Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday - hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster

I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, the survivors mostly with better-known co-writers. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) appears to have been an early hit for him, a good example of the hack outdoing himself. Hacks have their own kind of genius. Dekker is not a great poet but he has a great ear, or…