The Shoemaker's Holiday

NEW MERMAIDS

General editors:
William C. Carroll, Boston University
Brian Gibbons, University of Münster
Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford

Reconstruction of an Elizabethan Theatre
by C. Walter Hodges

NEW MERMAIDS

NEW MERMAIDS

THOMAS DEKKER

THE
SHOEMAKER’S
HOLIDAY

Edited by Jonathan Gil Harris

Professor of English, George Washington University

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

About the Play

Summary of the Plot

The Author

Dates and Sources

The Play

Going to Wittenberg

Staging Things: Dekker’s Lively Stage Properties

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

‘The Lord of Ludgate’: Monumental Time

Spectres of Debt

Performance History

A Note on the Text

FURTHER READING

ABBREVIATIONS

THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY

Preface

Dramatis Personae

The Prologue

First Three Man’s Song

Second Three Man’s Song

The Text

APPENDIX

Deloney’s Pleasant and Princely History of the Gentle Craft

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the previous New Mermaids editors of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, D. J. Palmer and Anthony Parr, whose excellent editions I have made extensive use of in preparing mine. I also wish to thank Stanley Wells who, in addition to being one of the finest editors of the play, has directed me to some helpful materials about Dekker – including the unfairly neglected work of C. J. Sisson. Michael Neill first introduced me to English Renaissance drama more than twenty-five years ago, and he still models for me what it means to be a sensitive reader as well as editor of early modern plays. Much of my thinking about The Shoemaker’s Holiday has been shaped in dialogue with Henry Turner, Natasha Korda, Jean Howard, and Deborah Harkness. For various references as well as images, I thank Liza Blake, Gordon Turnbull, and the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library. At New Mermaids, Jenny Ridout has been an attentive and patient production editor; I am grateful also to Brian Gibbons for inviting me to take on the project and, above all, to Bill Carroll for his invaluable editorial suggestions, which have saved me from many embarrassments. As always, my biggest debt is to Madhavi Menon, who knows a thing or two about a fine shoe.

J. G. H.
Washington DC, 2008

INTRODUCTION

About the Play

Despite its many poetic episodes, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is memorable chiefly for its buzzing prose. Thomas Dekker was an aficionado of street argot, and he gave this fascination full rein with his popular ‘canting’ dictionaries – glossaries of underworld London slang that he compiled in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Much of the energy of The Shoemaker’s Holiday likewise derives from Dekker’s keen ear for the colloquial speech of London citizens. The bibulous Simon Eyre has an earthy turn of phrase to rival Jack Falstaff’s, and the distinctively colourful idioms of the bawdy Firk, the pretentious Margery, the wise-cracking Sybil, and even the faux-Dutch Hans/Lacy repeatedly demonstrate Dekker’s delight in the choice terms of London’s prentices, working women, and migrant labourers.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday is a citizen drama, and it celebrates the culture of London’s artisanal classes. But it also chronicles an important shift in that culture. It subtly dramatizes the change from an old code of communal fellowship to a new capitalist one, in which commercial venturing in luxury commodities has become the individual’s means to wealth and social status. The Shoemaker’s Holiday suggests how the playhouses participated in that shift. Elizabethan theatregoers evidently desired not just to hear plays, but also to see fashionable items – in particular, high-end clothes. On this score, Dekker’s drama obliged them copiously. It is full of modish costumes: not only fine shoes, but also hoods, farthingales, and periwigs. Hence even as the play celebrates the communal fellowship of the shoemakers, it also underlines how the commercial playhouses relied on expensive stage properties as capital investments designed to lure spectators and generate revenue from them.

The play’s mood is prevailingly sunny: true love and festive cheer carry the day. Yet The Shoemaker’s Holiday has its dark side. The play is quietly haunted by the spectres of bankruptcy and debt; and it is set in a time of war – specifically, England’s fifteenth-century wars in France. In contrast to Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, which presents the French wars primarily from the perspective of the King and his fellow aristocrats, Dekker’s play spotlights the calamitous impact of war on the artisanal classes. It shows how the working men conscripted to fight abroad sustain devastating injuries, and the women they leave behind suffer immense economic and emotional hardship. With its sympathetic depiction of London citizens, their language, and their travails, The Shoemaker’s Holiday achieves a vernacular lyricism, one that contrasts with the more top-down snapshots of English life afforded by other Elizabethan drama.

Summary of the Plot

Roland Lacy, nephew to the Earl of Lincoln, is in love with Rose, daughter of the grocer Roger Oatley, Mayor of London. The Earl condemns Lacy as a spendthrift and ne’er-do-well; while travelling in Europe, Lacy had run up exorbitant bills and fallen into bankruptcy, as a result of which he was forced to train and work as a shoemaker in Wittenberg. The Earl and Oatley are both upset by Lacy’s love for Rose, which they regard as a transgression of class propriety. Hoping to put an end to the liaison, the Earl resolves to have Lacy sent to France to fight in the wars there.

To avoid military service, and to remain near Rose, Lacy draws on his Wittenberg experience and disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker named Hans. He joins the London shoemaking workshop of Master Simon Eyre, an exuberant, good-natured madcap. Eyre is married to the equally eccentric Margery, a dedicated follower of fashion; Eyre’s fellow shoemakers include his foreman, Hodge, and two journeymen, Firk and Ralph. Ralph, however, is conscripted to serve in France. His parting gift to his wife Jane is a fine pair of shoes, stitched collectively by all the shoemakers.

Lacy introduces Eyre to a Dutch skipper who seeks to sell a shipload of exotic commodities. By dressing up as a rich lord, and with the help of a loan from Lacy, Eyre convinces the skipper he has the necessary credit to purchase the ship’s cargo. He proceeds to sell the cargo for a huge profit, and is suddenly enormously wealthy. Eyre’s new status sees him elected Master Sheriff of London and Margery transformed into a lavishly dressed gentlewoman.

The lecherous city gentleman Hammon unsuccessfully woos Rose, who – ably assisted by her sharp-tongued maidservant Sybil – spurns him. Hammon turns his attentions to Ralph’s wife Jane, now a poor shopkeeper. She too rejects Hammon. But in the face of his persistent advances, and fearing that Ralph has died in the French wars, Jane tells him that if she marries again she will wed him. Ralph, made lame in combat, returns to the shoemakers. After Hammon’s servant appears at Eyre’s workshop to request duplicates of Jane’s custom-made shoes, Ralph fears that she now loves another man. Meanwhile, Lacy elopes with Rose, and the Earl of Lincoln and Oatley pressure Firk to reveal their whereabouts. Firk tells the men of a marriage scheduled to take place in a London church. The Earl and Oatley, believing the wedding to be that of Rose and Lacy, try to put a stop to it; but it turns out to be the wedding of Hammon and Jane. Ralph and his fellow workers interrupt the ceremony, challenging Hammon at the altar. Jane chooses Ralph over Hammon, and Hammon graciously apologizes to Ralph.

At play’s end, the ever-cheerful Simon Eyre is now Lord Mayor. He declares a banqueting holiday in honour of the shoemakers. The King, returning from the wars in France, meets Eyre; their meeting is interrupted by the Earl of Lincoln and Oatley, who request that the King annul the marriage between Lacy and Rose. He appears to do so, only then to intercede on the lovers’ behalf. And delighted by Eyre’s cheerful madcap disposition, the King grants him and the shoemakers the right to use Leadenhall two days a week to buy and sell leather.

The Author

Thomas Dekker was born in or around 1572 and probably lived in London all his life. His last name, however, suggests Dutch ancestry; and The Shoemaker’s Holiday displays a more than passing acquaintance with the Dutch language. We know nothing about Dekker’s childhood or education, but he was familiar with Latin as well as Dutch, and his multilingualism was accompanied – as we have noted – by a keen ear for lower-class vernacular. This is of a piece with his sustained interest in, and compassionate treatment of, socially marginal or unconventional characters. Dekker was by no means universally inclusive, however; his writing sometimes displays a penchant for jingoist Papist-bashing, as exemplified by his prose pamphlet The Double PP and his play The Whore of Babylon, both of which warn against threats posed to England by malevolent Catholic foreigners.

It is unclear how or why Dekker came to write for the stage. By the mid-1590s, he was odd-jobbing for various London theatre companies, including both the Admiral’s Men and its rivals the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; during this time, he probably joined the large team of playwrights, including Shakespeare, who penned the controversial drama Sir Thomas More. Dekker struggled to make ends meet, however, and in 1598 he was imprisoned for debt – though he was also named that year by Frances Meres, the author of the commonplace book Palladis Tamia, as one of the nation’s leading writers of tragedy. 1599 was, by contrast, an annus mirabilis for Dekker. The theatrical entrepreneur and impresario of the Admiral’s Men, Philip Henslowe, lists payments to Dekker that year for contributions to no fewer than eleven plays; two of these, Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, were selected to be performed at Court during the Queen’s Christmas festivals. Dekker received royal favour again after the death of Elizabeth and the accession of King James I in 1603, when he was contracted with Ben Jonson to write the ceremonial entertainments for James’s coronation procession through London. He was sorely in need of such commissions; the playhouses were closed for much of this year because of a plague outbreak that killed as many as a quarter of London’s population. During the outbreak, he retooled himself as a writer of satires – a genre in which he had acquired some dramatic experience in 1602, when he penned Satiromastix, a play that took aim at Ben Jonson (who had lampooned him the previous year in Poetaster). Dekker’s prose satires about the plague year reveal a new skill for gritty reportage and sympathetic attention to the enormous sufferings of the afflicted. He repeatedly returned to this genre when he was prevented, whether by theatre closures or by imprisonment, from writing for the stage.

Like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker’s plays in the years of James’s reign tend to dramatize the stories of citizens. And they again display a sympathetic fascination with socially marginal characters, often women – a prostitute (The Honest Whore, co-written with Thomas Middleton, 1604), a transvestite (The Roaring Girl, 1611, also co-written with Middleton), and a witch (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621, co-written with John Ford and William Rowley). But Dekker’s financial woes continued through these years, and he was once more imprisoned for debt between 1612 and 1619, a harrowing experience that he later claimed turned his hair white. Upon his release, he continued to write plays, citizen pageants, and prose pamphlets, but he never enjoyed the success of his earlier years. He died, leaving his widow no estate except his writings, in 1632.

Date and Sources

The first reference to what was to become The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an entry by Philip Henslowe in his diary for 15 July 1599, in which he records a payment of three pounds for ‘A Boocke of thomas dickers Called the gentle Craft’.¹ The Shoemaker’s Holiday was almost certainly staged in Henslowe’s Rose Theatre later that year, but the earliest record of its performance is for the evening of 1 January 1600, when it was acted at Richmond Palace for Queen Elizabeth during her Christmas celebrations.

Henslowe’s diary record indicates Dekker’s play was conceived from the outset as a stage adaptation of a prose narrative first published in 1598, Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft. The original has not survived, but later editions of Deloney’s narrative are close to the text Dekker would have read. The narrative is divided into three parts; each relates a tale of shoemakers – the princely Crispianus and Crispine who, to avoid persecution by a tyrant, disguise themselves as shoemakers; Saint Hugh who, for the love of a lower-class woman, becomes a shoemaker; and Simon Eyre, a humble shoemaker who comes into wealth and is elected London’s Lord Mayor. Dekker’s play builds primarily on Deloney’s tale of Eyre, but Lacy’s evasion of his uncle’s will echoes the tale of Crispianus and Crispine, the romantic subplot draws on the cross-class elements of the Saint Hugh story, and the references to the shoemakers’ tools as ‘Saint Hugh’s bones’ mine Deloney’s account of Hugh’s martyrdom.

Even as Dekker borrowed the tale of Simon Eyre from Deloney, he transformed its main character. He added flesh to the bare bones of Deloney’s Eyre by giving him a distinctively colourful turn of phrase; he also included details about the historical Simon Eyre drawn from the antiquarian John Stow’s Survey of London (1598), which includes an account of Eyre’s patronage of Leadenhall (as well as the name of Sir Roger Oatley, who is not mentioned by Deloney). And whereas Deloney presents Eyre’s upward mobility as morally dubious – Eyre is uncomfortable about the transaction that makes him wealthy, and performs it only at the urging of his acquisitive wife (see Appendix) – Dekker’s Eyre has no such qualms, and indeed revels in the opportunity for profit and theatrical self-reinvention that the transaction offers him.

Dekker was influenced also by what was popular on the London stage in 1599. The historical Simon Eyre – who was a draper rather than a shoemaker – became Lord Mayor of London in 1445, when Henry VI was on the throne. But Dekker instead evokes the world of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, performed several months before The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Dodger’s report about the casualties of the French wars in Scene 9 echoes Shakespeare’s account of the battle of Agincourt, fought on Saint Crispin’s day in 1415. Dekker would have known from Deloney not only that Crispin was a patron saint of shoemakers but also that Saint Crispin’s day – 25 October – was celebrated by shoemakers as their holiday. Here Dekker arguably reclaims Shakespeare’s loftier themes for artisanal culure; similarly, his many allusions to the shoemakers’ fellowship chime with, but also displace, Henry the Fifth’s vision of an aristocrat-led ‘band of brothers’ (4.3.60) triumphing over adversity.²

Always a magpie collector of shiny trinkets from everyday speech, Dekker adorns his characters’ language with numerous references drawn from Elizabethan London’s common stockpile of sayings, catchphrases, and repeatable refrains. The Shoemaker’s Holiday contains an unusually large share of the Renaissance English proverbs catalogued by M. P. Tilley; it evokes the titles or choruses of several popular ballads; and it is littered with throw-away allusions to plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Soliman and Perseda, and Tamar Cham, most of which – like The Shoemaker’s Holiday – were performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre. All these references add colourful splashes of Elizabethan popular culture to a tale supposedly set in medieval London.