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The Position of Thomas Dekker in Jacobean Prison Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Phillip Shaw
Phillip Shaw*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

This study is of the position of Thomas Dekker in a literary genre, prison literature, which comprises descriptions in prose works, poems, and plays, of one or more of London's fourteen prisons. The study seeks to establish the canon, chronology, and significance of Dekker's contributions to this literature, and, at the same time, it undertakes to overcome the absence, in literary and social history, of an examination of penal writings published during the reign of James I of England. The genre first flourished in the Jacobean period, and Thomas Dekker was its earliest principal writer. He wrote or collaborated upon about half of the entire output of Jacobean prison works; he composed all of his prison writings, with the possible exception of one, throughout the course of more than twenty years; and he cast the material into the four literary types of which this genre is composed: rogue exposures, dramatic settings, reformatory essays, and “characters.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 1947 , pp. 366 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 Dekker listed the London prisons as follows: “Upon one side of the Thames stand, the white Lion, the Kings-Bench, the Marshal-sea, the Clinke, the Counter in South-warke. On the other side, the Gate-house, Ludgate, New-gate, Wood-street Counter, Poultrey Counter, Finsbury, New-prison, Lobs-pound at the hole at Saint Katherines. Fourteen Golgathaes environing one City!” English Villanies (London, 1632), sig. J3v. The fourteenth prison, which is omitted in this list, is Bridewell. John Taylor catalogued eighteen London jails, including the Tower, three local lockups, and the fourteen referred to by Dekker; The Praise and Vertve of a Jayle and Jaylors (1623), in All the Workes of Iohn Taylor (London, 1630), pp. 130-131.

2 Descriptions of London jails appear in histories of London and in special studies of prisons, but they draw largely from post-Jacobean writers. W. Carew Hazlitt's “A Tentative Catalogue of Our Prison Literature, Chronologically Arranged” (Bibliography, vi [August, 1884], 71) is neither complete nor selective for the Jacobean period.

3 The Black Book was registered on March 22, 1604, and was published the same year. The “T.M.” who signed the Epistle to the reader is usually identified as Thomas Middleton. It is likely that Dekker helped him with this tract. The two authors had already worked together upon Caesar's Fall in 1602 (Walter W. Greg, Henslowe's Diary [London: A. H. Bullen, 1904, 1908], ii, 259), and, as Dekker himself stated, upon The Magnificent Entertainment (ed. R. H. Shepherd, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker [London: John Pearson, 1873] i, 321), which appeared a week before The Black Book was entered in the Register. Furthermore, in 1604, Dekker and Middleton were collaborating upon the first part of The Honest Whore (Greg. op. cit., ii, 260), and perhaps upon other works. Frank P. Wilson noted “striking resemblances” among four tracts of 1604: two by “T.M.,” Father Hubberd's Tales and The Black Book, and two anonymous pamphlets probably largely by Dekker, Newes from Graves-end and The Meeting of Gallants; The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. xix. If Dekker aided Middleton with The Black Book, he may have contributed the entire second part of the tract. Later, he cast revelations about thieves in the same mold, in “the Diuels last Will and Testament,” a chapter in A Strange Horse-Race; ed. Alexander B. Grosart, The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, The Huth Library (1884-1886), iii, 351-355.

4 Cf. The Black Dog of Newgate (c. 1596) by Luke Hutton.

5 One of the two Sheriffs of London administered the Poultry Counter; the other managed the Wood-Street Counter, (“Compter” is the preferred spelling now), each jail being so named because there the officers “accounted to the suitors for the debts they had received for them”; Sir. Henry Ellis, ed. The Obituary of Richard Smythe, Secondary of The Poultry Compter, London … 1627-1674; Camden Society, xliv (1849), vi, n. 2. Stow recorded that sixteen sergeants with an assistant (“yeoman”) apiece were appointed to serve each London Sheriff; The Survey of London, ed. Ernest Rhys, Everyman's Library (1912), p. 475. According to The Black Book, a sergeant sometimes watched ten consecutive hours to make one arrest, peering from behind the latticework of an alehouse (p. 38,—a vocational characteristic Dekker was fond of alluding to. The yeoman was feared more than his superior officer, according to Dekker, because the debtor was able to recognize the latter from his characteristic buff-leather jerkin and his mace, whereas he could not identify the former, who wore no distinctive dress; The Overburian Characters, ed. W. J. Paylor, Percy Reprints, xiii (1936), 88-90. Thus in West-Ward Hoe, a yeoman first corrals a debtor before his superior officer makes the arrest; ed. Shepherd, ii, 316. It is evident from a sharp protest by Fennor that sergeants sometimes disguised themselves craftily in clothes characteristic of other vocations; The Counter's Commonwealth, ed. A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: George Routledge & Son, 1930), pp. 456-457. The salutation that sergeants snarled at debtors as they clapped them roughly on the shoulder was, as recorded by Fennor: “Sir, we arrest you in the King's Majesty's name, and we charge you to obey us” (ibid., p. 429); hence, John Earl remarked that the sergeant made men hate the King's name worse than the devil's (Micro-cosmographie, ed. Gwendolen Murphy, Golden Cockerel Press [1928], p. 70).

6 Ed. A. H. Bullen, The Works of Thomas Middleton (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1885-1886), viii, 39-41. The legal fees are from Fennor, op. cit., p. 461.

7 F. G. Fleay's ascription to Dekker of most of the play, and his suggestion that the drama was composed shortly after the first part, which was registered November 9, 1604, are generally accepted; A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642 (London: Reeves & Turner, 1891), I, 132. Cf. Bullen, op. cit., i, xxv, and Mary Hunt, Thomas Dekker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), pp. 95-96.

8 Two scenes of Thomas Heywood's The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (1599) are laid in Marshalsea prison (ii.ii.iv.), and the closing episode of Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour (1600) takes place in the Counter.

9 Survey, ed. Rhys., pp. 351-352.

10 In the summer of 1597, for example, the Privy Council ordered fifty masterless men sent from Surry to Bridewell to be clothed and equipped suitably for war and then shipped out; Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Appendix i (1879), 657. Earlier that year, when Sir Walter Raleigh provided money for equipping an army, Bridewell was used as one of the supply centers; Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L'Isle & Dudley, Hist. Mss. Comm., ii (1934), 268. Fleay draws attention to the impressment into the navy in 1603, of six hundred vagabonds, and he suggests that the reference to “1600” soldiers in the play is to this incident (Biographical Chronicle, i, 132), but it is more likely that the figure expresses in round numbers one like that cited in the broadside quoted infra, n. 11.

11 Ed. Shepherd, ii, 166-168. An Easter broadside of 1610, begging alms for Bridewell states that during the previous year, 1697 wandering soldiers and other vagrants had been sent home, many with clothing and provisions, while at present, 130 men, women, and children were being maintained in “Arts and occupations, and other seruile workes and labours,” the children being held until their apprenticeship period expired and they became freemen; ed. H. L. Collmann, Ballads and Broadsides Chiefly of the Elizabethan Period, Roxburghe Club (1912), p. 222.

12 Ed. Shepherd, ii, 175.

13 “The Journal of Sir Roger Wilbraham,” ed. Harold Spencer Scott, The Camden Miscellany, x (1902), 47.

14 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Bon. The Marquis of Salisbury, Hist. Mss. Comm. (1883-1941), xi, 270.

15 Ibid., p. 507.

16 Fourth Report, Hist. Mss. Comm., App., i (1874), 55.

17 Seventh Report, Hist. Mss. Comm., App., i (1879), 529.

18 Twelfth Report, Hist. Mss. Comm., App., iv (1888), 429.

19 Memorandum by John Stow, ed. James Gairdner, in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, Camden Society, N.S. xxviii (1880), 127.

20 Reliquiae Wottonianae (London: Tooke, 1685), pp. 402-403.

21 Acts of the Privy Council of England, New Series (London, 1890-1933), viii, 365.

22 Ibid., xvi, 205.

23 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (London, 1856-1870), August 25, 1618.

24 State Papers, March 12, 1625.

25 State Papers, passim. Thus, a wry comment about a young pickpocket in Middleton's Your Five Gallants is more realistic than Dekker's observations: “And as for Bridewell, that will make him worse; 'a will learn more knavery there in one week than will furnish him and his heirs for a hundred year”; ed. Bullen, iii, 195.

26 Cal. of Mss. of Salisbury, xi, 270.

27 Note, for example, a lugubrious letter of 1596, penned in Bridewell by a suspected Catholic: I was committed here, he wrote, where “they kepte me eight monthes in the hemp house woorke, wher every dayes taske is to bunch five and twentye pounds of hempe, or els to have no meat. And then I was chayned nyne weekes to a blocke and a month besides with it and five monthes without it in Little Ease and one of the turrets which is as bad, and fiyve weekes I went in the myll and ten dayes I stood with bothe my handes stretched above my heade againste the wall in the standinge stocks.” When he refused to work on a holy day, they gave him no food. And, he continued, “for my freedom and release from the hemp house woorke and such lyke, I hade twentye lashes of the whypp upon the trosse.” During his confimenent he was “in commons with the catholike lay men, eighte of us together at the charge of ten grotes a man the weeke, with very slender commons throughe the dearth ther of things, and oppressions withall upon us.” Twelfth Report, Hist. Mss. Comm., App., iv, 335-336.

When the titular heroine of The Dutch Courtezan is finally committed to Bridewell, that institution is properly described as the “severest prison,” the “extreamest whip and Jaile”; ed. H. Harvey Wood The Plays of John Marston, ii (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1938), 134.

28 Acts of Privy Council, xxii, 41-42.

29 Rooms in Bridewell were leased to artificers who could employ the institution's orphans as apprentices; William Henry Overall and Henry Charles Overall, A nalytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia (London, 1878), p. 170. In 1614, the mayor reported that the vagrants swept off London's streets into Bridewell had not been punished but put to work (ibid., p. 358); and in 1630, James and the Lords ordered some Catholic churches in Ireland “turned into Bridewells, working houses of labour and correction”; Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Hist. Mss. Comm. (1900), p. 112.

30 The two-penny ward received its name from the daily charge there for a bed and pair of sheets; in the Knight's ward the fee was eight pence. The rental in the third pay-ward, the Master's side, was still higher. Fennor, op. cit., pp. 475-476. There was, of course, no charge for the poor ward, “the Hole.” A neat comparison of the accommodations in three of these wards is the remark of a character in George Wilkins' The Miseries of Inforced Marriage that there is a featherbed in the Master's side, a flockbed in the Knight's ward, and a strawbed in “the Hole”; ed. J. P. Collier [Dodsley's], A Select Collection of Old Plays, v (London: S. Prowett, 1825), 43.

31 Ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, iv (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 603-609, 612-618. From early in Elizabeth's reign the two London Counters held Puritan recusants. For example, Stow recorded that in 1567, eight Anabaptists were committed to the Poultry Counter; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed. Gairdner, p. 143.

32 Ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), pp. 234-237. A remark in The Pvritaine may be a playful rebuke of the author of the sergeant's episode in The Black Book. One sergeant says to another: “tis Naturall in vs, you know to hate Scholars, naturall: besides, they will publish our imperfections, knaueryes, and Conuayances vpon Scaffolds and Stages”; p. 234.

33 i.iv. and iii.v.

34 Ed. Brooke, p. 225. A stench pervaded the pay-chambers as well as the common ward, as is evident from a letter by a Knight there, writing “from a noisome prison” (Cal. of Mss. of Salisbury, iv, 436), but unless ordered to be “close,‘ ‘ the paying inmates lived rather freely. One prisoner wrote of walking in the garden every day (ibid., x, 281), a second stated that he played ”bowls“ there (State Papers, October 23, 1601), a sick inmate was permitted to go to Bath for a vacation (Acts of Privy Council, viii, 367), a prisoner's wife was allowed access to her husband (ibid., ix, 94), and a knight referred to his transfer from the Tower to Marshalsea Prison, as leaving his palace in London for his country house in Southwark. John Forster, Sir John Eliot: a Biography, 2d ed. (London: Longman [etc.], 1872), ii, 302.

35 Ed. Brooke, p. 239. The considerable extent to which the prisoners in the common wards of London's jails depended upon entreated alms is evident from the following rebuke by Dekker in A Rod for Run-awayes, of wealthy citizens who fled to the country to escape the plague in London: “The distressed in Ludgate, the miserable soules in the Holes of the two Counters, the afflicted in the Marshallseas, the Cryers-out for bread in the King's Bench and White Lyon, how shall these be sustained? These must languish and dye”; ed. Grosart, iv, 287. The poor prisoners of the Marshalsea and King's Bench, received meager alms by statute from parishes in the country. In 1599, the city of Exeter, for example, donated one pound, and, in 1615, another city contributed two pounds; Reports on the Records of the City of Exeter, Hist. Mss. Comm. (1916), p. 68; Tenth Report, Hist. Mss. Comm., App., ii (1885), 110. For a description of the manner in which the parish prison-tax was collected, see William Lambard's The Daties of Constables (London, 1610), pp. 30, 33. The poor inmates also benefited from bequests (e.g. Sir Thomas Gresham's testament, ed. John Gough Nichols and John Bruce in Wills from Doctors' Commons, Camden Society, lxxxiii [1843], 61) and from long-term lègacies (e.g. a quarterly bequest of bread for ten years; Inquisitions Post Mortem, British Record Society, xxxvi [1908], 47).

36 A petition among the State Papers for 1595 (?) reveals how effectively the “some” creditors referred to here agitated against the special power of this Commission. The petitioners, poor debtors in the King's Bench Prison and the Fleet, complained to Secretary Cecil that whereas the Commission had labored dutifully, “divers ill-disposed persons” had employed the statutes of praemunire so effectively to “grievously molest, vex, and sue” the Commissioners, that the latter refused to continue their work until the Queen granted them full dispensation against these Statutes. Cf. Cal. of Mss. of Salisbury, vii, 254. The authority of the Prison Commission was under fire from 1586, the year its patent was granted; State Papers, September and November 10. In the play No-Body and Some-Body (1592), three prison keepers declare that the number of debtors held by them in indefinite confinement is, respectively, one hundred (in one of the Counters), another hundred (in the other Counter [?]), and two hundred (in the King's Bench [?]); ed. John S. Farmer, Student's Facsimile (1913), sig.D3v. The evil of the unrelieved debtor did not appear first, of course, during Elizabeth's reign. As early as the time of Henry VIII, Robert Brinkelow pointed out that some debtors had been held in prison for six or seven years by heartless creditors; The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, xxii (1874), 28.

37 Patent of November 11, 1618; Comp. Thomas Rymer, Foedera, 2d ed., xvii (London: J. Tonson, 1727), 117.

38 James' first Parliament passed two consecutive bills to curb the double evil: “An Acte for Recoverie of Small Debtes, and releevinge of poor debtors in London” (1 Jac. 1, c. 14) and “An Act for the better relief of the Creditors against such as will become Bankrupts” (1 Jac. 1, c. 15). Neither was adequate. The latter was the third statutory attempt to protect creditors, but not the last. After a proclamation of August, 1618, was necessary to evoke the statutes against bankrupts, a fourth such act was passed in 1624. As for the former, the act for the relief of debtors, James' first Parliament continued to debate it (Journals of the House of Lords, ii, 317, 364, 389, 391; Journals of the House of Commons, i, 281, 290), until it superseded the bill with a second statute (3 Jac. 1, c. 15), in spite of the warning of a member of the Lower House, in March 1606, that the act would encourage political bankruptcy (The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, 1606-1607, ed. David Harris Willson [Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1931], p. 94). Six months later, The Seuen deadly Sinnes of London was entered in the Stationers' Register.

39 Rymer, op. cit., 117. During the fifteen years that the patent awaited renewal, the royal Council was not entirely inactive toward debtors held by stubborn creditors. Cf. Cal. of Mss. of Salisbury, xvii, 264; Acts of Privy Council, 1616-1617, pp. 120-121, 190; State Papers, 1618, June 25, July 11, et al.

40 Ed. Grosart, ii, 17-20.

41 Stow recorded that the gatehouse was opened in 1378, to provide refuge for indebted London freemen. In 1463, for the further relief of city bankrupts, an extension was built with spacious walking space below the lodgings and on the roof, and pipes were laid to conduct drinking water to the prison. Finally, in 1586, the façade of the gate was re-edified; Survey, ed. Rhys, pp. 37-38. William Rowley dramatized the circumstances of the fifteenth century improvement of Ludgate, in New Wonder, v.

42 The Belman of London, ed. Grosart, iii, 81.

43 In English Villanies, Dekker scored the rioting of voluntary bankrupts in “that abused Sanctuary of Ludgate,” in greater detail: “Here they play at Bowles, lye in faire chambers within the Rule, fare like Dives, laugh at Lazarus, can walke up and down many times, by Habeas Corpus, & ieere their Creditors: there they lye Barricadoed (within King Luds Bulwarke) against Gun-shot: there they strut up and downe the Prison (like Magnificoes in Venice), on the Rialta brave in cloathes, spruce in Ruffes, with Gold-wrought night-caps on their' heades. They feed deliciously, plenteously, voluptuously; have excellent Wines to drinke, handsome Wives to lye with when they please, who come in, not like the Wives of Prisoners, but of the Best and wealthiest Citizens.” Sig. J4v. English Villanies further records that these fraudulent prisoners lived merrily also in the Fleet and the King's Bench. Villanies Discouered describes their revelling in the latter prison; sigs. H4v-J1.

44 Ed. Grosart, ii, 69-70, 72-73.

45 According to A Petition (London, 1622), the statutes legalizing the imprisonment of debtors—the principal law was passed in 1533—were contrary to the Magna Charta; sigs. B1v.-B2v. On the Continent, debtors could not be detained in jail for more than a year, A Petition declares, and, moreover, a dowry for their families was taken out of the defaulted assets before the creditors' claims were satisfied; sig. E2.

46 Ed. Greg, Henslowe's Diary, I, 83. The paltry sum of two pounds by which Henslowe was able to have Dekker discharged from prison, indicates that Dekker could not have had the means to live in a pay-ward. Almost a year later, Henslowe provided three and one-half pounds to discharge him again; ibid., pp. 101, 161.

47 Ed. Grosart, ii, 45-46. Dekker often alluded to the inefficiency of the ward halberdiers —e.g., ibid., p. 67; The Gvls Horne-booke, ed. Gosart, ii, 262-263; West-Ward Hoe, ed. Shepherd, ii, 361—and in an incident of Lanthorne and Candle-light he revealed how easily they were duped (ed. Grosart, m, 270-271). A similar episode appears in The Dutch Courtezan, ed. Wood, ii, 120 ff. The country constable and watch were no less stupid than their London cousins, to judge from the literature—e.g., The Life and Death of the Merry Deuill of Edmonton, ed. William Amos Abrams (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942), pp. 252-253, and Shakespeare's Dull, Elbow, and Dogberry; cf. Louise D. Frasure, “Shakespeare's Constables,” Anglia, lviii (October, 1934), 384-391. It is clear, on the other hand, that these billmen sometimes terrorized persons they caught out after curfew—e.g., Dekker's A Knights Coniuring, ed. Grosart, v, 239, and “The Gull, and the Domineering Constable,” The Night-Rauen, in The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, Hunterian Club (1880), ii, 11—and they took bribes—e.g., Wit in A Constable, in The Plays and Poems of Henry Glapthorne, i (London: John Pearson, 1874), 218, 225 ff., and see Fennor's disclosures, discussed infra. Two published contemporary accounts describing the obligations of ward-police are William Lambard's The Dvties of Constables and the London Constable's oath of office in Stowe's Survey (1633 ed., p. 687).

48 Ed. Grosart, ii, 65-66.

49 No doubt has been cast on Mary Hunt's logical ascription to Dekker of all but the “Jests”; Thomas Dekker, p. 134. The subordination of Dekker's name on the title page should not be taken to imply that his part in the collaboration was minor. The prison portion of this work was not edited carefully. The title page omits the second part of the caption of the last chapter—“A Paradox in praise of Sergiants, and of a Prison”—and the material in this chapter and in the previous one is presented in reverse of the order promised (ed. Grosart, II, 343). The entry in the Stationers' Register is erroneous: 'Tests of Cocke Watt… and a paradox in praise of servantes“; ed. Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554-1640 (London, 1875-1877), iii, 158. Perhaps Dekker was confined at the time. A sketch in the first person of a poor scholar in the Poultry Counter, penned with an undertone of pain and resignation to adversity, suggests immediate personal experience, and resembles two later self-portraits by Dekker as a prisoner: Villanies Discouered, (J1v-J4v, passim), and Dekker his Dreame (ed. Grosart, iii, 7, 11).

50 An earlier tract where a prison section introduces rogue exposures is The Black Dog of Newgale (c. 1596), which was written in Newgate by the condemned rascal Luke Hutton. The first part, a poetic dream vision begins in hell and concludes realistically with Hutton's awakening in Newgate's “limbo,” the dungeon for the condemned. It bitterly reveals, on the one hand, the rapacity of the Newgate officials toward prisoners of means, and, on the other, their neglect of poor inmates, some forty starving creatures in filthy, noisome wards, lying on the bare floor surrounded with countless rats, who fed upon dying victims before they were fully dead. The second part, a prose dialogue, reveals that certain persons associated with Newgate employed general warrants to threaten to imprison former inmates of the jail on suspicion and then collect lucrative bribes from them for their release. Although innocent, the victims were willing to pay because during their detention in Newgate awaiting trial, they would have spent on prison fees more than the amount of the bribe.

51 Luke Hutton had ridiculed the belief in a canine apparition at Newgate as “fond imagination” (ed. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 278) but the legend must have been revived in 1603, when two plays (now lost) were acted, with the creature as titular hero. Five years after Dekker's treatment, Hutton's tract was re-issued with a new title somewhat embellishing the legend: The Discovery of a London Monster Called the Black Dog of Newgate.

52 Ed. Grosart, n, 299-303.

53 Ibid., pp. 337-343.

54 That country heirs, who, unlike their younger brothers, did not have to support themselves, matriculated at a London Counter to be schooled, was a stock joke among Dekker and his friends. Dekker stated so twice in this tract (pp. 352, 358), again in The Roaring Girl (ed. Shepherd iii, 188), and once more in a contribution to the Overburian collection (ed. Paylor, p. 84). Middleton repeated the joke in The Phoenix and Michaelmas Term (ed. Bullen, i, 192, 285), and Fennor used it in his prison tract (ed. Judges, p. 430). Earlier a third friend had playfully developed the idea at some length in Strange News; ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nash, i (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1910), 310.

55 This was the best quarters, where, according to Fennor, ten pence was the charge for dinner; op. cit., p. 474.

56 The potations differ according to the rank of the officers. The sergeants drink burnt sack and sugar, whereas their yeomen consume muscatel and “bruised” eggs.

57 Ed. Grosart, n, 343-359.

58 The portraits are not strictly “characters.” They are individual, personal, and diffuse, but the description of sergeants (pp. 235-237) has the rhapsodic conceits and flippant witticisms of the Overburian “characters.”

59 In “The Dove,” Foure Birdes of Noahs Arke; ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 53-57. (The prayer in the manuscript edited by Grosart [v, 35-36] has a hiatus.)

60 Note, for example, the lugubrious but angry complaint that merit goes begging and learning starves, in Dekker's dedication of If It Be Not Good (acted c. 1610-1612).

61 Ed. Collier, [Dodsley's] Old Plays, vii, 60-61, 97.

62 Pp. 71-74. Because of the scarcity of the food, a new prisoner in the common ward is portrayed as not permitted by the veteran inmates any share in the contents of the basket. He cannot eat the noisome stuff anyway, he declares, but

Hunger will draw me into their fellowship,
To fight and scramble for unsavoury scraps,
That come from unknown hands, perhaps unwash'd:
And would that were the worst; for I have noted,
That naught goes to the prisoners, but such food
As either by the weather has been tainted,
Or children, nay, sometimes full-paunched dogs
Have overlickt: as if men had determin'd
That the worst sustenance which is God's creature's,
However they're abus'd, are good enough
For such vile creatures as abuse themselves. P. 74.

63 On February 22, 1611, the Newgate keeper and others were examined regarding visits of the Spanish Ambassador and some Spanish ladies to Catholics in the prison; State Papers. The next year a correspondent in Louvain to a friend in England communicated the report that the Archbishop of Canterbury had instigated a plot to poison at supper twenty priests in Newgate; Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, Hist. Mss. Comm., iii (1938), 341.

64 Two entries in the Stationer's Register for March, 1612, are for broadsides about several felons executed at Newgate that month; ed. Arber, in, 217.

65 In Villanies Discouered (1616), Dekker stated that he had been confined for more than three years; sig. J1v. In Dekker his Dreame (1620), he described his total period of imprisonment as almost seven years; Grosart, iii, 11.

66 See the Epistle of the tract.

67 Ed. Grosart, iii, 366. In spite of Dekker's denial here of the imputation, “Catch-pole” was his favorite expression for a sergeant. The term, which means “tax-gatherer,” is vocational rather than rhetorical. Dekker used other vocational tag names in West-Ward Hoe, where the two officers are called “Ambush” and “Clutch,” and in The Roaring Girle, where the police characters are Sergeant “Curtilax”—or “short-ax,” a reference to the officer's mace—, and Yeoman “Hanger”—or “support for the ax.” Dekker repeated the latter tag name in the sketch of the yeoman in the Overburian collection, but he twice branded the superior police officer with the rhetorical term “bandog” (ed. Paylor, pp. 88-90). This is an echo of Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry The Fourth, which has Sergeant “Fang” and Yeoman “Snare” as characters, and of EastWard Hoe, where an officer, Sergeant “Fangs,” is described as “the Bandog O' the Counter” (ed. Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, iv, 604). These sheriffs' police were stigmatized by names of other animals: in The Pvritaine, two officers have the corvine names, “Puttock” and “Ravenshaw,” and in The Comedy of Errors, the arresting officer is assailed by such odious terms as “wolf” and “hound” (iv.ii.33-40). Match at Midnight endowed its sergeant with the cognomen, “Carvegut.”

68 Ed. Grosart, iii, 354.

69 Ed. Spenser Society, x (1871), 489-490, 495-499, 502, 504, 507, 519. Later, in The Scholar's Purgatory, Wither described the wretched conditions of solitary confinement he was forced to endure before he was permitted visits from friends; op. cit., xii (1872), 3.

70 Ed. J. Payne Collier, Illustrations of Old English Literature, iii (London: privately printed, 1866), 5.

71 In the tract, Vennar lamented the “late lightnesse of my purse, and now weaknesse of my friends”; p. 17. Although he declared that “I never held my selfe so fatally unfortunate as to expire my last breath in a prison” (p. 9), within three years he died in the common ward of the Wood-Street Counter (Fennor, op. cit., p. 472).

72 Pp. 16-20.

73 A Strappado for the Diuell, ed. J. W. Ebsworth (Boston [Lincolnshire]: Roberts, 1878), p. 208. Brathwaite momentarily touched the literary stream of roguish prison attendants, by dedicating his tract to Counter sergeants, among other grasping persons.

74 Sigs. Q4-Q5.

75 A letter to Edward Alleyn is signed: “Tho. Dekker King's Bench Sept. 12, 1616”; ed. J. Payne Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare Society, i (1841), 131. Dekker's forthright admission to Alleyn of the need for charity can be only from an inmate of the poor ward, and his other descriptions of the conditions of his imprisonment confirm his abject state. Vide supra, n. 64.

76 In the absence of objective evidence, W. J. Paylor's reasons for assigning the six prison characters to Dekker are sound; The Overburian Characters, pp. xxv-xxxi. The rogue tract probably preceded the Overbury work, which very likely appeared late in 1616, for it is the last of three impressions published during that year. As for the anonymity of the portraits, most of the Overburian non-prison “characters” are also anonymous, but if another reason for Dekker's concealment of his identity is required, Paylor's suggestion that Dekker feared retaliation from prison officials is logical; ibid., p. xxxi. The prison section of Villanies Discouered is also “anonymous,” because of the fiction that “the Bellman” received the material from someone who had stolen it from a prisoner; sig. Jl.

77 Vide infra.

78 Gwendolen Murphy did not include Villanies Discouered in her catalogue of works containing “characters,” (A Bibliography of English Character-Books: 1608-1700, Bibliographical Society, suppl. 4 [1925]), probably because of the personal nature of the chapters —Dekker wrote in the second person, plural—and the absence of definition of a single type.

79 Sigs. H4v-K3. Dekker did not give the reason for the stubbornness of the last type of prisoner, but it is clear that he is neither a political bankrupt nor an impoverished debtor. Dekker seems to have had in mind a debtor to a money-lender, because he drew the material for the portrait verbally from Philip Stubbes' description of a usurer. Stubbes had argued angrily that the legal prohibition of an “outrageous” interest of over 10 percent did not morally condone a charge of any interest; The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Frederick J. Furniyall, New Shakespeare Society, Ser. vi, Nos. 4, 6 (1877-1879), 124. Compare Dekker's remarks (sig. K1-K3) with Stubbes' statements that “the Vsurer killeth not one but many, bothe Husband, Wife, Children, seruants, famelie, and all, not sparing any,” which follows the gloss, “vsury equall with murther”; that the usurer is a Turk, not a Christian, and so is denied Salvation (p. 126); that the creditor's assertion about his insolvent debtor, “before I will release him, I will make dice of his bones,” is barbarous; and that “An Vsuruer is worse than a Iew” (p. 127).

80 Sir George Reynell, the master keeper of the King's Bench Prison during Dekker's confinement there, was a particularly odious and cruel person who persecuted his inmates—cf. State Papers, April, 1616 (Supplement); July 2, 1618—until the prisoners mutinied in 1620, the abuse touching off the rebellion being Reynell's barracading a window through which the prisoners had received food free from friends, and from venders, whose prices were a great deal less than Reynell's; Acts of Privy Council, 1619-1621, pp. 269-270.

81 Sigs. K3-L3v. The master keeper held a debtor not for the State but for the creditor and he was answerable to the latter either with the debt or the person owing it. He was free, therefore, to permit the prisoner to leave the jail—to go “abroad.” To protect his investment, however, he had to send one of his men along to guard him. At the King's Bench, according to Geffrey Mynshul, the daily fee paid by the prisoner for such a keeper was four shillings, “cum Cerere et Baccho” (Certaine Characters and Essayes, sig. C8v), the quoted charges being the likely basis of Dekker's complaint. At the Fleet Prison the warden had almost twenty keepers, called “bastons,” whose sole function was to “abroad” with prisoners at a daily charge of twenty shillings; Alexander Harris, The Oeconomy of the Fleet, ed. Augustus Jessopp, Camden Society, n.s xxv (1879), 77. Fennor mentioned Counter daily fees for keepers of twelve and eighteen pence, and he related several tricks played by scheming prisoners upon keepers to escape their custody; Counter's Commonwealth, pp. 479-481. When a debtor escaped, the master keeper was liable for the debt; if the latter was only the leasee of the office, and if he was not able to satisfy the creditor, the landlord of the prison was answerable. The Court of Chancery so ruled in 1612, against the keeper of the King's Bench; Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London: R. Pheney [etc], 1826), n, 510n.; v, 177. Thus a debtor was a commodity valuable enough to be “hijacked” from his keepe and returned upon payment of a ransom, as actually occurred—cf. Acts of Privy Council, ix, 204—and a creditor despairing of repayment from his debtor would hope that the latter escaped. Thus, one creditor stubbornly clung to his suit against the keeper of the King's Bench even after his debtor, who had escaped, had been returned to prison; ibid., 1623-1625, p. 29. There was doubt, anyway, as to what constituted “escape”; cf. Coke, op. cit., ii, 123 ff.

82 Ed. Paylor, pp. 82-92.

83 That Fennor was in the King's Bench Prison is evident from the title of, and a reference in a tract of 1615: A Cast over the Water, by John Taylor, Giuen Gratis to William Fennor, the Rimer, from London to the Kings Bench; in Workes (1630), p. 162.

84 The success of the prison collaboration appears to have induced Dekker in 1617 to prevail upon another fellow-inmate, Mynshul, to issue prison material under the same agreement. Vide infra.

85 Ed. Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 429-431, 434, 455-456. Cf. Iests, ed. Grosart, ii, 340-342, 355-357. Each work also has a passage lauding the orderly regulation of a prison; ed. Judges, p. 485; ed. Grosart, ii, 354.

86 The description appears on pp. 440-441. Dekker was in the common ward serving his fourth year in jail when this tract was registered. What appears to be a similar reference is the remark that in “this infernal island” many “lie wind-bound sometimes four or five years together” (p. 430), which is reminiscent of Dekker's statement made within the previous ten months: “More now then a three-yeeres voyage, haue I made to these infortunate Islands: a long lying haue I had under hatches” (Villanies Discouered, sig. J1v).

87 P. 439. The fourth edition of The Belman of London appeared in 1616. Years later Dekker spoke categorically of his work in similar terms: “I haue beene a Priest in Apollo's Temple, many yeares”; Match Mee in London (1631), ed. Shepherd, iv, 133.

88 The new edition of Dekker's rogue tract, which had been previously issued in 1612, was probably inspired by a proclamation of July 24 for punishing vagabonds. The Counter's Commonwealth was registered in mid-October.

89 The title, The Counter's Commonwealth; or a Voyage Made to an Infernal Island, echoes the description of the prison section of Villanies Discouered: “a discoverie which hee [the author] had made in a long Voyage” (sig. J1), which in turn is like the representation of Lanthorne and Candle-light as “A discouery of Land-villanies he had made in this Island voiage” (ed. Grosart, iii, 302). Also, the following ideas appear in both tracts: mace-bearers are necessary for the security of the commonwealth; in prison a good man may improve, but a bad one may worsen; little smoke emanates from chimnies in Cold Harbor; prison grates admit as many sins as city gates; the difference between the painted outside of an apothecary's gallipot and the sweet medicines within is comparable to that between a man's purse and his person, as far as a keeper is concerned; respectively, The Counter's Commonwealth, pp. 429, 434, 438, 466; 470; Villanies Discouered, sigs. J4, K3-K3v, L3, K4, L3. Finally, Fennor's work twice reveals (pp. 439, 483) specific details of a story told in Dekker's poem, Canaans Calamitie, a third edition of which appeared in 1617. Throughout, the biblical style, the nautical figures, the sudden appearance of clownish humor amid highly serious utterances, the topographical allusiveness, the fervent love of London, and the indignation at sin suggest Dekker's hand.

90 “Garnish” was money exacted from each new prisoner and applied to wine for the jailors and inmates. Fennor paid two shillings to the chamberlain who conducted him to the Master's side, one shilling to provide claret at his first meal with his chamber-fellows, and a half-shilling for claret for the prison attendants, who dined upon the scraps of the table in the Master's side (pp. 431, 433-434). When Fennor's inability to pay for “diet” and lodging in the best ward was disclosed by an authorized search of his purse and he was obliged to transfer to the Knight's ward, he was asked by the steward there to pay one and one-half shilling's “garnish”; not having it, he was assigned to a bed near a stinking privy (pp. 435-437). Fennor complained that the other taxes upon inmates of the best ward were likewise extortionate: 12d for the porter of the Master's side, 10d for dinner, 3s, 6d for discharge from prison, 6d to the bookkeeper, and 6d to the porter of the entrance to the jail; p. 474. There was also a “rental” charge for irons (into which recalcitrant prisoners were placed) and, upon discharge, a fee of three halfpence per pound of the sum for which the debtor was convicted; p. 475. However, Fennor declared, the only required fee allowed by the Counter statutes, which used to be displayed in the prison yard but which had been torn down and forgotten, was a committal fee of four pence (pp. 471-473); and special fees permitted were the charge for lodgings in the Knight's ward, of two pence a night for a single bed and a penny for a double bed to be shared with another, and the one-penny cost in what had become the “two-penny ward” (p. 476). (How arbitrary these extortions were is evident from a Chancery Case of 1602, when one of the contestants was a Counter keeper who had made “scandalous exactions” from his prisoners so as to be able to discharge a private debt; Overall and Overall Analytical Index to … Remembrancia, p. 287.) Nevertheless, Fennor continued, jailors insisted that the fees they demanded were due them by custom; yet when “England's Joy,” Vennar, sued for a warrant for the arrest of the Counter chamberlain who had seized his cloak as “garnish,” the sheriffs did not support the officer and the defendant was constrained to return the cloak to avoid arrest. Likewise, a prisoner in the Poultry Counter successfully threatened his keeper with arrest for extortion. Regardless, Fennor concluded bitterly, the exaction of extortionate fees continued; pp. 471-472, 474.

91 According to this tract, some of the victims of the night police were gentlemen forced to pay almost half a pound in fees in the Master's side for remaining there only one night. To stop this abuse, the mayor had directed that no one brought in by the watch should be placed in the best ward, but after a month or so of observance, the prison officers had ignored the rule. Pp. 474. What is pointed out as another abuse is that, to get more prisoners, Counter keepers urged bailiffs to be vigilant about cheating shopkeepers and gave wine to a beadle as an inducement to keep the watch in his ward wide-awake so as not to overlook any night-walker; p. 479.

92 Pp. 456-465, 476-477, 482.

93 Pp. 466-468. Two sorts of rascals not directly associated with the Counters but scored for populating them are thieving tradesmen abetted by dishonest brokers, and cheating gallants; pp. 441-454.

94 Examples of such bequests are the legacies of Chamberlain (The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, The American Philosophical Society [1939], ii, 633) and of Robert Rogers, who, in 1601, left almost three thousand pounds to charity, part of which was for the relief of poor prisoners in the Counters and several other jails, and part for the liberation of prisoners in execution for no more than twenty nobles (Collmann, Ballads and Broadsides, pp. 228-229). The prisoners circulated printed hand bills among London's rich citizens to invite donations. During Easter of what appears to have been a plague year, some fifty sick and starving wretches in the “Hole” of the Wood Street Counter made such an appeal: A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides (London: J. Lilly, 1867), pp. 16-17.

95 Pp. 483-487.

96 The title of the second edition (1618) is Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners, written by G. M. of Grayes-Inne Gent; ed. 1828 (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co). The title page states that the work is to be sold at two gates of Gray's Inn, and in an Epistle Mynshul thanks his fellow-students for their visits.

97 Mary Hunt reprinted in parallel columns the close borrowings here from Villanies Discouered: “Geffrey Mynshul and Thomas Dekker,” JEGP, xi (April, 1912), 231-243.

98 These details are as follows: a prisoner is like an object of attention in a barber's shop; a cruel creditor is a “Homo” and “Daemon,” whereas a merciful one is blessed by heaven; a prisoner should leave a bedfellow who scorns him in the parlor, although he is familiar with him in another room; a keeper guarding a prisoner “abroad” is like a cur who fawns, but is vicious; Certaine Characters and Essayes, sigs. B2v, B7v-B8, C2v, D; Villanies Discouered, sigs. L1-L1v, K1v-K2, K4v, L3.

99 One “character” borrows closely from Fennor's work; a prison is described as “a little common wealth … it is a famous Citty wherein are all trades.” “It is your Bankrupts banqueting house, where he sits feasting with the sweete meates borrowed from other mens tables, hauing a voluntary disposition neuer to repay them againe. It is your Prodigalls (vltimum refugium)”; it is “Purgatory.” Sigs. A6v, A7; cf. Judges, pp. 485 (bis), 434. One essay and the remaining “character” reveal knowledge of Fennor's tract, as follows: the “entertainment” one receives in prison, which is like hell because the porter is Cerberus and the attendants are furies, is a grasping for “aurum potabile” (sigs. C5-C7; cf. Judges, pp. 430-431, 458); prison visitors are as unreliable as clocks on Shrove Tuesday (sig. C4v; cf. Judges, p. 440) and are like the fair jewels bought at St. Martins' that prove to be of “alchemy” or copper, and the apples of Gomorrah, which have beautiful rinds, but bad insides (sig. C5; cf. Judges, p. 447); a messenger from a prisoner to a prospective visitor is as unpopular as the King's privy seal to a usurer, a sub-poena to a country gentleman, and a sergeant to a gallant (sigs. C4v-C5; cf. Judges, p. 429).

100 Mynshul described his length of confinement as “yet but few months”; sig. A5v. The Epistles clearly imply that Mynshul had not been imprisoned before.

101 The new material comprises two essays created out of a rewriting and an expansion of the next-to-last chapter of the first edition—the last is omitted entirely—and four new essays; Essayes and Characters, pp. 59-82.

102 During his first day in jail, the new inmate was mulcted by the porter at the gate, the chamberlain, his fellow-prisoners—“garnish” for them consisted of two dozen pots of wine and one dozen tobacco-filled pipes—the jailor, the steward, and the head-cook (sigs. C5-CSv). Some two weeks later he was forced to treat the prison attendants to sack in the tavern within “the rule” (the precincts outside the prison within which the prisoners not “close” were permitted to walk). Upon discharge, a prisoner confined on an “action” (awaiting trial) had to pay three half-pence per pound of “action” money, and one held in “execution” (convicted by a court) was charged three pence per pound of “execution” (sigs. C6v-C7). To go “abroad” the prisoner paid for a guard four shillings a day and costs of feeding him; sig. C8v. The fee for walking within “the rule” was six pence; two other exhorbitant charges were six pence for an earthen chamber pot and eight pence for dressing four-pence worth of fish; pp. 85, 88.

103 Pp. 60, 65. In 1575, Elizabeth nominated the Master of the Queen's Bench Prison (State Papers, November 25), and in 1603, James gave the position to someone for thirty-one years, but the next year he named a second, creating two “lives” out of the office (Cal. of Mss. of Salisbury, xvii, 20). State prisoners were particularly profitable since they were accommodated in the better wards and their bills were paid for them—in 1621, for example, for certain State prisoners, the master received £386, 12s, 6d from the Privy Council; Acts. 1621-1632, pp. 4-5.

104 Pp. 72-74.

105 Ed. Rymer, Foedera, xvii, 119. The Commission was directed to function immediately; State Papers, November 11, 1618. In March of that year, apparently in anticipation of renewed activity on the part of poor debtors, one publisher acquired from another the patent to print prisoner's petitions; ed. Arber, iii, 289.

106 It is clear from Dekker his Dreame, entered October 11, 1619, that Dekker had just been released; ed. Grosart, iii, 7, 11. However long his term of confinement, it was only half that of one of his fellow-prisoners; cf. Acts of Privy Council, 1619-1621, p. 28.

107 Two belletristic prison works of the period are poems of 1623; The Praise and Virtue of a Jayle and Jaylors by John Taylor and The Counter-Scuffle by “R.S.” The paradoxical rhetoric of the first and the mock-heroic style of the second make them literary hybrids, but they are not novel in form; verse had already been used for prison material by Hutton, Fennor (ed. Judges, p. 435) and Mynshul (passim). Perhaps prisons were too much of a reality to a public informed by pamphlets of 1618-1624 to find sympathetic readers of “conceited characters”; after Mynshul's “characters” of 1618, none seems to have appeared until Earl included two jail portraits in Micro-cosmographie, 1628, and a third in the 1629 edition; during 1628-1631, fourteen prison “characters” appeared in various collections, respectively, by Earl, “R.M.,” Saltonstall, Brathwaite, and Lupton.

108 The beginnings of the quarrel are recorded in the State Papers (July, 1618; July ?, 1618; August 2, 1619; October 16, 1619) and in the Acts of the Privy Council (1618-1619, pp. 235, 325-326, 335; 1619-1621, pp. 22-23); the prisoners' complaints are epitomized in A Brief Collection of Some Parts of the Exactions Done by A. Barris (1620?) and the Warden's answers and counter-charges are summarized in The Oeconomy of the Fleet (1621?).

109 A petition with an appended “Act for the better and more speedier payment of debt from men imprisoned now and ever hereafter” was sent to the Upper House in 1621; Third Report, Hist. Mss. Comm. (1872), p. 26. The next year a similar suit was published: A Petition (London, 1622). On March 18, 1624, another petition for poor debtors was printed (Fourth Report, Hist. Mss. Comm. [1874], p. 192), and on the same day the Atc referred to above was read before the Lower House (Commons Journals, i, 739); however, it was rejected within a month (ibid., 771). A Petition, like the other two suits, asserted the revolutionary belief, which had not been affirmed as boldly before, that imprisonment for debt was illegal (sigs. A3, Blv-B2v), and made the charge, levied earlier by Stubbes but carefully de-emphasized by Jacobean writers, that most imprisoned debtors were victims of usurers (sig. D3v).

110 As a veteran imprisoned debtor and the foremost champion of abused prisoners, Dekker is a candidate for authorship. The three suits were written with the King's Bench Prison specifically in mind. The first specifies this jail and another; the second refers by name to only the King's Bench (thrice; sigs. D1v-D2v) and the White Lion, which was immediately south of it (sig. D2v); and the third mentions only the King's Bench. A Petition was distilled out of a personal experience, the author declaring, for example, that “the miseries and afflictions of Imprisonment, are inexpressable, and cannot be conceived, by any that haue not felt them” (sig. B4v).

111 Ed. Grosart, iv, 287-288.

112 Frank P. Wilson, “Three Notes on Thomas Dekker,” MLR, xv (January, 1920), 82-84.

113 Sigs. J3-K2. The allegory is obviously descriptive of an actual occasion, but what that may be is not clear. Conscience, who is described as alone having “a Commission from the King of heaven, to call creditors before her,” is begged to do so lest poor debtors die in prison. It is evident from two Jacobean statutes (1 Jac. 1, c. 14; 3 Jac. 1, 3. 15) that the London Corporation's “Court of Requests, called the Courte of Conscience” was not functioning properly, to the disadvantage of small debtors, but since Dekker's complaint is about debtors in execution rather than under action, Conscience must refer to the royal Commission for the relief of distressed debtors in prison, rather than to the Court of Requests. The fact that the supplication is read before London natives at “a worthy citizen's house” suggests some social meeting, and not, for example, a session of the Common Council in the Guildhall. Mary Hunt's unsupported suggestion that this host, who is described as a much respected, wealthy, religious friend of scholars and soldiers, is Edward Alleyn (Thomas Dekker, p. 196) is not acceptable since Dekker did not allude here to Alleyn's many provisions for poor relief, no record exists of a petition to Alleyn by prisoners, and the actor's hospitality does not seem to have extended to scholars (Cf. Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, p. 154). The closing sentence of the chapter, that when the gathering dispersed, “one of the company, who was a well-wilier to prisoners, hastened home to write down what he heard Conscience utter” may refer to Chancellor Bacon, who, according to the patent of November, 1618, renewing the royal Commission for the relief of poor prisoners, suggested the patent (ed. Rymer, Foedera, xvii, 117).

114 Dekker seems to have written the dedicatory essay, “to the Reader,” in 1626. He asserted that “it is now about 18. yeeres past since a bed of strange snakes were found,” and, he added, “candle-light was then the first that discouered that cursed Nursery of Vipers.” If the phrase “18. yeeres” is correct, the quoted reference is unmistakably to the first appearance, in 1608, of Lanthorne and Candle-light. Furthermore, Dekker seems not to have composed the three prison chapters for the 1632 edition of the rogue tract, because they, and only they, are omitted from the Table of Contents, and they are not sutured to the tract. Although the old introduction, which first appeared in 1616 and presented the penal passages as composed by a prisoner, is retained, the first two sentences of the new chapter begin from another point of view, refer to an abrupt leave of a subject not treated, and allude to the previous chapter as if it were remote (sig. J3). Also, the first word on this page is not the printer's catchword on sig. J2v. Perhaps the inaccuracy of the “18. yeeres” and the errors in the Table occurred because Dekker was already dead when the edition was prepared. In this case, the work may have been published to launch posthumously some literary remains of the author. This suggestion is supported by the fact that, of five consecutive editions of Dekker's rogue-prison tract, this is the only one whose issue was not inspired by, or did not inspire a prison tract by another author. The first three editions of this work appeared with the first three issues of Fennor's prison tract in consecutive years (1616-1617; 1619-1620; 1629-1630) and the fifth edition appeared the same year (1638) as another issue of Mynshul's jail work; but this book, the fourth edition, appeared alone. However, whatever doubt the possibility of Dekker's death may cast on the reliability of the date of the dedicatory essay, it is very likely that Dekker composed the prison section during the Jacobean period, for, in the chapter on bankrupts (J4-J4v), Dekker specifically referred to the first three statutes against bankrupts, but he did not even allude to the fourth law, which was passed in 1624. It is not improbable that the chapters were left over from Dekker's four prison works or collaborations of 1616-1618. Possibly they comprise part of the “enlarged” section promised by the title page of the second edition of the rogue-prison work in 1620, but not fulfilled, although a new publisher issued it and entered it in the Stationer's Register (September 27, 1619). The last date is plausible, if, as I have suggested in the previous footnote, the third chapter allegorically describes an event of November, 1618.