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The Construction of The Shoemakers' Holiday Author(s): Michael Manheim Reviewed work(s): Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 10, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1970), pp. 315-323 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449920 . Accessed: 17/03/2012 00:07
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The Constructionof The Shoemakers' Holiday

MICHAEL MANHEIM Dekker's The Shoemakers' Holiday is constructed about the irony implicit in Simon Eyre's middle-class attack on courtiers in III.3. The irony lies in the fact that Hammon, the pretentious citizen in the play, embodies the attributes of Eyre's despised courtier, and Lacy, the courtier disguised as a shoemaker, embodies the virtues of the shop. In other words, a man's "inner linings" determine his worth, not his birth or rank. The play seems to be telling its predominantly middle-class audience that humble origins are no greater assurance of true manhood than noble origins. But the attributes the play condemns are those associated with the court, and the attributes the play celebrates are those associated with the shop. First we hear pretense and arrogance, then candor and good will, and so on back and forth until the concluding scenes. The play's three story-lines are practically subsumed in an antiphonal movement frequently found in Elizabethan plays. The play culminates with the arrival of the hero-King, probably Henry V, who despite his noble birth is himself evidence of the triumph of humility and good will over pride and intransigence.

ONE SCENEAT ALMOST the precise center

of Dekker's The Shoemakers' Holiday sharply focuses the play's underlying theme.1 The scene (Act III, scene 3) portrays the visit of Simon Eyre and his company of merry shoemakers to the country estate of Sir Roger Otley, the former grocer whose tenure as Lord Mayor of London has led him to put on airs. The atmosphere is festive; Simon, who has just been elected Sheriff, is at the top of his form. But classconscious Sir Roger, smarting over his daughter Rose's rejection of a desirable marriage to the citizen Hammon, asks Simon to speak to the girl. Rose is constant in her love to the courtier Lacy, and Simon hasn't much good to say for courtiers: a courtier, wash, go by, stand not vppon pisherie pasherie: those silken fellowes are but painted Images, outsides, outsides (III.3.40-42)2 Rose, their inner linings are torne.... This middle-class attack on the courtier is conventional, of
The scene in question is a "mirror-scene," as that term is defined by H. T. Price, "Mirror-Scenes in Shakespeare," in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948), pp. 101-113. 'Citations from Dekker in my text are to Thomas Dekker's Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, I (Cambridge, Mlassachusetts, 1953).

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course, but its function here is the opposite of what one would expect. The "silken fellow" in the play is not the courtier Lacy, whom Simon thinks he is attacking, but the wouldbe courtier Hammon, whom Simon thinks he is defending. Hammon's attitudes, as we shall see, are artificial and effete. His are the "torne inner linings." And at the conclusion of Simon's speech, a crew of lusty shoemakers dance a "morris" onto the stage led by none other than the courtier Lacy, disguised as Hans the Dutch journeyman, "the properest man I keepe," says Dame Margery. The virtues of the true courtier, in other words, are as resplendent in the shop as they would be at court. Through Simon's speech and what follows, the basic note of the play is sounded. The qualities celebrated are not exterior but interior qualities. What seems at first to be a class play becomes a play about a man's "inner linings," his inherent moral strength-joined with good nature and willingness to drink deep. Good will and honest industry link the true cobbler and the true courtier. The action of The Shoemakers' Holiday moves back and forth, in the fashion of many Elizabethan plays, between two contrasting sets of attitudes: integrity, spontaneity, and good cheer on the one hand-duplicity, pretense, and rigidity on the other. Obviously, the first set is extolled and the second condemned. The main plot-which follows the rise of Simon Eyre from humble cobbler, to Sheriff, and finally to Lord Mayor of London-is rooted in folklore and was a very wellknown legend in its time. Its being so well-known may account for its subordination to the antiphonal movement between the contrasting sets of attitudes. (None of Simon's elevations is actually shown on stage, only the domestic excitement preceding those appointments.) The sub-plots-first Rowland Lacy's courtship of Rose and second "dead" Rafe's return from the wars to his unfortunate Jane-are also absorbed into this pattern of alternating attitudes. There is narrative interest in the old legends which constitute the three plots, but the impact of Dekker's interpretation and treatment of those legends derives from the play's antiphonal movement. The play's opening scene is made up of two episodes. In the first, the duplicity and mutual distrust of a proud nobleman and an equally proud and wealthy citizen are revealed. The Earl of Lincoln, a conventionally haughty courtier, op-

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poses the marriage of his nephew Rowland Lacy to Sir Roger's daughter Rose. Privately, he gives his reasons to his nephew: I would not haue you cast an amorous eie Vpon so meane a proiect, as the loue Of a gay wanton painted cittizen.... (1.1.75-78) But Sir Roger's rigidity is equal to the Earl's: Poore Cittizens must not with Courtiers wed, Who will in silkes, and gay apparrell spend More in one yeare, then I am worth by farre.... (1.1.11-14) Actually, of course, Sir Roger is worth as much as, if not more than, Lincoln-and his protests later are bitterer than ever when Rose chooses a "fleming butter boxe, a shoemaker" (Hans) over the affected Hammon. ("Will she forget her birth?" asks Sir Roger.) The opening episode, then, betrays little more than the blindness of class hatred. Both characters are concerned only with "outsides," little with what a person really is. The effect of the second episode contrasts radically with that of the first. From calculating hypocrisy and rigidity, we move suddenly to volatile spontaneity and good will. Simon and his followers enter, hoping (in vain) to persuade the impressment officers not to take a good journeyman, Rafe, away from his wife and occupation to fight in France. The dominant attitudes here are those of Simon himself. Explosive, so honest that he is compelled to shift positions with every change of mood, and overflowing with love for his fellow man, he embodies all the qualities the play celebrates. He can rail against the state for impressing a dependable journeyman but in the end become overwhelmed with the great service that journeyman can do his country and his craft by fighting bravely against the hated French. The contrast goes beyond Simon, however. In the first episode, Lacy seeks to avoid military service in order to be with Rose, just as in the second, Rafe wants to stay home with his Jane. In the first Lacy is bribed by his uncle and the Lord Mayor to go to France. Bribery also has a place in the second episode, as Simon and his desperate journeymen indicate their willingness to pay Lacy (here the recruiting officer) to let Rafe off. But when convinced that Rafe's departure is inevitable and indeed honorable, the thought of bribery disappears and in its place are the gifts of hard-earned pence given Rafe by his master

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and friends. And whereas Lacy closes the first episode telling Askew of his counter-deceit of the old man, Rafe closes the second vowing eternal faith to Jane. This first pair of contrasting episodes in the play is followed by a second pair. Following a brief scene in which Rose is introduced and we learn of her abiding love for Lacy, with whom she hopes to establish a liaison through her recalcitrant maid Sibil, Lacy appears before the shop of Simon Eyre disguised as a Dutch shoemaker. In order to win his girl and evade the attention of his uncle, the young courtier happily assumes the disguise (one which he has assumed before) of a craftsman. He is, of course, heartily welcomed at the boisterous shop, though the journeymen Firk and Hodge must threaten their usual walkout in order to overcome Dame Margery's usual objections-this time to their hiring a "butter-boxe" (Dutchman). The occasion is immediately celebrated with "cans" of beer going the rounds, and it is apparent that everyone will get along famously with the new journeyman. "Hans" is at home from the start; his Dutch may be affected but not his manner. The true courtier is not out of place among true citizens. In contrast, the next episode concerns a figure who has sometimes mistakenly been considered "pathetic" by interpreters of the play.3 He is the wealthy citizen Hammon, who also assumes a disguise throughout the early acts in order to win the hand of Rose. His disguise, less explicitly identified but just as obvious as Lacy's, is that of a courtier. But while Lacy's presence in the shop is natural, Hammon's imitation of the courtly lover is unnatural. He affects the artificial diction of the romance, of Lyly's or Peele's elegant young courtiers, who woo in rimed couplets and word-play. The remarkable stiffness of the scene in question is rarely observed and seems important. In Italianate plays of the period, it might not seem out of place, but here it does. During a hunt (conventional pursuit of the courtier on the make), Hammon chases his "deere" across the estate of Sir Roger at Old Ford and comes across Rose and Sibil. In courting Rose, Hammon uses the following language:
3See,

for example, M. T. Jones-Davies, Thomas Dekker (Paris, 1958), II, 266; and M. L. Hunt, Thomas Dekker (N. Y., 1911), p. 58; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (N. Y., 1952), pp. 174175.

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Ham. A deere, more deere is found within this place. Rose. But not the deere (sir) which you had in chace. Ham. I chac'd the deere, but this deere chaceth me. Rose. The strangest hunting that euer I see, But wheres your parke? (She offers to goe away.)
(II.2.30-35)4

Hammon himself later tells us precisely what he has been doing in these lines when, after being decidedly rebuffed by Rose, he protests that he will not "the rimer play" to win her affections. Yet "the rimer" is exactly what he has sought to be here, and the effect is jarringly out of phase with a play dominated by Simon Eyre's outbursts against everything effete or pretentious. Hammon is rejected playJingthe courtier while Lacy is accepted playing the craftsman. The one disguise suggests Hammon's pretense and false conception of love, the other Lacy's inner humility and genuine dedication to love. Contrasting episodes of this kind characterize the play until its denouement. Pretense and weakness are repeatedly set against candor and good will, the latter, of course, based squarely in the shop. For all the play's celebration of inner qualities, those qualities are intended to be clearly associated with the middle-class. To that extent, perhaps, it is a class play. But the qualities celebrated can be found in anyoneeven a king. The "shop scenes" are of a piece; we get nothing from the last we have not already gotten from the first. Their effect is cumulative. Simon, their dominant figure, is mythical, an apprentice's superman endowed with honesty and merriment as the knight-at-arms is with strength and courage. Throughout the shop scenes people are judged by their essential qualities rather than by birth or outward bearing. Anything smacking of pretense, effeteness, or puerility is dismissed by Simon's ever-recurrent "Vanish !" When Dame Margery puts on airs because her husband has been made Sheriff, Firk says she sounds "like a new cart wheele," and Hodge later admonishes her: "mistresse, be rulde by me, and doe not speake so pulingly" (III.2.122). And to Simon, as we have
'Passages typical of those Dekker is satirizing may be found in George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris, in The Works of George Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1888), Act III, sc. 1; and Thomas Heywood's 1 Edward IV, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood (London, 1874), I, 64-66. Rose's part in this couplet-making is clearly as foil to Hammon. She is in no way being satirized. On the contrary, her responses may even be tongue-in-cheek.

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heard, courtiers are "but painted Images" whose "inner linings" are "torne." Simon is similarly contemptuous of the whimpering of his maids over Rafe's departure: "Leaue whining, leaue whining, away with this whimpering, this pewling,
these blubbring teares . . ." (I.1.117-118).

At the same time that they abhor weakness, however, the shop men are not averse to compromise. Above all, they are pragmatists. Since they will not view life with the blind certainty (born of fear) of the Earl of Lincoln or Lord Mayor Roger Otiey, they seek solutions that suit the circumstances, When they wish Rafe released from service, they try to bribe the recruitment officer; but when this proves futile, and they realize their craftsman's "honor" is at stake, they accept the inevitable with good will. The frequent quarrels in the shop are as amicably settled as they are quick to break out. Lacy's deception is acceptable to Simon because it is practiced in the name of youth and love. And Simon the master accepts a loan from "Hans" the journeyman because it will make possible the business venture which sets off the cobbler's meteoric rise. The prevailing attitudes in the shop are of explosive frankness mixed with a generous supply of horse sense. The scenes which alternate with those in the shop are dominated not so much by the Earl and Sir Roger, whose attempts to frustrate Lacy's plan to run off with Rose are chiefly concentrated in the last act, but, again, by Hammon, whose affected surface we have seen and whose "tome inner linings" are more explicitly revealed when he courts Rafe's unfortunate wife Jane, by whom, it appears, he has been rejected more than once in the past: Yonders the shop, and there my faire loue sits, Shees faire not mine, Owould sheand louely, but she Iiscourted her,.... were, thrise haue I am infortunate, I stil loue one, yet no body loues me, I muse in other men what women see, That I so want? fine mistris Rose was coy, And this too curious,.... thus I oft haue stood, In frostie euenings, a light burning by her, Enduring biting cold, only to eie her,.... (III.4.1-3, 6-10, 15-17)

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The view that Hammon is a pitiful figure is, it seems to me, based on standards other than those of popular Elizabethan theater. To a public audience of 1600 inured to applauding bold, virile lovers like Mucedorus, George-a-Green,Petruchio, Henry V-even Hotspur-and scoffing at figures like Sylvius in As You Like It, or the foolishly persistent Paris in Romeo and Juliet, it seems fair to speculate that Hammon's self-pity would have appeared contemptible. Moreover, Hammon plays on Jane's feelings by producing "evidence" that Rafe has been killed in France, then ostentatiously employs the conventional
"sentences" of the consoling friend: "mourning . . . / helps

not the mourned; Forget the deade, loue them that are aliue."6 Finally, when all else fails, he threatens Jane into submission: "Nay then I wil grow rude, by this white hand / Until
you change that colde no, here ile stand, . . ." (III.4.115-116).

Again we have an implicit contrast between Hammon and Lacy as lovers. Not one to skulk about on frosty evenings trying to get a glimpse of his love, Lacy is all directness. Like the sturdy monarch who is to forgive him at the play's end, Lacy knows "no way to mince it in love." In his sole affectionate speech to Rose (IV.2.9-19), he dwells quite briefly on her "rich perfection" and draws his single conceit fittingly from the world of the money-lender: "thou paist sweete interest
to my hopes. / Redoubling Loue on loue.
. .

." The affected,

self-pitying Hammon seems in all details to be created as a foil for the strong, unassuming, determined courtier. Humble origins have not dictated that one man be better than another but rather his "inner linings," the stuff of which he's made. And for those with any doubts, the stuff of which Hammon is made is amply revealed in his deception and abuse of Jane in Act III, scene 4. The pattern of the play is maintained through four acts by an antiphony between the robust and the puerile, between sincerity and duplicity, between industry (shop-style) and indolence. The play's center, both in arrangement and in meaning, is the scene discussed at the opening of this paper in which Simon condemns "the courtier" for his "tome inner linings" while "Hans" leads his fellow-journeymen in a morris. The plots come together in Act V, scene 2, the episode in which Rafe and his merry men rescue Jane from Hammon
'See M. P. Tilley, Proverbs in England (Ann Arbor, 1950), item D126.

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at church door at the same time that the Earl and Sir Roger are tricked by Firk into forestalling the wrong wedding. The unfortunate Hammon, attacked from two sides, hardly knows what has hit him. With this hilarious, pseudo-melodramatic climax, the stage is set for the denouement, the meeting between the newly-elected Lord Mayor Simon Eyre and his King. Bringing folk-hero and monarch together in a patriotic final scene is conventional in popular Elizabethan comedy. The King appears-like the god in classical drama-to resolve the problems of the play and stand as a defender of youth, love, and country (meaning, as a rule, establishing his alliances with the middle-class against a troublesome, conniving nobility). The King here heartily approves the marriage of Lacy and Rose and, in chastising the class-bound Earl, states the play's basic message: Lincolne, no more, Dost thou not know, that loue respects no bloud? Cares not for difference of birth, or state... ? (V.5.102-104) The play's underlying theme is, therefore, appropriately punctuated even if the King is not specifically identified. But the King, as I sought to show in a note some years ago, is the identity is significant.6 He is identified-implicitly-and the former madcap prince, the most renowned of Henry V, folk-heroes, the hero-King of the middle class.7 He may, I think, be viewed as the embodiment of the theme of The Shoemakers' Holiday, a blend of the best of two worlds: the courtier's world of honor and the commoner's pragmatic world. He
IV 6"The King in Dekker's The Shoemakers' Holiday," N & Q, N.S., (Oct., 1957), 432-433. W. K. Chandler's "The Sources of the Characters in The Shoemakers' Holiday," MP, XXVII (Nov., 1929), 175-182, concludes that the King must be Henry VI. I support A. F. Lange's identification of the King as Henry V in his introduction to The Shoemakers' Holiday, Representative English Comedies, ed. C. M. Gayley (N. Y., 1914), III, 3-17. David Novarr also lends support to Henry V in his "Dekker's Gentle Craft and the Lord Mayor of London," MP, LVII (May, 1960), 233-239. TThat Shakespeare's Henry V preceded The Shoemakers' Holiday is strongly suggested by the facts. The time limits for the writing of Henry V are the departure of Essex for Ireland on April 15, 1599, and his return on September 15. (See Henry V, Act V, prologue, ll. 28-34.) We know from Henslowe that Dekker was writing The Shoemakers' Holiday on July 15, and it was performed at Court on New Year's Day, 1600. This means its first performance was sometime during the fall of 1599, probably later than September 15, the latest limit for Henry V.

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is the lord who is at home in the tavern, as Lacy is at home in the shop. He, too, has hated the "painted Images" and has been contemptuous of those whose "inner linings are torne." As Shakespeare's Prince Hal (created more than a year before The Shoemakers' Holiday), he learned to balance the uncompromising court and the quixotic world of Hotspur with the comic nihilism of Falstaff, in which all things can be compromised. A pragmatic honor is what Simon and his shop men seek. They do not wish to abandon tradition-the rituals surrounding Simon's advancement certainly show this-but they see and point out the folly in tradition when it is meaningless, and they cannot abide pretense. They want to know what they are getting for their honor, and as Lacy gets Simon a Lord-Mayorship for his, King Henry will get half of France for them all. The Shoemakers' Holiday is fittingly concluded by the soldier-King who learned his trade both in Eastcheap and at Shrewsbury. In summary, The Shoemakers' Holiday is constructed about the ironic implications of Simon's conventional attack on courtiers in Act III, scene 3. The attributes of Simon's courtier are embodied in a pretentious citizen and those of the good citizen in a disguised courtier. A man's "inner linings" are more important than birth or rank. The play presents its contrast between those attitudes it is celebrating and those it is condemning in the antiphonal manner common in Elizabethan drama. First we see falsity and arrogance, next warmth and candor-and so on until the concluding scenes culminate with the image of a hero-King pronouncing victory for the forces of humility and good will over those of false pride and blind adherence to the past.8
THE UNIVERSITY TOLEDO OF

8For a recent interpretation concerned with a different aspect of the play while touching on some of the same points I do, see Joel Kaplan, "Virtue's Holiday: Thomas Dekker and Simon Eyre," Renaissance Drama, N. S., II (1969). 103-122.