Thomas Dekker

Thomas Dekker was a London playwright and pamphleteer who wrote or collaborated on some fifty plays for Henslowe’s companies, was often in debt and spent seven years in the Poultry prison for it, and described the underside of Jacobean London in pamphlets on rogues, plague and the gulls’ hornbook. The Shoemaker’s Holiday of 1599 is his one enduring comedy, the story of a gentleman who disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker for love, and of the shoemaker Simon Eyre’s rise to Lord Mayor, and it is the warmest picture of the city’s tradesmen on the Elizabethan stage.