Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist, born in 1572. Possibly of Dutch origin, very little is known of Dekker's early life and education. His career in the theatre began in the mid-1590s but it is unclear how or why Dekker came to write for the stage. By that time he was odd-jobbing for various London theatre companies, including both the Admiral's Men and its rivals the Lord Chamberlain's Men; he probably joined the large team of playwrights, including Shakespeare, who penned the controversial drama Sir Thomas More around this time. Dekker struggled to make ends meet, however, and in 1598 he was imprisoned for debt.

1599 was, by contrast, an annus mirabilis for Dekker. The theatrical entrepreneur and impresario of the Admiral's Men, Philip Henslowe, lists payments to Dekker that year for contributions to no fewer than eleven plays; two of these, Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker's Holiday, were selected to be performed at Court during the Queen's Christmas festivals. Dekker received royal favour again after the death of Elizabeth and the accession of King James I in 1603 when he was contracted with Ben Jonson to write the ceremonial entertainments for James's coronation procession through London. He was sorely in need of such commissions; the playhouses were closed for much of this year because of a plague outbreak that killed as many as a quarter of London's population.

During the outbreak, he retooled himself as a writer of satires - a genre in which he had acquired some dramatic experience in 1602, when he penned Satiromastix, a play that took aim at Ben Jonson (who had lampooned him the previous year in Poetaster). Dekker's prose satires about the plague year reveal a new skill for gritty reportage and sympathetic attention to the enormous sufferings of the afflicted. He repeatedly returned to this genre when he was prevented, whether by theatre closures or by imprisonment, from writing for the stage.

Like The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker's plays in the years of James's reign tend to dramatize the stories of citizens. And they again display a sympathetic fascination with socially marginal characters, often women - a prostitute (The Honest Whore, co-written with Thomas Middleton, 1604), a transvestite (The Roaring Girl, 1611, also co-written with Middleton), and a witch (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621, co-written with John Ford and William Rowley). But Dekker's financial woes continued through these years, and he was once more imprisoned for debt between 1612 and 1619, a harrowing experience that he later claimed turned his hair white. Upon his release, he continued to write plays, citizen pageants, and prose pamphlets, but he never enjoyed the success of his earlier years. He died, leaving his widow no estate except his writings, in 1632.
Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) was an English dramatist, who excelled in both comedy and tragedy. Whilst his so-called 'city comedies' provide insight into 17th-century London life and manners, his tragedies are noted for their richly poetic verse, their emphasis on guilt and corruption, and their understanding of feminine psychology. His admirer T. S. Eliot wrote: "Middleton was a great observer of human nature, without fear, without sentiment, without prejudice." Middleton's first plays were acted by boy companies at Blackfriars Theatre and other venues. He often worked in collaboration with other dramatists for the theatre owner Philip Henslowe. With Thomas Dekker (c. 1570-1632) he wrote The Honest Whore (1604) and The Roaring Girl (1610), and with William Rowley he produced the powerful tragedy The Changeling (1622). Some modern scholars also believe that the texts we now have of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure were substantially altered by Middleton. The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) is now generally attributed to Middleton, rather than Cyril Tourneur. Middleton's social comedies include A Trick to Catch the Old One (1604-05), which provided the basis for Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1623), A Mad World, My Masters (1605), which introduced Sir Bounteous Progress, a lively country gentleman who is generous to all except his heir Dick Follywit, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1619), which satirized ordinary Londoners. Other works include the tragedy Women Beware Women (1621) and the political satire A Game of Chess (1624), about the futile efforts to unite the royal houses of England (represented by the White Knight) and Spain (the Black Knight). The play drew huge crowds to the Globe Theatre but the Spanish ambassador protested and James I had A Game of Chess banned after only nine performances. It proved equally popular in print.

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