Historicity in Dekker's 'The Shoemaker's Holiday': Examining Simon Eyre and London's Past, Exercises of English

Download Historicity in Dekker's 'The Shoemaker's Holiday': Examining Simon Eyre and London's Past and more Exercises English in PDF only on Docsity! Brian Walsh 323SEL 46, 2 (Spring 2006): 323–348 ISSN 0039-3657 Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday BRIAN WALSH In a recent book on Shakespeare and genre, Lawrence Danson writes that most Elizabethan plays labeled as histories represent “a tiny sliver of the past,” and “deal mainly with the public realm, with political events, and specifically with the things that hap- pened to or because of a few English kings.”1 As Danson implies, such a reductive definition of the genre denies the full breadth of the dramatic historical field in this period. Closer examination of the performance of pastness in the late-Elizabethan and early- Jacobean theaters indeed suggests a historical imagination among popular playwrights that was open to more than the “tiny sliver” that is most often recognized as historical drama. The commercial stages were wide enough to accommodate visions of the English past in which housewives, merchants, and citizen figures domi- nated. In plays such as Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Roaring Girl, the early modern stage tapped into histori- cal subject matter that complemented the kind of state history Danson describes by focusing on what can be broadly called the “middling sort.” 2 Perhaps the best-known play to feature a middling-sort his- tory is Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599). Dekker recounts the story of Simon Eyre, a figure from the English chronicles, who becomes Lord Mayor of London in the fifteenth century. The Shoemaker’s Holiday presents a multilayered plot, and features, along with this historical story, a prominent ro- mantic narrative in which Eyre is only peripherally involved. Brian Walsh is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has published essays and re- views in Shakespeare Quarterly, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere. He is working on a book-length study of theoretical performance issues in Shakespeare’s early history plays, entitled Shakespeare’s Past. 324 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday Critics traditionally give greater weight to this romantic aspect of the play, and it is thus usually classified as some species of comedy.3 In this essay, I focus on Eyre’s trajectory toward the office of mayor. Through scrutiny of this storyline, I want to con- sider The Shoemaker’s Holiday as dramatic historiography in order to explore what impact staging a middling-sort past might have had on the historical imagination of the early modern era. I aim to show that, through its engagement with the “local” past of London and its citizens, The Shoemaker’s Holiday participates in cultivating a critical awareness in audiences that historicity is an effect that is produced by modes of performance. This effect is achieved in The Shoemaker’s Holiday through an emphasis in the play’s language and characterizations on the humanly produced nature of historical knowledge, an emphasis that is sharpened and reenforced by the practical dynamics of dramatizing a London past on the London stage. To read The Shoemaker’s Holiday as an Elizabethan history play helps to redefine the limits of that genre, while also help- ing to redefine the relation between the popular theater and the emerging historical consciousness of the English Renaissance. The history play was a predominant genre in the commercial theater in the age of Shakespeare. The popular stages were thus sites for the cultural work of historical transmission, places where the past became intelligible through the dynamics of drama. I begin exploring the place of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in this context with a brief discussion of tensions over the subject mat- ter of historiography in the sixteenth century in order to see how Dekker positions himself within these debates by locating the local within the historical sensibility of his play. I then look at Dekker’s protagonist Simon Eyre as a figure who creates himself through his language and role playing as a significant subject of history. I next move to an analysis of moments of history making within the play that demonstrate Dekker’s interest in establishing historicity as a temporal effect itself constructed in time. Finally, I examine the play’s conspicuous citation of its London environs, a move by which The Shoemaker’s Holiday reveals itself, and the practice of staging history at large, as originating in the laboring imaginations and bodies of theater artisans in the context of an increasingly plentiful and powerful urban citizenry. While The Shoemaker’s Holiday cannot deliver a comprehen- sive answer to the ancient question “Quid sit historia?” or “What is History?” for the Renaissance, it can expand our imagination of how, and indeed where, early modern playwrights imagined Brian Walsh 327 of Tyler and Jack Straw. Such commitments can be seen across Deloney’s oeuvre, in particular in his novelistic prose works Jack of Newbury and Thomas of Reading, and the two parts of The Gentle Craft, each of which probably appeared between 1597 and 1600.10 Deloney and Johnson are representative of a cluster of popular authors who were expanding romance plots toward mat- ters of social, urban history. Both men present an alternate field of historical subject matter, making clear that the more exclusive preferences of humanist writers did not preclude a flowering of more inclusive modes of historical representation. The Shoemak- er’s Holiday demonstrates this alternate perspective migrating to the commercial stages, where a low-born playwright like Thomas Dekker might depict a citizen like Simon Eyre.11 Deloney’s influence is in fact directly palpable in The Shoe- maker’s Holiday. Dekker drew on historical sources, namely Stow’s Survey of London (1598), for some details in his play, but his primary narrative debt is to Deloney’s The Gentle Craft (The First Part) (ca. 1597). Deloney’s novel introduces the figure of Simon Eyre by citing and perhaps incorporating the authority of the chronicle histories that flourished in the sixteenth century: “Our English Chronicles do make mention that sometime there was in the honourable City of London a worthy Maior, known by the name of Sir Simon Eyer [sic], whose fame liueth in the mouths of many men to this day, who, albeit he descended from mean parentage, yet, by Gods blessing, in the end he came to be a most worthy man in the commonwealth.”12 Dekker’s play follows the paths taken by Deloney and Johnson by making the middling sort a component of the historical imagination. Just as Deloney trans- fers Eyre’s story from chronicle to novel, Dekker transfers it from novel to the stage, where it takes its place alongside plays explor- ing figures from English history such as Shakespeare’s Henry V, usually dated as exactly contemporaneous with The Shoemaker’s Holiday (a coincidence I will explore later in this essay). It should be noted, though, that Dekker himself did not claim to be doing historical work in his play. In an “Epistle” prefacing the 1600 quarto, he calls The Shoemaker’s Holiday a “merry conceited comedy” wherein “nothing is purposed but mirth.”13 In the “argument” of the play put forward in the Epistle, Dekker devotes just one line to Eyre’s “coming to be Mayor of London” (Epistle.16), and seems mainly concerned with describing the ro- mantic plot involving Lacy, a nobleman who disguises himself as a shoemaker to woo a prosperous, but low-born, citizen’s daughter. While Dekker chose to advertise his play in terms of its romantic 328 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and comedic elements, one of the play’s most salient features is a concern with telling a story from the past and a more general idea of enacting pastness. The play proposes a cross-class love match that alludes to rising social tensions between the wealthy nonaristocracy and the old nobility, a story that, I will argue, is interrupted and punctuated by moments that complexly mark the play world as a thing of the past, and thus cultivate a sense of historicity. This historicity is structured around the humble rather than the great. Simon Eyre, and not the king with whom he socializes at the play’s end, is the prominent character in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s historical narrative. In fact, the king is not even named. One critic has conjectured that Dekker sought to suggest Henry VI, because according to the chronicles it was during his reign that Simon Eyre became Lord Mayor, while another, noting the king’s bonhomie among the tradesmen, has asserted that Dekker’s king “could only be” Henry V.14 Such arguments are conjectural. What is certain is that leaving the king unnamed has the effect of diverting attention from the monarch figure to the historic specificity of the middling-sort hero of the play. In this story about the past, the monarch is a composite, and, while he performs important—indeed, necessary—functions at the play’s end, his particular identity is not central to the story of Eyre’s journey toward the Lord Mayor’s office. The focus on the Londoner Eyre at the expense of any particu- lar interest in the king gives a place to the local in the historical imagination. Along these lines, Simon Morgan-Russell has claimed that in The Shoemaker’s Holiday “allegiance to the monarch” is represented as being “at odds with an allegiance to London citi- zenship.”15 The tension of the “odds” Morgan-Russell describes is evident in Eyre’s first scene in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, as he attempts to spare his workman Ralph from conscription so that the young man can remain with his new bride and continue working in the shoemaking shop. Eyre thus enters the play in opposition to the demands of an impending conflict between Eng- land and France and the martial, national imperatives it suggests. National concerns are certainly raised in the play, as when the nobleman Lincoln desires a trajectory for his nephew Lacy that would involve making a name for himself through service to the state. Lacy promises his uncle that he will “guide [his] actions in pursuit of France / As shall add glory to the Lacys’ name” (I.88–9). The sentiment is familiar, as Lacy outwardly aspires to win renown in posterity for himself and his family as well as Brian Walsh 329 promote his country through military action. However, as quickly becomes evident, Lacy has secret commitments, particularly his love for Rose, daughter of the grocer Oatley, that overshadow the traditional values he professes. The king himself ultimately gives priority to the local over the national. At the play’s end, upon hearing that Lacy neglected his sworn duty to lead troops in the wars in France in order to stay in London and marry Rose, the king declares to Lincoln: your nephew for her [Rose’s] sake did stoop To bare necessity and, as I hear, Forgetting honours and all courtly pleasures, To gain her love became a shoemaker. As for the honour which he lost in France, Thus I redeem it: Lacy, kneel thee down. Arise Sir Rowland Lacy. (XXI.109–15) Lacy’s choice to renounce his duties in France, remain in London, and work as a shoemaker is rewarded with a knighthood, while his shirking of national responsibility is glossed over. The solution pleases the citizen Oatley, whose daughter Rose thus becomes a lady, but not the noble Lincoln, who tells the king he is satisfied only “since there’s no remedy” (XXI.119). In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the national, traditional historical narratives favored by Lincoln are articulated but countered and eventually trumped by local concerns.16 By adopting the figure of the citizen hero, Dekker broadcasts a historical sensibility that recognizes people of the middling sort who are enmeshed in local concerns as having an at least paral- lel place in history with kings and high nobles. The Shoemaker’s Holiday, then, intervenes in contemporary disputes about the most fit subject for historical narratives. However—and this is an important point I will explore more below—the play goes beyond simple celebration of such figures. The Shoemaker’s Holiday in fact cultivates a critical consciousness of history, including “citizen history,” at the same time as it presents a chronicle of a London folk hero. This critical consciousness is partly achieved through the play’s emphasis on Eyre’s use of dramatic, and at times amoral, strategies to establish his own historical relevance, by which Dekker suggests that the past comes into being as narrative through a self-interested, theatrical construction of historicity. 332 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday status. Eyre is marked by an inscrutable lunatic excess in his dialogue, what one commentator has described as his “linguistic corpulence.”23 Through his unusual way of speaking, however, Eyre establishes his distinction and integrity while claiming space for himself precisely as a subject fit for remembrance. Eyre introduces himself early in the play as “the mad shoe- maker of Tower Street” (I.129–30), and his madcap reputation springs almost entirely from his verbal exuberance. Sending away his companions to reflect on his new post late in the play, he pro- claims “Go, vanish, vanish, avaunt, I say. By the Lord of Ludgate, it’s a mad life to be a Lord Mayor. It’s a stirring life, a fine life, a velvet life, a careful life” (XVII.39–41). The cadence of repetition that ends this speech is consistent with his general manner of continually enlarging on his descriptions, figures of speech, and insults. It is Margery his wife for whom he reserves his wildest, Falstaff-inflected linguistic flourishes: “Away, you Islington white- pot. Hence, you hopperarse, you barley pudding full of maggots, you broiled carbonado” (XX.52–4).24 Eyre’s joy in unusual phrases and appellations is seen in the names he chooses for his work- men, who, in addition to being his “fine dapper Assyrian lads,” are alternately his “Hyperboreans,” his “mad Mesopotamians,” and his “true Trojans” (XVII.54; IV.129; VII.83; XXI.148). These names evoke both a jumbled but vibrant sense of pastness and a seemingly limitless capacity for verbal variation. Dekker’s protagonist as defined by his own language use is, in most senses, at odds with the more serious subjects of histori- cal narrative. Thomas Worden may be too harsh in calling him a “coarse buffoon,” but Dekker’s Eyre is certainly not troubled with concern for gravitas.25 At one point in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Eyre describes to his wife’s maid, Cicely Bumtrinket: “She has a privy fault: she farts in her sleep” (IV.37). Eyre’s unprovoked, punning, and scurrilous account of Cicely is more concise than most of his utterances, but is nevertheless emblematic of his verbal mode: surprising, wild, and most often less than majestic. But the impression that he is solely a “bully swaggerer,” in the words of another critic, or a “huffcap” (XIX.10) in the king’s words, is too simplistic.26 Eyre’s refusal to recognize verbal constraints suggests a developed, self-conscious sense of language use as his distinguishing feature. Particularly, Eyre continually asserts his integrity as a speaking subject, one fit to be juxtaposed with more prominent figures. In his first appearance, on the verge of making a request to noblemen of the military, he asserts his ability to speak with anyone, including “Gentlemen, captains, colonels, Brian Walsh 333 commanders,” proclaiming: “I am a man of the best presence. I’ll speak to them an they were popes” (I.125–7). As a “man of the best presence,” Eyre is not merely being bombastic, but is also staking some claim to his own historical importance. When Margery warns him to moderate himself when he meets the king, Eyre refuses in deliberately immoderate fashion: “Avaunt, avaunt, avoid, Mephistophilus! Shall Sim Eyre learn to speak of you, Lady Madgy? Vanish, Mother Miniver-Cap, vanish! Go, trip and go, meddle with your partlets and your pishery-pashery, your flews and your whirligigs! Go, rub, out of mine alley! Sim Eyre knows how to speak to a pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine an he were here. And shall I melt, shall I droop before my sovereign? No! Come, my Lady Madgy; follow me, Hans; about your business, my frolic freebooters. Firk, frisk about, and about, and about, for the honour of mad Simon Eyre, Lord Mayor of London” (XX.54–65). As with many of Eyre’s utter- ances, this outburst is overdetermined by the range of its possible connotations. Eyre here betrays his misogyny, as he belittles the feminine marks of his wife’s dress to undermine her attempt to advise him, while also anachronistically displaying his theatri- cal know-how as he shows himself to be an admirer of Marlowe. Most important for my purposes here, however, is Eyre’s asser- tion of himself as a substantive figure, one who will not “melt” in the king’s presence. Refusing to “droop” before the king, Eyre asserts his integrity as a subject of history. When he does get to meet the king, Eyre indeed flouts Margery’s call for moderation. As he tells the king, pointing to his wife: “Mark this old wench, my King. I danced the shaking of the sheets with her six-and-thirty years ago, and yet I hope to get two or three young Lord Mayors ere I die. I am lusty still, Sim Eyre still” (XXI.29–32). Eyre boasts of his sexual prowess and frames his ability to procreate in the language of dynastic continuity, insisting on his own fitness for reproduction: to reproduce himself biologically and for himself to be reproduced in representation. Eyre further announces himself to be a subject fit for sanc- timonious remembrance when he envisions how aspiring crafts- men will memorialize him: “And prentices shall pray for Simon Eyre” (XVII.58). Eyre perhaps even suggests the potential for his person to be enacted. This can be seen in the catch phrase he repeats, with some variation, six times during the play: “Prince am I none, yet am I princely born,” an expression that Dekker adapts from Deloney’s The Gentle Craft, where it appears as a title-page maxim. In The Gentle Craft the phrase emerges in two 334 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday places. In the first instance, a Persian general responds to in- sults about his father’s trade by assuring his enemies that “thou shalt understand that a Shoomakers son is a Prince born”; in the second instance, another character affirms the truth of this saying when a son is born to a prince who is disguised as a shoemaker.27 Dekker thus takes the phrase but divorces it from its original context, and in this detachment the words accrue different connotations. Dekker indeed transforms the phrase he finds in Deloney for Eyre somewhat cryptically—in the words of one critic, it appears an example of “equivocation.”28 In four of the exclamations, the syntax is “Prince am I none, yet am I princely born” (e.g., XXI.35–6), while in one he substitutes “nobly” for “princely.” The lines suggest the performativity of social personas, the ability and agency to “act” nobly, even if one is not born into nobility. Eyre understands himself as capable of manipulating his reception to others. When Margery warns him he must “put on gravity” to attain high office (perhaps much as he “put on” the alderman’s disguise) Eyre again upbraids his wife with an asser- tion of control over his persona: “Peace, Madgy; a fig for gravity. When I go to Guildhall in my scarlet gown I’ll look as demurely as a saint, and speak as gravely as a Justice of Peace; but now I am here at Old Ford . . . I’ll be merry . . . prince am I none, yet am I princely born!” (XI.10–9). Beyond expressing mastery over his own social performances, Eyre uses this maxim to assert his own “representability.” Though not a prince, Eyre cuts a figure that is “princely,” and is worthy of being “born” as princes are. “Born” can then be read in the sense it is used in As You Like It when Touchstone, wishing to encourage the appearance of more sophistication from his lover, admonishes Audrey to “bear your body more seeming.”29 Eyre speaks some version of the expression “Prince am I none, yet am I princely born” twice in the presence of the king, as if to directly emphasize this fact in front of the play’s reigning monarch figure. Eyre suggests his posture to be princelike, and thus hints at his own potential to “craft” himself as material for representation on stage or by other means. His catch phrase is perhaps another instance of the “proleptic propriety” Kastan ascribes to Eyre’s rise to prominence.30 “AND THIS SHALL CONTINUE FOR EVER” Eyre’s ability to claim vigorously for himself a place of impor- tance is complemented and expanded by his, and his fellows’, Brian Walsh 337 examining here. In the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech before Agincourt, Shakespeare’s King Henry exhorts his troops through reference to the feast day on which the battle will take place, the feast of the brothers Crispin and Crispianus (IV.iii.18–67).35 Ac- cording to legend, Crispin and Crispianus were Roman brothers who worked as shoemakers while preaching the Gospel in Gaul, and became the formally canonized patron saints of shoemak- ers and tanners after they were martyred for their faith. Deloney uses these names in The Gentle Craft, and, drawing on elements of Caxton’s The Golden Legend and other sources, transforms their story of brutal martyrdom to a romance set mostly in Ro- man Britain, but shoemaking remains an important aspect of their story.36 At the height of Henry’s move toward asserting his imperial power as both legitimate English and French king, he invokes and seeks to re-signify a feast day dedicated to a pair of artisan patron saints that had recently been even more directly associated with tradesmen through Deloney’s novel. Alison A. Chapman, in an excellent article on shoemak- ers in early modern literature, has noted a tendency to depict members of the “gentle craft” as claiming the right to declare holidays. Chapman reads Henry’s use of Crispin and Crispianus in his oration as an indication of a struggle in Henry V between a kingly prerogative to dictate holidays, and the traditional right of shoemakers to do so.37 As Chapman argues, Henry’s invocation of Crispin and Crispianus is an act of appropriation, through which he “imaginatively recreates” the holiday, a move that has implications for the class-inflected sense of time and history in Henry V.38 Henry employs the feast of Crispin and Crispianus as a mnemonic through which he can teach his auditors how to construct, maintain, and reflect on historical narratives. As many commentators have pointed out, Henry’s exclusive commitment to his own social class is never in question, and the “brother- hood” he promises his common soldiers is clearly a fantasy.39 His rhetoric, though, powerfully engages some notion of Agincourt as a historical project that is communal, both in how the battle will be fought, and how it will be remembered and retold. More than simply claiming his right to intervene in a particular festal observance, Henry is modeling a method for initiating historical narratives. Eyre and Firk likewise draw on holiday making as a form of historical narration, although from a different perspective and for different ends than Henry. For Eyre and Firk, declaring holi- day bears on their own experience of time. Holiday differentiates 338 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday work time from non-work time, a distinction that was taking on the protocapitalist idea of the modern work week in urban, early modern England. When Henry cryptically claims that he and his soldiers are “warriors for the working-day” (Henry V, IV.iii.109), defined against “gentlemen in England, now a-bed” (line 64) and, presumably, Westmoreland’s men “[t]hat do no work to-day” (line 17), he is imposing an idealized description of solidarity that would obliterate class difference and privilege martial action in a king’s cause above all other forms of labor or, especially, leisure. Eyre and Firk find a means of self-definition through recognizing the importance of trade-oriented feast days to those who labor as precisely occasions to do no work, both for the respite it provides artisans and apprentices and the reflection on the cultural signifi- cance of their work that it allows. Henry V, then, generalizes the feast of Crispin and Crispianus, figures who implicitly resonate in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. While Henry’s use of the day might draw rhetorical power from its association with common artisans, by the time Henry is done with it, the day is to be remembered as about a great battle of conquest, with both national and imperial implications starring “Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter” (line 53). Eyre and Firk seek instead to specify their own experiences within the creation of an artisan holiday. Eyre’s revamped Shrove Tuesday and Firk’s St. Hugh’s Holiday open space for a calendric recognition of the artisan’s earned leisure. They negotiate a place for rightful otium in history. While Henry envisions his army as workers by associating them with the “working day,” Firk describes his fellow cordwain- ers as warriors. On route to the Shrove Tuesday feast, he tells his friends “I’ll lead you to victuals, my brave soldiers. Follow your captain. O brave!” (XVIII.191–2). Firk parodies the ambi- tions of warriors and instead promises his men something more tangible than glory, “victuals.” Firk thus balances his marking of St. Hugh’s day as commemoration with attention to a more immediate and material set of desires, the leisure, eating, and drinking that seem here less ritualistic than the “flowing cups” (Henry V, IV.iii.55) of the Crispin’s Day vigil Henry imagines in his speech. The Shoemaker’s Holiday presents moments that in- dicate origins and transition, forms of measuring the passage of time. Eyre creates space for himself within the historical imagina- tion of the play through his “crafted” performative persona and role-playing, just as he and Firk do for their fellow artisans in purporting to re-invest Shrove Tuesday with renewed meaning. Middling-sort figures in The Shoemaker’s Holiday thus create a Brian Walsh 339 place for themselves in historical time. I will conclude this essay by arguing that this move is mirrored by the actual performance of this play on the popular stage. DEKKER’S “PECULIAR ANACHRONISM” First performed at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre in Southwark, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is defined by the lively invocation of its urban setting. This is not surprising considering Dekker’s lifelong, intimate fascination with London. Dekker’s penchant for local set- tings and middling-sort protagonists in The Shoemaker’s Holiday is part of a larger pattern in his works, which are fundamentally oriented toward London and its inhabitants. In the prose narrative A Rod for Runaways, Dekker writes that London is the “Mother of my life, Nurse of my being,” while elsewhere he again addresses the city in maternal terms, writing “from thy womb receiued I my being, fro[m] thy brests my nourishment.” 40 Dekker depicts Lon- don as giving life, while his portrait of how human agents shape the city’s places and institutions in The Shoemaker’s Holiday gives London citizens a complementary role. As Firk says to his men, “Let’s march together for the honour of Saint Hugh to the great new hall in Gracious Street corner, which our master the new Lord Mayor hath built” (XVIII.197–200, emphasis added). In addition to Eyre’s and Firk’s declarations about the Shrove Tuesday holiday and the “great new hall,” Leaden Hall, a landmark in London later mentioned prominently by Stow and others, The Shoemaker’s Holiday offers to explain derivation of the hall’s name (XXI.132–4) and the establishing of a leather market there (XXI.160–2).41 Here and elsewhere within Dekker’s prolific literary output, London is figured in a state of symbiosis with its inhabitants.42 Dekker presents London itself as historical. And yet, while such resonance between the play’s sense of place and the site of its performance on the edges of the city implies an immediate affiliation between The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s content and its London audience, I would argue that this sense of immediacy is challenged throughout by Dekker’s indulgence in a kind of temporal bricolage. It is precisely through this bricolage that the play cultivates a critical consciousness of the idea of history. For the play’s citation of its London locales juxtaposes the fifteenth- century city of Simon Eyre and the late sixteenth-century city of the Rose Theatre, producing a jarring historicity. As much as it is a familiar environment that is being evoked in performance, London and its past is heightened for audiences as an object to 342 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday working Elizabethan theatrical scene, a fact that is emphasized through the play’s conscious citation of its present tense locale. Indeed, in my reading of the play, the production and dissemina- tion of history on the stage is itself revealed to be a form of mid- dling-sort labor. The play attempts to historicize the city and its inhabitants, but in doing so reveals inevitably that historicization is always contained by the present in which it unfolds. By opening itself out onto its contemporary moment, The Shoemaker’s Holiday demonstrates that history is a construct of the now, a narrative form that is subject to appropriation along a range of topics, and which can be adopted, shaped, and promoted in performance by voices and bodies “from below.”53 While I’m sympathetic with the political position that would laud that as an inspiring development, it would be naive to reduce The Shoemaker’s Holiday to a mere piece of celebratory literature on London and its citizens. Rather, The Shoemaker’s Holiday gives audiences an awareness of the complications involved in having a past. Dekker achieves this in part by hinting at Eyre’s checkered status as a historical “hero,” and also by exploiting theater as a form, namely its ontology of disappearance. A play always has a clear expiration, and this subjection to temporality is heightened when the performance seeks to suggest past moments and people, things which are also always threatened with fading to oblivion. A dialectic between absence and presence and past and present defines the aesthetics of performing history.54 The play indicates the irrecoverable distance of history by demonstrating that the past is unintelligible without the lens of the present to bring it into focus. It simultaneously demonstrates that the pleasures involved in piecing a history together are not defeated, but rather enabled, by this palpable sense of distance. Historical memory emerges in The Shoemaker’s Holiday through initiating acts that must be persistently invoked in order to be sustained, and it is in the persistent invocations that Eyre, Firk, and the others display the wonderful verbal energy that drives the play. Definitively establishing the historicity of London or of a citizen class is a project beyond the scope of what any single play can do. The Shoemaker’s Holiday does participate in such a project, though, and further participates in a more general dialogue with spectators, who come away from this play with a sense that understanding the familiar as historical involves more than just learning that a building or a custom is old. Apprehending historic- ity in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, whether it be the historicity of a mayor, a street, a profession, or a holiday, involves also recogniz- Brian Walsh 343 ing history as an invigorating form of labor that, as seen when the actor playing Eyre assiduously cultivates his own historical status, takes continual work to take continued effect. NOTES 1 Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, Oxford Shakespeare Topics, ed. Peter Holland and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 87. 2 “Middling sort” is an approximate, early modern equivalent of “middle class” or “bourgeoisie,” usually preferred in early modern scholarship to those later terms because of its use in the period. It is by no means a precise or unequivocally accurate term. This results in large part from the confusion over social positions unleashed by nascent capitalism and the decline of feudalism, a confusion that features so prominently in the literature of the period. See Keith Wrightson’s survey on “the language of sorts,” “‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Chris- topher Brooks, Themes in Focus (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 28–51. Wrightson points out that the term “middling sort” seems to have originated in an urban context. See also Wrightson, English Society: 1580–1680 (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 17–38 for a survey of the period’s complex field of social positions in which some version of a “second” or “middle” class is emergent. Although The Shoemaker’s Holiday resists easy application of such terms because Simon Eyre’s own financial status alters radically through the course of the play, moving him up within the various layers of the bloated middle station, for my purposes here, I use the term “middling sort” in line with An Apology of the City of London, an anonymous appendix to John Stow’s Survey of London (1603). An Apology asserts that “three sorts may be considered, either in respect of their wealth or number” and goes on to describe the second “sort” as “retailers and all artificers” who exist between the very wealthy and the poor. The anonymous author notes that “in number they of the middle place be first, and do far exceed both the rest,” in The Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley, new introduction by Val- erie Pearl, Everyman Classics (London: Dent, 1987), pp. 482–97, 492. I use “citizen” to refer both to the technical designation conferred on members of guilds, and more generally to describe the merchant-tradesmen milieu. For more insight into the difficulties involved in labeling classes with any preci- sion in this period, see Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees, and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today 37, 22 (January 1987): 17–22. 3 Irving Ribner refers to The Shoemaker’s Holiday in his classic study of the English history play, only to then banish it from the genre. He labels it a “historical romance,” and warns against confusing such works with those having any real “historical purpos[e].” The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 270. As an exception to this generalization about how The Shoemaker’s Holiday is normally clas- sified, see Simon Morgan-Russell’s excellent article “‘How Far Is It, My Lord, To Berkeley Now?’: English Chronicle History and the Rise of the London 344 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday City Comedy,” EIRC 27, 2 (Winter 2001): 245–62. Morgan-Russell says that Thomas Dekker’s play can “be classified without much equivocation as [a] ‘chronicle history’” (p. 253), but goes on to argue convincingly that the play, through its attention to topography and physical structures (a topic I will explore later in this essay) in fact helps to signal a transition from the popular history play genre to the London city comedy. Morgan-Russell points also to Brian Gibbons, who in Jacobean City Comedy also calls The Shoemaker’s Holiday a “chronicle play” (p. 254). See Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 2d edn. (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 1. 4 “Thomas Blundeville’s The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574),” edited and with an introduction by Hugh G. Dick, reprinted in HLQ 3, 2 (January 1940): 149–70, 159. 5 For a summation of humanist calls for decorum in the writing of his- tory, see D. R. Woolf’s article “The Shapes of History” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 186–205. 6 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), p. 41. 7 Gabriel Harvey quoted in D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, ed. Anthony Fletcher, John Guy, and John Morvill (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p. 25. Thomas Nashe quoted in Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958 [originally published 1904–10]), 1:137–245, p. 194. In Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), Nashe spe- cifically castigates writers who glorify tradesmen; see Summers Last Will and Testament in McKerrow and Wilson, 3:227–95, 276. 8 On urban historical literature, see, for instance, London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Manley (University Park PA: Penn- sylvania State Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 209–37. 9 Richard Johnson, The Nine Worthies of London (London, 1592). Quota- tions are taken from Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, http://80eebo.chadwyck.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu. This poem is discussed briefly in Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, Folger Shakespeare Library Publications (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958 [originally published 1935]), pp. 329–30, where I first learned of its existence. 10 Merritt E. Lawlis, introduction to The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Lawlis (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), pp. xi–xxxii, xxix. 11 Similarly, Jean E. Howard has argued that Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV, which like The Shoemaker’s Holiday was probably first written and per- formed in 1599, is an example of a history play that “intertwines the history of the nation with the history of London, inscribing on the urban landscape the names of those whom he [Heywood] deems her citizen heroes.” See “Other Englands: The View From the Non-Shakespearean History Play,” in Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 135–53, 149. 12 Thomas Deloney, The Gentle Craft (The First Part), in The Works of Thomas Deloney: Edited from the Earliest Extant Editions & Broadsides with Brian Walsh 347 36 See Deloney, Works, pp. 522, 525 for information on the sources of the Crispin and Crispianus plot in The Gentle Craft. 37 Chapman, 1468. 38 Ibid. 39 See, for instance, Anthony B. Dawson, “The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theater and the National Past,” ShS 52 (1999): 54–67, and Robert Lane, “‘When Blood is their Argument’: Class, Character, and His- torymaking in Shakespeare’s and Branagh’s Henry V,” ELH 61, 1 (Spring 1994): 27–52. 40 Quoted in introduction to The Shoemaker’s Holiday, pp. 1–70, 2. 41 The tradition that Simon Eyre erected Leaden Hall is anachronistic; he was responsible merely for renovating and enlarging it. See Bonahue Jr., p. 83n29. 42 Interestingly, new historicist critics have argued that the politically oriented history plays of Shakespeare and others helped audiences feel connected to an emergent concept of nationhood, and, according to a recent formulation of the emergence of national community, “one of the essential projects of nation-building has been to dismantle the historic primacy of urban citizenship and to replace it with the national.” At a moment proximate to the emergence of the nation-state concept in England, The Shoemaker’s Holiday can be said rather to have engendered in playgoers a sense of affiliation and identification with the urban community of London itself. For signal work on the history play and national community, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), as well as Peter Womack, “Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 91–145. The quotation is from James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” Public Culture 8, 2 (Winter 1996): 187–204, 188. 43 See Chandler, “The Sources of the Characters in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” pp. 175–82, especially p. 176. 44 See Shoemaker’s Holiday, p. 74n8. 45 Chandler “The Topography of Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” SP 26, 3 (July 1929): 499–504, 500. 46 Chandler, “The Topography,” p. 504. 47 See Chandler, “The Topography,” pp. 499–504, as well as the introduc- tion to The Shoemaker’s Holiday, p. 25. 48 Introduction to The Shoemaker’s Holiday, p. 24. 49 On sensitivity to anachronism as a hallmark of an emerging Renais- sance historical consciousness, see Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, Documents of Modern History, gen. ed. A. G. Dickens and Alun Davies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969). 50 Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), p. 94. Rackin’s section on anachronism (“Anachronism and Nostalgia,” pp. 86–145) powerfully explores this concept and its radical implications for historiography. 51 Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance Eng- land and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 181. See especially pp. 179–85. 348 Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday 52 Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shake- speare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). See especially chapter 4, “Call Me Ganyemede,” pp. 53–82. 53 I would suggest, further, that in making evident the middling-sort ef- forts behind dramatizing history, The Shoemaker’s Holiday helps to reveal that the presentation of aristocratic-centered national histories is also driven by middling-sort labor—both imaginative and bodily. 54 I discuss the aesthetics and theoretical implications of performing his- tory more extensively in my article “‘Unkind Division’: The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI,” SQ 55, 2 (Summer 2004): 119–47.