brock of the University of Warwick for the translation. 24 Foakes, ed., 106–7, 121, 125, 128, 129, 135–6. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 23 Figure 6 An Identical Monogram below Stow’s Portrait at the Right Bottom Corner. This impression was pasted to the back of the title of a copy of Stow’s Survey (1603). See ‘‘John Stowe, The Antiquary of England (With a Portrait).’’ In The Gentleman’s Magazine, January to June n.s.7 (1837): 48. and ‘‘Progenie’’ (sig. D2v).25 He could have read the ‘‘Arguments to euery Tale and Booke’’, that is, summaries of the plots (sig. D1r). Most significantly, Dekker could have seen Speght’s highly appreciative comments on Chaucer as ‘‘an originator of 25 Speght’s English biography of Chaucer is based on John Leland’s (1545) and John Bale’s (1548) Latin versions. See Spurgeon, III, 13–19. C. S. Li Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 24 Figure 7 Frontispiece to Speght’s Chaucer 1598, STC 5078. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB99592. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 25 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 language’’ who wrote ‘‘true english’’ (sig. A1r), and his claim for Chaucer’s superior Englishness: ‘‘neither was Chaucer inferior to any of them [continental writers]’’; ‘‘England in this respect is much beholden to him’’; ‘‘Our England honoureth Chaucer poet, as principall / To whome her country tongue doth owe her beauties all’’; and ‘‘the Canterburie Tales . . . were of his owne inuention’’ (sig. D1r). In his later pamphlet, A Knights Conjuring (1607), Dekker would endorse Stow and Speght’s reverence for English Chaucer. There, having completed the journey from Hell with the Knight of the Post, Dekker-the-dreamer enters the ‘‘Fields of Joy’’ (an English Elysium) and sees Chaucer very much alive and very much the centre of attention: old Chaucer, reuerend for prioritie, blythe in cheare, buxsome in his speeches, and benigne in his hauiour, is circled a round with all the Makers or Poets of his time, their hands leaning on one anothers shoulders, and their eyes fixt seriously vpon his, whilst their eares are all tied to his tongue, by the golden chaines of his Numbers; for here (like Euanders mother) they spake all in verse: no Attick eloquence is so sweete: their language is so pleasing to the goddes, that they vtter their Oracles in none other. (sigs. Kv–Lv) By writing in the Chaucerian tradition of the dream vision, by locating Chaucer in the ‘‘dreame’’ (sig. Lv), and by placing him at the top of the literary hierarchy, Dekker shows that he reveres Chaucer’s styles, language and ‘‘auctoritee’’. While Stow and Speght endorse Chaucer’s ‘‘fatherly’’ authority, Dekker in the vision recognises the poet as the father of ‘‘all the Makers’’ of English poetry. Although Stow in his late years did not return to revise his Chaucer, simply because he was assisting Speght, Stow documented his own contribution and incorporated his remembrance of Chaucer in his chronicles and antiquarian works, which continued to make a lasting impact on Dekker.26 In The Annales of England (1605) where Stow wrote about the tradition of editing Chaucer,27 Stow placed himself in that great tradition of editing Chaucer (see Figure 8). In the Survey of London, Stow not only reveres Chaucer as ‘‘our most famous English poet of England’’ but also nostalgically calls ‘‘the Tabard’’ one of ‘‘the most anucient’’ 26 John Stow was not only the first Elizabethan literary executor of Chaucer but also an indefatigable chronicler, citizen antiquary and topographical surveyor, whom Dekker was deeply indebted to. Dekker wrote in The Wonderfull Yeare (1604) that ‘‘Stow’s Chronicle in decimo sexto’’ (that is, the sixteen-degree Summarie of the Englysh Chronicles) contrasts sharply with ‘‘huge Holinshed’’ (STC 6536.5, sig. C1r). Dekker consulted Stow’s Annales of England (1592) when writing about King William Rufus in Satiromastix, Lady Jane in Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the state affairs in The Whore of Babylon (1607 in the S.R.). Producing for Queen Elizabeth a festive city comedy, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), Dekker also used Stow’s Survey of London (1598) to map his theatrical geography. Writing The Dead Tearme (1608), a historical pamphlet, Dekker used Stow’s Survey of London as the principal source. See Li. For Dekker reading Stow’s Annales, see Hoy, ed., Vol. I, 15, 28, 201, 312– 13, 321–2, 330, 332, 335, 338, 343, 345, 349; Vol. II, 281, 373, 378, 341, 337. For Dekker’s indebtedness to Stow’s Survey, see Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, 17–26, 199–200; Lawlis, 13–16, in which Lawlis argues that Stow is ‘‘the sole authority on Eyre’’ and ‘‘all the editors of the Survey, the Gentle Craft, and the Shoemaker’s Holiday have followed him without question’’. 27 Stow’s Annales of England was updated and published fives times in 1592, 1600, 1601, 1605 and 1615 (STC 23334–23338). Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 26 C. S. Li Figure 8 A marked-up copy of Stow’s Annales of England vntill 1592 corrected (1605) in the Bodleian Library, Douce SS147, fol. 528, with a manicule pointing to ‘‘Geoffrey Chaucer’’, which emphasizes Stow’s contribution. Ó Chi-fang Sophia Li. By permission of Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. ‘‘Innes’’ that receive ‘‘trauellers’’ in Southwark (Survey, II, 62–3). Through Stow’s works, which offered a rich ‘‘storehouse’’28 of literary and historical sources, Dekker would explore vernacular Chaucer in a textual London—Stow’s Survey—suffused with words, images, cultural memories and imaginations (see Figure 9). III. Meeting Minds: Dekker and Chaucer in the Theatre It is just possible that Dekker first encountered Chaucer not in the study or at the bookstalls but in the playhouse when he began writing for the Rose. From the evidence Philip Henslowe’s Diary supplies of play titles in Lord Strange’s Men’s repertoire, it looks like Rose playwrights in the early 1590s turned regularly to Geoffrey Chaucer for material. Zenobia (March 1591/92) no doubt took as its central character the valiant ‘‘queene’’ ‘‘of Palymerie’’ who appeared in the Monk’s Tale; 28 The term ‘‘storehouse’’ was used by Stow’s contemporary, William Harrison (1534–1593). See Harrison, 176. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 27 Figure 9 John Stow’s publications in folio, quarto, octavo, and decimo sexto, which exhibits Stow’s acumen in the print economy. Ó Chi-fang Sophia Li. By permission of Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Right to left: 1. Works of Chaucer (1561, Bod. C1.7 Art); 2. The Annales of England (1605, Bod. Douce SS147); 3. The Abridgement of the English Chronicle (1618, Bod. S. 653); 4. A Survey of London (1598, Bod. Douce S219); 5. The Summarie of English Chronicles (1587, Bod. Douce S78). Hester and Ahasuerus (June 1594), the long-suffering ‘‘good wife’’ who is listed among other models of female virtue in The Merchant’s Tale, The Legend of Good Women and The Book of the Duchess. Palamon and Arcite (September 1594)— apparently dramatising The Knight’s Tale—was followed by Guido, a character who appears in many of Chaucer’s poems (The House of Fame, 1469–74).29 Dido in January 1598 may have staged Chaucer’s Dido from The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame, which brought together Virgil’s and Ovid’s Didos.30 Advertising in the frontispiece that ‘‘In this impression you shall find’’ ‘‘Arguments in every Booke gathered’’, ‘‘Old and obscure words explained’’, and ‘‘Difficulties opened’’, the 1598 edition must have made Chaucer attractively accessible to busy playwrights looking for shortcuts to material. But most significantly, it offered a wellspring of stories told in a theatrical idiom—told in scenes, in dialogue, between characters whose action was imagined dramatically, stories ripe for staging by playwrights like Dekker and his fellows at the Rose—who, it appears, did exactly that, making regular raids on Chaucer. Between 1599 and 1602, Troilus and Cressida, Patient Grissil, Fair Constance of Rome and Sir John Oldcastle were commissioned 29 Foakes, ed., 16, 21, 24–25, 50, 57, 84, 319. Also, in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer borrows from Guydo’s account of Jason—‘‘In Tessalie, as Guido tellith us’’ (1396)—to narrate the tale of Hypsipyle and Medea. See Gray, ed., 220. 30 Benson observes that Chaucer’s Dido is something of a drama queen, given to numerous theatrical gestures: she turns pale (1159), sighs and tosses about in her bed (1165–7), moans (1169), and swoons (1314, 1342); she kneels and cries (1310–11). See Robert G. Benson, 27–8, 112–13. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 28 C. S. Li from Dekker and his Rose collaborators. Very little can be said about the lost Oldcastle and Constance, but it is permissible to speculate that Oldcastle first consulted the 700-line Plowman’s Tale in Stow and Speght31 (and returned to Speght’s second edition in 1602 when additions to the play were made by Dekker that year), while Constance was inspired by the Man of Law’s Tale, whose ‘‘Custance’’ is another long-suffering wife in the Grissil mould. More can be said about Dekker and Chettle’s Troilus and Cressida. Among the ‘‘Arguments to euery Tale and Booke’’ in Speght, Dekker would have seen a summary of Troilus and Criseyde as an ‘‘excellent booke’’ that ‘‘shewed the feruent loue of Troylus to Creseid, whome he enioyed for a time: and her great vntruth to him again in giuing her selfe to Diomedes, who in the end did so cast her off, that she came to great miserie’’ (sig. E1v). Casting an eye over the ‘‘Table of all . . . the workes, contained in this Volume’’ (in both the 1561 and 1598 Chaucer), Dekker would have seen Chaucer’s Troilus (‘‘deuided into fiue bookes’’) immediately followed by Henryson’s Testament of Cresseide—that is, two versions of the Troy story cheek by jowl (sig. F2r, fols. 151–92) (see Figures 10 and 11). Unfortunately, Dekker and Chettle’s Troilus does not survive, but a fragmentary stage plot of the play does. From the information it contains (actors’ names, entrances, exits, stage effects and directions), it is possible to speculate that the playwrights used both versions of the story that appeared in Stow and Speght’s Chaucer. ‘‘Enter Tro[y]l[u]s and Pandarus . . . to them Cressida’’ points to a play using Chaucer; ‘‘Enter Cressida wth Beggars . . . to them Troylus’’ looks like a scene issuing from Henryson, who invents Cressida’s ending as a beggar and leper.32 Attempting to reconstruct Dekker’s Troilus, Geoffrey Bullough points out that the love plot (a climax, known as the ‘‘Scene E’’ in which Pandarus takes Troilus to meet Criseyde) and the exchange of Cressida may have been drawn from Books II to IV of Chaucer’s Troilus. What Bullough has not noticed is that Dekker could have found both Chaucer and Henryson in Stow’s and Speght’s Chaucer. More, too, can be said about Patient Grissil. Although there were many versions of the Griselda story in circulation that Dekker might have known, Chaucer’s 1176-line retelling in The Clerk’s Tale seems his most immediate source. Boccaccio was not available in English until 1620. John Phillip’s Commodye of pacient and meek Grissill was fundamentally a morality play, which heavily uses personified figures, Politicke Perswasion (Gautier’s minion), Diligence, and Fidence, Reason, and Sobriety (three courtiers). Grissill’s homiletic songs and the children’s moral education requested by Ianickel in Phillip’s also purport the play’s didacticism. Besides, in the play, Grissill 31 The attribution to Chaucer of The Plowman’s Tale, which ‘‘refers sympathetically to Sir John Oldcastle’’ (Gray, ed., 388), is now recognised as spurious, although editors from Thomas Godfrey (1536) onwards took the tale to be Chaucer’s. Hence, it appeared in all sixteenth-century editions. 32 Bullough, 30–31. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 29 Figure 10 ‘‘The Table of All the Names of the Woorkes Conteigned in this Volume’’ in 1561 Chaucer (STC 5076), sig. A3v. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB84667. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. has a mother and a female nurse, whereas Dekker’s Grissil does not.33 Thomas Deloney’s 183-line ballad of Grissil offered merely a sketch. This short narrative poem that provides no speech patterns also omits many details.34 By contrast, Chaucer (in Speght’s ‘‘Argument’’) offered a story that ‘‘prooueth the patience’’ of the ‘‘wife’’ ‘‘by three most sharpe trials’’ that, in the tale itself, were conducted with a high sense of theatricality. Walter and Grisildis speeches in Chaucer offered material ripe for turning into dramatic dialogue by the playwright, and interior monologue into soliloquy. The storyteller’s narrative provided details of scenes, settings, locations, costumes, gestures and movements that practically constituted stage directions for the playwright, observations I will return to and develop. 33 Hunt, 59, and Jenkins, 161. It has been established that Dekker and Chettle’s Patient Grissil was inspired by Chaucer. Also see Baldwin, 199–212. 34 For example, the noblemen and Grissil’s father are absent in the ballad. Walter makes no anti-matrimonial remark; neither is there any description of Grissil’s diligence. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 30 C. S. Li Figure 11 The Table of Content in 1598 Chaucer (STC 5078), fols. E3v–E4r. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB99592. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. IV. Dekker Re-imagining Chaucer The link between Dekker and Chaucer having been established, I want now to investigate how Dekker re-imagines Chaucer in specific ways. Sometimes, he simply calls Chaucer, the storyteller, into his own story by name as if to compare the authenticity of their narratives. In A Rod for Runaways (1625), for example—which recounts tales of horror in Hertfordshire, Hampshire, and Kent, among them the story of a young plague victim who dies on the highway because the ‘‘unmerciful, heathenish, and churlish townsmen’’ refuse her entry into the town—Dekker writes in the margin that this Kentish tale is ‘‘truer then those of Chaucers’’.35 Sometimes, he cites Chaucer verbatim, as in A Strange Horse-Race where he uses a passage from The Franklin’s Tale, woven into the textual fabric of his pamphlet. 35 Wilson, ed., 154–5, 161. Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 31 Having narrated various allegorical races (sun v. moon, winds v. waters, a lawyer v. his conscience, a tailor v. his pride, Prodigality v. Thrift, Hospitality v. Niggardliness) (Grosart, ed., III, 325–36), Dekker goes on to praise the generosity of ‘‘Hospitality’’, saying that ‘‘in reuerence of one season’’—winter—‘‘in the yeare, all that come may freely take’’. What follows is a straight lift from Chaucer, acknowledged in the margin: Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Chaucer in the Franklins tale. And this is (as the Booke doeth remember) The cold frosty season of December: Phoebus waxed old, and hewed like Latoun That afore in his hot Declination Shone as the burned gold, with streames bright But now in capricorne adowne he light: Whereas he shone full pale, I dare well seyne, The bitter frostes with the sleet and raine Destroyed hath the greene in euery yerd: Ianus sitteth by the fire with double berd, And drinketh of his Bugle-horne the wine, Before him standeth the Brawne of the tusked swine. (Grosart, ed., III, 336–7) Here Dekker only slightly alters the first line of Chaucer’s text—‘‘And this was, as thise bookes me remembre’’—to his own, ‘‘And this is (as the Booke doeth remember)’’. Integrating Chaucer’s imagery of winter (‘‘Phoebus waxed old’’) and abundance (‘‘wine’’ and ‘‘swine’’) into his own description of the forbidding season and Hospitality’s largess, Dekker not only conveys Niggardliness’s stinginess in a critical fashion, but also imitates Chaucer’s style. Dekker’s reverence for Chaucer’s textual ‘‘auctoritee’’36 bespeaks not least a certain kind of stylistic compatibility, or even emotional dependence, but also a linguistic congeniality constituted between the two writers. In a more complex using of his source, Dekker brings the Chaucerian tradition of dream vision into his own writing, recreating an idyllic English Elysium where dwell only native, congenial souls. In Chaucer, the dream-vision begins when the dreamer falls asleep. A journey starts, a guide transporting the dreamer to a destination where he sees figures from antiquity or allegory whom he contemplates. Then he awakes and writes down his dream. Like Chaucer-the-dreamer who arrives at the forest, the temple of glass, or the House of Fame and encounters the likes of Ovid and Virgil, Delyt and Beauty, Dekker-the-dreamer in A Knights Conjuring (1607) enters the Field of Joy, seeing not only Chaucer but other figures of fame. The character 36 Quoting Chaucer verbatim suggests that Dekker had either memorised the passage or had Chaucer’s book at hand. Nevertheless, having checked all the early modern editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pre-1607, I do not find Dekker’s spelling matches Chaucer’s. It is possible that the intervention was made by either Dekker himself or the printer. There was no standard orthography in Chaucer until Urry’s publication of Chaucer in the eighteenth century. For Chaucer orthography, see Scala, 488. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 32 C. S. Li sketches in Dekker’s Elysium bespeak not just a vision of congenial souls, Dekker’s personal house of fame, but an imitative fantasy that constitutes his tribute to Chaucer, in whose House dwell the vividly rendered Virgil, Ovid and Dante. But while Chaucer-the-dreamer wakes up unsatisfied by his encounter with the celebrated past and returns to his books determined to ‘‘fare the bet’’ ‘‘to make’’— that is, to out-do the past with his own poetic ‘‘making’’ in the present—Dekker seems less impressed by the dream experience: ‘‘all this Coniuring . . . is . . . but a dreame’’. And the dream inspires no writing: the pamphlet simply ends with the dreamer ‘‘now awake’’. Across his theatre writing, Dekker constantly returns to Chaucer for character, situation and scene. In The Wonder of a Kingdom (1631) Dekker uses the ‘‘January and May’’ scenario: Chaucer’s January becomes Dekker’s elderly and decrepit married man, Lord Nicoletto Vanni, while May becomes Alphonisa. When Vanni celebrates his robustness and refuses to admit that he is in his dotage—‘‘Old Oakes doe not easily fall: / Decembers cold hand comes in my head and beard, / But May swimmes in my blood; and he that walkes / Without his wooden third legge, is never old’’ (1.1.12–15)—he seems to be remembering Chaucer’s January (IV.1458–66). Later, when Vanni hops on the coach that will take him to Alphonisa, his servingman, Cargo, says to himself sarcastically, ‘‘Old Ianuary goes to lie with May’’ (2.3.54). The Merchant’s Tale offers Dekker not only January and May for re-imaginings in The Wonder of a Kingdom but provides language and situation for refashioning in Westward Ho. In this city comedy, a middle-class merchant, Justiniano, disguises himself as an Italian schoolmaster called Master Parenthesis to test his brethren’s wife, Mistress Honeysuckle. In 1.2, coming to her house as the disguised Justiniano, he flirts with her, teaching her—suggestively—how to hold a pen (and the double entendre it signifies) (2.1.140–51). At this point, Justiniano makes signs to Mistress Honeysuckle, suggesting that if she consents, he will play the young lover who will meet her in Honeysuckle’s ‘‘gardens’’ for mutual entertainment. As he reasons, a young wife ‘‘can be content to lye with olde men all night for their mony’’ as long as she can ‘‘walk to [her] gardens with yong men / I’th day time for [her] pleasure’’ (2.1.152–4). This situation and character citation certainly recall Chaucer’s May and Damyan, whose secret rendezvous is planned in January’s ‘‘fair’’ ‘‘gardyn’’ (IV.2030). The name ‘‘Justiniano’’ is also drawn from one of January’s brethren, Justinus, who offers January pertinent counsel that marriage is ‘‘no childes pley’’ and that it requires careful consideration before commitment (IV.1519–61). His name sets him up as just (as does the contrast with the flatterer Placebo) but what Justinus says reveals him as a misogynist (IV.1544–65). Dekker’s Justiniano is overwritten with such paradox: Justiniano’s manipulative tests on his own wife and his friends’ spouses and his commentary on womankind are not at all just. More than consulting Chaucer for character, situation and scene, Dekker frequently turns to him for plot devices, as in Northward Ho where he borrows Chaucerian tropes of ‘‘quiting’’ and ‘‘pilgrimage’’ to structure the play’s double plot, Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 33 which has Mayberry (a wealthy merchant and jealous husband) attempting to get ‘‘quit’’ with Luke Greenshield (a gallant who is attempting to seduce his wife) while the unwitting gallants are forced into a ‘‘competition’’ en route to Ware. Plotting his revenge, Mayberry promises to contrive ‘‘A comedy’’. He tells Bellamont—his friend, the ‘‘old Poet’’—that ‘‘A Canterbury tale’’ would smell ‘‘not halfe so sweete’’ as the ‘‘Commedy’’ he has in mind: ‘‘thou shalt write vpon’t Poet’’ (4.1.208–10). When Bellamont impatiently demands ‘‘the plot, the plot’’ (4.1.212), Mayberry answers mysteriously: ‘‘the plot lies in Ware my white Poet’’ (4.1.213–14). Thus, while Chaucer’s pilgrims travel southward from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to (sacred) Canterbury, Mayberry and Bellamont take the lecherous gallants—the sex pilgrims— northward from Mayberry’s garden house in Moorfields to (irreligious and profane) Ware. The idea of the pilgrimage, overwritten with irony in Northward Ho, demonstrates the way in which the dramatist remaps the pilgrims’ moral geography. Northward Ho also follows the ‘‘linear structure’’37 described by Helen Cooper of The Canterbury Tales, Dekker devising a jest competition to be played out on the way to Ware that is modelled on the story competition in The Canterbury Tales. As Mayberry, Bellamont, Philip (Bellamont’s spendthrift son), Greenshield, Leverpoole and Chartley (Philip’s fair-weather friend) set out, Bellamont proposes that, to make the time on the road fly by, they should ‘‘Practise iests’’ upon one another, with the one that has ‘‘the best iest / Throwne vpon him’’ bearing ‘‘the charge of the whole iourney’’: For mirth on the highway, will make vs rid ground faster then if theeues were at our tayles, what say yee to this, lets all practise iests one against another, and hee that has the best iest throwne vpon him, and is most gald, betweene our riding foorth and coming in, shall beare the charge of the whole iourney. (4.3.14–18) Bellamont’s ‘‘mirth’’ recalls the Host’s ‘‘myrthe’’ in proposing the story contest in The Canterbury Tales—and its genial forfeiture. There, whoever tells tales of ‘‘best sentence and moost solaas’’ ‘‘Shal have a soper at our aller cost’’ (General Prologue, I.790–99). But Bellamont’s scheme puts a sting in the tail of this project: imagining ‘‘theeues . . . at our tayles’’ darkens the game, as do the verbs ‘‘throwne’’ and ‘‘gald’’. This ‘‘practise’’—in fact, humiliation and punishment—suggests more pain than merriment. Moreover, while in The Canterbury Tales everyone else contributes a minimal sum of money to pay for the winner’s ‘‘soper’’ (as well as their own share), in Northward Ho the loser must bear the cost of the entire journey for everyone as well as himself. As things develop theatrically, Dekker’s spectators see inflicted upon the gallants what, in Chaucer’s pilgrims’ stories, they hear related as examples of ‘‘quiting’’ games. On the way to Ware Greenshield has Bellamont bound and beaten by madmen at Bedlam. Philip plagues his father by hooking him up with Doll the 37 Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 17. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 34 C. S. Li prostitute who has been long infatuated with the poet. Bellamont rallies Greenshield to ‘‘put this little Hornet [Doll Hornet] into Fetherstone’s [the lecher’s] bosome and marry ’em together’’ (5.1.385–6). Fetherstone accordingly exposes Greenshield’s slander of Mistress Mayberry’s chastity. Having performed the supreme jest of marrying the gallant to the whore, Bellamont claims the reward: ‘‘Who payes for the Northern voyage now lads?’’ (5.1.496). The cumulative plotting in Northward Ho is evidently inspired by the reward system so conspicuous in The Canterbury Tales, but Dekker goes further than Chaucer. The incomplete Tales provides no conclusion to the competition, whereas Northward Ho produces a finale that concludes the ‘‘mirth’’. Finally, I turn to the two most interesting examples of Dekker’s Chaucerian indebtedness, Patient Grissil and The Roaring Girl, wanting to read them as case studies of theatrical re-imaginings. Grissil is the work of the young playwright, still an apprentice, and, while it survives as the single detailed example demonstrating how the dramatist transforms his narrative source, it also shows Dekker rather piously imitating his ‘‘auctoritee’’. In Patient Grissil, when Dekker consults Chaucer for dramatisation, the playwright not only looks out for Chaucer’s ‘‘forms of speech’’38 as speech models (his narratives containing direct and indirect speeches), but also quotes his dramatic pointing (setting, location, gesture and movement), which provides the playwright with a grammar for dramaturgy. In the main plot of Patient Grissil, hunting, marriage advice, choosing a wife, marriage as yoke, life in the country, Grissil’s diligence, Gwalter’s proposal, the courtiers’ contempt, stripping and nakedness constitute not only general correspondences to The Clerk’s Tale, but also project Chaucer’s theatrical style of delivery in talk and in performance. The first part of The Clerk’s Tale, which locates Walter and ‘‘alle his liges’’ in ‘‘a lusty playn, habundant of vitaille’’ (IV.59, 67), provides a setting that Dekker quotes in the opening scene in Patient Grissil. Like Chaucer’s Walter, who loves ‘‘to hauke and hunte on every syde’’, Dekker’s Gwalter enters to ‘‘A noyse of hornes’’ surrounded by ‘‘huntsmen’’ and courtiers ‘‘all like Hunters’’ (S.D., stage direction). Chaucer’s Walter is a man whose ‘‘present . . . thought’’ is ‘‘al’’ of ‘‘lust’’; Dekker’s Gwalter, a man whose speech reveals a ‘‘minde’’ bent to the kingly indulgence of ‘‘pastimes’’ (1.1.16). Gazing at his men’s ‘‘limbes’’, ‘‘suited in a Hunters liuery’’, he exclaims with pleasure: Oh tis a louely habite, when greene youth Like to the flowry blossome of the spring Conformes his outward habite to his minde. (1.1.3–5) And he invites these ‘‘Iocond spirits’’ to ‘‘ply the Chase’’ with him, ‘‘For hunting is a sport of Emperors’’ (1.1.1–15). 38 As Ganim argues, Chaucer’s ‘‘Canterbury Tales is on one level a written document attesting to the importance of talk’’. The Tales exploiting types of social registers, ‘‘Chaucer’s forms of ‘talk’ comment on the act of speech itself’’ (123). Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 35 In both Chaucer and Dekker, while they are out hunting, both Marquises are advised by their noblemen to take a wife in speeches that echo each other. Chaucer’s nobleman ‘‘requeste[s]’’ Walter to ‘‘Chese yow a wyf’’, to ‘‘taak a wyf’’ (IV.92–113; 104, 130, 135, 153), whereas Dekker’s Pavio, Lepido and Mario urge him ‘‘to choose a wife’’, to ‘‘seeke a Bride’’ (1.1.13, 19, 28, 52, 58). While Chaucer’s Walter considers marriage a ‘‘yok’’ (IV.113) and says, ‘‘I me rejoysed of my liberte, / That seelde tyme is founde in mariage / Ther I was free, I moot been in servage’’ (IV.145–7), Gwalter moans to his subjects, ‘‘The importunitie of you . . . / Thrusts my free thoughts into the yoake of loue, / To grone vnder the loade of marriage’’ (1.1.60–62). Gwalter having been persuaded to marry, his answer to the noblemen—‘‘This day the Marquesse vowes to choose a bride’’ (1.1.58)—echoes Walter’s, ‘‘I wole assente / To wedde’’ ‘‘as myn herte is set’’ (IV.150–51, 173).39 The second part of Chaucer’s Tale, which locates impoverished Grisildis and her ‘‘povre’’ father in the ‘‘village’’ (IV.200), provides the playwright with a setting for the second scene in Patient Grissil, a house where Grissil and her family ‘‘worke’’ (1.2.20, 22). The stage direction indicates: ‘‘As they [the courtiers] goe in hornes sound and hollowing within: that done, Enter Ianicola, Grissil . . . with two baskets begun to be wrought’’ (1.2.1.S.D.). Chaucer’s Grisildis takes ‘‘hir sustenance’’ from ‘‘hire labour’’ (IV.201–2); Dekker’s has to ‘‘worke tooth and naile’’ to ‘‘haue victualls’’ (1.2.1–2). Drawing on Chaucer’s Clerk’s description of a life of domestic activity (IV.223–4, 29), Dekker turns Grisildis’ diligence into stage business. His Grissil’s onstage movement is indicated in Janicola’s speech. He commands her, ‘‘goe daughter Grissill, / Fetch water from the spring’’; ‘‘Grissill make hast, run and kindle fire’’ (1.2.157). Janicola continues, ‘‘while I worke to get bread . . . Grissill spin vs yearne to cloath our backs’’ (1.2.164–5). Dekker’s tireless Grissil enters ‘‘running with a Pitcher’’ (1.2.170), like Chaucer’s, who ‘‘set[s] doun hir water pot . . . / Beside the threshold’’ (IV.290–91). The first act of Dekker’s play typifies his borrowing, and the play proceeds to demonstrate this level of dedicated rewriting. Nevertheless, as theatre writing per se is different from storytelling, Dekker cuts unstageable descriptions in Chaucer,40 rearranges the order of information,41 and condenses Chaucer’s narrative, turning it into movement and short dramatic dialogue that ‘‘introduces character and personality’’.42 For example, while Grisildis gives birth to a baby daughter and then a son, Grissil delivers twins. While Walter dispatches an ‘‘ugly’’ ‘‘sergeant’’, his 39 Elsewhere in 1.1 and 1.2, Dekker imitates the speech patterns he found in Chaucer. See the Marquises’ condition for marriage (IV.164–8 and 1.1.66–8), their proposals to Janicola (IV.307–8, 313–15 and 1.2.244, 247), Janicola’s reply (IV.319–22 and 1.2.260), and Grisildis’/Grissil’s consent to the Marquises (IV.350, 262–3 and 1.2.264, 267–8). 40 The long descriptions of Walter’s fame (Part I) and notoriety (Part IV), of Grissil’s virtue (Part II, 386–441), and Walter feigning the papal bull which endorses their separation (Part V) are omitted in the play. 41 The order of the plot in Patient Grissil is hunting, marriage, banishment, dispossessing the twins, reunion, whereas that of The Clerk’s Tale is hunting, marriage, taking away the daughter and then the son, Grissil’s banishment, and reunion. 42 Gray, ed., 136–7. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 36 C. S. Li ‘‘privee man’’, to ‘‘take’’ (IV.519, 533, 673) the children (Parts 3 and 4), Dekker’s ‘‘Marquisse and Furio’’ ‘‘Enter . . . with an infant in his armes’’; ‘‘Grissill and Mario’’ ‘‘Enter’’ ‘‘with a childe’’ (4.1.1; 4.1.40, S.D.). In the next sequence, Dekker tightens Chaucer’s plots to speed up the pace of onstage narration: baby snatching, stripping, and Grissil’s nakedness culminate in 4.1 to constitute Dekker’s theatrical highlights taken from Chaucer (Parts 3–5). The crucial shift Dekker is making at all times when using Chaucer is not just writing Chaucer’s narrative action onto the body that performs it, but also intensifying—and sometimes comically exaggerating (as a characteristic of Dekkerian humour)—Grissil’s insults to make the spectators see her pain and resilience and Walter’s notoriety. Through theatre, the intensification of torment is conveyed through visualisation. In the banishment scene, while Chaucer’s Grisildis is asked to strip herself before returning ‘‘Toward hir fadres hous’’ (IV.894–5), Dekker’s Grissil is utterly deprived of dignity. Gwalter demands that Mario and Lepido ‘‘Disrobe her of these rich abiliments, / Take downe her hat, her pitcher, and her gowne’’. While they hesitate, Gwalter commands again, ‘‘Disrobe her presently’’, and amusingly, Grissil embraces the insult, ‘‘To worke some good deede thus you would not runne’’ (4.1.208, 209), before returning ‘‘to her fathers’’ (4.1.170–73). As her sharp trials climax in 4.1, Dekker’s spectators see not only Grissil physically undressed but also a humiliated body taken apart. In the final test, where Chaucer’s Walter is to remarry and his long-suffering wife is summoned back to court to serve as a housekeeper (IV.975–80), Dekker’s Gwalter has Grissil and her family do all the drudgery for the wedding to bear more humiliation. The stage direction indicates, ‘‘Enter Janicola and Babulo [servant] carrying coales’’, ‘‘Laureo’’ and ‘‘Grissil with wood’’ (5.2.51). Besides, Janicola is asked to ‘‘play’’ in ‘‘the morning’’ ‘‘a bridal song’’ ‘‘To leade forth Gratiana’’, the ‘‘bright bride’’ (5.2.81, 83–4). And Grissil is obliged to ‘‘Put these imbrodered slippers on her feete’’, ‘‘deliuer’’ her own ‘‘wedding ring’’ and ‘‘Circle’’ it on the new bride’s ‘‘finger’’ (5.2.115–18). What Dekker’s spectators see onstage is not just a patient housekeeper like Grisildis, but Grissil and her family stooping low, swallowing the insults and keeping on working. What projects onto the stage is a theatrical spectacle of ‘‘giants’’ oppressing ‘‘pigmies’’ (5.1.54, 45), terms the play sets up for theatrical re-creation and character revisions. In the restoration scene, Dekker does not find the third stripping (IV.1114–20) in Chaucer necessary. Having given up his tests, Gwalter simply crowns Grissil (5.2.179–81) to trope her change of status. This is not the only place that Dekker disagrees with Chaucer. In the main plot, Dekker removes from the source the premarriage condition of total obedience (‘‘whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay’’’, IV.355), the religious referents (Job and lamb, IV.932, 537–8) and the belief in ‘‘Fortune’’ to transform Chaucer’s Christian exemplum—a masculine translation, argues Carolyn Dinshaw43—into a theatrical, sociological reflection that reviews the secular saint in 43 Dinshaw, 132–55. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 37 the Elizabethan context. Dekker effects these radical changes to signify his strong opinion of Chaucer’s Tale. He explores types of double tropes (hunting and taming, class and birth, test and patience, court and country), using stage properties (gowns, a pitcher, baskets and gold) as a performative medium to narrate his own story onstage. More importantly, writing for the public playhouse, Dekker alters the focus of ‘‘giants’’ and develops scenes for ‘‘pigmies’’. Siding with the commoners, Dekker removes the gravitas of the Marquis, invents new characters absent in Chaucer, and dramatises the stories untold. Mostly, in the main plot Dekker sets the country against the Court, Grissil’s father against the twins’ father, paternal love against authoritarian wantonness, the grass-roots servant against courtiers, boundless tolerance against wanton tests, and unqualified protection against qualified love. Two worlds fall further apart in Patient Grissil. Patient Grissil demonstrates not just Dekker’s meticulous reading of Chaucer but also an apprentice’s conscious moves between his source material and theatre. From the examples of textual echoes, speech patterning and imitative rewriting, it emerges that for Dekker The Clerk’s Tale is unique in contributing to the playwright’s theatrical re-imaginings, as among other literary precedents, none—in Latin, English, French and Italian—is comparable to the dramatic capacity in Chaucer. I agree with Robert Benson that ‘‘Boccaccio does not use gestures to develop characters’’ and ‘‘where he turns his attention to characterization, he seems unaware of the potentialities of gestures’’.44 I want to conclude this essay by looking at the most creative example of Dekker’s Chaucerian indebtedness, The Roaring Girl, a unique play that shows the playwright’s development and maturity when using Chaucer. Dekker in 1611 was an experienced playwright approaching 40, using Chaucer dexterously in his late city comedy, reshaping Chaucer’s Loathly Lady of The Wife of Bath’s Tale into an entirely new character whose name, The Roaring Girl, bears the title of the play. The naming of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady is derived from the description of her by a Knight, who reacts to her physical appearance, ‘‘thou art so loothly, and so oold also’’ (III.1100–1). Doubleness (‘‘fair’’ and ‘‘foul’’, III.1220, 1223), loathliness (‘‘foul’’, ‘‘oold’’, and ‘‘poor’’, III.1063),45 shape-shifting46 and redemption constitute her distinctive features. In the Tale, as an old hag, she redeems the Knight, a rapist sentenced to death unless he can ‘‘answere’’ the Queen’s question, ‘‘What thyng is it that wommen moost desiren?’’ (III.905). As the Wife of Bath’s ‘‘alter ego’’,47 the Loathly Lady is a ‘‘noble prechour’’ (III.165), who challenges the Knight’s misogynistic glossing of her loathly body, teaching him gentilesse (III.1134–212) to redeem him from ‘‘arrogance’’ (III.1112). His correction made, she offers one final redemption, to ‘‘amende’’ herself (III.1105) to his wish for a beautiful wife by transforming herself from ‘‘the olde wyf’’ (III.1046) into a ‘‘fair’’ one, whose fairness 44 Robert Benson, 77. My ideas of ‘‘doubleness’’ and ‘‘loathliness’’ are inspired by Carter. 46 Cooper points out that the Arthurian Loathly Lady is a ‘‘shape-shifter’’ See Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 162. 47 Ibid., 164. 45 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 38 C. S. Li is a reward for his repentance. In Chaucer’s Tale, it is the Loathly Lady’s ‘‘wise governance’’ (III.1231–3) and moral authority that reclaim ‘‘maisterie’’ (III.1236) from the Knight, whose apology is embodied in his submission to her sovereignty. Most importantly, Chaucer’s Loathly Lady is a medieval redeemer who restores the disorderly world disrupted by male violence in the Arthurian romance. Such a construction, as the ‘‘sentence’’ of the Tale testifies, is a Chaucerian prolepsis of reform from which the misogynist glossator is taught to see fairness through the Loathly Lady’s performance of loathliness. Dekker re-imagines the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady as the organising metaphors in The Roaring Girl. The imagery of doubleness is projected onto Mary Fitz-Allard, who plays the ‘‘faire Bride’’ (5.2.125), and Moll Frith, Mary’s counterpart, who plays the cross-dressed, loathly changeling bride. Their initials and roles are intended to be interchangeable for Sebastian, who enlists Moll’s help to provoke Sir Alex to capitulate on his son’s original choice of poor Mary. Like Chaucer’s Knight’s ‘‘loothly’’ lady, Dekker’s Moll is ‘‘loathsome’’, and pronounced so by ‘‘The two leaud tongues of slander and truth’’ (2.2.1–12). But her double, Mary Fitz-Allard, is also ‘‘loothly’’: cross-dressed, ‘‘Disguised like a sempster’’ (1.1 S.D.) to get access to Sebastian’s house, Mary sees herself as ‘‘a loathed sight’’ (1.1.62). Following the Chaucerian tradition, Dekker downplays the role of the fair bride to concentrate most attention on Moll, emphasising her ‘‘strange’’ ‘‘quality’’ (1.1.95) of loathliness. She is shaped as a ‘‘strange Idoll’’ (1.1.112), a ‘‘strange thing’’ (1.2.136) that induces disgust and confusion. Her male commentators find her ‘‘most wicked, most vnnaturall’’ (1.2.164), ‘‘naughty’’ and ‘‘nought’’ (1.2.139, 141). Sir Davy Dapper (Sir Alex’s friend) takes her to be ‘‘some Monster’’ (1.2.138), a ‘‘drabb’’ (3.3.57), and Sir Alex is horrified to see his son besotted with the loathly ‘‘monster with two trinckets’’ (2.2.72). Like Chaucer’s shape-shifting Loathly Lady, Moll constantly changes her ‘‘shapes’’ (2.1.216) onstage. In 2.1 she enters Mistress Gallipot’s tobacco shop ‘‘in a freese jerkin and a black saueguard’’ (2.1.155, S.D.) like a man-woman, which induces Mistress Openwork’s repugnance. In 2.2 Moll appears as a male musician, bringing her viol to a meeting with Sebastian regarding his marriage. In 3.1 she goes to Grays-Inn Field ‘‘like a man’’ (3.1.34, S.D.) to ‘‘meete’’ (2.1.268) lecherous Laxton, a gallant who ‘‘hawkes for venery’’ (3.1.38–9), thinking he can swive ‘‘sweete plumpe Mol’’ (2.1.256), just like the Knight in Chaucer who rapes a maid he finds on the wayside (III.886–8). Upon her arrival (‘‘Enter Mol like a man’’, 3.1.34, S.D.), Laxton intently ‘‘looke[s] for’’ her social signs (‘‘a shag ruffe, a freeze ierkin, a short sword, and a safeguard’’, 3.1.31–2), only to take Moll as a ‘‘yong barrister’’ (3.1.43). In 5.2, Moll wears ‘‘mans clothes’’ (S.D.) as her ‘‘wedding gown’’ (5.2.98, 99), entering the scene as the ‘‘maskt’’ changeling bride ‘‘in Sebastians hand’’ (5.2.128), to effect a family reconciliation between Sebastian and his father. Through shape-shifting, the Chaucerian prolepsis of teaching—the ‘‘sentence’’ of the Tale—is rewritten into The Roaring Girl’s principle of moral reform. And whenever Dekker uses Chaucer, he not only emphasises Chaucer’s moral message but Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 39 also deepens the vision. Where in Chaucer the purpose of the Loathly Lady’s shapeshifting is to educate and redeem, Moll’s shape-changing is to enact different levels of teaching and redemption. For example, to ‘‘teach’’ ‘‘purblind’’, ‘‘wanton’’ Laxton, who leers at her body and ‘‘thinkes each woman’’ a ‘‘flexable whore’’ (3.1.47, 68, 69), Moll lectures him (3.1.85–99) and then ‘‘puts of her cloake and drawes’’ (3.1.54) to challenge his male gaze in the most gallant fashion—‘‘They fight’’ (3.1.113, S.D.)—to accompany her teaching. Moll having ‘‘wounded’’ Laxton ‘‘gallantly’’ (3.1.126), Laxton beseeches her for forgiveness: ‘‘I do confesse I haue wrong’d thee Mol’’, ‘‘I aske thee pardon’’, ‘‘I yield both purse and body’’, ‘‘Spare my life’’ (3.1.115, 118, 120, 122). His correction made, Moll, through a feminist lecture, attempts to redeem him from misogyny. To induce Sir Alex to see Mary’s fairness through the reflection of loathliness, Moll simply poses a mirrored image of the loathly bride by ‘‘play[ing]’’ her ‘‘part’’ (4.1.83). Having seen Mary’s ‘‘brightnesse’’ and ‘‘worth’’ (5.2.195), a true nobility that transcends rank and wealth (like gentilesse in Chaucer, III.1155–63), Sir Alex admits his ‘‘blindnesse’’ (5.2.191), ‘‘wrongs’’ (5.2.227–9, 255), and ‘‘shame’’ (5.2.252–55), begging Mary and Moll (doubling the Loathly Lady) to ‘‘forgiue’’ him (5.2.243): ‘‘I’me sorry, I’le thrice double ’em / To make thy wrongs amends’’ (5.2.255–56)—a confessor more repentant than the Chaucerian example. Here Moll not only redeems Sebastian’s wish to marry the ‘‘faire fruitfull Bride’’ by ‘‘play[ing]’’ her ‘‘part’’, but also redeems Sir Alex from his aristocratic arrogance. Like The Wife of Bath’s Tale, which concludes in the Knight’s redemption and reward, Dekker rounds off the play with Sir Alex’s redemption (‘‘an unmarkt Knight[’s]’’ apology, 5.2.154–61, 186) and Sebastian’s reward of the fair bride. If in Chaucer to redeem is to save sinners by grace not by punishment, then Dekker in this point follows Chaucer rather religiously. Where Chaucer’s Loathly Lady is constructed as a medieval redeemer, the ‘‘sovereignty of the land’’48 who delivers the Knight from death and restores order, Dekker’s Moll is reshaped into something I want to call a ‘‘roaming redeemer’’, who provides ‘‘good worke’’ (3.3.212–14) and ‘‘good seruice’’ (5.2.206) for the London community. A knowing cryptolect, Moll not only ‘‘rescue[s]’’ Jack Dapper (a gambler) from the hands of Sergeant Curtilax and Yeoman Hanger (3.3.209–10, 200; 5.1.3) but also saves Lord Noland (disoriented in the underworld) from being robbed (5.1). She says to men in London, ‘‘If any Gentleman be in Scriueners bands, / Send but for Mol, she’ll bail him by these hands’’ (3.3.213–14). Playing the loathly bride as a practice of ‘‘good seruice’’, she also reminds Sir Alex, the snob, of the redeeming qualities of this sovereignty of the underworld (5.2.154–61). Of course, in this context the concept of redemption has lost its primary religious connotations, but what matters is that by using the image of Moll Frith (the female thief, whom the spectators knew well) and by exploiting her voice to preach to those who deny virtue and morality, Dekker not only removes high didacticism from 48 Carter. Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 40 C. S. Li the play but also entertainingly conveys his moral message with strong irony. What the spectators see and hear onstage is not just Moll’s performative body that preaches and entertains, but a corrupt London waiting for reformation and redemption. As I have shown, the ‘‘sentence’’ of The Wife of Bath’s Tale is rewritten into The Roaring Girl, and using Chaucer, Dekker always revisits the same moral issues and re-imagines them in the same cultural context. While Chaucer addresses the male gaze, rape and the maid’s nightmare in the Arthurian romance (III.877–99), Dekker stages male leers and potential sexual threat intimidating Moll, an unmarried woman. While Chaucer’s Knight is called upon to ‘‘seketh’’ and ‘‘lerne what thing women loven moost’’ (III.919) and is taught gentilesse, Dekker’s London gallant and knight— Laxton and Sir Alex, the misogynistic glossators—are taught to see fairness through loathliness, to see women’s virtue, not just their sexualities. While Chaucer in the Tale hypothesises what women most desire (III.925–38) and concludes in sovereignty, Dekker not only opens up possibilities of city wives’ secret desires but also rewrites an answer to Chaucer’s question. Celibacy—an option conspicuously absent from The Wife of Bath’s Tale—is what Moll most desires. Besides, in the finale Moll’s wish for a free space where ‘‘Gallants voyd from Serieants feare, / Honesty and truth vnslandred, / Woman man’d, but neuer pandred’’ (5.2.218–20) also recalls the idyllic, safe space in the Chaucerian romance. V. Dekker’s Asserted Englishness As I have shown, Dekker’s reading of Chaucer is deep and extensive, and Dekker consistently returned to Chaucer for ideas and inspirations. From the simplest fashion of drawing Chaucer for comparison, to the most complex fashion of embedding Chaucer in his own work by citing him verbatim, by using Chaucerian allusions, situations and theatrical strategies, by rewriting the dream vision, the speeches, the Loathly Lady and her tropes, Dekker drew from Chaucer not only vernacular English that was ‘‘buxsome’’ and ‘‘blithe’’ but a language of theatre that constituted a particular sympathy between them. Dekker made Chaucer part of Elizabethan England’s popular culture by popularising a newly established Chaucer tradition—established by Stow and Speght—with an audience that was placed to share it. Using Chaucer, Dekker asserted an intellectual stance, moral position and, most importantly, his Englishness, which distinguished himself from other classically inspired Elizabethan playwrights. Chaucer in this light was the best guarantor of Dekker’s self-asserted Englishness. But if imitation constitutes flattery, then re-creating the tradition constitutes a higher form of intelligence. And re-creation is precisely what Dekker did, not content merely to imitate but refashioning his source material to invent the ‘‘new science’’ which The Parliament of Fowls argues should be the aim of the excellent poet/maker. It is in Dekker’s ‘‘new science’’ that we encounter the playwright’s theatrical curiosity energetically at work onstage. Inheriting the Legacy: Dekker Reading Chaucer 41 Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 18:33 26 February 2012 Acknowledgements This article was revised several times with scholarly advice from Professor Carol Chillington Rutter (Warwick), Professor Peter Mack (Warwick), Dr Susan Brock (Warwick), Dr Richard Rowland (York), and Dr Gillian White (Warwick). I am deeply grateful for their generous support and patience. Part of this article was presented at the 4th Biennial Conference of the Society of Renaissance Studies at York, UK, during 16–18 July 2010. This research was made possible by a Taiwan Merit Scholarship (941-A-010) and a research grant (98-2410-H-110-075) from the National Science Council of Taiwan, which allowed me to look at various editions of Chaucer at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. References Ascham, Roger. Toxophilus. London, 1545. 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