Exeunt

FINIS

APPENDIX

Simon Eyre and the Shipload of
Luxury Commodities in Thomas Deloney’s
Pleasant and Princely History of the Gentle Craft

When writing The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Thomas Dekker drew heavily on Thomas Deloney’s prose narrative, The Pleasant and Princely History of the Gentle Craft. Although the first 1598 edition of Deloney’s book no longer survives, we can assume that the many editions published in the seventeenth century are substantially close to the text Dekker would have read. Approximately one third of Deloney’s narrative presents the details of Simon Eyre’s life, most of which Dekker reproduced in his play: Eyre’s trade as a shoemaker, his sudden acquisition of wealth, his appointment first as Alderman and then as Lord Mayor of London, his preparation of a carnivalesque feast for his fellow shoemakers, his building of Leadenhall, and his nostalgic memory of carrying the water tankard as a prentice.

Yet Dekker transformed certain crucial details of Deloney’s text, and nowhere more than in his account of Eyre’s acquisition and resale of the shipload of exotic luxury commodities. In this extract from The Pleasant and Princely History of the Gentle Craft, Deloney relates the events leading up to Eyre’s decision to buy the commodities. It is interesting to consider which parts of Deloney’s narrative Dekker the theatre practitioner retained: ever attentive to details of costume and spectacle, Dekker borrowed some of the items that Eyre’s wife proposes he wear in his disguise as a man of credit. But Dekker also significantly altered other details, especially Eyre’s unremarkable style of speaking, the Lady Macbeth-like character of his wife, and - more subtly - the ethics of his capital venture. When compared to the equivalent episode in Scene 7 of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, then, this extract suggests a great deal about how Dekker creatively appropriated and reworked his source materials.

In preparing this extract, I have drawn primarily on the 1637 edition of Deloney’s text, with a handful of interpolations from later editions. I have lightly edited the text to modernize spelling, streamline punctuation, and explain the meanings of certain words and phrases.

Chap. X
How Sir Simon Eyre being at first a shoemaker
became in the end Lord Mayor of London,
through the counsel of his wife . . .

Our English chronicles do make mention that some time there was in the honourable city of London a worthy Mayor, known by the name of Sir Simon Eyre, whose fame liveth in the mouths of many men to this day; who, albeit he descended from mean parentage, yet by God’s blessing in the end he came to be a most worthy man in the Commonwealth. . . .

Now it is to be remembered that, while John Denevale [a Frenchman] dwelt with Simon Eyre, it chanced that a ship of the Isle of Candy [i.e. Crete] was driven upon our coast, laden with all kind of lawns and cambrics [i.e. fine textiles], and other linen cloth, which commodities at that time were in London very scant and exceeding dear. And by reason of a great leak the ship had got at sea, being unable to sail any farther, [the ship’s merchant] would make what profit he could of his goods here.