The Shoemakers' Holiday

by Thomas Dekker, James Loxley (editor), Suzanne Gossett (series_editor)

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Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Fiction, School, Theatre, Read For School

328 pages, Paperback

Published August 22, 2024

About the author

Thomas Dekker (c.1572 - 1632) was an Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Reviews

[Majenta]

Rounded up to 4 stars. Interest in the story and how it would turn out lured me through the highly-unorthodox spelling--even a person's name was spelled "Lacy," then "Lacie," then "Lacey" and not all that far apart, either. One of the many I first learned about through my mother's MASTERPLOTS set of summaries and critiques of world literature.

[BJ Lillis]

Too fast, exuberant, silly, and short to wear out its welcome, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an amusing fantasia of working-class London ca. 1600. A good deal of the humor depends on the idea of a wealthy young Englishman disguising himself as a Dutch shoemaker, who speaks most of his lines in a kind of early modern “Dutchlish.” Obviously, this was meant to be both comprehensible and hilarious. And I suspect that an actor could still make it at least kind of work on stage as slapstick—but I think if I didn’t read Dutch myself, I’d have found it even more tedious than I did. That said, genuine English shoemakers Eyre and Firk are hilarious whether they make sense or not. Who could resist a line like: “How, merry? why our buttocks went jiggy-joggy like a quagmire. Well, Sir Roger Oatmeal, if I thought all meal of that nature, I would eat nothing but bagpuddings.” The first bit, about jiggly butts, is self explanatory. As for Sir Roger Oatmeal and bagpuddings—your guess is as good as mine (I think it’s a sex joke, because oatmeal was at least sometimes maybe associated with sexual disinterest, and bagpudding was certainly associated with pregnancy? But maybe it really is just a joke about food?).

“Come out, you powder-beef queans! What, Nan! What, Madge Mumble-crust! Come out, you fat midriff-swag-belly-whores, and sweep me these kennels that the noisome stench offend not the noses of my neighbours.” I guess five acts of that either sounds like fun or it doesn’t. What can I say, I have sophisticated taste.

[M.L. Rio]

Enjoyed this much more the second time around, though I'm not sure why. It is actually funny in places, unlike so many city comedies (looking at you, Ben Jonson), and the ending makes for a refreshing break from the usual reaffirmation of existing social hierarchies. Everybody's welcome at the banquet--so long as you're not French.

[Pete]

i dont really know that you or anyone else needs me to rate a 17th century play about shoemakers so take that four stars as mostly meaningless BUT this play = pretty funny, pretty weird, in a direct conversation with shakespeare's henry v

basically what happens here is there are some shoemakers, and then one of them is secretly an irresolute rich man who is in love with a middle-class lady, and he sends ralph (one of the shoemakers) to the wars in his stead so he can stay and woo (he must go about disguised as a dutchman named hans in order to do this). meanwhile his mean uncle hires a random pepe lepew ish nobleman to court the middle-class lady, and all kinds of goofiness happens, including lots of costume changes, then ralph comes back missing a leg or something, then there is a plot event involving identifying a special custom-made pair of shoes, then rascality, then the shoemakers basically have a hoedown and declare a new shoemaker-centric holiday and then it's over

emerging theory: i'm pretty sure the movie caddyshack is based on this play

[willow]

full of goofy insults

[Hannah]

So this was a pretty easy read and at times I genuinely enjoyed it. However, while I found the text pretty engaging for the most part I was SO let down by the ending. WHERE WAS THE CONFLICT, THE EXCITEMENT, THE DRAMA. So disappointed!! I may appreciate the play a bit more (hopefully) when I delve into the historical side of things and consider different themes that Dekker may have been trying to discuss. However, for the most part I'm quite underwhelmed unfortunately!

[Anna-Marie]

I watched the play while reading. I’m not sure if I fully understood it, but some comedic times made it better

[cey]

bölümü bırakacağım

[N]

Firstly -- what a breath of fresh air to read an Elizabethan play which isn't one by Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong, I love Bill as much as anyone, but I often just tend to forget that there are other Elizabethan plays out there ('m sorry Kit, Bennie).

Secondly -- this play was much more entertaining than I initially thought. I felt that the female characters had, to Elizebathan-play-standards, quite some control over their lives. Firk and Simon Eyre; wtf, but also, firk yes. The King was so benign and he seemed so amused, and then all was well.

[Ana]

This was an interesting morality and class play, but something was missing.

[aaron p]

I liked this on a first read, but upon a reread I'm feeling almost as moved as the Jacobean audience would be... a great comedy!! Very close to giving it a 5 stars

[pey]

This was pretty mid in terms of comedies. If you’ve read one you’ve pretty much read them all, and this one didn’t have anything that set it apart from the others. There’s the traditional lovers who are banned from being together and spend the entire play trying to be together while some other carnivalesque plot is going on. I did actually quite like all the character foils between the nobles and the shoemakers that highlighted the social class differences with lifestyle, exceptions, etc. And to be fair, it was quite funny in the beginning until it got to the point where a guy tricks a married woman into marrying him, stalking, etc. Not cool man. That’s my main issue with comedies is that the jokes are always at the expense of women or POC, so I’m not a big fan of comedies. That, plus the fact that nothing really set this apart from others, meant that this was just a pretty mediocre read.

[Katie Grace]

i read this for one of my uni modules, and it really wasn't my cup of tea. i enjoyed the 2 love story side plots, but even those were a bit lacklustre. i find that in a lot of early modern drama/plays of this time that the characters feel very hollow. they seem very two-dimensional and it makes it hard for me to care about whatever happens to them. i loved firk though !

[Tom Caskie]

The more renaissance plays I read the more I see how silly they were back then. Also; its more and more clear that Shakespeare was the GOAT. A couple of them come close... this play does not I fear but maybe I'm jaded by the fact this is for an essay

[loïs]

did not understand a single thing tbh

[Severind Alexander]

To be frank, I didn't know what I was reading half the time and didn't much care to find out.

[James]

I read The Shoemaker's Holiday in preparation for attendance at a local Shakespeare company's production. I'd certainly heard the name Dekker, but never read him before this week. My experience with Shakespeare's contemporaries is extremely limited. I've seen or read a handful of Marlowe, Webster and Tourneur tragedies, but no early modern English comedies apart from the half (whatever that comprises) of The Two Noble Kinsmen that Shakespeare didn't write. Reading this play was, therefore, an unanticipated pleasure.
I love Shakespeare but, on the whole, I don't love the comedies. Their slangy everyday language has dated more than the lofty political and philosophical speech in the histories and tragedies. The chief plot line is ypically a swain/ingenue love story interchangeable with the swain ingenue love story in just about every other comedy. The boilerplate rustic setting is half idealized Arcadia and half Hooterville, affording an erstwhile Country Mouse the opportunity to amuse his sophisticated city cousins with absurd hayseed caricatures. The resolutions of the multiple subplots, which , as often as not, turn on impossibly convincing transvestite disguises, are invariably a matter of supreme indifference to me . All of this combines to engender more disbelief than I'm generally willing to suspend.

The Shoemaker's Holiday, by contrast, is urban, a very real London populated by some real historical characters, including rags-to-riches "Mad" Simon Eyre, cordwainer turned merchant prince turned Lord Mayor of London. It is exuberantly about the world of work and, more specifically, the particular awesomeness of those who ply the "Gentle Craft." The plot, in comparison to the zany misapprehensions and mischances of a Shakespearean laff-riot, is lean and mean - there are separated lovers, but none of that tiresome he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not-confusion. The disguised character is immediately recognized by the other characters who know him. And the language, while there is no shortage of shoemaker technical jargon and even some Language Poet-y riffing on words as strings of fun phonemes (for a simple example, Simon Eyre is fond of uttering, seemingly appropos of nothing, the phrase "pisherie pasherie."), is much easier to understand than Shakespeare's lampooning of ignorant hayseed lingo, which was a real benefit because I read a version that preserved the idiosyncratic spelling of the first printed editions and had no helpful critical apparatus.

[Emily Weatherburn]

I always struggle to appreciate early modern comedies, and this is why: when it comes to the tragedies, they are somewhat universal. No matter how you look at it, the tragic love scene in Romeo and Juliet is sad - that understanding of sorrow hasn’t changed since the seventeenth century. Yet humour HAS changed. A lot of the jokes made in this period are either overtly sexual or offensive; humour was built on misogyny, racism, and the general ridicule of others, and this fact really comes to light in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

It’s just not funny. Elements of it are lighthearted, but that’s about it. This is due to no fault of Dekker’s; in my opinion, the same can be said of even Shakespeare’s most famous comedies. They’re lighthearted, but nowhere near as comedic as they would have appeared to contemporary audiences. Because of this lack of humour, such comedies often (though not always) give the impression that they are MISSING something. They fail to evoke the emotion expected from a play, which is why I often find myself disappointed after finishing a comedy.

I didn’t even slightly enjoy the first half of this play due to this distinct LACK. It did improve in the later scenes, but this is mainly because the story had, at this point, gotten going and the play was no longer purely reliant on its comedy. There are some quite touching love scenes which are probably what have prevented me from giving this play a much lower rating. Nevertheless, there are some good ideas and some strong characterisation. It’s not Hamlet, but it’s not terrible, and certainly isn’t the worst comedy I have read, even if it does fall victim to many conventions of the early modern comedy.

[Mac]

Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday" was the third play I've read following a course on Elizabethan-era theater other than Shakespeare. Unlike the first two, it was a comedy. I had to chuckle at some of the outrageous lines. I would say the humor has aged well over the past 400+ years.

One point of interest is that one character disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker for a while. Much of his dialogue is therefore rendered in quasi-Dutch dialect that is just this side of comprehensible. I can imagine a Chico Marx-like actor generating lots of laughs from this part.

"The Shoemaker's Holiday" was light and pleasant to read. I enjoyed it like a fluffy movie or sitcom that will probably not linger long in my memory.

[Charlye Mondak]

I really enjoyed this comedy. It's clever and entertaining, surprising me with both elements throughout the play. It's also partially a commentary on social issues of the times [or today], but thoroughly enjoyable even disregarding those. The reason I only give it three stars is because I've now read "The Roaring Girl" as well, and I liked that one more.

[Isaac Timm]

A lot of late 1600 century topical humor and speech, but the light story and repetition quickly squared my understanding away. I'd rate it up with some of Shakespeare's early comedies. Dekker's uses many locations closely related to Shakespeare's Henry IV and Merry Wives of Windsor, I nice quick moving play that that didn't disappoint.

[Jennifer Griffith]

Boy, I am sure it must have been loved in its time, but this thing making it into a collection called "The Harvard Classics?" Boggles the mind. Yes, the language is lilting, high level example of Elizabethan wit. But the plot...well, I guess it wasn't for me.

[Kukkik W]

Most of the reviews are 'for uni reading', so I'll join in too! I read this for my 'Writing London' module; first play we've read this semester. It was enjoyable but I didn't think it was anything special - would probably never have heard of it otherwise.

[Ela]

Really enjoyed this, it was comical and romantic with the subtlest hints of satire.

The bawardy humour and double entendre is quite effectively contrasted with with very romantic, slightly tragic passages. Would be really interested to watch a stage version of this.

[Emily Rennie]

Read for Shakespeare & Early Modern Drama module. A simple but cute play; not a lot stuck out for me, and it was quite predictable, but it's always fun to read other 'old' plays that aren't by Shakespeare.

[Jules]

I will call this a "cute" comedy.

[Duncan Maccoll]

I enjoyed the information about the author, location etc. as much as I enjoyed the play itself.

[Jill Gilbert]

For my British Lit class at Drake!

[Ron Christiansen]

Believe I saw it at the Shakespeare festival--one of the first Alison and I attended.

[Tinquerbelle]

Dunn, Esther Cloudman
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays

In compilation only.