Books by Thomas Dekker
The Roaring Girl: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)
by Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker
Middleton and Dekker’s comic triumph is as relevant today as when it was first performed in 1611. With its helpful annotations, historical documents on cross dressing and on the colorful Mary Frith (the real-life model for Moll Cutpurse), and wealth of scholarly interpretations, this Norton Critical Edition brings The Roaring Girl to life for today’s reader. This Norton Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is based on the text from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. It is accompanied by generous explanatory annotations, five illustrations, and a detailed introduction.
“Contexts” is thematically arranged to include almost all known documents from the period concerning Mary Frith (aka Moll Cutpurse), among them records of her court appearances, letters recounting the same, and her last will. Also reprinted are significant passages from her purported 1662 “autobiography,” The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. While of dubious veracity, the “autobiography” is useful for comparing the play’s portrayal of Moll with later developments in Moll Cutpurse lore, which the Norton Critical Edition traces through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps most engaging for classroom discussion are substantial excerpts from the 1620 cross-dressing pamphlets―Hic Mulier; or, The Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man―which appear in annotated, modern-spelling versions. Together they give insight into how gender-bending trends in clothing, similar to those practiced by Moll, were understood in the early seventeenth century. A related passage from A Sermon of Apparel adds another perspective on cross-dressing practices.
Fourteen critical essays chart the development of scholarly interest in The Roaring Girl, from the first half of the twentieth century, when the play received only passing reference, through the work on city comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, to the explosion of analyses in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the play became a major focus for early modern gender studies. The more recent critical essays move beyond a strict focus on gender and cross-dressing to explore The Roaring Girl’s depiction of other aspects of early modern London, including consumer culture and the contemporary fascination with the language of the criminal underworld. Contributors include, among others, T. S. Eliot, Alexander Leggatt, Mary Beth Rose, Jonathan Dollimore, Jean E. Howard, and Jonathan Gil Harris.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
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Four Birds of Noah's Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare
by Thomas Dekker, Robert Hudson
A timeless, little-known literary classic to engage a new generation of readers
As the Black Death ravaged London in 1608, in the midst of societal chaos and tragedy, playwright Thomas Dekker wrote Four Birds of Noah’s Ark, a book containing fifty-six prayers for the people of London and all of England.
The prayers in this book bear witness to Dekker’s deep faith with a power and poignancy that few written prayers in English literature achieve. Bringing Dekker’s devotional classic back into print for the first time since 1924, editor Robert Hudson has annotated the prayers and modernized their language without sacrificing their enchanting beauty and simplicity. Hudson’s substantive and illuminating introduction is a gem in itself.
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The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies (Oxford World's Classics)
by Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston
This excellent volume brings together four of the most popular, most frequently studied and performed comedies that depict city life, by Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson and their contemporaries. Included are The Roaring Girl, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Eastward Ho!, and Every Man in His Humour. The text is freshly edited using modern spelling. A critical introduction, a wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays (Oxford World's Classics)
by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley
Here is a marvelous collection of plays from the English Renaissance period, offering prime examples of the "domestic drama" genre that first appeared around 1590. These four pioneering works, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage and crime rather than war and power, focus on the lives of ordinary people, instead of kings and queens and politicians. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling, critical introductions, wide-ranging notes, a chronology of the plays, and appendices that address the question: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Thomas Heywood write The English Traveller.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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The Witch of Edmonton: by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (Revels Student Editions)
by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley, Peter Corbin, Dekker Sedge
The Witch of Edmonton has received considerable attention recently both from scholars and critics interested in witchcraft practices and also from the directors in the theatre. The play, based on a sensational witchcraft trial of 1621, presents Mother Sawyer and her local community in the grip of a witch-mania reflecting popular belief and superstition of the time. This edition offers a thorough reconsideration of the text with a complete transcription of the original pamphlet by Henry Goodcole. This edition will be of particular interest not only to students of Renaissance Drama but also of the cultural history of the seventeenth century.. Open University adopted text (for their new Renaissance Drama module).
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The Shoemaker's Holiday: by Thomas Dekker (The Revels Plays)
Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of the most popular of Elizabethan plays, entertaining, racy and vivid in its characterisation. Revealing a vital portrait of Elizabethan London and the interaction of social classes within the city, its social commentary is on the whole optimistic, though darker tones are discernible. The play has the whole optimistic, though darker tones are discernible. The play has had a lively history of performance on both the professional and amateur stage; the roles of Simon and Madgy Eyre in particular have proved worthy vehicles for the talents of such performers as Sir Donald Wolfit and Dame Edith Evans, and a notable production was directed by Orson Wells.
The editors offer a study of the text; a historical and critical introduction, which includes a study of the play's relationship with contemporary life and drama and of its place in Dekker's work; a stage history' a detailed commentary and a reprint of source materials.
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