Thomas Dekker is best known as a major Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist, author of The Shoemakers' Holiday (1599), The Honest Whore (1604-1605), and many other plays. Although some of his nondramatic works--such as The Wonderful Year (1603) and The Gull's Hornbook (1609)--are well known, the richness and extent of his nondramatic work are often obscured. The Wonderful Year, Dekker's first known prose work, achieved three editions in 1603, after he had been for at least five years a prolific playwright. Dekker's inspiration for the book may have been economic, since the plague closed the theaters from 1603 to spring 1604; but it was obviously inspired also by the "wonderful" coincidence of the plague, Queen Elizabeth I's death on 19 March 1603, and the accession of James I, for whose London entry in spring 1604 Dekker devised The Magnificent Entertainment .

The Wonderful Year follows two patterns: temporal and spatial. Temporally, it moves from an idealized pastoral springtime...