This chapter explores Thomas Dekker’s contribution to the contemporary literature on war. Dekker drew on the playwright’s craft of heightened emotional tone, rhetorical devices and allegorical imagery to influence his audiences’ reactions to war. The chapter provides a portrait of Dekker and why his social commentary on war is worth exploring for the insights it gives into the intersections between early modern drama, reactions to war and early modern mentalities. It examines the timing and content of particular works in relation to events occurring on the Continent. The chapter discusses how the Anglo-Dutch relationship was viewed and why paying close attention to this clarifies how audiences interpreted the cultural and physical proximity between England and the Low Countries and made sense of war narratives. It describes the social, political and dramatic function that emotional language served in war writing. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Dekker, like Thomas Heywood, wrote for the Queen’s Men.
