Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Dekker

A toast raised in the teeth of a world that keeps trying to sell you dread. Dekker, writing in plague-shadowed, debt-ridden London, understands that “care” isn’t just a private mood; it’s a social currency, a way the era disciplines bodies through fear of illness, poverty, and the debtor’s prison. The speaker’s command to “cast away care” is less self-help than street-level defiance: if tomorrow is structurally uncertain, refusing to worship it becomes a kind of freedom.

The couplets move with the brisk certainty of a drinking song, and that’s the trick. Rhyme and rhythm do the persuading that logic can’t. “He that loves sorrow / Lengthens not a day” lands like a blunt medical fact, turning melancholy from moral depth into useless labor. Then Dekker flips the Calvinist script on thrift: “nor can buy tomorrow.” In a city where luck, patronage, and catastrophe decide outcomes more than virtue does, the fantasy that prudence purchases security is exposed as sentimental economics.

“Money is trash” sounds reckless until you hear the irony: money isn’t literally worthless; it’s just a poor substitute for time, health, and fellowship. “Fortune will send it” is not confidence in justice but a shrug at volatility. Spend, drink, laugh - not because the world is kind, but because it isn’t. The subtext is a refusal to let anxiety be the only rational response to precarity. Dekker’s merriment is a pressure valve, yes, but also a quiet indictment of a system where tomorrow is always for sale and never actually delivered.