Golden Slumbers Thomas Dekker1572–1632

Background Information 1 •Little is known of Dekker's early life or origins. From references in his pamphlets, Dekker is believed to have been born in London around 1572, but nothing is known for certain about his youth. His last name suggests Dutch ancestry, and his work, some of which is translated from Latin, suggests that he attended grammar school.•Between 1598 and 1602, he was involved in about forty plays for Henslowe, usually in collaboration. To these years belong the collaborations with Ben Jonson and John Marston that presumably contributed to the War of the Theaters in 1600 and 1601.•A recent book has provided linguistic evidence to support a theory that “Thomas Dekker” was an identity of playwright Thomas Nashe, assumed to enable Nashe to return London after he was banned from the city in the summer of 1597.•Dekker embarked on a career as a theater writer in the mid-1590s. His handwriting is found in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, though the date of his involvement is undetermined. More certain is his work as a playwright for the Admiral’s Men of Philip Henslowe, in whose account book he is first mentioned in early 1598. While there are plays connected with his name performed as early as 1594, it is not clear that he was the original author; his work often involved revision and updating. 

Dekker His Dreame (1620) is a long poem describing his time in prison.

•For Jonson, Dekker was a bumbling hack, a "dresser of plays about town"; Jonson lampooned Dekker as Demetrius Fannius in Poetaster and as Anaides in Cynthia's Revels. Dekker's riposte, Satiromastix, performed both by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the child actors of Paul's, casts Jonson as an affected, hypocritical Horace.•When Dekker began writing plays, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge were still alive; when he died, John Dryden had already been born. Like most dramatists of the period, he adapted as well as he could to changing tastes; however, even his work in the fashionable Jacobean genres of satire and tragicomedy bears the marks of his Elizabethan training: its humor is genial, its action romantic. The majority of his surviving plays are comedies or tragicomedies.•Most of Dekker's work is lost. His apparently disordered life and his lack of a firm connection with a single company may have militated against the preservation or publication of manuscripts. Close to twenty of his plays were published during his lifetime; of these, more than half are comedies, with three significant tragedies.•He was imprisoned for debt on three occasions and once for recusancy (= resistance to authority or refusal to conform, especially in religious matters, used of English Catholics who refuse to attend the services of the Church of England). •During his imprisonment, Dekker did not write plays. On release, he resumed writing plays, now with collaborators both from his generation (John Day and John Webster) and slightly younger writers (John Ford and Philip Massinger).•Dekker published no more works after 1632, and he is usually associated with the "Thomas Dekker, householder" who was buried at St. James‘s in Clerkenwell that year.

Background Information 2

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, aSmiles awake you when you rise. aSleep, pretty wantons, do not cry, bAnd I will sing a lullaby: bRock them, rock them, lullaby. b

Care is heavy, // therefore sleep you; cYou are care, // and care must keep you. cSleep, pretty wantons, do not cry, bAnd I will sing a lullaby: bRock them, rock them, lullaby. b

Analysis 1 Wantons] naughty childrenCare] (1) worldly preoccupation, sorrow; (2) the object of cherishing; (3) attentive

solicitudeSleep you] go to sleep

The poem is part of a play known as “Patient Grissel,” co-authored by

Dekker, William Houghton, and Henry Chettle, and it is sometimes titled “Cradle Song.” Although at first glance the poem appears to

be nothing more than an innocuous lullaby, its context in the play

clothes it in insidious foreshadowing: Grissel, the

lowborn daughter of a basket-maker, is married to the Marquess of Salucia, who tests her patience and loyalty in increasingly cruel

ways, eventually taking away her newborn twins; the lullaby, sung by

Grissel’s father in her presence, occurs right before the twins are

separated from their mother. Indeed, the poem itself presents

subtle hints of its nefarious import: firstly, the use of the word “must”

(line 7) forebodes that another individual will have to take on the role of caregiver, “keep[ing]” (line 7) the children in their mother’s

absence; secondly, the repetition of the word “lullaby” in lines 4-5

and 9-10 assigns seemingly undue importance to a simple song, and the fact that the lullaby itself is

directly addressed in the last line of each stanza transfers the

aforementioned role of caretaker to the song, implying the mother’s

future absence.

THEME: The poem is addressed to children, urging them to sleep so

that they might retain their blissful innocence.

The TONE of the poem is gently soothing, albeit a touch sad as a

result of the implied absence of the children’s mother. (It is to be noted that the poem, taken out of context, bears no hint of the identity of the

caregiver, which, therefore, may be generalized either to parents or to

guardians.)

The meter of the poem alternates between trochaic tetrameter and catalectic trochaic tetrameter. The

lines that feature catalexis—namely lines 1, 2, 5, and 10—provide a clue as to its purpose: in general, catalexis may be said to imply that something is missing—or perhaps that the poem conceals a

hidden meaning—so in this case it may hint at the fact that idealism, which is implied by lines 1-2, does not carry over into reality; moreover, as the children are taken away from their main caregiver, awakening in unfamiliar surroundings and then being greeted by

strange faces cannot make for a pleasant experience; as for the last line of each stanza, catalexis lends itself to the idea that the role of

caretaker is transferred to the lullaby.

The utter lack of enjambment implies that there is no

effusion of passion in the poem—the lullaby itself is

simple and soothing, and the joy of children is generally

self-contained and untainted by worry. The caesura in line 6

implies causality; that is to say, young children have

nothing to do with “care” (line 6), taken to mean hardship or anxiety, and ergo can sleep

unperturbed. As for the caesura in the following line, it

forces readers to pause, making the phrase “and care must keep you” (line 7) seem almost like an afterthought, as

though the prospect of the children’s being taken away were painful to ponder upon

for the speaker.

Analysis 2

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, aSmiles awake you when you rise. aSleep, pretty wantons, do not cry, bAnd I will sing a lullaby: bRock them, rock them, lullaby. b

Care is heavy, // therefore sleep you; cYou are care, // and care must keep you. cSleep, pretty wantons, do not cry, bAnd I will sing a lullaby: bRock them, rock them, lullaby. b

The use of the word “golden” (line 1) implies that the cessation

of discontent, as that which is occasioned by sleep, is precious. Furthermore, it hints at idealism, and so does the word “smiles” in the second line of the poem as happiness is at best transient.

Sleep is personified, in that it is said to “kiss” (line 1) the

children’s eyes, creating an image of love, gentleness, and

nurture.

Dekker assigns three meanings to the word “care” (lines 6-7) in the second stanza of the poem. The second of these meanings—that in the seventh line—lends itself to the interpretation that raising the children is a difficult

endeavor, possibly because they are naughty, as implied by the

noun “wantons” (lines 3, 8). However, they are evidently

loved, and the speaker assures them that the time for assuming responsibility is still locked in the distant future, as evidenced by the statement “Care is heavy, therefore sleep you” (line 6).

The poem’s rhyme scheme is excessively simple, the two stanzas being end-rhymed aabbb-ccbbb. The bbb structure is repeated in both stanzas, constituting a refrain, and the rhymes used are identical. This mirrors a real lullaby, and likewise emphasizes the main point of the poem: the speaker urges the children to sleep, stating that he or she will do the

singing; on a broader scale, this showcases the belief that adults do that which needs to be done while children make the most of a dream-like,

albeit brief, period in their lives.