Thomas Dekker

Thomas Dekker (c. 1572–1632) was an English playwright and pamphleteer who wrote for the London stage from the late 1590s. His best-known comedy, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), celebrates the craftsmen of the city, and he followed it with Old Fortunatus and the two parts of The Honest Whore, and later collaborated with William Rowley and John Ford on The Witch of Edmonton. His prose pamphlets, among them The Wonderful Year, on the plague of 1603, and The Gull's Hornbook, offer vivid pictures of London life. Chronically short of money, Dekker spent about seven years in a debtors' prison in the 1610s.