The Play

Going to Wittenberg

In or around 1600, London’s rival theatre companies – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men – presented two plays in which leading characters return, transformed, from Wittenberg. In Hamlet, the title character has come back to Denmark from Wittenberg’s university where, it seems, he has discovered not just philosophy, but also the private interiority of the individual – ‘that within which passeth show’ (1.2.85). In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, another character has spent time in Wittenberg, where he too has learned something that has changed him. But his new knowledge is of a more practical and public bent. Driven to bankruptcy during his tour of the continent, Roland Lacy studies in Hamlet’s university town the ‘goodly science’ (1.30) of shoemaking, a skill that profits him well upon his return to England.

Shakespeare’s and Dekker’s two Wittenberg plays are worlds apart. Hamlet is a tragedy widely regarded as one of Shakespeare’s greatest artistic achievements; the prince’s anguished self-consciousness is supposed to mark – in the words of Harold Bloom – ‘the invention of the human’, inasmuch as it limns a psychological depth and complexity that Bloom associates with the modern self.³ The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by contrast, is a comedy often pigeonholed as a trivial if pleasant diversion. For all its characters’ lively colour, they are not possessed of psyches with hidden inner depths. Whereas Hamlet’s Wittenberg philosophy steers him into the realm of the individuated self, Lacy’s Wittenberg ‘science’ directs him and his fellows into the world of the collectively crafted commodity. Indeed, it is not The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s characters so much as its physical objects that command the stage. Not only shoes, but also tools, clothes, coins, and luxury goods determine the characters’ relations with each other. If in Hamlet ‘the play’s the thing’ (2.2.581), then The Shoemaker’s Holiday insists that the thing’s the thing.

Why does Dekker send Lacy to Wittenberg to learn his shoemaking? This detail is not in the play’s source materials; it is Dekker’s own addition, and a mysterious one at that. Wittenberg had no reputation as a shoe-making centre, and it is located not in Holland, where Lacy has acquired the language that allows him to masquerade as ‘Hans’, but in Germany. For Dekker’s audiences, as for Shakespeare’s, Wittenberg would doubtless have conjured up associations with Martin Luther and the origins of the Protestant Reformation. Shakespeare’s Hamlet registers some of the ideological fallout of that schism, particularly the Protestant revulsion at materiality and retreat into interiority. The presence of Martin Luther’s city makes sense in Hamlet; its appearance in Dekker’s thing-oriented play is more mysterious.⁴ Nevertheless, Wittenberg is arguably a significant compass-point for The Shoemaker’s Holiday.