Biography Essay

Thomas Dekker was one of the most versatile of Renaissance English writers, and the plays and the nondramatic pamphlets (usually cast in the form of journalistic essays and narratives) that he produced during a career extending from the late 1590s to the early 1630s provide a record of popular taste during the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, through the reign of James I, and into the early years of Charles I. Dekker earned his living by his pen, and nearly everything he wrote shows signs of haste. Only rarely, as in such plays as The Shoemakers' Holiday or The Honest Whore, or such nondramatic pieces as The Gull's Horn Book or Four Birds of Noah's Ark does a single work of his seem entirely satisfactory, but nearly everything that he wrote bears witness to a sensitive and shrewd imagination and to a...