An exchange between Eyre and Sir Roger Oatley raises the spectre of debt:

OATLEY

Ha, ha, ha! I had rather than a thousand pound

I had an heart but half so light as yours.

EYRE

Why, what should I do, my lord? A pound of care pays not a

dram of debt. Hum, let’s be merry whiles we are young. Old age,

sack and sugar will steal upon us ere we be aware.

(11.18-22)

Eyre’s carefree holiday spirit does not appear from nowhere. Rather, it is presented here as a direct response to, and structurally dependent on, the possibility of debt. This suggests how the threat of bankruptcy need not produce simply anxiety, fear, or sadness. It can also include cheerful disavowal, somewhat in the vein of the mad chorus of crucified men at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian who cheerfully warble ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.’²⁵

The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s obsession with the language of debt is apparent also in its romantic subplot. Lacy tells Rose:

But since thou payest sweet interest to my hopes,

Redoubling love on love, let me once more,

Like to a bold-faced debtor, crave of thee

This night to steal abroad . . .

(15.11-14)

If Rose is a debtor in the economy of love, Lacy recuperates her debt for a romantic vision of a controllably profitable commerce: the redoubled interest that Rose pays Lacy is their happy future together, the reward for his initial down-payment of love. Yet this vision follows on the heels of his uncle the Earl of Lincoln’s characterization of him as a wastrel who, in running up debts during his travels on the continent, has exhausted his credit. The possibility of bankruptcy is thus the keynote of the play’s opening scene, one that the play seeks to transcend with Eyre’s prosperous ‘freebooting’. But Eyre’s success remains haunted by Lacy’s career prior to the play. Lincoln’s description of that career anticipates Eyre’s remark to Oatley about debt: the cheerful disposition that shoemaking prompts in Lacy as much as Eyre does not so much oppose as mask the shame of bankruptcy. Because both Eyre’s profession and his experiment with credit point back to Lacy’s financial disaster, the play suggests there is no such thing as a certain outcome to transnational venturing. The time of global commerce always implies an indeterminate future shaded by risk.

Hence Eyre’s invocation of Ludgate may be seen not just as a tribute to the city’s mythical founder and monumental time. His oath both conceals and reveals the play’s economic unconscious: that is, the play’s fears about an uncertain future that may consist of ruin rather than profit. This unconscious is suggested also by the subplot of Ralph, a soldier seriously maimed in a different kind of overseas venture – war in France. Both lame Ralph and his abandoned wife Jane are just the type of early modern citizen for whom the spectre of debtors’ prison loomed large. But the play’s economic unconscious is nowhere more apparent than in the actors’ prologue to Queen Elizabeth, in which they describe themselves as ‘wretches in a storm’ counting on the Queen to provide a safe ‘anchor’ that will secure their ‘sails of hope’ (Pr. 1, 3, 8). They thus compare their labours to those of sailing merchant venturers for whom the future represents not the reproduction of the past, but an undiscovered country, an uncertain space that may mean profit or loss, life or death. Their sailing metaphor acquires a more desperate dimension at prologue’s end, where the actors beg for the Queen’s favourable judgment knowing that their future is uncertain: her ‘celestial breath’, they say, ‘Must send us life, or sentence us to death’ (Pr. 17-18). Here the actors present themselves as debtors petitioning for deliverance from their confinement. Dekker knew this scenario all too well, and not just as a struggling actor depending on the munificence of royal patrons as well as theatrical creditors. In 1598 and 1599, he had spent time in the Poultry Counter for debt, and he was to spend seven more uncertain years in the King’s Bench between 1612 and 1619.²⁶