SOURCE: “Dekker's Drama: Independent Work,” in Thomas Dekker, Twayne Publishers, 1969, pp. 34-83.

In the essay below, Price surveys the eight surviving plays that Dekker wrote without a collaborator. The critic argues that these were effective pieces that pleased their Elizabethan audiences.

More than with most dramatists of the English Renaissance, it is necessary to begin a consideration of Dekker's plays with a reminder of how thoroughly this playwright is sustained by the native dramatic tradition. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), the most familiar of his works to twentieth-century readers, may be somewhat misleading in this respect; for, despite its romantic love-theme, this comedy is likely to be regarded as marking an advance in realism in its depiction of bourgeois life. Actually, the advance was being made, then and in the next decade, by Ben Jonson and such younger satiric dramatists as Marston and Middleton. In contrast, The Shoemaker's Holiday and...