Thomas Dekker, “best known as a second rate playwright of the age of Shakespeare,” is the subject of Anna Bayman's fascinating biography (1). Working primarily for Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theater, Dekker helped write dozens of plays from the 1590s through 1603. In 1603, though, Dekker, along with everyone else involved in London's thriving playhouses, faced destitution when the plague closed them down. Desperate, Dekker turned to another type of writing, pamphleteering, to earn his way. While he would still help write plays and pageants, from 1603 until his death in 1632 Dekker's primary form of income was writing pamphlets. This earned him enough money that he spent most of the last three decades of his life outside of debtors' prison, a grim place where he resided from 1613 to 1620. Bayman argues that Dekker picked an opportune time to begin writing pamphlets. She notes that a culture of pamphleteering had emerged in late Elizabethan England for a variety of reasons. First of all, religious conflict caused by competing Protestant visions for the English church inspired the Martin Marprelate pamphlet debates of the 1580s. These amusing and vicious theological pamphlets helped make pamphleteering an acceptable medium for discussing public events. Then, the dramatic growth of London meant that there was a larger market for pamphlets. Lastly, due to the growth in trade, many people had disposable income that they could spend on these cheap publications, which cost a bit more than the price of admission to a playhouse.
While some early seventeenth-century pamphleteers wrote about sensitive political and religious issues, the vast majority did not. Faced with the prospect of censorship, imprisonment, and financial destitution, only the most zealous would write something that overtly angered the authorities. Instead, authors and their publishers tried to write missives that people would actually buy. The desire for commercial success combined with a large and growing readership in London meant that the range of potential topics was vast. Authors often knew each other and they routinely borrowed each other's ideas and even prose. Working with printers (who in effect were their publishers), authors sometimes created controversies simply to sell copy. Dekker moved in and out of this world. He worked closely with several publishers and his works echoed sentiments in many other pamphlets. Since Dekker wrote to earn money, he lent his pen to any subject he and his publisher believed would sell. In order to do this, he had to learn how to be sensitive to his readership. Writing for a diverse commercial audience rather than an aristocratic patron meant that he had to be familiar with what his readers knew about a variety of topics. Bayman exploits this insight to assert that Dekker's works provide entrée into the minds of Londoners during the early decades of the seventeenth century. While he occasionally filled his pamphlets with sensational events (for instance, the 1605 Gunpowder Plot or the failed wars of Charles I in the second half of the 1620s), Dekker usually wrote about everyday life in London.
The chapters that examine Dekker's exploration of living in London are the book's strength. Bayman deftly teases out Dekker's complex and important contribution to Londoners' understanding of their world. For example, one of the tropes in Dekker's writings was that of the gull. He described gulls as young men, usually of means, who could easily be parted with their money. While at first read it might appear that Dekker was warning young men not to be gulls, in fact he was actually celebrating gulls. Without gulls, London's economy would grind to a standstill. For gulls spent their money not only on wine, women, and song but also on baked goods, clothes, hats, and the like. Without foolish young men wasting their money, ordinary Londoners would be worse off. The theme that economic activity of any kind helped the quality of life of ordinary Londoners expands in Dekker's later writings. This occurred because as Dekker grew older he developed a clearer sense of what made a good life. He realized that peace was better than war, because it led to more trade, and trade led to more wealth. While many writers, including Dekker himself, ridiculed the sin of greed, Dekker acknowledged that without the desire and means of greedy men for fashionable clothes, homes, finery, food, and entertainment everyone in London would suffer. Further, these were things worth having in and of themselves, according to Dekker, and religious warfare made for a poor substitute for a nice glass of wine that one could enjoy after reading one of his pamphlets.
Bayman ends her book by highlighting the methods Dekker used to instruct readers how to read critically. She argues that Dekker managed to give readers signs that helped them untangle truth from propaganda. This was especially useful by the 1620s, when war again darkened England's foreign policy. Bayman asserts that by teaching readers to identify and evaluate polemical arguments produced by various political factions, Dekker helped prepare them for navigating the torrent of publications that would come at them during the Civil Wars in the 1640s.
This is a clear and well-written book that makes an interesting analysis of Dekker's position in the emerging world of pamphleteers in the early seventeenth century. It should be useful to scholars of print culture for years to come. Its only shortcoming is that it does not have a bibliography, and readers have to keep track of the sources in the footnotes.
