These striking items are not just simple adjuncts to the plot. In the play’s original performances, they were also vital to the commercial success of the Admiral’s Men. Playwrights were paid three to six pounds for a new play; but companies would pay up to twenty pounds for a new costume. Such enormous expenditures were doubtless made in the expectation that they would attract larger numbers of playgoers – and their purses – to the theatres. Dekker complains in his pamphlet The Gull’s Horn Book about theatre-going gallants who, during performances, ‘examine the play-suits’ lace, and perhaps win wagers upon laying ‘tis copper’.⁷ Yet when writing his plays, Dekker seems to have had few qualms about pandering to spectators’ fascination with luxury goods. Several scenes of Dekker’s 1611 collaboration with Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, are located in front of three shops retailing fashionably exotic commodities – European textiles, North American tobacco, and South American feathers – which the play’s characters covet with an almost sexual longing. Similarly, many of The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s stage properties are luxury garments – French hoods, Romish gloves, fine gowns – which exert an erotic power over the characters. As the ever-bawdy Firk asks, ‘why should not my master feel a rising in his flesh, having a gown and a gold ring on?’ (7.138-9). The power of the play’s luxury goods is such that they do not just arouse the characters but ultimately erase them. Sybil’s description of Lacy, for example, lingers not on his person but on his expensive accessories: ‘a scarf, and here a scarf, here a bunch of feathers, and here precious stones and jewels, and a pair of garters – O monstrous! – like one of our yellow silk curtains at home’ (2.26-8).

A play in which things come to life and people become things can be interpreted in two very different ways. On the one hand, the reversal of human and thing suggests the upside-down world of medieval carnival as described by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s analysis, carnival upends the hierarchies of official Christian culture and affirms an alternative, festive folk ideology grounded – like Firk’s vision – in the material commonality of people and the physical world.⁸ But the inversion of human and thing also recalls Karl Marx’s account of the fetish character of commodities under capitalism, according to which – as in Sybil’s description of Lacy – mere objects usurp the agency of people.⁹ Thus the play’s lively stage properties simultaneously evoke a collective past and prophesize a capitalist future. This paradox, both cultural and temporal, is arguably the shaping tension of the play.

From ‘Skill’ To ‘Freebooters’: Artisanal vs. Capitalist Property

The Shoemaker’s Holiday can be seen as a shrewd attempt by Dekker, Henslowe, and the Admiral’s Men to target and profit from London’s large number of playgoing artisans. By dramatizing both a Master Shoemaker’s acquisition of enormous wealth and an aristocrat’s love for the daughter of a Gentleman Grocer, The Shoemaker’s Holiday enacts a fantasy designed to appeal to artisan spectators.¹⁰ This fantasy, however, entails conceptions of property that are torn between two very different world-views – one artisanal and the other capitalist.