Thinking with the Feet in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman

When at the beginning of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday Hugh Lacy, Earl of Lincoln describes with disgust how his nephew “Became a shoemaker in Wittenberg — / A goodly science for a gentleman / Of such descent,” he expresses succinctly a central characteristic of early modern England’s aristocracy: a disdain for labor (1.29–31).^[1] As a class marker, the corporeality of labor was viewed negatively relative to the leisure of the aristocracy. As Paul Freedman has argued, although labor was not universally derided or devalued in the medieval and early modern world, the aristocracy treated labor as strictly the province of the lower social orders, its primary value being “that it produced what was necessary for consumption and display” by the aristocratic elite.^[2] The aristocracy was thus inclined to take labor for granted, acknowledging productive activity only insofar as it furnished the material by which the aristocracy could display its own class privilege and distance from economic necessity. As I argue in this chapter, however, Lincoln’s aristocratic disdain for labor, which in the play is heightened by the presence of a mercantilist ideology that subordinates production to exchange, is challenged by Simon Eyre and his shoemaker apprentices, who locate value in the laboring body and its position within a sustaining communal network.

This struggle to articulate the value of labor sheds light on why London’s laboring population, from vagrants to apprentices and freemen, was attracted to the theater. While the play’s nearly utopian depiction of London’s community of laborers has led critics to characterize it as fantasy, the play also offers an understanding of labor that directly links social and communal meaning to bodily sensation, and in doing so it actively engages with an economic reality in which labor was increasingly dehumanized and reduced to exchange value. To this extent, the play is more than fantasy—it also stages a way of seeing the world, a subjective orientation grounded in the laboring body. Through readings of two plays, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, I seek to recover an artisanal perspective that understands value to be the product of the sensuous, bodily labor that connects the individual to the community at large. In making this argument, it is not my intention to suggest that artisanal or craft labor was the expression of an untainted or pristine socioeconomic world that was falling victim to protocapitalist exploitation. On the contrary, the skilled labor of the guild system experienced profound exploitation from the late medieval period onward. Nevertheless, at the level of ideology artisanal labor was the location of an oppositional way of seeing the world. In artisanal discourses of the period—from guild records and petitions to ballads and plays—the artisan is a symbol of communal cohesion and in this way is imagined as offering an alternative to dominant and emerging regimes of value that deprecate bodily labor.

Artisanal Consciousness, or Thinking with the Body

Early modern aristocratic and mercantile ideologies relegate the body and its productive potential to the margins of the socioeconomic. Richard Brathwaite, for instance, in his popular account of proper aristocratic behavior, The English Gentleman, carefully distinguishes between aristocratic forms of labor and lower-class labor. The aristocrat should not be idle, but he must also avoid giving “too much care to the things of the Bodie,” especially manual labor.^[3] In his performance of labor, the gentleman should represent the “golden meane.”^[4] Having been “from worldly affections weaned,” he will not “slave the noblest motions of the soule to the unworthy bondage of the body.”^[5] The gentleman, in short, engages in a thoroughly disembodied form of labor, serving the noble “affaires of State” rather than the base toils of the body.^[6] Mercantile theory, while ostensibly at ideological odds with aristocratic values, can be seen as more fully theorizing and systematizing this aristocratic marginalization of the laboring body. The merchants consistently formulate the relationship between productive labor and abstract value in such a way as to de-emphasize laboring bodies as a source of social and economic worth. Thomas Mun is forthcoming in his awareness of the importance of labor and production to a healthy economic system, contending that because those who “live by the Arts” greatly outnumber the wealthy, “we ought the more carefully to maintain those endeavours of the multitude, in whom doth consist the greatest strength and riches both of King and Kingdom.”^[7] But Mun nevertheless views the laboring endeavors of the multitude primarily as a supplement to trade, since “where the people are many, and the arts good, there the traffique must be great, and the Countrey rich.”^[8] More people working means more trade which in turn means more wealth for the nation. The generation of economic wealth is here squarely identified with the circulation of goods and money, and not with laborers, who are important only insofar as they grease the wheels of commerce.

As Joyce Appleby has argued, the rise of mercantilism was part of a paradigm shift in the conception of value, facilitating a process in which “the economy of sales and exchanges” became separated “from the moral economy of production and sustenance.”^[9] The result was that laborers, increasingly alienated from the social network of production that had sustained them, became “supernumeraries . . . without a place, without a prescribed life role.”^[10] Appleby’s account of the effect that early modern England’s socioeconomic changes had on labor, although highly suggestive, nevertheless makes the mistake of taking the mercantile view of labor at face value, assuming that early modern labor was largely powerless and voiceless against emerging capitalist exploitation. The question that needs to be asked is: To what extent did labor speak on its own behalf? The early modern social world was not, after all, divided neatly between a declining aristocracy, an ascending merchant class, and the placeless poor. Artisanal labor, which in its historical development and socioeconomic role tended to overlap with all three of these categories, remained a significant factor in the shaping of early modern English society.

The most notable difference between artisans and the aristocrats and merchants is the bodily orientation of the artisanal worldview. Whereas both aristocrats and merchants, despite their social and economic differences, construct their visions of self and society through the exclusion of the laboring body, artisanal consciousness hinges on an awareness of the central role of the body and labor in the production and reproduction of the social order. If, for the dominant classes, the body serves to differentiate the common population from the elite, for the artisanal community, on the contrary, the laboring body is what links the individual to society at large, designating the laborer’s fundamental value and place within society. This relationship between body and community could manifest in very direct ways, as for instance in the rules for the Weavers, which dictate that any new apprentice “shalbe presented by his master that so shall retayne him unto the sayd Master and Wardens of the sayd craftes and occupation for the tyme being, and there openly to be seen and examined of and upon his or their Birthes and clenes of their bodies and other certen points, for the worship of the sayd citie and honesty of the sayd craftes.”^[11] As the first step in the long journey towards becoming a freeman, the initiating examination had profound implications not only for the individual apprentice but also for the guild and the city. The apprentice’s body, to this extent, serves as a point of intersection for the guild members and civic authorities. The corporate body of the guild and the individual body of the aspiring guild member are in this moment united, as the social standing of the former is interpreted in terms of the physical well-being of the latter. In this account, the laborer’s body is the location of a moral economy of production, with the determination of his physical suitability for artisanal labor affirming the value of civic duty and a sense of social rootedness.

Attention to the body was also, for very practical reasons, a defining feature of early modern artisanal existence. The standard seven-year training period for an apprentice was a measure of the length of time that was typically required “to master complicated techniques and competences, which varied greatly between trades and crafts, but which often required a great deal of physical and mental maturation.”^[12] That this mastery entailed intense physical discipline is suggested by the working conditions of the average apprentice, who commonly spent the early years of the apprenticeship performing unskilled labor in addition to learning the complex intricacies of his specific trade.^[13] This learning process could be so emotionally and physically demanding as to constitute, in Peter Searle’s words, a “traumatic experience” for the young apprentices, many of whom ran away from their new masters when they could no longer deal with the physical hardship of the training process.^[14] Paula Smith similarly frames artisanal training and practices in terms of bodily experience, which she suggests constitutes a uniquely artisanal literacy: “Rather than producing a ‘lettered man,’ such literacy had the goal of making knowledge productive. We might regard this as a nontextual, even a nonverbal literacy.”^[15] Smith speculates that “artisans might see reality as intimately related to material objects and the manipulation of material.”^[16] If the artisan manipulates material as part of his experience of reality, this manipulation is first and foremost a manipulation of bodily skills and practices. Smith’s argument suggests a practical basis to artisanal consciousness: if discourses by and about the artisanal community emphasize the body as a source of communal cohesion, this reflects or grows out of the “nonverbal literacy” that underpins artisanal labor and that was fostered by the guild system.

It is helpful to think about the artisanal intersection of bodily skill and perception in relation to recent developments in cognitive theories of mind and body.^[17] The basic insight of contemporary cognitive theory is that the mind, contra a dualistic Cartesian model of thought, cannot be understood in isolation from a physical brain and thus, by extension, a physical body. The mind, from this view, is the product of a body that continually interacts with its environment. Alva Noë’s enactive theory of perception has especially useful implications for thinking about artisanal consciousness. For Noë, perception depends not only on bodily interaction with the environment but, more precisely, on the implementation of bodily skill as well. As Noë contends, “If perception is in part constituted by our possession and exercise of bodily skills . . . then it may also depend on our possession of the sort of bodies that can encompass those skills, for only a creature with such a body could have those skills. To perceive like us, it follows you must have a body like ours.”^[18] Having a body and corresponding bodily skills makes possible a sort of virtual perception of the world, so that we experience reality not as something represented to us as in a picture, but as available to us through the proper manipulation of the bodily skills acquired through lived experience. “The world,” posits Noë, “is within reach and is present only insofar as we know (or feel) that it is.”^[19] The perception of reality is not given but enacted by us through the possession and manipulation of bodily skills—or to put it another way, reality as we perceive it is a thoroughly embodied phenomenon, a process of making sense of things through our bodily interaction with the world.

Although, of course, the early modern artisan has no access to cognitive theories of the mind/body connection, the essence of Noë’s treatment of perception as an extension of bodily experience underpins the artisanal worldview. For the artisanal community, skilled labor is the framework in which self and society is conceptualized. The possession of skilled bodily labor is at once what distinguishes the artisan from other classes and what unites him with the broader society. The early modern artisan, I want to suggest, sees the world in terms of the possession and implementation of skilled bodily labor and is thus keenly aware of the value that such labor has for the production and reproduction of the social order in its entirety. In this way, a cognitive theory of the body can supplement Marxist understandings of class consciousness. Marx’s analysis of labor under capitalism begins with that historical moment “when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”^[20] The subsequent tradition of Marxist analysis tends to follow Marx’s lead in thinking about laboring class-consciousness in terms of the absolute dichotomy that pits the rightless proletarian against a system of production which confronts him as an outside, alien force. And yet, while this condition of proletarianization has important implications for the laboring body, the topic of the body rarely appears in Marx’s writings. Instead, Marx’s intervention into the history of capitalism takes as its starting point a highly developed system of production in which the laboring body is at best an appendage to the mechanisms of profit, an object of capitalist exploitation rather than a subject in control of his or her productive ability.

When Marx, in his early manuscripts, does directly address the laboring body, it is in a distinctly abstract manner. Marx suggests that the natural human body, uncorrupted by alienating capitalist influences, is a holistic and nonalienated one that, through its labor, is capable of connecting individuals one to another and to the external world. Marx informs us that this prelapsarian man “lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continual intercourse if he is not to die.”^[21] The outside world, in this view, is an extension of the laboring body, the arena in which the laborer makes and remakes him- or herself physically and mentally. The outside world is the laborer’s “inorganic body,” so that by performing labor he or she constructs a conscious awareness of the self in relation to the world. In this model of labor, body and mind are inseparable.^[22] Abstracted from historical and material grounding, however, this theory of the body/mind connection remains only an ideal, and it is perhaps for this reason that neither the later Marx nor the majority of his successors have much to say about the corporeal dimensions of consciousness.

Nevertheless, this early Marxian conceptualization of the body, however abstract, offers a potentially fruitful way of approaching early modern artisanal labor—or, rather, artisanal labor provides the early Marx’s ahistorical theory of a bodily basis of laboring consciousness with concrete historical content. For the early modern artisan, the means of production and subsistence is not located in an external apparatus—a factory, for instance—but in his own body. The performance of labor is imagined not as an exploitative activity but, on the contrary, as that which allows the artisan to realize his skill through the transformation of material resources into finished goods. The artisan, whose bodily skill is the sole source of his subsistence, approaches the external world as a part of the self, as a resource to be embraced. Extending Noë’s framework to the larger socioeconomic context with which Marx was working, then, we might say that, for the artisan, consciousness of self and of one’s relationship to the broader social world is imagined and enacted through the medium of bodily labor. For the artisan, the possession of bodily skill as the sole means of subsistence situates the body as the central framework for thinking the world. The body is the source of personal value and meaning for the artisan, and it is what connects him, materially and symbolically, to the world outside of his particular body.

The economic precariousness of the early modern artisan seems to have cultivated a profound awareness of the laboring body and its place within the social order. Poised, in this moment of transition, between a feudal apparatus and a more capitalist mode of production, the artisan walks a thin line between maintaining respectable status as a skilled laborer and falling into the ranks of the dispossessed and often vagrant laborers that constituted such a large portion of London’s population. The early modern artisan, in other words, conforms to neither of Marx’s versions of labor: he is neither the ideal autonomous laborer of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts nor the rightless proletarian of Capital but, instead, is something between these two poles. Petitions from artisans suggest a growing awareness of this new social ambiguity. Thus, a 1571 petition of guild companies explains: “In olden times past, when the companies of artificers and handicraftsmen of this city reserved to themselves the only use, trade, and exercise of their several arts and handicrafts, the things then pertaining to the said arts were truly workmanly and substantially made and the Queen’s Majesty’s subjects well and truly served thereof.”^[23] The diminishment of the guilds’ control of the production process due to the increase of industrial manufacture results in inferior goods, directly reflecting the quality of the labor producing them: “workmanly” goods can only be made by skilled artisans who control the production process and the implementation of bodily skill. Artisanal identity thus appears to be grounded not simply in production but, more precisely, in the quality and usefulness of the goods produced, and it is this usefulness that links artisans to the larger community. The artisanal skill that has been actualized in superior goods is a symbolic and material point of junction between the artisan and English society. For this reason, the reduction in the quality of goods is taken as a direct assault on the artisanal sense of self and community.

As we saw in chapter 1, the anxiety engendered by this liminality is reflected in the 1624 “petition from the Artizan Cloth-workers of the Citie of London,” which begins by highlighting the traditional paternal bond uniting subject and sovereign, noting that “in the times of his Maiesties most noble Progenitors, Kings and Queenes of England, the State haue from time to time had an especiall care for the imployment and setting on worke of the said Artizans, and thereupon haue made diuers good prouisions for their reliefe.”^[24] The state has a responsibility to maintain the well-being of the artisanal community. But both this well-being and the paternal relationship between the Crown and the artisans are in peril, for economic conditions have made it so that some artisans “are enforced for want of worke to betake themselues to labour in the Citie as Porters, Waterbearers, and in other such like meane callings; others to returne home into their Countries, and there to be either chargeable to their friends, or to follow husbandry and dayly labour.”^[25] The artisan is in a difficult position: he understands his labor as valuable and meaningful not because it is labor per se but because it is inscribed within a network of social relations that extends all the way to the Crown. This network, however, is now threatened, and without it the artisan is deprived of the skills, values, and meanings that define the social import of artisanal labor. But the commonwealth is equally deprived of meaning, thrown into “great scandal” by the diminishment of the artisanal class. The petition thus imagines the fate of the English state to be bound to that of the artisanal community. Notable about this petition is the interconnection of the artisanal community and state interests, as if the two entities are ultimately one and the same. Just as the artisan is deprived of the material conditions that support his identity as a skilled laborer, the petition implies that the Crown is for its part deprived of the stability and honor that defined James’s “most noble Progenitors.” The shattering of the artisan’s identity entails a corresponding disintegration of the Crown’s connection to the English past. The artisan imagines a direct correlation between his own skilled bodily labor and the means of subsistence, on one hand, and the maintenance of the state, on the other. This connection centers on the skilled production of goods, which is understood to benefit not only the artisanal community but England as a whole.

Of all the early modern English trades, the shoemakers were one of the most intimately connected to processes of production. The shoemakers’ (or cordwainers’) guild was unique amongst London’s companies, as one of the largest and most widespread crafts to stress the production side of business rather than processes of exchange and financial enterprise. George Unwin, in his extensive study of London’s guilds, observes that the shoemakers’ guild “embraced from the first a mercantile element that tended to bring it on the level with the wealthier crafts, but the industrial elements in them remained predominant, and they were displaced from their leading position by newer mercantile combinations like the Haberdashers and the Salters.”^[26] It was by not expanding the mercantile element of its trade that the shoemakers’ guild fell to the marginal position which would largely define the English shoemaking trade for centuries. Unwin suggests, however, that this marginal position and the company’s focus on production yielded a favorable representation of the shoemaker in the popular imagination. As a result of its business practices, “the Cordwainers’ company appears throughout the reign of Elizabeth as the champion of the small shoemaker against the oppressive middlemen of the Curriers’ Company.”^[27] The historical development of the shoemakers’ guild was thus determined in large part by its emphasis on production and manufacture rather than exchange.

The shoemakers’ company was predominantly concerned with quality rather than quantity when it came to production, as indicated by the guild’s long struggle to regulate the quality of leather being traded in England.^[28] Indeed, many of the public records that pertain to the shoemakers deal with their efforts to preserve the high quality of the leather being used in the making of shoes. A Remonstrance of all the Shoemakers of London and Elsewhere, from 1675, complains about those who engross leather so that they can resell it “and neither can nor do convert the same Leather into made Wares.”^[29] The author requests a “Seizure to take away from all unlawful buyers that cannot work and convert the same Leather in made Wares, and to set such a Fine on the heads of those shoe-makers that may buy Leather lawfully, and yet sell it again Red as it came from the Tanners.”^[30] Leather is valuable to the extent that it can be transformed through skilled labor into a good that can be used by another person. Engrossers, on the contrary, who “scorns to work, and are become sole Merchants of Leather onely,” undermine the practical use of leather by focusing only on its exchange value. Skill is elided by the pursuit of profit so that “the best and ablest Shoe-Maker in all England must stand off until [engrossers] be served.”^[31] The artisanal community’s means of existence—its craft—is directly threatened by a mercantile logic that values buying and selling over useful production. And the fate of the cordwainers is tied to that of the “Majesties subjects,” who suffer “great discouragement and utter ruin” when the state authorities fail to “stand up for the prosperity of the Land of their Nativity.”^[32] The shoemakers have no illusions about the impact that the logic of exchange has on the production process: the unhindered pursuit of wealth neither benefits the laboring community nor enriches the nation, as the merchants would have it, but, on the contrary, functions to alienate the laborer from the production process and, in doing so, destabilize the nation. By opposing the use value of labor and the goods it produces to exchange value, then, the author attempts to stress the importance of labor to the English community.

These petitions and complaints span more than a century of economic change, but they express a remarkably consistent frustration from workers. The sentiments expressed by the artisanal community point toward an anxiety about the proletarianization of skilled labor within an emerging capitalist system. An abiding faith in the communal dimensions of physical labor appears in these writings as a kind of fallback position, a touchstone of value and meaning. We also encounter this sentiment in seventeenth century ballads about shoemakers and cobblers. For instance, “The Cobler’s Corrant,” a late-seventeenth-century ballad by Richard Rigby, “a faithful brother of the Gentle-Craft,” situates physical labor as the most enduring feature of the shoemaker’s identity:

On one hand, Rigby’s ballad is, of course, a highly romanticized depiction of the artisanal laborer’s life: all he needs to survive is his skilled labor and the means to implement it, not money or aristocratic patronage. But this logic also has practical import that resonates with the artisans’ petitions and addresses to the state. Rigby manages to articulate, in especially succinct form, a consciousness which understands physical, skilled labor to possess value and meaning which transcends aristocratic and mercantile class orientations. Neither the possession of “ten thousand pound” nor service to a “Noble Peer” compares to the satisfaction of shoemaking. Whether this view of labor as the fundamental reserve of personal and communal value is merely fantasy is beside the point: the artisanal community imagines a world in which physical labor is personally and socially sustaining, the reality that underpins the more ephemeral values of nobility and monetary wealth.

Shoemakers were known for performing their ballads in communal locations, such as taverns and markets. As Elizabeth Rivlin observes, Dekker draws “from historical and literary precedents to emphasize that shoemakers’ musical and theatrical performances were a socially inclusive form of service.”^[34] The performance of ballads achieves social inclusiveness by creating a physical space in which a multitude of people from different social backgrounds might interact and participate. This spatial inclusiveness is especially prominent in “Roome for companie, here comes Good Fellowes,” printed in 1617:

The ballad proceeds to list virtually every variety of tradesman in London, all of whom have been brought together at the marketplace of Bartholomew Fair. Although the cobblers are mentioned first, they share the space of performance with all “good fellows.” The ballad calls for the physical enactment of communal inclusiveness, envisioning a space of performance that is socially open and all-embracing. By tapping into the culture of artisanal ballads, Dekker transports this space of performatively enacted communal inclusiveness to the stage.

Peter Stallybrass speculates that shoemakers in particular were likely to be associated with both the making of social value and exploited labor. The shoemaker, according to Stallybrass, is “materially and symbolically the maker of the social (she or he is the foundation of social movement in its most literal sense); at the same time, she or he is the person most trodden upon by a hierarchical society that imagines itself in terms of an elite who put their foot upon those whom they subordinate.”^[36] I would suggest that the shoemaker, due to his historical dependence on skilled labor rather than mercantile activity, serves as a privileged representative of an artisanal way of seeing, a worldview in which the sustaining capacity of skilled bodily labor is at the center of personal and social meaning. In petitions, addresses, and ballads, shoemakers formulate an embodied vision of the world. And yet, these artifacts of social consciousness are limited, offering a partial representation of how early modern social and economic dynamics were perceived by the artisanal community. It is with what might loosely be called the artisanal drama of the period that we encounter a more complete formulation of artisanal consciousness. In particular, this drama is revealing in the way that it places artisanal consciousness into dialogue with other early modern worldviews. Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday places laboring bodies and the communities that sustain them in opposition to dominant discourses of labor that deny the value of productive activity. In the play, aristocratic and commercial attitudes toward the value of the laboring body are challenged by an artisanal perspective. The materiality of labor is shown to be the basis of a uniquely artisanal way of seeing the world, and the play stages a vision of a social world in which the labor of the body is embraced as the source of social and economic value.

The Labor of Community in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

It is tempting to interpret The Shoemaker’s Holiday as a bourgeois fantasy, a depiction of a London in which self-determination and a bit of luck are all one needs to achieve personal wealth and climb the social ladder. In Paul S. Seaver’s words, the play offers a demoralized London populace “a piece of commercial escapism”; however, as Seaver speculates, the audience may well have “seen a much more problematic drama scarcely disguised beneath the surface innocence of the play,” in particular the economic hardship experienced by so much of the late Elizabethan London community.^[37] The temptation to see the play’s lighthearted take on London’s social and economic situation as an exercise in bourgeois ideological obfuscation is understandable: the drama unfolds as a veritable topography of London’s nascent capitalist world, detailing the obsolescence of the aristocratic elite while seeming to reward the city’s ascending commercial class.^[38] Peter Mortenson has even suggested that the play endorses a mercantilist doctrine, arguing that “Dekker’s conceptual notions reflect those of the merchants: wealth is a fixed pie; an increase in one’s position depends upon the diminution of another’s.”^[39]

The Shoemaker’s Holiday, however, while undoubtedly reflecting a mercantilist worldview, does not valorize or reify this doctrine. Instead, what we find in the play is a tension between three models of economic and social value: an aristocratic sense of inherent value and social importance, a mercantilist or protocapitalist vision in which all value is understood in commercial terms, and a counterdiscourse, associated with the artisanal community, which locates the laboring body as the source of social meaning. The play takes advantage of the ideological tensions between the emerging bourgeoisie and the declining aristocracy to open up a space for the acknowledgment of the value of laboring bodies. I want to suggest, moreover, that the apparently fantastical nature of the play—its unrelenting emphasis on a frictionless process of social mobility—does not obscure the darker, more problematic dimensions of the play—the economic and social realities associated with England’s nascent capitalism—but, in fact, works to draw them out and expose them to scrutiny. In doing so, the play presents the artisanal community as the sole social agent capable of resisting the disruptive effects of emerging commercial forces and maintaining communal integrity. The play, in short, suggests that social order is sustained by a consciousness of the social and economic importance of labor. The artisanal experience serves as the starting point for a consciousness that, moving beyond the ideological limits of aristocratic and commercial perspectives, sees the material body and its products as the lynchpin of social cohesion. The social world, the play suggests, must be actively produced, and the preservation of social order and community is best understood as an act of labor.

Like many comedies of the 1590s, the dramatic thrust of The Shoemaker’s Holiday hinges on a romantic plot that stresses the tension between the aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie. The Earl of Lincoln’s discussion of the romantic relationship between his nephew, Roland Lacy, and Rose, daughter to Sir Roger Oatley, mayor of London, articulates a perceived mutual opposition between the aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie. In forbidding Lacy to pursue his affection for “a gay, wanton, painted citizen,” Lincoln voices a distinctly essentialist conception of class identity, noting that both he and Oatley “hate the mixture of his blood with thine” (1.77, 79). Lincoln further attempts to convince Lacy of the seriousness of his class transgression by appealing to the sense of honor attached to his aristocratic blood, encouraging him to fight in France for the English cause and to remember “What honourable fortunes wait on thee” if he “Increase[s] the King’s love which so brightly shines / And gilds thy hopes” (1.81–83). Lacy reassures his father by building on these romantic aristocratic values:

Oatley, for his part, contends that Rose is “Too mean . . . for [Lacy’s] high birth,” positioning the aristocracy on an inaccessible rung of the social ladder (1.11). Oatley’s concern, however, does not reflect a sense of class inferiority but stems rather from his own class interests. A citizen who thrives on financial savvy cannot tolerate a courtier who will spend “[m]ore in one year than I am worth by far” (1.14). The romance between Lacy and Rose thus evinces two competing class perspectives—one aristocratic and the other bourgeois—with both parties involved seeming to agree on their basic incompatibility. The conflict over Lacy’s romantic inclinations functions to oppose a rigidly essentialist vision of class identity to a more bourgeois model in which worth is measured in terms of hard-nosed financial calculation. The affection between their children, Lincoln and Oatley agree, is not enough to overcome the two families’ fundamentally different attitudes toward wealth.^[40]

That Lacy’s promise to his uncle proves false as he proceeds to adopt the disguise of Hans, a Dutch shoemaker, to escape his military duties suggests the irrelevance of Lincoln’s aristocratic pretensions.^[41] Indeed, the aristocracy begins to appear not only purposeless, but, also, as Seaver notes, “it seems a class that has lost its attractiveness even to its privileged members.”^[42] This is all but acknowledged by Lincoln, who informs Oatley that Lacy abandoned his grand tour, a traditional staple of aristocratic coming of age, after he grew “[a]shamed to show his bankrupt presence here [and] Became a shoemaker in Wittenberg” (1.28–29). Especially important about this acknowledgment is the way it not only highlights the decay of aristocratic superiority but also exposes the fundamental economic underpinnings of aristocratic privilege. The aristocratic lifestyle is unsustainable on its own merits. It is not inherently valuable but must be sustained, in the final analysis, by actual labor. The romantic plot that opens the play thus encodes both a demystification of the aristocratic ideology of inherent value and a tacit acknowledgment of the importance and value of labor. That Lacy resorts to shoemaking a second time to escape the pressures of aristocratic life—declaring, “The Gentle Craft is living for a man!”—further positions labor as a mode of activity which underpins the dominant classes’ competing narratives of social and economic value (3.24).

If early modern marriage was typically a means for solidifying class identity and interests, the animosity between Oatley and Lincoln regarding the cross-class relationship of their children evinces a lack of such a cohesive class structure, exposing instead the class tensions within and between dominant factions.^[43] But this tension does not produce an irreparable tear in the social fabric, a void in the place of a coherent system of social meaning and value. It is instead the artisanal class that fills the void left by the feuding aristocracy and bourgeoisie. At this moment, Lacy’s discussion of his plans to ignore his father’s advice and transgress class boundaries is interrupted by the arrival of Simon Eyre and his shoemaking apprentices on the scene, who seek the release of Ralph, one of Eyre’s apprentices, from military conscription. Recognizing Ralph’s predicament as an opportunity to escape his own military duties, Lacy refuses to heed their appeals, claiming that he “cannot change a man” (1.148). In contrast to Lacy’s disruptive behavior, which severs communities and undermines social cohesion, Eyre and company use this situation to demonstrate an overriding concern for communal accord. Firk, another apprentice, asks Lacy to take into account Ralph’s recent marriage to Jane, pointing out, “You shall do God good service to let Ralph and his wife stay together. She’s a young, new married woman. If you take her husband away from her a-night, you undo her. She may beg in the daytime; for he’s as good a workman at a prick and an awl as any is in our trade” (1.138–42). When this appeal to family unity and the corresponding preservation of sexual propriety fails to persuade Lacy, Eyre is forced to acknowledge the economic implications of Ralph’s leaving: Jane’s status as a wife will be sullied by a life of labor, as her “fine hand, this white hand, these pretty fingers must spin, must card, must work. Work, you bombast-cotton-candle quean, work for your living, with a pox to you” (1.210–13). The harshness of Eyre’s tone matches the harshness of Jane’s new life, because he refuses to obscure the economic realities and challenges of being a laborer. Indeed, we might say that this consciousness of work defines and structures the collective identity of the shoemaker community in contrast to the play’s aristocrats.

By allowing Ralph to take his place in the war, Lacy not only betrays the filial, social, and national obligations that define him as an aristocrat but also threatens the fundamental patriarchal integrity of the domestic unit, which was so central to England’s basic socioeconomic functioning as to leave “virtually no place at all for the single man or woman taking up an occupation alone.”^[44] It is Eyre who resists the destabilizing impact of Lacy’s actions, using Ralph’s conscription and the domestic hardship it creates as an opportunity to espouse the honor of artisanal labor, encouraging Ralph to “[f]ight for the honour of the Gentle Craft, for the Gentlemen Shoemakers, the courageous cordwainers, the flowers of Saint Martin’s, the mad knaves of Bedlam, Fleet Street, Tower Street and Whitechapel” (1.214–18). This expression of honor differs markedly in two ways from the preceding conversation between Lincoln and Lacy. First, whereas Lincoln encourages Lacy to fight in the name of national and family honor, hoping to use the king’s cause in France as a means for securing the prestige of the Lacy family, Eyre defines honor in far more specific collective terms, his words encompassing not only London’s shoemakers but also its “mad knaves” and the diverse manufacturing and laboring community of the city. Eyre’s speech affirms the social worth of London society’s most marginalized members. Second, in contrast to Lacy’s deceptive and strategizing affirmation of national and family honor, Eyre’s rallying cry is precisely that—an effort to raise his companions’ spirits and assert the fellowship of the laboring community despite the destabilization threatened by Lacy’s presence. Eyre, with his communal perspective and emphasis on the fellowship of labor, acts as a centripetal social force that opposes Lacy’s unsettling influence.

A common reading of the play discovers a class fantasy guiding the drama. In Kastan’s words, the play is “a fantasy of class fulfillment that would erase the tensions and contradictions created by the nascent capitalism of the late sixteenth-century.”^[45] But as suggested by the failure of Oatley and Lincoln to consolidate their respective class hegemonies through marriage arrangements, neither the urban, increasingly bourgeoisified aristocracy, nor Oatley’s citizen bourgeoisie is capable of erasing class tensions. On the contrary, the play would seem to draw out those conflicts and contradictions. Even the most seemingly lighthearted and conciliatory interactions amongst characters express class tension, as when Oatley welcomes the newly wealthy Eyre “into our society,” presumably referring to London’s elite bourgeois community (11.8–9). Responding to Eyre’s characteristic joviality, Oatley proclaims, “I had rather than a thousand pound I had an heart but half so light as yours” (11.18–19). Eyre’s reply—“Why, what should I do, my Lord? A pound of care pays not a dram of debt”—evinces more than a naïve carefree disposition: whereas Oatley understands personal qualities such as happiness to be determined by purchasing power, as something to be acquired in exchange for a thousand pounds, Eyre, with his attitude, eschews the reified perspective that subordinates happiness to the circulation of wealth.

While it is easy to see Eyre as an idealized self-fashioning bourgeois subject, or “a figure who creates himself through his language and role playing as a significant subject of history,” the performance of his new bourgeois identity is not self-determined but supported, as he gratefully acknowledges, by the loyalty and hard work of his apprentices.^[46] Indeed, in opposition to Oatley’s consumerist perspective, Eyre, as a shoemaker, a skilled producer of goods, is guided in his social perspective by his experience with productive labor.^[47] Thus, after learning Hans’s true aristocratic identity, Eyre nevertheless vows to support him in his effort to win approval for marrying Rose. This support reflects not merely Eyre’s goodwill but, more crucially, his profound appreciation for the laboring community as the basis of his prosperity and increased social influence:

The portagues signify, in Eyre’s mind, Lacy’s loyalty as an apprentice to his master, a sense of loyalty that Eyre seeks to reciprocate by supporting Lacy’s marriage to Rose. Eyre thus recognizes not merely the ability of labor to produce goods and wealth—his words suggest a deeper understanding of his laborers’ productive capacity, an awareness of labor as the sustaining force for the material conditions on which happiness and communal well-being are grounded. Indeed, it is with this speech that the plot of the play is tied together and the denouement rendered possible. The king may be the one who ultimately sanctions the marriage between Rose and Lacy, but it is Eyre’s respect and sense of responsibility for his apprentice that facilitates the play’s happy resolution.

It is therefore a mistake to interpret Eyre’s sense of fellowship as offering a class fantasy in the place of class tensions. Those tensions still remain, but they open up a space for labor to emerge as the foundational bastion of social meaning and order. The play’s concluding holiday, the massive banquet that caters to everyone from London’s apprentices to the king, is presented as primarily serving the interests of the laboring class, as Eyre directs Hodge to “cover me those hundred tables again, and again, till all my jolly prentices be feasted” (20.15–16). Although the feast’s most prominent guest represents a feudal, aristocratic social system, Eyre’s concern for sharing his wealth with the entire community actually stands in stark contrast to early modern England’s decaying feudal framework of social interdependency. Increasing its conspicuous consumption in order to compete with the growing commercial middle classes, the aristocracy was compelled to exchange an ideology of communal responsibility for one of self-interest. Already by the late medieval period, the aristocracy’s consumption patterns were growing more and more private, undermining feudal relations of dependency and paternalism.^[49] In contrast to the increasingly commercial drive of aristocratic consumption patterns—exemplified in the play by the financially unrestrained Lacy—the massive banquet that Eyre organizes is not oriented towards conspicuous consumption or private enjoyment but rather toward the immediate satisfaction of the artisanal community’s needs. Eyre certainly engages in market consumption, directing Hodge and Ralph to “run, my tall men, beleaguer the shambles, beggar all Eastcheap, serve me whole oxen in chargers, and let sheep whine upon the tables like pigs for want of good fellows to eat them” (20.25–28). Unlike the declining aristocracy, however, whose consumption practices were becoming increasingly private, a selfish indulgence in London’s consumerist excesses, Eyre’s consumption is, on one hand, market oriented, tapping into the possibilities offered by “all Eastcheap,” but also profoundly practical, a matter of supplying meat for a laboring population that “would eat it an’ they had it” (20.21–22).

The utopian element of Eyre’s altruism, its fantasy vision of social wholeness, is not escapist but works to oppose a troubling, and very real, economic dynamic. In an era in which consumerist market forces are rapidly dissolving a feudal subsistence economy geared toward the production of use values, Eyre’s communal implementation of his newfound wealth presents the possibility of a social world where the spheres of production and consumption are inseparable, mutually reinforcing moments in the socioeconomic process. In this world, the class that produces goods, through the implementation of skilled bodily labor, is also the class that benefits from the fruits of that labor, with the products of labor sustaining the bodies that made them. This unity of production and consumption is reflected in the ease with which Eyre takes on his new identity as a man of wealth and prestige. When he dons the velvet coat and alderman’s gown after receiving Lacy’s portagues, Hodge remarks that “now you look like yourself, master!”(7.114). Firk comments that Eyre is “like a threadbare cloak new turned and dressed,” and expresses amazement “to see what good raiment doth!” (7.117–18). On one hand, the teasing by Eyre’s companions indicates a certain skepticism of clothing’s real social value, an awareness of its function as a superficial token of imagined self-worth and social status. But Hodge’s remark, in particular, suggests also that Eyre has earned his new apparel and its attendant prestige. Furthermore, Eyre does not use this wealth to break with his past as a member of the artisanal community. In the newly appareled Eyre, Hodge does not see a shoemaker transformed into a wealthy member of the upper class, but an artisan who directly experiences the wealth that labor produces. In the eyes of the artisanal community, then, Eyre is more than this wealthy apparel, which seems only an external sign of his (and by extension his class’s) true worth.

The shoemakers seem largely defined by an awareness of the interrelation of labor and wealth. Eyre’s new apparel does not so much signify his upward mobility as reflect instead the artisanal community’s unique perspective with respect to issues of wealth and want, production and consumption. Thus, Eyre treats Lacy’s gift of portagues not as a ticket out of the laboring class but as an opportunity to celebrate and better the lives of his apprentices.^[50] On one level, then, this artisanal consciousness appears as class solidarity, as when the wounded Ralph returns to the workshop after losing his legs in war. In response to his lament that he “want[s] limbs to get whereon to feed,” Hodge replies: “Limbs? Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand” (10.79–83).^[51] The scene’s emphasis on the wounded body in articulating its vision of laboring comradery suggests a conception of value at odds with other competing models of wealth. Value and wealth—in Ralph’s case, the basic means of sustenance—are made possible through physical labor and do not derive from ineluctable essence or market forces. Hodge’s encouragement of Ralph, like Eyre’s determination to share his wealth with his apprentices, locates value—social, moral, and economic—in sensuous, lived communal experience. In this vision, wealth and want are not mutually opposed conditions or disparate class orientations but moments in a single process: want is the motivation behind productive laboring activity, which, in turn, can alone satisfy want.

It is important that Hodge’s valuation of labor occurs in response to the sight of Ralph’s wounded body. The wounded body, as that which both hinders its possessor and engenders a sense of the need to overcome this existential obstacle, figures here the complex nexus of labor, sensuous bodily experience, and personal and communal wealth. Ralph’s maimed body and the response it engenders in Hodge point out the reciprocal relationship between the body and the external world, subject and object. The ability to produce, to go to work on the world, is depicted not as an unfortunate burden but as an opportunity somehow to regenerate the lost body, not literally but to the extent that the wounded body, in order to satisfy its wants, must supplement itself with the social and material products of labor. “Since I want limbs and lands,” concludes Ralph, “I’ll to God, my good friends, and to these my hands” (10.110–11). Ralph’s want of body and wealth does not marginalize him from others, does not render him unviable in the eyes of his community but is on the contrary an invitation to view that community as an extension of his own body. In this way, Ralph’s wounds position the laboring body as the locus for a uniquely artisanal conception of value and meaning, encompassing everything from personal survival and communal support to material and spiritual satisfaction.

Thus, Ralph’s linking of the body to the world outside is not taken in abstraction. It is rather the practical result of his dependence for survival on the performance of skilled physical labor. When the ability to perform this labor is threatened, his thoughts turn to the way that the community of which he is a member might help him to conserve and cultivate the bodily potential that remains. In her novel rereading of Marx’s labor theory of value, Elaine Scarry discusses precisely this reciprocal interaction between the body and the external world. Extending her basic thesis that “physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content” and is therefore capable of making and unmaking the conceptual content of the world in which we live, Scarry identifies a similar dynamic in the process of labor: “In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object (the coat, the poem), for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers.”^[52] The shoemaker’s body, exemplified in this scene by Ralph’s wounded body, the body in pain, is precisely such a “fulcrum or lever”: it is the lynchpin that connects self and other, allowing the laborer to fashion and extend himself by treating the world outside not as a hostile alien presence but as a surrogate self.

It is possible to interpret the play’s emphasis on the laboring body as symptomatic of a tacit ideological agenda, an effort to obscure the harsh reality of the early modern laboring class beneath a romanticized version of laboring existence. Ronda Arab argues along these lines: “The increased status given to the productive body deflects attention from the transformation of working men into a laboring class. Thus, ironically, the adulation of the artisan body makes possible its pacification and submission to capitalist work regimes.”^[53] But the very act of identifying the laboring body as productive of economic and social value has the power to disrupt any effort to subject the body to capitalist command. Instead, the laboring body is depicted as an autonomous, socially constitutive force which is capable of existing independently of commercial and market regimes. This is made especially clear with the recurring theme of shoes as a sign of communal cohesion. Ralph presents Jane with a pair of shoes before he leaves for war:

These shoes, in contrast to the rich gifts purchased by rich men on the market, are not commodities. Instead, they embody the autonomous, unalienated labor that immediately signifies the cohesion of the artisanal community.^[54] The value that the shoes possess is not monetary and abstract but communal and tangible, signifying a lived community of labor rather than an external market system. This is a community in which the skilled application of labor serves as the touchstone of personal and social reality. Hence, Ralph does not focus on the shoes as finished products but, instead, stresses the multiple skills that constitute the production process. The stitching, seaming, and pinking that, taken together, produced the shoes represent so many members of the artisanal community. The shoes, which embody various forms of skilled labor, are synecdochal representations of real people who belong to a real community. Ralph will know Jane by these shoes, not because of their sentimental or monetary worth but because they connect, in a sensuous way, her body to the laboring bodies of the shoemakers.

As a physical and emotional token that links Ralph, Jane, and the artisanal community that produced them, the shoes represent an alternative to Marx’s account of labor in the capitalist system. Marx’s classic insight into the commodity system is that it alienates producers from their products, labor from the market mechanisms of exchange, thereby “reflect[ing] the social relations of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.”^[55] But unlike the alienated laborer, who is confronted by the products of his labor as by an alien violence, Ralph is able to reunite with Jane after their separation precisely by his personal connection to the products of his labor. Thus, when Hammon’s servingman solicits Ralph to make more shoes on the model of Jane’s, Ralph immediately recognizes that in those shoes “trod my love. / These true-love knots I pricked. I hold my life, / By this old shoe I shall find out my wife” (14.47–49). Ralph thus identifies the shoe by the labor it embodies—and not as a commodity in the abstract. Indeed, if commodification works by exchanging the particularities of labor for an abstract general equivalent, Jane’s shoes, in contrast, are defined by the use-value that makes them unique. The shoes retain their unalienated quality, representing social relations between people and not relations of exchange between material objects or commodities. As the fruit of Ralph’s laboring body, and as goods designed to mold perfectly to Jane’s body, the shoes affirm the bodily immediacy of the artisanal community over against an abstract and disembodied market system.

The contradiction between a productive laboring subjectivity and a commercial perspective is further drawn out by the romantic tensions between Jane, Ralph and Hammon. When Hammon discovers that Jane is already married to Ralph, he attempts to barter for her, offering Ralph “twenty pound” in “fair gold” (18.79–80). In refusing to commodify his wife, Ralph makes specific reference to his position as an artisan, asking Hammon if “thou think a shoemaker is so base to be a bawd to his own wife for commodity?” (18.84–85). It is not an inherent moral superiority, then, that enables Ralph to resist the logic of commodification but his identity as an artisan, a notion seconded by Firk’s disgust at Hammon’s proposal: “A shoemaker sell his flesh and blood—O indignity!” (18.88). In the same way that the shoes retain their connection to flesh and blood laborers, Jane, as a member of the artisanal community, remains in the eyes of her companions a flesh and blood person and not an abstract commodity.

Hammon, as a wealthy gentleman, is not a laborer or a producer of goods, and this class orientation is reflected in his desire for Jane. When Hammon first approaches Jane, she is selling goods at a sempster’s shop. In response to her call, “What is’t you lack, sir? Calico, or lawn, / Fine cambric shirts, or bands? What will you buy?,” he answers, “That which thou wilt not sell” (12.22–23, 24). Indeed, Hammon’s account of his desire for Jane could just as well express his appetite for a new commodity: he confesses to having stood outside the shop window where she works “[i]n frosty evenings, a light burning by her, / Enduring biting cold only to eye her” (12.16–17). Hammon’s unrequited affection for Jane highlights an economic system that thrives on desire, a system in which consumption does not satisfy want but only heightens it, playing on the lack at the heart of desire. That Jane will not sell her affection or her body does not prevent Hammon from trying to acquire her, and he wastes no time before offering to “pay you for the time which shall be lost” if she were to come with him (12.32). But just as Ralph’s refusal to commodify Jane is not a reflection of his superior moral status, Hammon’s attempt to purchase Jane as a prostitute speaks more to his class position than to any moral or ethical flaw. The troubled romantic relation between Jane and Hammon draws out class contradictions: as a consumer in the London marketplace, Hammon cannot approach Jane as a fellow human being but only as a good to be purchased, as a commodity displayed within a shop window.

Romance in the play thus encodes the differential class perspectives pertaining to an emerging capitalist system, illustrating the tension at the center of a society that separates the spheres of production and consumption. Hammon’s objectifying treatment of Jane reflects a consumerist attitude; in contrast, Ralph’s treatment of Jane, from his gift of personally manufactured shoes to his refusal to reduce her flesh-and-blood existence to an exchange value, reflects a laboring subjectivity that values social relations between people rather than things.^[56] That the play valorizes the former rather than the latter is perhaps most profoundly indicated by Lacy’s love for Rose. Indeed, Lacy’s affection at times seems to conflate the ideal of love with the practical, more down-to-earth need to engage in labor to survive. He voices the common early modern theme of love as a transcendental force which can override social and economic barriers:

In praising love, Lacy finds himself in fact acknowledging labor as that which is capable of sustaining his romantic pursuits. Love may conquer all, but it is his labor as a shoemaker that “will further me / Once more to view her beauty, gain her sight” (3.17–18). Even the king recognizes the material labor that underpins Lacy’s love, contending that “love respects no blood” before noting that it was Lacy’s willingness and ability to “stoop / To bare necessity and . . . To gain her love become a shoemaker” that made this love-match possible (21.105, 109–11). Thus, whereas Hammon seeks to gain love through the exchange of money, Ralph, Lacy and, indeed, the king understand love as rooted in the social relations established by the labor process. By sanctioning the marriage between Rose and Lacy, then, the king not only legitimates cross-class relations but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the artisanal community that has facilitated this romantic pursuit.

There are two standard readings of the play’s conclusion. One posits ideological closure and the containment of class tensions. For David Bevington, “[s]ocial discontent is purged in the play’s closure by the fact that Eyre and his shoemakers get what they want, yet without undue abrasiveness.”^[57] The other reading argues the opposite, contending, in the words of Marta Straznicky, that the conclusion does not resolve class tensions but instead “invites the audience to share in the shoemakers’ triumphant appropriation of commercial and political, thus not only reinforcing but also reinventing the interests of the apprentices and industrial capitalists among them.”^[58] Amy Smith similarly argues that the concluding marriage ceremony does not resolve the contradictions that have emerged in the play, but “instead that this marriage embodies them.”^[59] The play’s conclusion does not seem as tidy as Bevington’s reading suggests, although a certain sense of social harmony does prevail in the final scene. At the same time, however, Straznicky’s reading may place too much emphasis on the commercial dimensions of the shoemaking community. Smith is correct to see the marriage as an embodiment of class contradictions and tensions, but the function of the play’s refusal to purge these tensions is unclear.

It would seem, instead, that the king’s presence at the concluding feast manages both to gesture toward ideological resolution while also preserving class tensions. While the king appears to embrace Eyre as an equal, there is nevertheless a sense that this gesture is at best merely formal, a way of disguising elitism as tolerance. The king is concerned to maintain a respectful distance from Eyre, sanctioning Eyre’s social mobility while not assimilating Eyre’s artisanal disposition into an aristocratic framework. The king wishes to “behold this huffcap” but is also worried that “when we come in presence, / His madness will be dashed clear out of countenance” (19.10–12). To avoid this situation, the king requests that Eyre be informed “’tis our pleasure / That he put on his wonted merriment” (19.14–15). When Eyre arrives, the king reiterates his request: Eyre should freely express his laboring subjectivity, behaving “[a]s if thou wert among thy shoemakers” (21.14). The king’s presence brings different classes together only to reaffirm their differences.

But if the king’s formal gesture toward communal cohesion works to preserve social conflict and tension, it is not the king whose worldview ends up defining the play’s conclusion. Although the king’s concluding request that “all shake hands” pretends to resolve, in a formal manner, the class tensions between Lincoln and Oatley, we are reminded by Eyre that this conciliatory gesture takes place in “my poor house” amongst his apprentices (21.119, 124). In a way, Eyre’s remark serves to prioritize what is important, a reminder that underneath, and indeed propping up, the agonistic posturing of the dominant classes are laboring bodies. In the end, social agency is left with the artisanal community, the king’s legitimation of the world of artisanal production opening up an alternative space for the emergence of an artisanal consciousness. The artisanal community presents a worldview which, grounded in the material and communal labor of the body, is able to see past the ideological tensions and fault lines that inform the dominant classes. In contrast to the conflicting positions of aristocratic essentialism and commercialism, the shoemakers represent an embodied understanding of value and meaning. The social world, from the artisanal perspective, is made, not given. Where aristocratic and commercial conceptions of social order and cohesion fail, the shoemakers’ worldview succeeds, grounding social order in the communal sensuousness of the laboring body. The play intervenes in a critical historical moment, pushing against the depreciation of labor that characterized the emergence of capitalism. Responding to a system that was objectifying workers, the play subjectivizes labor, giving it a prominent voice and determinant place within the social.

Foundational Labor in Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman

The class tensions at the center of The Shoemaker’s Holiday are often intertwined with the articulation of a national identity. With particular reference to The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Andrew Fleck contends that “[t]he comedies of the 1590s, with their romanticized plots of social mobility for the London tradesmen and their staging of foreigners as blocking agents to English advancement, instill nationalist feeling among London’s workers.”^[60] Interpreted in this way, nationalist sentiment functions to divide different categories of workers against one another. But it is possible to see the nationalist elements in a play such as Dekker’s as serving a different purpose. Nationalism was an emergent, and as a result, highly fluid discourse in early modern England. Accordingly, nationalist texts, literary or otherwise, do not reflect a political reality but “are actively engaged in constructing—and deconstructing—[England’s] origin-myths, in blurring, as well as bolstering its boundaries.”^[61] As an emerging and unstable discourse, nationalism is not a finished category to be imposed by or on a particular social group but an open field of contestation. Early modern nationalism’s open-endedness allows us to see it as a site of conflict between various class, cultural, and political interests: if national sentiment could function to indoctrinate or discipline the laboring class, it could also serve to invest labor with a sense of foundational value.

This latter possibility is especially evident in William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, which presents an ennobling vision of England’s artisans. Like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Rowley’s play takes up themes and story elements from Deloney’s The Gentle Craft, setting the action of his play in an ancient British past.^[62] In doing so, the play takes advantage of England’s uncertain historical and national origins. As Andrew Escobedo has shown, a profound sense of historical loss and fractured national identity led early modern historians and poets alike to construct “narrative representations of nationhood to mediate what they perceived as a troubling breach in history and in the process attempt to bring together the English past, present, and near future in a complete and continuous story.”^[63] These narratives, however, only exacerbate this uncertainty, “exposing in detail the imperfect grasp the English have on their past.”^[64] I want to suggest that Rowley’s play takes advantage of this imperfect grasp on history, this failure of historical and national recall, to reconstruct the foundations of English identity from the perspective of the artisanal community.^[65] Artisanal labor is presented, quite literally, as the foundation on which a national identity can be constructed. For the play, historical uncertainty is productive uncertainty, giving rise to a version of the nation’s past with direct implications for early modern London’s beleaguered artisans.

If The Shoemaker’s Holiday identifies labor as the basis of social and economic value, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman expands on this logic, remembering a national origin in which labor is central to the very foundation of English identity.^[66] Whether this remembered past is objectivity true is largely irrelevant: in its ideological functioning, the power of nostalgia rests in its ability to negate a given symbolic order, to serve as a reminder that other realities are possible. In the play’s alternative history, the laboring body is not only capable of producing commodities: it is presented as the very force that fashions England’s historical and national identity. More precisely, by nostalgically representing a distant British past in which apprentice labor is a thriving and noble occupation, the play offers a symbolic resistance to the early modern proletarianization of the guild system. Rowley’s play delves deeper than Dekker’s into the relationship between skilled bodily labor and ways of seeing social reality, depicting the guild system, with its ability to cultivate and sustain artisanal labor, as the organizing principle of English history. Just as the play’s plot hinges on two ancient British princes’ realization that “to exchange for the body’s labour, / Were a far freer good” than surrendering to Roman conquerors, the play as a whole exchanges a history of exploitation and social and economic subordination for one that gives center stage to the laboring body (1.2.48–49).

The representation of the guild system as a central component of social organization can be found in early modern political thought. Thus, for instance, Jean Bodin seems to privilege the guild as the basic building block of society:

Colleges and corporations, or guilds, are the basis of community, the foundation on which all forms of community are constructed. Bodin, Antony Black has contended, was “the first to assign to friendship, in the traditional guild sense as a specific social quality peculiar to colleges and sodalities, an irreplaceable function in the social order.”^[68] If for Bodin this attention to the guild ultimately serves to support his philosophy of sovereignty, appropriating guild values and the organization of the artisanal community to argue for the immutability of absolutism, the artisanal consciousness presented in A Shoemaker, A Gentleman does precisely the opposite. Instead, the play interprets political power as factious and largely arbitrary, an ongoing power struggle between competing interests, in contrast to a guild system that is depicted as a constant source of communal meaning and cohesion.

The organization of the plot indicates a fundamental concern with blurring national and ethnic origins. The conflict between ancient native Britons, led by King Allured and his sons, Elred and Offa, and the Roman invaders, led by Maximinus and Dioclesian, does not favor a “true” ethnic identity.^[69] Maximinus’ initial tyrannical threat to the British Queen to “prostitute thy body to some slave” gives way to a far more assimilatory intention with his later decision to “collect ten thousand ablest Britons” and “[l]et them be mix’t / With two Roman bands” in the fight against the Goths (2.2.108–10). Indeed, by the play’s conclusion the fighting between the British and the Romans seems all but forgotten, as Maximinus decides to “let [Offa and Elred], / Being English born, be Briton kings again,” despite having engaged in bloody conflict to remove their father from the throne (5.2.182–83). Religion, too, is able to overcome ethnic and national differences, as indicated by the Roman knight Alban’s eagerness to join the British knight Amphiabel in a “partnership in Christianity” (2.2.12). This “mixing” of ethnic identities in the formulation of England’s origins is also developed by the marriage plot between Maximinus’s daughter, Leodice, and Offa, who has taken the disguise of a shoemaker.

Thus, while the play stresses England’s ethnic origins, this distant past is not depicted as a source of purity. If the question of ethnic purity is not central to the play, there is persistent attention given to the representation of labor that underpins this tale of blurred national and ethnic boundaries. When Leodice, realizing her affection for Offa, her shoemaker, attempts to rationalize her class transgression, she finds reassurance in her nurse’s claim that “great Maximinus’ father — / Your father’s father, madam—was but even a smith, / That with his labour hammer’d out his living” (2.3.21–23). Leodice responds,

If it was common for royalty and aristocracy to invent noble origins to legitimize family lines, that inclination is here resisted, the noble lineage leading back instead to the artisanal laborer. The allure of majesty inflicts a sort of violence on the laboring body, not only concealing labor from historical memory but, indeed, maiming or mutilating it as well. Leodice’s and Offa’s romance is thus predicated on an act of remembering which recovers the laboring origins of national identity. In the same way that the romance plot mixes ancient British and Roman identities, it also troubles boundaries between classes. In doing so, the play draws attention to the physical, sensuous labor that underpins class difference. This act of remembering leads to the recognition, as Leodice puts it, that “[b]eggars and kings are all one piece of earth, / Nor can the head be without the foot” (2.3.78–79). Although this description reaffirms a hierarchical distinction between the aristocracy (the head) and laborers (the foot) within the body politic, it also suggests that the aristocracy is fundamentally dependent upon the foundational communal support of labor.

The line that separates the aristocracy from the artisanal community is repeatedly blurred in the course of the play, even as the ancient British aristocracy is given a mythologizing positive representation. The opening scene, which details the defeat of the ancient British at the hands of the invading Romans and the British princes’ subsequent decision to seek refuge as shoemakers, makes a point of enumerating the noble qualities of the ancient aristocracy: the princes and the queen are unwaveringly loyal to the dying king, the princes agreeing to flee the advancing Romans only after he urges them repeatedly to “[f]ly from Death”; the king himself is unambiguously brave in his upholding of military duty and honor, affirming with his last words that he “did not yield, / Nor fell by agues but, / Like a king, I’th’ field,” and the queen, preferring the fate that “heaven hath knit” to fleeing, refuses her companions’ admonitions to escape (1.1.24, 49–50, 120). We are presented, in short, with a romanticized depiction of the aristocracy that highlights the class’s faithfulness, piousness, self-sacrifice, bravery, and sense of extrapersonal duty.

And yet, the emphasis on noble features does not seem ultimately to be directed toward the aristocracy, affirming instead the nobility and value of laborers. In escaping capture by the Romans, the princes, Offa and Elred, disguise themselves as shoemakers and gain employment with a British shoemaking outfit. Elred’s assertion that “poor habiliments may find surer footing / Than the rich robes which royalty is clad in” establishes a practical equality between the aristocracy and artisanal labor (1.1.122–23). Nobility and labor are not opposed to one another but are indeed complementary, with the artisanal community providing a refuge and stabilizing reinforcement for a demoralized aristocracy. Rather than presenting status positions as discrete and self-contained, the play exposes the dialectical relations that fashion social identity. Artisanal labor is not merely a temporary refuge for the princes but is recognized as possessing an inherent value that is lacking in the aristocracy: “Who would venture to walk upun the icy path of royalty,” wonders Elred, “That here might find a footing so secure?” (1.2.39–41). The recurring theme of sure footing, an image made all the more palpable by the fact that the princes are specifically becoming shoemakers, suggests a privileging of the artisanal community: when the contradictions within the aristocracy become overwhelming, as in the case of war, labor offers a secure and reliable refuge. Where the normal social and infrastructural means by which Offa and Elred defined themselves and their place in society has been destabilized, shoemaking continues to offer an “honest trade to get our living by” (1.2.67).

The princes’ noble features do not alienate them from their fellow artisans but, on the contrary, facilitate their assimilation into their new community. In their new roles as shoemakers, Offa and Elred bow and weep as their mother, the queen, passes by as a prisoner of the Romans. Their distinctly noble behavior earns them respect from Cicely, the shoemaker’s wife, who declares that they are “[k]ind boys . . . indeed, they shall fare ne’er the worse. / I could e’en weep myself, to see my boys so kind-hearted” (1.2.132–33). The queen urges Cicely to “use them well, / So much the more ’cause they were kind to me” (1.1.140–41). The princes’ kindness, their gentleness, accords nicely with their new laboring existence. As Cicely notes, “their compassion of women shall lose ’em nothing if they be but dutiful to their master and just to their dame” (1.2.172–74). The princes’ aristocratic disposition thus renders them more desirable as laborers. As with its mixing of ethnic boundaries, then, the play recovers an ancient Britain in which manual labor is not only a noble way of life but, in fact, harmonizes with an aristocratic value system to such a degree that the two class orientations become virtually indistinguishable. Indeed, if anything labor is presented as the fundamental basis, the origin, of social order, a sentiment expressed by Cicely as she surveys the destruction of the war: “The world treads not upright; methinks it had need of a good workman to mend it” (1.2.149–50). In the face of war and destruction, skilled labor, labor which is capable of mending that which is damaged, remains the sole social force capable of rebuilding a war-torn nation.

As Cicely’s remark suggests, labor is not merely a component element of an imagined British past: it is the constitutive force, the motor behind British national development. When that nation is wracked by war and aristocratic power struggles, labor remains as a touchstone of stability. It is here, with this romantic depiction of the laboring community, that the act of historical remembering takes on great import. If the fundamental purpose of the medieval guild was to serve as “a fighting organization for the defense of the trade interests of those who belonged to it,” by the early modern period guilds and small craftsmen were being reorganized by an expanding market into a profit-based triad of merchants, manufacturers and nascent industrial capitalists, and waged laborers.^[70] This was a system that most certainly did not have trade interests in mind. As Braudel has argued, the expansion of the putting-out system, in which merchants took direct control of the productive capacity of guilds, was becoming so influential that “all sectors of craft life were touched, and the guild system was gradually being destroyed,” even if the guild, as a formal organization, lingered for some time.^[71] The supersession of local economies and social networks by a national economy geared toward large-scale production and commercial trade between nations had a devastating effect on the traditional guild structure, which valued stability, community, and the practical satisfaction of needs over the imperatives of impersonal market dynamics. By the early modern period, the days in which the guild functioned to conserve social and economic order were coming to an end, as merchants came increasingly to view the guild, with its communal outlook and stress on preserving traditional labor practices, as a hindrance to economic improvement and innovation. Keith Wrightson sums up the dire consequences for the laboring community in no uncertain terms: “A growing proportion of urban craftsmen belonged to a skilled or semiskilled journeyman proletariat struggling to cope with declining wages and with the uncertainties of demand for their labour in what was frequently an overstocked labour market.”^[72]

Whether or not a harmonious and vigorous guild system that was opposed to capitalist change ever actually existed is open to debate.^[73] But the play’s depiction of the ideal guild of the distant past is “true” to the extent that it articulates a real desire for an alternative history in which labor is not oppressed and exploited by external social and economic forces.^[74] Thus, Rowley’s play contains not a hint of a proletarianized labor force. Moreover, as a play that can be broadly classified as a city comedy, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman is unique in its lack of merchants or other commercial figures. The play imagines a past in which guild labor not only coexists in harmony with an ancient aristocracy but serves as the very foundation on which that aristocracy can flourish. After all, both Offa and Elred, as well as Sir Hugh, another British aristocrat who has been unsettled by the fighting, take shelter in a welcoming guild structure when they are forced to flee their positions of aristocratic privilege. Without this guild support, the play would seem to suggest, the very possibility of British history would have been compromised.

The guild structure at the center of the play is not the exploitative one of early modern England’s nascent capitalist economy but a supportive organization, one concerned with preserving the integrity of its members. Elred’s and Offa’s new master (referred to only as Shoemaker) views his new apprentices as future masters, not merely as waged laborers with a precarious economic standing. He informs them that they will be “bound for seven years, and then you are your own men, and a good trade to get your livings by” (1.2.88–90).^[75] When Elred leaves to fight against the Goths, his master assures him that he will “sell all the shoes in my shop before my lame soldier shall be kept in an hospital” (3.2.70–71). Elred gratefully acknowledges the familial nature of his master’s support, which is “not as to a servant, / But a child” (3.2.72–73). The shoemaker values Elred as a particular, unique individual, not as a source of economic profit, to such an extent that he is willing to direct all of his wealth into securing Elred’s well-being. Wealth, for the shoemaker, is not generated by exploiting labor; on the contrary, wealth is best used to preserve the dignity of labor. Sir Hugh also views the shoemaker’s guild as possessing practical value. He explains to the shoemaker that he is willing to accept

Hugh’s emphasis on the value of his life, and his recognition of the guild as offering refuge from the wars that “hath ruin’d me,” suggest that labor is not adequately represented by pay or the wage relation (3.2.178). Labor possesses a value that transcends the bounds of financial or economic interests, in this case enabling Hugh to escape the “dangerous quick-sands” of war (3.2.179). The guild that Hugh and Elred embrace is one in which the wage relation is a supplement to life and not a commanding force that dictates one’s existence. Whereas the early modern guild was frequently a locus of poverty and proletarianization, here the guild serves precisely the opposite function, offering Hugh and Elred a way of avoiding hardship and ruin.

To a certain extent, the association of artisanal labor with an ancient, indigenous British aristocracy works to legitimize or naturalize the laboring community, using an interpretation of the past, in Raymond Williams’s words, as “a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order.”^[76] In representing artisanal labor as a refuge for the aristocracy, an escape from the contradictions of the ruling class, the play does more than just ratify a laboring class perspective. More profoundly, the guild structure is positioned as the fundamental organizing principle of English national identity. If the play, on one level, is an account of England’s national origins, depicting the successful assimilation of Roman and ancient British ethnic identities, it also makes clear that this origination was made possible by the values and organizational coherence of the guild. Thus the symbolic mechanism of this ethnic assimilation, the marriage of Offa and Leodice, does not take priority over Offa’s obligation to the guild. Out of respect for the standard prohibition of apprentice marriage, Offa explains to Leodice that “I am a ‘prentice and must not wed,” because doing so would “bind me to a perpetual ’prenticeship” (2.3.147, 150). What is presented as a founding event in England’s national development—the marriage of the British and Roman ruling classes—must accommodate itself to guild rules. If we follow Laslett’s classic characterization of the early modern world as a family that was “not one society only but three societies fused together; the society of man and wife, of parents and children and of master and servant,” then it would seem that the play places the latter familial union in a determinant position relative to the others.^[77] An aristocratic marriage negotiation is subordinated to the sense of duty and honor that defines this imagined laboring community. The guild, and not the aristocratic institution of marriage, is the foundation of ancient British history.

The play reformulates important plot elements and themes, from military honor to marriage and, ultimately, the unification of native British and Roman ethnic identities, in terms of the values of an idealized guild structure. Thus, for instance, when Elred, who has been pressed into fighting with the Romans against the Goths and Vandals, rescues Dioclesian from Huldrick, the king of the Goths, Dioclesian promises that “[n]ever had Briton soldier such a pay / As thou shalt have” (3.4.55–56). When the dust of battle settles, Dioclesian marvels that Elred’s “sword the greater half hath won,” and vows to “pay thy merits” accordingly (3.5.26–27). Dioclesian asks Elred’s social status, in response to which, interestingly, Elred affirms his artisanal identity, replying that he is

Rather than use Dioclesian’s goodwill as an opportunity to reveal his aristocratic identity, Elred instead chooses to reinforce his status as a laborer. In doing so, he positions the guild system as an honorable social institution. Elred’s labor, and not his aristocratic essence, is directly implicated in this mythical making of England’s national identity, because his military prowess and honor are attributed as much to his artisanal consciousness as to his sense of national pride and duty. His honest disposition as a laborer and his loyalty to the guild translate flawlessly into his ability to defend national interests.^[78]

Both princes, indeed, find the guild accommodating of their royal/aristocratic dispositions. Even when the shoemaker is apprised of Offa’s and Elred’s true princely identities, he promises Elred—his “princely ‘prentice”—that, like “leather that will hold all water,” he will keep their secret (5.1.160). The shoemaker’s willingness to protect the princes’ identities captures the sense of communal cohesion and responsibility that defines guild life in the play: it is, quite simply, because they belong to a guild that the princes are able to survive in secret. But it also indicates an understanding of classed identity that is not in line with the standard aristocratic worldview. The shoemaker continues to view the princes as laborers, apprentices of the guild, despite the revelation of their royal status. Where official aristocratic ideology situates class identity within a thoroughly essentialist framework, the shoemaker’s characterization of the princes as “princely ‘prentices” suggests, if not a denial of aristocratic ideology, then at the least a willingness to think class identity in a significantly different way. Offa and Elred can be both princes and apprentices—the latter identity is not subordinated to or elided by the former. Identity, for the shoemaker, is not determined by one’s place within an immutable hierarchy of status, but is instead the product of one’s participation within a community in which one’s life—indeed the very question of survival—is understood as a matter of mutual concern amongst members. The mutually sustaining act of physical labor here overrides the aristocratic metaphysic of identity. Offa and Elred do not resist the shoemaker’s conceptualization of class identity, with Offa proudly affirming that Elred’s newborn son will never “scorn, till that race [of kings] be run, / To call himself a prince, yet a shoemaker’s son” (5.1.199–200). The son, from this view, is the material embodiment of the shoemaker’s conflation of aristocratic and laboring identities.

There is thus a certain “moral economy” of labor informing the shoemaker’s eagerness to protect and support his apprentices. To a certain extent, this moral economy helps to articulate the play’s guiding fantasy of an ideal past in which labor was not exploited or maligned, but it is also historically accurate to the extent that it reflects what Margaret Pelling argues is a central feature of the early modern guild, namely its fostering of the social interdependency “which bridged the gap between the family and ‘the State,’ and connected families one with another.”^[79] The play draws out the guild’s function as an agent of communal connectivity, concluding with the queen’s acknowledgment of the shoemaker’s and Cicely’s familial care of the princes, as she commends them for being “loving parents” to her sons during her absence (5.2.163). The shoemaker’s response further emphasizes the importance of the guild as a preserver of communal networks: “I did, madam, the best I could for ’em. I have seen one married to the Emperor’s daughter” (5.2.164–65). The play’s prominent royal figures (Maximinus, Diolclesian, the queen) play no significant role in resolving the conflict within the aristocracy. The bloodshed is ended by the marriage for which the shoemaker takes credit, a marriage that leads Maximinus to marvel to the queen that “[w]onders hath fallen since you have a prisoner been; / You, and your sons, and we are grown a-kin” (5.2.156–57). But this wonder has been brought about by the guild’s success in upholding values of social interdependency, a point stressed by Maximinus’s subsequent acquiescence to Barnaby’s request that the “fellow servants” to the princes, “being of the Gentle Craft, may have one holiday to ourselves” (5.2.172–73). By consecrating the newly established allegiance between the British and the Romans with the declaration of St. Crispin’s Day, or the Shoemaker’s Holiday, the play implicitly positions artisans as the makers of English national history. In reaching back to an ancient past, then, the play remembers a history that serves as a foil to the early modern degradation of labor, placing the skilled laboring body, quite literally, at center stage as the producer of the nation.

Notes

All references are to Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr (New York: Norton, 1990).

Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 30.

Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (London, 1630), 135.

Ibid.

Ibid., 135–36.

Ibid., 136.

Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1664), 31.

Ibid.

Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 52.

10.

Ibid., 129.

11.

Tudor Economic Documents, ed. Richard Tawney and Eileen Power (London, 1961), 173.

12.

Llana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 116.

13.

See ibid., 109–32.

14.

Peter Searle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 101.

15.

Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 8.

16.

Ibid.

17.

It is not my intention, however, to impose a contemporary understanding of the mind on the early modern period. I would echo Mary Thomas Crane, who asks “that we apply to cognitive theory the same tests we apply to other kinds of theory, that is, simply to consider whether it convinces or intrigues or interests us, and whether it provides us with a useful model for interpreting texts and cultures.” Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10.

18.

Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 25.

19.

Ibid., 67.

20.

Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 876.

21.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988), 76.

22.

Ibid.

23.

Quoted in Michael Berlin, “Broken all in Pieces: Artisans and the Regulation of Workmanship in Early Modern London,” in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 81.

24.

Anon., The Humble Petition of the Artizan Cloth-workers of the Citie of London (London, 1624), 1.

25.

Ibid.

26.

George Unwin, The Guilds and Companies of London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), 83.

27.

Ibid., 252.

28.

See Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 53–65.

29.

Anon., A Remonstrance of all the Shoemakers of London and Elsewhere (London, 1675), 1.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Richard Rigby, “The Cobler’s Corrant,” http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project.

34.

Elizabeth Rivlin, The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 81.

35.

Anon., “Roome for Companie, Here Comes Good Fellowes,” (London, 1617), 1.

36.

Peter Stallybrass, “Footnotes,” in The Body In Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), 320.

37.

Paul S. Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theater and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 87.

38.

For an account of the historically accurate and realistic basis for the play’s social types, see W. K. Chandler, “The Sources of the Characters in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Modern Philology 27, no. 2 (November 1929): 175–82.

39.

Peter Mortenson, “The Economics of Joy in The Shoemakers’ (sic) Holiday.” Studies in English Literature 16, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 247.

40.

Even as they agree on the need to undermine the marriage, they cannot help but express their mutual dislike. Don E. Wayne explains: “While [Oatley and Lincoln] collaborate in obstructing a marriage that would join their families, there is no mistaking the element of hostility that governs their dialogue.” Don E. Wayne, “A Pox on Your Distinction”: Humanist Reformation and Deformations of the Everyday in The Staple of News,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 75.

41.

For a discussion that sees the Dutch presence not as a class question but in terms of the play’s religious agenda, see Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16–35.

42.

Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” 100.

43.

Lawrence Stone notes that despite a trend toward companionate marriage in the late Elizabethan period, “[t]he first and most traditional motive for marriage is the economic or social or political consolidation or aggrandizement of the family [which] tended to be the predominant motive at the top and also towards the bottom of the social scale.” Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 271.

44.

Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 228.

45.

David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in Philology 84, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 325.

46.

Brian Walsh, “Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 46, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 324.

47.

For a contrasting reading that sees the differing perspectives of the characters as moral rather than class based, see Michael Manheim, “The Construction of The Shoemakers’ (sic) Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 10, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 315–23.

48.

For a sustained consideration of Eyre’s various moments of banter with Mistress Eyre, see Roy J. Booth, “Meddling with Awl: Reading Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (With a Note on The Merry Wives of Windsor),” English 41, no. 171 (Autumn 1992): 193–211.

49.

For a discussion of changing aristocratic consumption patterns, see Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

50.

Patricia Thomson has also noted Eyre’s loyalty to his class despite his newfound wealth: “As Lord Mayor he remains what he was: a member of his gild and class.” Patricia Thomson, “The Old Way and the New Way in Dekker and Massinger,” The Modern Language Review 51, no. 2 (April 1956): 169.

51.

Hodge’s support is especially significant because, as A. L. Beier has shown, “[s]ervants and apprentices were indeed most prone to vagrancy of all London’s socio-economic groups, accounting for almost three-quarters of the Londoners whose occupations were listed in Bridewell records from 1597 to 1608, thus surpassing even their substantial share of the labour force.” Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Routledge, 1985), 44. Without the support of the guild, Ralph would be a prime candidate for this unfortunate fate.

52.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5, 307. Italics in the original.

53.

Ronda Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001): 185.

54.

Jonathan Gil Harris argues that the scene “invites the audience to view the shoes less as a love-token for Jane than as a homage to the artisans’ property of fellowship and association.” Jonathan Gil Harris, “Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 51.

55.

Marx, Capital: Volume I, 165.

56.

For more on the relationship between gender relations and the play’s class dynamics, with particular focus on Simon and his wife, see Ann C. Christensen, “Being Mistress Eyre in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Deloney’s The Gentle Craft,” Comparative Drama 42, no. 4 (2008): 451–80.

57.

David Bevington, “Theater as Holiday,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theater and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116.

58.

Marta Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 36, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 368.

59.

Amy L. Smith, “Performing Cross-Class Clandestine Marriage in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 45, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 347.

60.

Andrew Fleck, “Marking Difference and National Identity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 46, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 351.

61.

Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 3.

62.

Depictions of ancient Britons within early modern England’s national imaginary were not common, but they were also not unheard of. Colin Kidd notes that “Anglo-Saxonism predominated as the core identity of the English people, but, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘aboriginal’ ancient Britons enjoyed significantly more than a walk-on part in the national pageant.” Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 75.

63.

Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3.

64.

Ibid.

65.

For a discussion of the relationship between historical representation and historical truth, see D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and “The Light of Truth” From James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 13.

66.

Alison A. Chapman explores the way shoemaking narratives upset class relations through their representation of the control of historical memory: “By depicting shoemakers who change the calendar and create new holidays, early modern texts raise pressing questions about who should be the custodians of England’s historical and liturgical memory.” Alison A. Chapman, “Whose Saint Crispin’s Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 1468.

67.

Jean Bodin, Six Bookes of a Common-weale (London, 1606), 363.

68.

Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 131.

69.

This is interestingly not the case in the play’s source, Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft. In this text, the Queen makes a point of emphasizing the ethnic and national otherness of the Romans. She warns her sons to flee, because Maximinus’s intention is to gather British princes “to make them slaues in a forraigne Land, that are free borne in their owne Country . . . to the end he might plant strangers in their stead.” Thomas Deloney, The Gentle Craft (London, 1637), 15. Rowley’s play, on the other hand, truncates this interaction between the queen and her sons, removing any reference to questions of foreign versus native lands.

70.

Georges Renard, Guilds in the Middle Ages (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publications, 1968), 32.

71.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 317.

72.

Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 194.

73.

See, for instance, the articles in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. Stephen R. Epstein and Maarten Roy Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), many of which explore how medieval guilds could be in practice, if not necessarily in ideology, forces of technological and economic innovation.

74.

Roger Ladd sees a similar motive at work in the writings of Thomas Deloney, whose The Gentle Craft served as Rowley’s source material. Roger A. Ladd, “Thomas Deloney and the London Weavers’ Company,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 981–1001.

75.

The shoemaker’s promise would have rung hollow for a seventeenth-century London audience, as the dropout rate of London apprentices during this time was about 50 percent. Those who did not become freemen through apprenticeship typically descended into the ranks of the London poor. See Llana Krausman Ben-Amos, “Failure to Become Freemen: Urban Apprentices in Early Modern England,” Social History 16, no. 2 (May 1991): 155–72.

76.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 116.

77.

Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Scribner, 1973), 2.

78.

Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis suggest that a national consciousness may have been a component of changing guild structure in this period. A variety of London guilds, following the lead of market forces, spread their enterprise and influence of control from a local to a national level: “London in the early seventeenth century was at the peak of [economic] influence, with a larger share of the urban population and trade of the nation than it had had before or would indeed have until relatively recently. The national perspective of some of its guilds reflects this.” Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis, “Reaching Beyond the City Wall: London Guilds and National Regulation, 1500–1700,” in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 314.

79.

Margaret Pelling, “Apprenticeship, Health and Social Cohesion in Early Modern London,” History Workshop Journal 37 (1994): 33.