The second half of the play, however, presents luxury commodities in a much more complicated way. No longer just vulgar feminine foils to masculine skill, they prove to be as appetizing to men as they are to women – but for slightly different reasons. Once he has been elected Lord Sheriff, Eyre gives Margery free rein to act upon her desires for luxury goods. She gleefully exploits her new licence: ‘let me have a pair of shoes made: cork, good Roger – wooden heel too’ (10.27-8). This change illustrates the complexity of footwear as property in the play. Fine shoes are at one and the same time the material embodiment of collective male skill, feminine possessions suitable for well-heeled gentlewomen, and badges of status for the gentlewomen’s husbands. Eyre may ridicule Margery’s accessories as ‘pishery-pashery’ (20.49-50), yet he cheerfully profits from them too, extracting from them a personal value – proof of his new social standing – that contrasts the shoemakers’ more egalitarian code of fellowship.

Indeed, private dealership in luxury goods profits Eyre throughout The Shoemaker’s Holiday. In what proves to be the play’s crucial development, Eyre – with the help of a loan from Hans/Lacy – buys a Dutch ship’s load of ‘sugar, civet, almonds, cambric, end a towsand towsand tings’ (7.120-1) at a bargain price. He then resells these exotic commodities at a considerable profit, a transaction that not only makes him extraordinarily wealthy but also buys him immense social capital. Eyre’s resale of the Dutch cargo is presented by Deloney as a dubious, even feminine act, performed at the urging of his covetous wife and prompting in him a sustained attack of conscience (see Appendix). By contrast, the play presents Eyre’s resale of the cargo as an exemplary instance of masculine capital gain, in which the private dealer prizes luxury items not for their material substance but for a new immateriality in them – their exchange value. The term Dekker uses to represent the shoemaker’s novel guise as venture capitalist is ‘freebooter’ (20.54). His pun deftly bridges the distinction between a shoemaker who enjoys the ‘freedom’ of guild membership and a pirate-like privateer, questing for ‘booty’ and profit. By recasting luxury goods as the capital assets of the upwardly mobile privateer, The Shoemaker’s Holiday complicates its seeming glorification of the property of skill. Property as collective membership blurs into property as individual ownership for the sake of profit.

This confusion is reflected in the original spellings of the play’s title. In the edition of 1600, the title is ‘The Shomakers Holiday’; in the 1618 edition, ‘The Shoomakers Holy-Day’. Neither has an apostrophe. It is therefore uncertain whether Dekker intended the titular ‘holiday’ to be the property of all shoemakers (and hence a celebration of their public fellowship) or the property of just a single shoemaker such as Simon Eyre (and hence a celebration of his upward mobility). The original title hints at the indeterminacy throughout the play of collective membership and private dealership, artisanal property and capitalist property. This indeterminacy has important consequences for how the play understands not only property but also the relations between past, present and future.