ABSTRACT
Thomas Dekker is a chronically underrated major writer, at the start of a 30-year career spanning numerous genres. F. G. Fleay was the first to identify The Whore of Babylon, printed in 1607, with Truth's Supplication to Candlelight. His argument is rooted in a conviction that the play was originally a celebration of Elizabeth, performed late in Elizabeth's lifetime after the disgrace of the Earl of Essex. In other respects Dekker has long been recognized as an important early inheritor of Thomas Nashe. The Seven Deadly Sins of London features a personified Candlelight, one of a pageant of villains who parade before the reader on triumphal chariots. Dekker is interested in Christ's Tears, arguably the model for his own later plague pamphlets. He is interested in Nashe, particularly interested in Christ's Tears, and even more particularly interested in the attack upon lust within that work.
