J. G. H.
Washington DC, 2008

INTRODUCTION

About the Play

Despite its many poetic episodes, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is memorable chiefly for its buzzing prose. Thomas Dekker was an aficionado of street argot, and he gave this fascination full rein with his popular ‘canting’ dictionaries – glossaries of underworld London slang that he compiled in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Much of the energy of The Shoemaker’s Holiday likewise derives from Dekker’s keen ear for the colloquial speech of London citizens. The bibulous Simon Eyre has an earthy turn of phrase to rival Jack Falstaff’s, and the distinctively colourful idioms of the bawdy Firk, the pretentious Margery, the wise-cracking Sybil, and even the faux-Dutch Hans/Lacy repeatedly demonstrate Dekker’s delight in the choice terms of London’s prentices, working women, and migrant labourers.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday is a citizen drama, and it celebrates the culture of London’s artisanal classes. But it also chronicles an important shift in that culture. It subtly dramatizes the change from an old code of communal fellowship to a new capitalist one, in which commercial venturing in luxury commodities has become the individual’s means to wealth and social status. The Shoemaker’s Holiday suggests how the playhouses participated in that shift. Elizabethan theatregoers evidently desired not just to hear plays, but also to see fashionable items – in particular, high-end clothes. On this score, Dekker’s drama obliged them copiously. It is full of modish costumes: not only fine shoes, but also hoods, farthingales, and periwigs. Hence even as the play celebrates the communal fellowship of the shoemakers, it also underlines how the commercial playhouses relied on expensive stage properties as capital investments designed to lure spectators and generate revenue from them.

The play’s mood is prevailingly sunny: true love and festive cheer carry the day. Yet The Shoemaker’s Holiday has its dark side. The play is quietly haunted by the spectres of bankruptcy and debt; and it is set in a time of war – specifically, England’s fifteenth-century wars in France. In contrast to Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, which presents the French wars primarily from the perspective of the King and his fellow aristocrats, Dekker’s play spotlights the calamitous impact of war on the artisanal classes. It shows how the working men conscripted to fight abroad sustain devastating injuries, and the women they leave behind suffer immense economic and emotional hardship. With its sympathetic depiction of London citizens, their language, and their travails, The Shoemaker’s Holiday achieves a vernacular lyricism, one that contrasts with the more top-down snapshots of English life afforded by other Elizabethan drama.

Summary of the Plot

Roland Lacy, nephew to the Earl of Lincoln, is in love with Rose, daughter of the grocer Roger Oatley, Mayor of London. The Earl condemns Lacy as a spendthrift and ne’er-do-well; while travelling in Europe, Lacy had run up exorbitant bills and fallen into bankruptcy, as a result of which he was forced to train and work as a shoemaker in Wittenberg. The Earl and Oatley are both upset by Lacy’s love for Rose, which they regard as a transgression of class propriety. Hoping to put an end to the liaison, the Earl resolves to have Lacy sent to France to fight in the wars there.