Even though it is set in the century before the Reformation, the play is subtly informed by transnational solidarities and enmities that belong to the religious geography of Dekker’s time. The heroes are characters identified with what were to become Protestant nations – England and Holland; the (offstage) enemy is Catholic France. But the play’s Protestant sympathies arguably find fullest expression in its fascination with fashionable objects. Protestantism recoiled from what it perceived to be Catholicism’s excessive investment in mere things such as saints’ relics, priests’ gaudy robes, and communion wafers. But in some of its guises – particularly the more worldly Protestantism of London merchants – it regarded luxury objects as a means to spiritual as well as economic prosperity, on the condition that such objects be prized not for their physical allure but for a more ineffable quality that transcends them: their exchange value.⁵ In this, the Protestant Reformation contributed to the rise of English mercantile capitalism. If Hamlet imagines a clash between Catholic and Protestant understandings of materiality, The Shoemaker’s Holiday also dramatizes conflicting ways of understanding objects. But this conflict is implicated less in the sectarian tensions of the sixteenth century than in the period’s increasingly global networks of trade. Dekker’s Wittenberg is thus a geographical marker of economic as much as religious transformation. The Shoemaker’s Holiday may be set exclusively in London; yet its main characters profit from their dealings in exotic goods and services – not just the artisanal knowledge Lacy has acquired in Wittenberg, but also luxury items from continental Europe.

Staging Things: Dekker’s Lively Stage Properties

The title of Dekker’s comedy promises a holiday, and that’s what we get. At play’s end, the journeyman Firk fantasizes about the enormous banquet Simon Eyre has ordered for his fellow shoemakers: ‘venison pasties walk up and down piping hot like sergeants, beef and brewis comes marching in dry-fats, fritters and pancakes comes trolling in in wheelbarrows, hens and oranges hopping in porters’ baskets’ (18.190-3). Firk conjures up a carnivalesque world of abundant food, the edible Land of Cockaigne as painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. But Firk’s vision goes further than Bruegel’s: his walking venison pasties, marching beefs, trolling pancakes, and hopping oranges insist that supposedly inanimate things have a human-like life of their own.

True to Firk’s vision, this is a drama in which things come alive. In the process, The Shoemaker’s Holiday lays to rest the myth that the Elizabethan stage was a bare one, designed to appeal to the ear rather than the eye. When Rose sits down ‘upon this flow’ry bank’ (2.1), she most likely alludes to one of the Admiral’s Men’s more visually arresting stage properties. In his 1598 inventory of the company’s stage items, Philip Henslowe lists two ‘moss banks’; one of these may have been used in Scene 2 of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The Admiral’s Men were evidently in the habit of dazzling their spectators’ eyes with lively props and scenery. Henslowe’s inventory also includes a Hell-mouth, a tree with golden apples, and ‘the city of Rome’.⁶ The most eye-catching stage properties in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, however, are sartorial items not listed by Henslowe: high-end footwear (Jane’s custom-made pair, Margery’s cork shoes), fashionable clothes (Margery’s hood and farthingale, Rose’s stomacher and gloves), and ceremonial robes (Eyre’s lavish alderman’s gowns, the shoemakers’ red livery).