A Note on the Text

Both the previous New Mermaids editions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday have much to commend them. This text, however, is closer to Anthony Parr’s 1990 edition than to D. J. Palmer’s 1975 edition. Palmer’s text is largely a modernized version of Fredson Bowers’s in Volume I of his Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (1953). Although Bowers’s old-spelling version was a watershed in modern treatments of the play, it bequeathed to Palmer’s edition certain problems, including a dubious act/scene structure and several textual difficulties derived from an unquestioned reliance on the first quarto edition of 1600. Like Palmer, Parr respects the first quarto as the authoritative text; but he proposes a number of emendations to resolve certain textual problems. Following the argument of R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells in their excellent 1979 Revels edition, moreover, Parr dispenses with the traditional five-act structure employed by Bowers and subsequently adopted by Palmer. As Smallwood and Wells make clear, the 1600 quarto not only fails to offer act and scene divisions; it also shows no signs of having been composed with such a schema as an organizing principle. Parr wisely replaces the act-and-scene structure, then, with twenty-one scenes, noting that his arrangement reflects the fact that the stage is cleared twenty times during the course of its performance.

Like Parr, I both drop Bowers’s five-act structure in favour of simpler scene divisions and lightly emend the 1600 quarto to address its textual dilemmas. I have used the Folger copy of the first quarto (Q1) of 1600 as my control text; unlike Parr, I read it against subsequent editions published during Dekker’s lifetime, especially the Folger copy of the third quarto (Q3) of 1618, which shows signs of careful revision of the earlier quarto’s typographical errors and textual cruxes. As a result, I have adopted a number of Q3’s variant readings with an eye to rendering the play-text more semantically and syntactically coherent for modern performance.

FURTHER READING

Editions

Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). An influential old-spelling edition with much useful information about textual variants among the various quarto editions; uses the conventional five-act structure that most modern readers associate with Shakespeare’s drama.

Anthony Parr (ed.), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (London: A & C Black, 1990). Excellent introduction to the play, particularly on the details of the play’s staging in the Rose Theatre.

Robert L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (eds.), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). Dispenses with Bowers’s five-act structure, employing scene divisions only; critical introduction offers invaluable discussions of the play and its performance history.

Biographical Information

Marie-Therese Jones-Davies, Un peintre de la vie londonienne: Thomas Dekker (circa 1572-1632) 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1958). Still the most richly detailed biographical portrait of Dekker.

Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). An important study of the commercial basis of Dekker’s career as playwright.

C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Contains invaluable information about Dekker and his work, including the historical contexts for some of his lost plays.