Henslowe’s diary record indicates Dekker’s play was conceived from the outset as a stage adaptation of a prose narrative first published in 1598, Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft. The original has not survived, but later editions of Deloney’s narrative are close to the text Dekker would have read. The narrative is divided into three parts; each relates a tale of shoemakers – the princely Crispianus and Crispine who, to avoid persecution by a tyrant, disguise themselves as shoemakers; Saint Hugh who, for the love of a lower-class woman, becomes a shoemaker; and Simon Eyre, a humble shoemaker who comes into wealth and is elected London’s Lord Mayor. Dekker’s play builds primarily on Deloney’s tale of Eyre, but Lacy’s evasion of his uncle’s will echoes the tale of Crispianus and Crispine, the romantic subplot draws on the cross-class elements of the Saint Hugh story, and the references to the shoemakers’ tools as ‘Saint Hugh’s bones’ mine Deloney’s account of Hugh’s martyrdom.

Even as Dekker borrowed the tale of Simon Eyre from Deloney, he transformed its main character. He added flesh to the bare bones of Deloney’s Eyre by giving him a distinctively colourful turn of phrase; he also included details about the historical Simon Eyre drawn from the antiquarian John Stow’s Survey of London (1598), which includes an account of Eyre’s patronage of Leadenhall (as well as the name of Sir Roger Oatley, who is not mentioned by Deloney). And whereas Deloney presents Eyre’s upward mobility as morally dubious – Eyre is uncomfortable about the transaction that makes him wealthy, and performs it only at the urging of his acquisitive wife (see Appendix) – Dekker’s Eyre has no such qualms, and indeed revels in the opportunity for profit and theatrical self-reinvention that the transaction offers him.

Dekker was influenced also by what was popular on the London stage in 1599. The historical Simon Eyre – who was a draper rather than a shoemaker – became Lord Mayor of London in 1445, when Henry VI was on the throne. But Dekker instead evokes the world of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, performed several months before The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Dodger’s report about the casualties of the French wars in Scene 9 echoes Shakespeare’s account of the battle of Agincourt, fought on Saint Crispin’s day in 1415. Dekker would have known from Deloney not only that Crispin was a patron saint of shoemakers but also that Saint Crispin’s day – 25 October – was celebrated by shoemakers as their holiday. Here Dekker arguably reclaims Shakespeare’s loftier themes for artisanal culure; similarly, his many allusions to the shoemakers’ fellowship chime with, but also displace, Henry the Fifth’s vision of an aristocrat-led ‘band of brothers’ (4.3.60) triumphing over adversity.²

Always a magpie collector of shiny trinkets from everyday speech, Dekker adorns his characters’ language with numerous references drawn from Elizabethan London’s common stockpile of sayings, catchphrases, and repeatable refrains. The Shoemaker’s Holiday contains an unusually large share of the Renaissance English proverbs catalogued by M. P. Tilley; it evokes the titles or choruses of several popular ballads; and it is littered with throw-away allusions to plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Soliman and Perseda, and Tamar Cham, most of which – like The Shoemaker’s Holiday – were performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre. All these references add colourful splashes of Elizabethan popular culture to a tale supposedly set in medieval London.