The play sometimes advances a conception of property that is exemplary of trade-guild culture. After serving a period of apprenticeship (usually for seven years), a journeyman acquired what was known as the property of ‘skill’ – that is, the right to practice a trade and to associate with the other members of his guild. Skill was thus not a private possession. Rather, it was a relational practice endowed by virtue of membership in a ‘mystery’, a common term for the secret knowledges and social bonds uniting a skilled artisanal community.¹¹ The property of skill is crucial to the play-world of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Upon meeting Lacy, disguised as the Dutch shoemaker Hans, Simon Eyre asks him whether he possesses ‘any skill in the mystery of cordwainers’ (4.81). Eyre’s question is about more than simple shoemaking ability: in this scene and throughout the play, fellowship or fraternity is repeatedly emphasized as the foundation of skill. Eyre’s foreman Hodge addresses lame Ralph, injured in the wars in France, as ‘brother of our trade’ (10.54-5); the journeyman Firk, upon seeing Hans for the first time, calls him ‘a brother of the Gentle Craft’ (4.42) – a demonstration, as David Scott Kastan has noted, of his generous if improbable allegiance to the bonds of skill across national borders;¹² and when Firk is offered a bribe by Oatley to disclose Lacy’s whereabouts, he exclaims: ‘No point. Shall I betray my brother? No. Shall I prove Judas to Hans? No. Shall I cry treason to my corporation? No’ (16.93-4). Hodge’s and Firk’s remarks all align the property of skill with a network of unbreakable fraternal relations. This alignment is most explicit in the shoemakers’ concluding toast to Eyre and ‘incomprehensible good fellowship’ (18.200-1), a phrase that pointedly highlights the ineffable nature of the guild’s skill or ‘mystery’.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday materializes the property of skill in many lively stage properties. Stage directions at the beginning of several scenes require the shoemakers to be at work. This would have necessitated the display of their tools, repeatedly referred to as ‘Saint Hugh’s bones’ (4.43, 61, 75-6). In Dekker’s source, The Gentle Craft, Thomas Deloney relates the bizarre story of how the bones of the shoemakers’ patron saint, the martyred Saint Hugh, were transformed by his fellows into the tools of their trade and signs of their mystery. But if the shoemakers’ tools materialize their property of skill, so do their products. Before leaving for the wars, Ralph reveals the shoes he will give Jane as a farewell present:

Here, take this pair of shoes cut out by Hodge,

Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself,

Made up and pinked with letters for thy name.

Wear them, my dear Jane, for thy husband’s sake.

(1.228-31)

Ralph ennobles the shoes as the skilful product of collective craftsmanship. In doing so, he invites the audience to view the shoes less as love-token for Jane than as homage to the shoemakers’ property of fellowship and association.

As Ralph’s tribute to his fellows suggests, the property of skill in The Shoemaker’s Holiday is repeatedly confined to male relations. Lacy says that the ‘Gentle Craft is living for a man’ (3.24); the women of the play are notably excluded from the property of skill. Instead, ‘living for a woman’ involves retailing, possessing, or desiring a different species of property – the fashionable luxury item. After Ralph has left for war, Jane supports herself by selling ‘Calico, or lawn, / Fine cambric shirts, or bands’ (12.22-3). And when Rose bribes her maid Sybil, she does so by tempting her with ‘my cambric apron, and my Romish gloves, / My purple stockings, and a stomacher’ (2.55-6). The female characters’ supposedly typical desire for luxury items is registered in one of the many derisive names Eyre devises for them. In the opening scenes of the play, he brands first Jane and then his wife as a ‘bombast-cotton-candle quean’ (1.209, 7.35-6), a term that refers to a costly, ornate candle and hence, by association, a woman who owns or covets it.¹³ The feminine luxury item here contrasts the masculine immaterial property of skill.