Thomas Dekker (1572-1626) was an established playwright when Middleton arrived in London. Indeed, his 1599 play Old Fortunatus may have inspired the name of the newly opened Fortune playhouse in 1600. Between 1598 and 1602 he ‘wrote all or parts of 44 different plays for Henslowe’ - a remarkable, though perhaps not exceptional, rate of production. One, now lost, was Caesar's Fall (1602), the first in which Middleton had a hand. Plague closed the playhouses in 1603: in response, Middleton and Dekker produced two pamphlets, News from Gravesend and The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, followed by their first surviving collaboration; in spring 1604 Henslowe records a payment ‘unto Thomas Dekker & Middleton in earnest of their play called The Patient Man and the Honest Whore’. The year 1604 was productive and prestigious for both men: with Stephen Harrison and Ben Jonson they contributed to The Whole Royal and Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James through the City of London to celebrate the new monarch's entry into the capital. Both wrote pageants independently: Troia Nova Trium-phans (Dekker, 1612) and The Triumphs of Truth (Middleton, 1613) are considered the highest achievements of the genre. In addition to The Bloody Banquet (1608-9), their names are linked with those of John Ford, William Rowley and a 1623 play, The Spanish Gypsy, but it is for The Roaring Girl (1611), which draws on Dekker's pamphlets on canting and dramatizes the life of a famous contemporary figure, that they are remembered together.

In the case of a sustained collaborative relationship it is tempting to speculate on the precise nature of the partnership. One reason these two dramatists repeatedly worked together was their compatibility, though whether by this we might infer they were similar in outlook, or rather that their differences combined to produce an aesthetic greater than the sum of its parts, is a matter of conjecture. Certainly, like many of their countrymen, they had one belief in common: fear of Spain and suspicion of Rome, a concern that increased markedly during the reign of James I. Dekkehs The Whore of Babylon (1605) has been described as ‘the definitive militant Protestant play’, and in pamphlets and plays Dekker's support for the poor is apparent, suggesting that ‘his work echoes the factional and class politics of a radical Protestant opposition’.