‘The Lord of Ludgate’: Monumental Time

Throughout The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Eyre swears by ‘the Lord of Ludgate’. The oath serves as Eyre’s catchphrase in much the same way that his equally colourful wife Margery’s refrain, ‘but let that pass’, serves as hers.¹⁴ But if Margery’s motto – a kind of early modern predecessor to the contemporary American pejorative ‘whatever!’ – says something about her distinctive tone of cheerful complaint, it is harder to pin down what, precisely, Simon Eyre’s oath says about him. His invocation of Ludgate – a gate at the city’s west end, immediately next to Saint Paul’s – is perhaps typical of a play that lavishes so much attention on the local details of London’s geography. But who is, or was, the Lord of Ludgate?

Most editors gloss Simon Eyre’s ‘Lord of Ludgate’ with a tentative reference to King Lud, the legendary founder of London. Lud was a mythic early British king who, according to medieval historians, rebuilt the capital city in the first century BC; both London and Ludgate were believed to have been named for him. Through its association with Lud, the gate became a powerful symbol not just of London pride, but also of English patriotism. As preparations were being made for possible war with Spain in 1586, statues of Lud and his two sons were installed, in Roman military gear, on the gate’s east side. At the same time, however, the city leaders also erected a statue of Queen Elizabeth on the gate’s west side. So even as Dekker and his contemporaries associated Ludgate with the ancient king Lud, they would have recognized the ‘Lord of Ludgate’ equally as the living royal figure depicted on the gate’s entrance. Ludgate was thus a temporally complex structure. A memorial simultaneously to London’s valiant antiquity (represented by King Lud and his sons) and its equally valiant present (represented by Queen Elizabeth), the gate asserted a conception of history we might term monumental time, in which the matter of the present both commemorates and reproduces the glorious past.¹⁵

Simon Eyre’s oath, then, points simultaneously to London’s antiquity and to its Elizabethan present, asserting their homology. This temporal double vision typifies a play whose London is both medieval and Elizabethan. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is nominally set in the fifteenth century, but its characters are conversant with contemporary dramas such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine, and Doctor Faustus. And Dekker’s detailed references to city locations familiar to his audiences – the shoemaking district of Tower Street, the archery fields of Finsbury Park, the Boar’s Head tavern, the pissing conduit of Cheapside – lend vividness to medieval London by making it indistinguishable from its Elizabethan counterpart. Even the play’s few medieval historical details point back to the Elizabethan present. Ralph is made lame by the French wars, but his disability would have reminded early modern Londoners of the large number of maimed veterans returning from the wars with Spain in Holland. And Eyre’s ‘new’ building, Leadenhall, was well known to Dekker’s audiences as one of the city’s main marketplaces. These details exemplify what Brian Walsh has dubbed the play’s ‘temporal bricolage’, and hint at how the monumental time of Ludgate is the time of The Shoemaker’s Holiday.¹⁶