Stanley Wells, Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in his Story (New York: Pantheon, 2006). Chapter on Dekker provides a useful general introduction to his life and career.

Critical Studies

Ronda Arab, ‘Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13, (2001), 182-212. A thoughtful analysis of gender and labour issues raised by the play.

David Bevington, ‘Theatre as Holiday’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576-1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 101-16. Considers the play’s ‘utopian’ social vision in relation to its theatrical contexts.

Alison A. Chapman, ‘Whose Saint Crispin’s Day Is It? Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, (2001), 1467-94. Studies the shoemaking trade and its role in forming the holiday calendar.

Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Analyzes Dekker’s drama as the work of an internationalist Protestant.

Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’, in Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds.), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35-66. Considers Dekker’s play in relation to artisanal culture and the medieval mystery play’s performance of skill.

——— ‘Ludgate Time: Simon Eyre’s Oath and the Temporal Economies of The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, in Deborah E. Harkness and Jean E. Howard (eds.), The Places and Spaces of London: Huntington Library Quarterly 71, (2008), 11-32. Examines Ludgate’s compression of monument and debt in relation to the competing understandings of time in Dekker’s play.

Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). An enduringly valuable resource that couples an introductory essay with detailed line-by-line commentary on the play.

David Scott Kastan, ‘Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Staging The Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 151-163. Considers the overlaps between the world of the play and the world of the playhouse, as well as tensions between English and foreign artisans.

Paul S. Seaver, ‘Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday: The Artisanal World’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576-1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 87-100. Studies the economic and social conditions of early modern London to illuminate Dekker’s representation of urban tensions and their resolution.

Marta Straznicky, ‘The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, Studies in English Literature 36, (1996), 357-72. Unravels the anti-Catholic significance of the play’s associations with Shrove Tuesday and Accession Day.

Brian Walsh, ‘Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, Studies in English Literature 46, (2006), 323-48. Examines the play’s citizen-oriented conception of history.

Joseph P. Ward, ‘Fictitious Shoemakers, Agitated Weavers and the Limits of Popular Xenophobia in Elizabethan England’, From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550-1750. ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, (Brighton UK: The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Sussex Academic Press, 2001), pp. 80-87. Considers representations of shoemakers, including Dekker’s, in relation to anxieties about foreign artisans.