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INFLUENCE OF DEKKER

Prefixed to the first edition of the Northern Lass, Brome's first publication (1632), are the following lines:

To my Sonne Broom and his Lasse.
Which, then of Both shall I commend ?
Or thee (that art my Son and Friend)
Or Her, by thee begot? A Girle
Twice worth the Cleopatrian Pearl.
No, 'tis not fit for me to Grace
Thee, who art mine; and to thy Face.
Yet I could say, the merriest Maid
Among the Nine, for thee has laid
A Ghyrland by; and jeers to see
Pyed Ideots fear the Daphnean Tree;
Putting their eyes out with those Boughs
With which she bids me deck thy Brows.

But what I bring shall crown thy Daughter
(My Grand-child) who (though full of laughter)
Is chaste and witty to the time;

Not lumpish-cold, as is her Clime.

By Phoebus Lyre, thy Northern Lasse
Our Southern proudest Beauties passe:

Be Jovial with thy Brains (her Mother)
And help her (Dick) to such another.

Tho. Dekker.

The presence of these verses, with such an intimate title of address, doubtless gave the hint to Fleay that Brome may have been influenced by Dekker. He does not say what this consists in, but merely says it is apparent in the City Wit.1 Schelling mentions that Dekker appears to have imparted some of his easy humor, although no scruple of Dekker's subtler gift, that of poetry, is discoverable in the verses of Brome.' 2 Bayne even goes so far as to say that Brome' is more truly a 'son' of Dekker than of Jonson. His best and happiest

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1 Fleay, Biog. Chron., 1. 36. 2 Schelling, Eliz. Drama 2. 269.

work is in the vein of Dekker.' He attributes the gaiety and lightness of touch of parts of Brome to this influence.'

But all this is very vague, and easily overestimated. I doubt whether we should have heard so much of the influence of Dekker had he not written the prefatory verses quoted above. However, if we may safely attribute to Dekker the occasional un-Jonsonian touches of idealism or of pathos that we find in Brome, there are a few that are worth pointing out. In the Northern Lass (4. 3, p. 75), Constance Holdup, a harlot, laments the wretched condition of her class in a way that is strongly reminiscent of the Honest Whore, though there is no verbal parallel. Another bit of pathos, the most effective in all the plays, is the scene in the Damoiselle3 in which Phillis, a poore Wench,' talks of her mother and her lost father. This is the sort of thing that Jonson's harsher nature never attempted. The first two scenes of the Sparagus Garden have the easy humor that Schelling mentions, and some of the finer imagination of Dekker in the passages in praise of love and poetry. This sort of thing, as Bayne says, makes a strange contrast with the rough Jonsonian manner and crass realism of the greater part of Brome.1

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It is a curious fact that the part of Dekker's work that shows most definitely in Brome is his worst. Northward Ho and Westward Ho, by Dekker and Webster, are the two plays that are most like Brome's, and that represent the lowest depths of grossness in Jacobean drama. These two comedies of manners are quite the same in type as Brome's, but without the humor-studies. They

1 Cambridge Hist. Eng. Lit. 6. 255--6.

2 Especially Pt. 1, sc. 9. Dekker's Works (ed. Pearson, 2. 50–54). 3 4. 1, pp. 443 ff.

4 The dialogue and jokes of the scenes at the shop of Candido in the Honest Whore, Pt. 1, are in a manner that Brome frequently tries, but there is no direct influence apparent.

have very complicated plots, but not so well managed as Brome's. They are totally without a regular organic development of one theme: Northward Ho, especially, is a string of episodes. Brome's skill in construction can not come from Dekker. The influence, I think, consists in the fondness for bourgeois intrigue as a dramatic theme, hints for the plot of the City Wit, and a similarity in a few characters.

In Westward Ho there are four intrigues of citizens' wives with city gallants. This I have already mentioned as not only a favorite theme in Brome's plots, but one which he alludes to constantly.1 The underplots of the Mad Couple well Matched, Sparagus Garden, and New Exchange, have characters that find their duplicates in both these comedies of manners of Dekker and Webster. The treatment of this theme and these characters, moreover, is much closer to that of Northward Ho and Westward Ho than that of the few cases found in Jonson.2

The last mentioned of these plays is, I think, a much closer source for the City Wit than Timon of Athens, which Professor Koeppel has proposed as the original. Justiniano, the merchant, through his jealousy causes his wife to leave him. He then, under pretense of going on a journey, goes about the city disguised as a writingmaster or a collier, makes a great deal of trouble for his faithless friends and neighbors, and finally discovers his wife's fidelity. The merchant's character might well have formed the basis for the character of Crasy in the City Wit, and, though the motives are different, the general scheme of a man revenging himself by tricking

1 See above, p. 65.

2 See above, p. 89. Thomann (Der Eifersüchtige Ehemann im Drama der Elisabethanischen Zeit, Halle, 1908) gives a catalogue of examples in the miracle plays, Heywood's interludes, Lyly, Greene, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, etc.

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his friends through a series of disguises makes the resemblance quite close. The fact that several of Crasy's tricks are designed to test the fidelity of his wife adds something further to the evidence. Finally, this is the play which Fleay and Bayne agree shows most markedly the easy humor' of Dekker. However, the very successful treatment of a plot of trickery in the matter of structure, as I have already suggested,1 is due to a study of the Alchemist.

The most tangible indication of the borrowing of a specific character is the similarity of the wittol, Saleware, in the Mad Couple well Matched, to Candido, the husband in the underplot of the Honest Whore, Part I. Saleware refuses to be jealous of his wife, who tries her best to make him; Candido refuses to lose his patience, though his wife lays various plots against him to force him to show some resentment.2 Another type of character that Brome uses, which is a great favorite with Dekker, is the loud, coarse-grained, but good-natured harlot, or bawd. For instance, Bettie and Francisca, who attack each other with torrents of Billingsgate in Covent Garden Weeded (4. 1), and then are easily reconciled, are quite like such characters in Dekker.

I should also mention the cony-catching underplot of Northward Ho as a possible source for the similar theme in Brome and his contemporaries. Dol, a harlot, with the help of several men friends, cheats some foolish fellows of their money by pretending to offer herself as a wealthy ward looking for a match. This, of course, is not so close a parallel to the favorite situation of late drama, the tricking a dull country fellow who wishes to

1 See above, p. 55.

2 Faust (op. cit., p. 62) works out the similarity at length. As I came to the same conclusion before reading Faust, I am convinced that this is an undoubted case of the influence of Dekker.

become a gay city blade, as is the Alchemist, though the difference of dates, 1605 and 1610, gives Dekker and Webster the priority. However, the possible influence of Northward Ho on the Alchemist is worth suggesting. The similarity in character of the two Dols, and the fact that two of the victims in Northward Ho speak foreign languages, and one in the Alchemist pretends that he does also, with the resulting confusion, strengthen the impression that Jonson may have borrowed this incident. Brome's introduction of Swatzenburg, the 'glorious German,' a French cavalier, and a brave Spaniard, as suitors for the advertised maidenhead of Victoria, the famous Novella,' in the play so called, may have been in imitation of Dekker's Hans von Belch, the Dutchman, and Captain Jenkyns, the Welshman, or of Jonson's Sir Pertinax Surly, in the guise of a Spaniard.

MINOR INFLUENCES

Beside these three important sources of influence, there are a few possibilities of borrowing from most of the other contemporaries. Some of these are extremely doubtful. Eight of the cases that have been indicated by various scholars seem worth pointing out. To these I have added eleven more.

From Massinger Brome may have received four hints, or at best, possible reminiscences. The genius who appears in the Queen's Exchange, Act 4, to encourage Anthynus, and help along the action by dumb show, may have been suggested by the good and bad spirits who follow two of the characters in the Virgin Martyr.1 There is a general resemblance between parts of the main situations of the New Academy and of the City Madam. This consists in the plotting of a landless scoundrel with the steward of his wealthy brother to get money away 1 Ward, op. cit., 3. 129, note 4.

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