Spectres of Debt

When Dekker wrote The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Ludgate did not simply commemorate London’s mythic founder Lud and current monarch Elizabeth. Since the fourteenth century, it had served also as a debtors’ prison. A ballad called ‘The Cry of Ludgate’, published in 1620, addresses the statue of Lud from the perspective of those imprisoned inside Ludgate for debt:

Noble King Lud, long heare hast thou stood,

Not framed of wood,

But of stones;

Stones sure thou art, like our creditors heart,

Which cares not a———

For our grones.¹⁹

Here the statue of Lud is no longer the valiant double of Queen Elizabeth. His image is instead a symbol of the forces of disenfranchisement that accompany debt. These forces, the ballad tells us, are best understood by merchants acquainted with the hyperbolic uncertainties of venturing abroad: ‘what griefe, & what losses, / When theire carackes to sea, / They take’.²⁰ With this image, Eyre’s ‘Lord of Ludgate’ acquires a disturbing shadow that complicates Ludgate’s relation to time. The ballad’s Lud symbolizes not the continuity of then and now but a painful break with the past caused by catastrophic loss. Monumental time, in other words, has given way to the uncertain future presumed by global capitalist venturing. As the ballad concludes, ‘Tis so man, that no man, can know man his ending’.²¹

Simon Eyre’s ‘Lord of Ludgate’, then, may have suggested the debtors’ prison to many of the play’s first audiences. Indeed, Dekker’s references to Ludgate in his other writings clearly invoke the prison as much as the monument. His most sustained treatment of Ludgate prison is in his satirical plague pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606). Building on the customary greeting of dignitaries with entertainments at the city entrances, Dekker imagines the Deadly Sins treated as royalty, feted theatrically as they enter through the gates of London. The first Sin is ‘Politick Bankruptism’, who enters Ludgate prison, where ‘Lud and his two sonnes stood in a very cold place, waiting for his coming’.²² The sinister Politic Bankruptism seems a world away from the cheerful, civic-minded Simon Eyre in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. But there are points of intriguing overlap between Sin and shoemaker. Not least amongst these is their shared holiday spirit. The day of Politic Bankruptism’s arrival, Dekker tells us, ‘was proclaimed Holiday in all the wardes; every prisoner swore if he would stay amongst them, they would take no order about their debts . . . and for that purpose swarmd about him like Bees about Comfit-makers, and were drunke’.²³ This satirical sketch of the relation between sinful potentate and festive drunken minions recalls the climactic scene in The Shoemaker’s Holiday where Lord Mayor Eyre rewards the city’s prentices with the proclamation of a holiday, a banquet, and endless alcohol: ‘Let wine be plentiful as beer, and beer as water’ (20.8).

The Seven Deadly Sins is less a satanic inversion of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, then, than its dark underbelly. The pamphlet’s vision of bankrupts incarcerated in Ludgate debtors’ prison is the possibility that cannot speak its name in the play. Yet that possibility is instrumental to its story. Simon Eyre’s transnational capital venture is an apparently secure one, guaranteed to make him a fortune. But what if his deal with the Dutch skipper went seriously awry, and he was forced to default? What if Eyre were to find himself in another play, in debt once more to a supposedly foreign money-lender – but this time a usurer who (like Shakespeare’s Shylock) demanded his confinement within prison as a prelude to even more harsh punishment? Eyre could have ended up in Ludgate as a failed trader in global commodities far more easily than he ends up passing through it as a Lord Mayor. As Philip Massinger notes in his citizen comedy The City-Madam, the debt one accumulates in order to be a ‘venturer’ in global trade is ‘the certain road / To Ludgate’.²⁴ The penal road not taken is not just a fanciful possibility in The Shoemaker’s Holiday; it is obliquely suggested by the play’s pervasive obsession with the language of debt and bankruptcy.