4/9/2023 0 Comments Iron wars shake spearNatasha Korda, for instance, reads “the sign of the last” as a token of the shoemaker’s trade (the “last” which stretches shoes) and as a play on words-shoemakers as among the last bastions of traditional trade in a London increasingly driven by mass production and importation. Much recent criticism of Shoemaker’s has centered on the play’s interest in material goods and their production, locating the play in the context of a commercial sea change that saw the importation of large quantities of luxury consumer goods. Other characters become deeply invested in self-fashioning through material goods, and I will argue that Ralph’s sense of self appears all the more lucidly as an alternative to that kind of identity. ![]() Yet his identity is formed in relation to the riches that populate the play while he is absent. 10 Ralph’s place in the story is unusual in that he partakes of few of the play’s good things, its rich clothes and feasts. The play is filled with characters seeking to move between different social and economic modes: Lacy, who seeks to circumvent the aristocratic principles that prevent him from wedding Rose Firk and Hodges, riding on the coattails of their rapidly rising master and Simon and Margery Eyre, whose canny use of labor allows them to move into the mercantile world, trading in shipments and holding administrative office. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is, in its simplest form, a dream of upward mobility of nice clothes, parties, and good things to eat and drink. Making Identity from Properties and Prosthetics ![]() Moreover, the fact that Ralph’s disability is “put on” by an able-bodied actor in front of a (potentially impaired) audience returns us once more to the problematics of physicality, identity, properties, and prosthetics. Ralph’s reintegration into the shoemakers’ society is promising, but not complete. Finally, I will show that even as Dekker makes his argument for reconstructing identity in terms of interpersonal relationships, he complicates and interrogates that model. This identity is no more an “essential self” than that of the man “made” by clothes, but it is reliable, self-directed, and inalienable. ![]() As Dekker shows, there is a less showy but nonetheless valuable place in the world to be established via the bonds of matrimony and fraternity, and the enduring value of artisanal skill. Unable to assume a different identity based on the sumptuary “transformation” of his body, he must embrace an alternative ontology. He cannot shed his lameness, of which the economic and social significance is so great that his friends need not, and dare not, acknowledge it. Ralph, whose disability renders him in need of prosthesis in the traditional sense, is unable to participate in this material putting-on of identity. However, the play also shows that this kind of identity is not the only or the best model. He shows how various characters rely on clothing and material goods not only to express, but actually to construct their identity, such that the boundary between person and thing becomes indistinct. I argue that in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker shows himself to be interested in prostheses in the broad sense of that word. ![]() 9 However, this essay will demonstrate that Ralph’s missing or injured leg and the plethora of material goods that populate the rest of the play are not divorced concerns, but closely wedded. 8 Meanwhile, the matter of journeyman Ralph’s “lame” form has attracted relatively little critical attention. 7 In recent years, scholars have emphasized the play’s obsession with commercialism, material goods, and craftsmanship. 4ĭespite sounding, and feeling, very much of its own time, The Shoemaker’s Holiday has remained among the most popular of the era’s citizen comedies, with several twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions, and a substantial body of criticism devoted to the play’s structure, 5 characterization of the “gentle craft,” 6 and relationship to Shakespeare’s Henry V. 3 The play would have been performed sometime in 1599, and seemingly played well, since it was acted by the Admiral’s Men for Queen Elizabeth on New Year’s Day, 1600. 2 This play, which became The Shoemaker’s Holiday, reworked Thomas Deloney’s 1598 The Gentle Craft, building on its story of Simon Eyre, the London shoemaker who becomes Lord Mayor, and adding the new subplot of injured shoemaker Ralph/Rafe and his lost wife Jane. In 1599, Philip Henslowe recorded in his diary that he had paid “thomas dicker” the sum of three pounds for a play about “the gentle craft” that is, about shoemaking. These silken fellows are painted images-outsides, outsides, Rose, their inner linings are torn.
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