It is unclear how or why Dekker came to write for the stage. By the mid-1590s, he was odd-jobbing for various London theatre companies, including both the Admiral’s Men and its rivals the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; during this time, he probably joined the large team of playwrights, including Shakespeare, who penned the controversial drama Sir Thomas More. Dekker struggled to make ends meet, however, and in 1598 he was imprisoned for debt – though he was also named that year by Frances Meres, the author of the commonplace book Palladis Tamia, as one of the nation’s leading writers of tragedy. 1599 was, by contrast, an annus mirabilis for Dekker. The theatrical entrepreneur and impresario of the Admiral’s Men, Philip Henslowe, lists payments to Dekker that year for contributions to no fewer than eleven plays; two of these, Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, were selected to be performed at Court during the Queen’s Christmas festivals. Dekker received royal favour again after the death of Elizabeth and the accession of King James I in 1603, when he was contracted with Ben Jonson to write the ceremonial entertainments for James’s coronation procession through London. He was sorely in need of such commissions; the playhouses were closed for much of this year because of a plague outbreak that killed as many as a quarter of London’s population. During the outbreak, he retooled himself as a writer of satires – a genre in which he had acquired some dramatic experience in 1602, when he penned Satiromastix, a play that took aim at Ben Jonson (who had lampooned him the previous year in Poetaster). Dekker’s prose satires about the plague year reveal a new skill for gritty reportage and sympathetic attention to the enormous sufferings of the afflicted. He repeatedly returned to this genre when he was prevented, whether by theatre closures or by imprisonment, from writing for the stage.

Like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker’s plays in the years of James’s reign tend to dramatize the stories of citizens. And they again display a sympathetic fascination with socially marginal characters, often women – a prostitute (The Honest Whore, co-written with Thomas Middleton, 1604), a transvestite (The Roaring Girl, 1611, also co-written with Middleton), and a witch (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621, co-written with John Ford and William Rowley). But Dekker’s financial woes continued through these years, and he was once more imprisoned for debt between 1612 and 1619, a harrowing experience that he later claimed turned his hair white. Upon his release, he continued to write plays, citizen pageants, and prose pamphlets, but he never enjoyed the success of his earlier years. He died, leaving his widow no estate except his writings, in 1632.

Date and Sources

The first reference to what was to become The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an entry by Philip Henslowe in his diary for 15 July 1599, in which he records a payment of three pounds for ‘A Boocke of thomas dickers Called the gentle Craft’.¹ The Shoemaker’s Holiday was almost certainly staged in Henslowe’s Rose Theatre later that year, but the earliest record of its performance is for the evening of 1 January 1600, when it was acted at Richmond Palace for Queen Elizabeth during her Christmas celebrations.