“A Shoemaker Sell Flesh and Blood—O Indignity!”: The Labouring Body and Community inThe Shoemaker's Holiday

Abstract

Two models define early modern English thinking about social and economic value: an aristocratic model in which value derives from an ineluctable essence; and a mercantile or proto-capitalist model which posits value as the product of monetary exchange on the market. Both models marginalize labouring bodies. For the aristocracy, labour is the province of the lower social orders; for merchants, the productive activity of the labouring body is elided by a focus on monetary circulation. What, then, do we make of plays that take labouring bodies as their subject matter? Through a reading of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, this article explores how labouring bodies resist dominant class efforts to deny the value of productive activity. In the play, aristocratic and bourgeois attitudes toward labour are displaced by a vision that embraces the labouring body as the source of social and economic value. In opposition to aristocratic and mercantile world views, I argue that the play affirms an artisanal consciousness, a perspective that views the social in terms of the sensuous and communal activity that underpins the production process. The play, in short, offers a thoroughly embodied vision of the social world, one in which social and economic value derives neither from an essential birthright nor from the impersonal circulation of goods on the market, but must be enacted through sensuous communal labour.

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