David McInnis ed. Old Fortunatus by Thomas Dekker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, The Revels Plays, 2020. Pp 253.

Emma Smith's review of Old Fortunatus by Thomas Dekker, edited by David McInnis.

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

“Quilted with Mighty Words to Lean Purpose”

This chapter zeroes in on the sartorial practices of the aptly named Jack Dapper from Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Taking up new materialism and ecocritical theory, it demonstrates that through his sartorial extravagance, especially his interest in feathers, and his related fiscal profligacy, Jack resists restrictions upon his sexuality as well as the patriarchal imperatives of wealth accumulation. Furthermore, his superficial embodiment fosters in him, as well as the audience, an awareness that new pleasures attend upon reimagining one’s relationship to nonhuman matter. The chapter also accesses the multiple, partially realized avenues for identification and desire that a text opens up through a minor character in a play whose efforts at characterization, plot, and theme seem focused elsewhere. Such a shift in focus to what seems peripheral and precarious can form the basis of a more nuanced account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory ways that sartorial extravagance could be viewed in the period.

Paul’s Work

This chapter highlights the fabric of the cathedral and the protracted debates surrounding its repairs. A narrative is constructed of the efforts of cathedral renovation in the sixty years after the 1561 burning of the spire, focusing especially on the Jacobean period when royal and public interest in the condition of the church gained ground. While secular writers such as Henry Farley and Thomas Dekker demonstrate the cultural interest in the renovation, visual representations of the cathedral serve as reminders of the Cathedral’s prominence in London. King James paid special attention to Paul’s and commissioned a sermon by Bishop John King arguing for its repairs, laying the important groundwork for the massive renovation project of the 1630s.

Paul’s Nave

This chapter provides an overview of the architectural features, uses, and users of the nave, with discussion of its physical condition. It also discusses the occupations of the nave—the various church-related and secular practices and professions that were carried out in the interior, and emphasizes the commercial activities, including those of labourers, lawyers, clergy, serving men, and criminals. The chapter looks at the newsmongers and walkers of Paul’s, including John Chamberlain, and attempts to reframe the rituals of their ‘walk’ as purposeful rather than idle. Several literary texts, including those by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, are discussed. Further, consideration is given to how the nave’s architecture and material features, principally the tombs and monuments influenced the practices by both restricting and affording human agency, all the while affirming the importance of the dead to the living in Paul’s.

Bewitching Power: The Virtuosity of Gender in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr

This paper considers Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s play The Virgin Martyr (1622) in light of scientific notions of the female body circulating during the period to illustrate how the performance of martyrdom manifested a performance of gender virtuosity, elevating it to the status of the supernatural or divine. Like well-known female martyrs from the period, such as Anne Askew, the protagonist, Dorothea, takes on characteristically male attributes: she assumes the role of the soldier and defies scientific understanding of the female gender by sealing her phlegmatic “leaky” body and exuding divine heat that defies her cold, wet “nature”. The theatricality of gender reversals in the play, from Dorothea and other characters, illustrates how the act of martyrdom could be interpreted not only as a miraculous performance, a “witness” to the divine, but one built on sensational, seemingly impossible performances of gender.

Ben Jonson's Reception of Lucian

Throughout his career Ben Jonson drew variously upon Lucian, whom he encountered in the mythographies as well as in several Greek and Latin editions he owned. Jonson's receptions take the form of glancing reminiscence in the masques, as Lucian supplies mythological decoration and literary conceit. They appear as transformative allusion in Cynthia's Revels, which draws upon several satirical Dialogues of the Gods, and in The Staple of News, which re-appropriates a favorite satirical dialogue, Timon, the Misanthrope, to satirize the greed of the news industry. Jonson practices an extended and creative imitatio of Lucian's fantastic moon voyages (A True Story and Icaromenippus) in his much neglected News from the New World Discovered in the Moon. And, likewise, Jonson reworks Lucian extensively for the action of Poetaster: The Carousal supplies the lascivious banquet of 4.5, and Lexiphanes, the humiliating purge of Crispinus. Jonson's rich engagement with Lucian comes to a climax in Volpone, which borrows directly from The Dream, and several Dialogues of the Dead. Here whimsical ancient satire enables stern moral allegory. Responding to Poetaster in Satiro-mastix, Thomas Dekker has Captain Tucca rebuke Horace (i.e. Ben Jonson) by sarcastically calling him “Lucian.” Jonson, no doubt, took the proffered insult as the highest compliment.

The theatrical adaptation of Merry More

The early modern play Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, takes an ecumenical viewpoint of the play's Catholic hero in order to conform to the expectations of the Master of the Revels and to appeal to a cross-confessional audience. The playwrights carefully construct the play within the confines of censorship by centering the play's action around More's dynamic personality instead of giving a full exposition of historical plot. More's personality and famous wit function together as a means for diverting attention away from the controversy surrounding More's silent opposition to Henrician policy while subtly validating his martyrdom. The argument of this article examines the adaptation of the play's ideologically diverse source material, the playwrights’ use of martyrological conventions, and the subtle traces of Erasmian allusion and recusant rhetoric in its reading of the play.