Simon Eyre’s oath, then, is appreciably more complex than first meets the eye. As a reference to a civic monument that cannot quite erase the spectre of debtors’ prison, Eyre’s ‘Lord of Ludgate’ evokes not just two monarchs from different times, but also conflicting conceptions of time itself. This conflict is symptomatic of Dekker’s play and early modern London alike. The figure of Queen Elizabeth, on the Ludgate entrance as much as in the prologue to the play, presides over a world that simultaneously asserts historical continuity and hints at rupture, embraces an old code of artisanal fellowship and promulgates a new culture of capitalist venturing, assures the future and puts it radically in question. Even if The Shoemaker’s Holiday is in many ways the polar opposite of Hamlet, Dekker’s Wittenberg play – like Shakespeare’s – recognizes that the time is out of joint.

Performance History

Apart from its presentation at Court before the Queen on New Year’s Day, 1600, there are no surviving records from Dekker’s lifetime of performances of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Its inclusion in the Queen’s holiday entertainments indicates that it had been previously staged, and to some acclaim, by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre.²⁷ And despite the scarcity of records concerning its seventeenth-century performances, the five reprints of The Shoemaker’s Holiday up to 1657 strongly suggest its continuing success on the stage. But after 1657, there were no professional productions of the play until its revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, it has enjoyed considerable popularity; in 1975 Smallwood and Wells speculated that The Shoemaker’s Holiday ‘has become perhaps the most frequently performed non-Shakespearian play of its period’.²⁸ Although it has been a mainstay of amateur and university stages, however, it has received only a handful of professional productions.

Twentieth-century stagings of the play often sought to recreate the historical details of Elizabethan culture; but these details varied greatly from production to production. Some reproduced the familiar personages of Shakespeare’s playworlds. A well-received production at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 1926 presented the King as Henry V, and one reviewer described Simon Eyre – played by Baliol Holloway, familiar to audiences for his portrayal of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor – as ‘compounded in equal parts of Falstaff and Pistol’.²⁹ The first professional production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the United States, in 1938, aspired to a different kind of verisimilitude. Directed by Orson Welles – then only 22 – at New York’s Mercury Theatre on a set that simulated the streets and cityscape of Elizabethan London, the production notably began its run on New Year’s Day, 338 years to the day after its performance before the queen. Despite his faithful recreation of cityscape and performance date, Welles radically transformed the play. Famous already for cutting Julius Caesar to a mere ninety minutes on stage, Welles wielded the scalpel even more brutally on Dekker’s playtext, excising Margery completely. The rapid-paced performance, without intermission, ran just over an hour. Though some reviews lamented the cuts, most responded favourably: Time magazine declared that ‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday struck Broadway like a brisk wind’.³⁰