Thomas Dekker (writer) (1572 – 1632)
Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.
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BALTHAZAR: I have a private coat for Italian stilettos, I can be treacherous with the Walloon, drunk with the Dutch, a chimney-sweeper with the Irish, a gentleman with the Welsh and true arrant thief with the English. What then is my country to me?
ONAELIA: One step to human bliss is sweet revenge.
BALTHAZAR: Sin is a raven croaking her own fall.
And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,
There ’s a lean fellow beats all conquerors.
QUEEN: But Hymen's torch, held downward, shall drop out,
And for it, the mad Furies swing their brands
About the bride-chamber.
Honest labour bears a lovely face.
ALANZO: Wrongs, like great whirlwinds,
Shake highest battlements. Few for heaven would care,
Should they be ever happy.
A wise man poor
Is like a sacred book that ’s never read,—
To himself he lives, and to all else seems dead.
This age thinks better of a gilded fool
Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.
KING: I am full of thoughts,
A thousand wheels toss my incertain fears,
There is a storm in my hot boiling brains,
Which rises without wind. A horrid one.
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
O punishment!
BALTHAZAR: Subjects may stumble, when kings walk astray.
Thine acts shall be a new Apocrypha.
To add to golden numbers golden numbers.
ONAELIA:You are like common beadles, apt to lash
Almost to death poor wretches not worth striking,
But fawn with slavish flattery on damned vices
So great men act them. You clap hands at those,
Where the true poet indeed doth scorn to gild
A gaudy tomb with glory of his verse,
Which coffins stinking carrion.
ONAELIA: What sort of poets are there?
POET: Two sorts lady: The great poets and the small poets.
ONAELIA: Great and small! Which do you call the great? The fat ones?
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