Life of thomas dekker book

This is Dekker's journey from youthful idealism to a sordid path of excess and doping that lays bare pro-cycling's darkest secrets like never before.

Woodcut from title page of published play Dekker his Dreame [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Very little is known of Dekker's early life, though it is likely he was born in London around While he probably did not attend university, his capable Latin translations suggest he did attend grammar school. Dekker married a woman named Mary and had three daughters in , , and Dekker wrote more than forty plays for The Admiral's Men, many of which are lost.

Dekker was seriously impoverished for most of his career, in and out of debtor's prison for much of his life including in and , the year The Shoemaker's Holiday was performed. From to Dekker was imprisoned for seven years because of a debt to the father of fellow playwright John Webster. In addition to plays, Dekker wrote a series of pamphlets in the early seventeenth century, including popular cony-catching pamphlets describing tricks of conmen and thieves.

Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday is often credited as being one of the first city comedy plays. City comedies are identifiable by taking place in an existing city often London and including recognisable landmarks of that city. Smith explains that city comedies "stress the energy and drive of the merchant classes", as opposed to the plays of say, Shakespeare, whose comedies deal primarily with aristocrats.

Thomas Dekker (c.

Unlike Shakespeare's plays, city comedies encourage audience members to laugh with rather than at the working classes. About The Shoemaker's Holiday Shoemaker is a hilarious and festive comedy, and Dekker insists in his dedicatory epistle that in the play "nothing is proposed but mirth". In fact, as Dr. Smith highlights, the play touches on a great number of serious contemporary issues.

Lacy uses his wealth to don a disguise and dodge the draft for the war in France, but Ralph is not so lucky, and loses his leg: certainly a problem for a shoemaker, to whose profession his lost foot is particularly relevant. In the war in Ireland also raged, a bitter battle against committed and popular guerrilla fighters.