Dekker wrote, in conjunction with Webster, 'Westward Ho,' Northward Ho,' and 'Sir Thomas Wyatt'; with Middleton, 'The Roaring Girl'; with Massinger, 'The Virgin Martyr'; and with Ford, 'The Sun's Darling' and 'The Witch of Edmonton.' Among the products of Dekker's old age, 'Match Me in London' is ranked among his half-dozen best plays, and 'The Wonder of a Kingdom' is fair journeyman's work.
One of the most versatile of the later Elizabethans,--prolonging their style and ideas into the new world of the Stuarts,--Dekker was also prominent as pamphleteer. He first appeared as such in 1603, with 'The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is showed the picture of London lying sicke of the Plague,' a vivid description of the pest, which undoubtedly served Defoe as model in his famous book on the same subject. The best known of his many pamphlets, however, is 'The Gul's Horne Booke,' a graphic description of the ways and manners of the gallants of the time. These various tracts are invaluable for the light they throw on the social life of Jacobean London.
Lastly, Dekker as song-writer must not be forgotten. He had the genuine lyric gift, and poured forth his bird-notes, sweet, fresh, and spontaneous, full of the singer's joy in his song. He also wrote some very beautiful prayers.
Varied and unequal as Dekker's work is, he is one of the hardest among the Elizabethans to classify. He at times rises to the very heights of poetic inspiration, soaring above most of his contemporaries, to drop all of a sudden down to a dead level of prose. But he makes up for his shortcomings by his whole-hearted, manly view of life, his compassion for the weak, his sympathy with the lowly, his determination to make the best of everything, and to show the good hidden away under the evil.
"Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,"--
these he knew from bitter experience, yet never allowed them to overcloud his buoyant spirits, but made them serve his artistic purposes. Joyousness is the prevailing note of his work, mingled with a pathetic undertone of patience.
HOW A GALLANT SHOULD BEHAVE HIMSELF IN POWLES WALK[49]