Thomas Dekker

“ It is striking that the most high-spirited picture of London life in the time of Elizabeth should come from the pen of the author who seems to have been more hardly treated by fortune than any of his contemporaries. ”

“ He disappears from view in the thirties of the seventeenth century. 1 “The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” first acted in 1599, is a good example of Dekker’s work in the drama. The story is taken from Thomas Deloney’s “Gentle Craft,” and gives an opportunity for a picture of life among the trades-people of London at a period when the frequency in the drama of Italian Dukes and Cardinals is liable to make us forget that, in spite of vice and frivolity in high places, the world was still kept going by decent work-people who attended to their business. ”