Missing Parts in The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeMissing Parts in The Shoemaker’s HolidayAlanna SkuseAlanna SkuseUniversity of Reading Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThese silken fellows are painted images—outsides, outsides, Rose, their inner linings are torn.(11:40–41)1In 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.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.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, 1600.4Despite 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.7 In recent years, scholars have emphasized the play’s obsession with commercialism, material goods, and craftsmanship.8 Meanwhile, the matter of journeyman Ralph’s “lame” form has attracted relatively little critical attention.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.I argue that in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker shows himself to be interested in prostheses in the broad sense of that word. 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. However, the play also shows that this kind of identity is not the only or the best model. Ralph, whose disability renders him in need of prosthesis in the traditional sense, is unable to participate in this material putting-on of identity. 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. Unable to assume a different identity based on the sumptuary “transformation” of his body, he must embrace an alternative ontology. 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. This identity is no more an “essential self” than that of the man “made” by clothes, but it is reliable, self-directed, and inalienable. 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. Ralph’s reintegration into the shoemakers’ society is promising, but not complete. 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.Making Identity from Properties and ProstheticsThe Shoemaker’s Holiday is, in its simplest form, a dream of upward mobility; of nice clothes, parties, and good things to eat and drink. 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.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. Yet his identity is formed in relation to the riches that populate the play while he is absent. 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.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. Natasha 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.11 Matthew Kendrick goes further in his reading of the play as an economic fable, claiming that “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 proto-capitalist vision in which all value is understood in commercial terms, and a counter-discourse which locates the labouring body as the source of value and meaning.”12 In this commercial, status-obsessed world, it is fitting that when Ralph is pressed into the army to fight a war in France, his parting gift to the “loving, lovely” Jane (1:224) is a pair of shoes:Here, take this pair of shoes cut out by Hodge,Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself,Made up and pinked with letters for thy nameWear them, my dear Jane, for thy husband’s sake,And every morning, when thou pull’st them on,Remember me, and pray for my return.Make much of them, for I have made them so,That I can know them from a thousand moe. (1:228–35)Jane’s shoes are not only a material property; throughout the exchange, they are closely aligned with Ralph’s hand-work and his cooperation with his fellows, Hodges and Firk, as well as his skill at “pinking,” also known as “pricking.” For Jane’s part, the shoes are emblematic of the faithfulness with which she will guard access to her body, despite the jeopardy which attends being left alone in the city, and which leads Firk to suggest she might earn a living as a prostitute (1:137–41). This alignment of goods with bodies and bodily status sets the stage for the action to come, in which the equation between material and personal properties becomes increasingly apparent. Significantly, the shoes are also a collaborative effort between Ralph and his fellows. The capacity of manual skill to bring people together and enable social mobility is repeatedly emphasized in the play. In scene 4 alone, the journeymen and their “Gentle Craft” are described as “fine” eight times, as well as “proper,” “brisk,” “good fellows,” and “true Trojans.” “[T]he play,” in Kendrick’s terms, “subjectivizes labour, giving it a prominent voice and determinant place within the social.”13An emphasis on material goods therefore underlines the place of artisanal economies at the heart of commercial London. More than this, however, the play’s characters—with the notable exception of Ralph—find their identity in the sumptuary. As Kendrick observes, the primacy of handiwork and artisanal skill in Shoemaker’s makes elision between self and thing particularly easy: “The social world, from the artisanal perspective, is made, not given.”14 More generally, the significance of clothes as transformative items in the early modern period has long been recognized by historians of dress. In their Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000), for instance, Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones argue persuasively that “To understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance, we need to undo our own social categories, in which subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their power as material memories.”15 The notion espoused here, that “fashion fashions,” transforming and becoming identical with the body, corresponds closely with readings of material goods as “prostheses,” items that both signal and materialize one’s way of being in the world.16 This reading in turn relies on an idea of prostheses, broadly defined, as “supplemental” in a Derridean sense. That is, the items that are added to the body both supply a deficiency and make that deficiency conspicuous, at once transforming the “original” and remaining apart from it. In his Materialising Gender, for instance, Will Fisher adopts what he terms a “free-ranging” definition of prosthesis that includes items such as hair, handkerchiefs, and codpieces.17 Fisher views these items as “auxiliary organs” mediating the body’s form and function.18 He describes the codpiece, for example, as a “constitutive accessory”: “I believe that the codpiece wasn’t simply a sign of masculinity, but that it quite literally helped to mold the body and make the man. Or, to use the language of a writer from the period, the codpiece had the ability to make an individual ‘man in body by attire.’”19In Shoemaker’s, the idea of sumptuary transformation is played out in spectacular style. With the aid of manual skill “learned in Wittenberg” (3:21), a phony Dutch accent, and a set of new clothes, idle nobleman Lacy is able to disguise himself as Hans the shoemaker. This transformation is not only one of “semblance,” but an alteration of the bodily and mental state, a “change [from] / High birth to baseness” (3:20–21), which Lacy equates with the metamorphoses of the classical gods (3:1–2). Even more noticeable is the play’s obsession with Margery and Eyre’s new clothes—garments that go hand-in-hand with Eyre’s new venture into buying and selling luxury commodities.20 Immediately as the couple are attired in fine clothing, they acquire new status in their own eyes and those of onlookers:Firk.Ha, ha! My master will be as proud as a dog in a doublet, all in beaten damask and velvet.Eyre.Softly, Firk. For rearing of the nap, and wearing threadbare my garments. How dost thou like me Firk? How do I look, my fine Hodge?Hodge.Why now you look like yourself, master! I warrant you, there few in the city but will give you the wall, and come upon you with the ‘Right Worshipful’.Firk.’Nails, my master looks like a threadbare cloak turned new and dressed. Lord, Lord, to see what good raiment doth!(7:98–107)Clothes make the (wo)man in these cases in a profound sense. These garments not only transform the couple in their outer appearances, but are, as Jonathan Gil Harris has commented, envisioned as acting upon the very flesh of their bodies, “not just arous[ing] the characters but ultimately eras[ing] them.”21 In characterizing Eyre as looking like a cloak, Firk collapses the distinction between his master and the garment he wears, so that new clothes possess the alluring power to remake one’s essential self. Hodge, meanwhile, responds that “now you look like yourself,” backdating Eyre’s transformation to imply that the new cloak has merely revealed his master’s hidden qualities.Clothes may also confer power. At the end of the scene, Margery comments, “I do feel honour creep upon me, and which is more, a certain rising in my flesh” (7:134–5). The bawdy subtext of “rising … flesh” implies a newfound agency that is so potent it is imagined as phallic. While she may be quick to put on airs, Margery’s assessment of her new “honour” is accurate; by the end of the play, Eyre is Lord Mayor, and she is no longer Dame but “Mistress.” The equation between bodies and garments, between personal and commercial value, takes on a darker side in relation to Ralph’s abandoned wife, Jane. Attempting to woo Jane in the shop where she works, Hammon fails to understand the difference between buying a ruff or a handkerchief and purchasing a wife. When Jane asks “What will you buy?” he replies “That which thou wilt not sell. Faith, yet, I’ll try” (12:22–23, my emphasis). When she responds negatively to his offer, he redoubles his insistence on the commercial nature of their exchange:Jane.My hands are not to be sold.Hammon.To be given, then.Nay, faith, I come to buy.(12:26–28, my emphasis)Hammon’s treatment of Jane is not only crassness; he is equally willing to equate his own body with material items, as when he remonstrates, “Look how you wound this cloth, so you wound me” (12:24). Neither are Ralph and Jane themselves entirely immune to this pervasive metaphor, though they ultimately reject the mercantile model of identity. When Ralph discovers Jane’s shoe, he declares of the item that “This is her size, her breadth” (14:46). Later, when they are finally reunited, Jane frames the choice between Ralph and the wealthy Hammon as a choice between fine garments and “humble weeds” (18:57).The effect of material goods as prosthetic markers of identity is, for Dekker, largely positive. It enables social mobility in a play which is pitched to present mobility as a desirable aim. Nonetheless, such markers are, by their nature, unstable, able to be passed around, lost and gained, and reproduced. Inevitably, the more accessible a social marker is, the more liable it is to be tarnished by association with the “wrong sort” of wearer, hence the period’s persistent anxiety about women’s use of cosmetics and both sexes’ adoption of courtly fashions.22 The importance of such goods also inevitably implies that the people they prostheticize are in some sense incomplete or incapable of enacting social transformations without material additions.Taking “prosthesis” in a broad sense thus exposes the instability of that category in ways that are useful to disability studies scholars as they seek to interrogate the very concept of the “whole” or “deficient” body. Central to such scholarship has been the idea that disability itself is perhaps being made to do ideological and narrative work. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s now-seminal Narrative Prosthesis (2000) treats disability as a sort of metaphorical prosthesis, acting on (and in) the “body” of literary texts.23 The presence of a disabled character in a narrative, they argue, provides “unusualness.” The anomaly of disability drives forward plots and lends a corporeal grounding through which intangible themes may be discussed: “disability has been used … as a crutch on which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and social critique. Yet, at the same time, literature avoids designating disability itself as a source for derisive social myths that need to be interrogated.”24 Ralph’s disabled body works as a narrative prosthesis, according to this description, because it facilitates both the subplot of Ralph and Jane’s reunion, and the wider focus on identity with which I argue that the play is concerned. Where, though, do these narrative prostheses leave the disabled user of actual prostheses? Talk of material objects as supplemental to the body undermines the notion of any body as fixed and complete, since, as Margaret Shildrick argues, “the supplement is necessary in constituting the object as such, and in turn its necessity exposes the undecidable nature of categorical distinctions between self/other, natural/artificial, and so on that are usually taken for granted.”25 Writing on the philosophy of prosthetics and Shildrick out that the of on items from to undermines the notion that the body at the and the self as a In even this Eyre, and need of though they use them for of social than It is out that about by prosthesis may not make much difference to the of Shildrick that despite the between self and thing by our on material objects, those with to be to a with a prosthesis on the of the prosthetic to the of the and material of the In the of she the prosthesis is and an object only when a or social it into the of the social such as those played out in Shoemaker’s, it is not only the but the of one’s prosthetics that is at In her on the of Thomas The of the that the difference between and disabled bodies is most in one’s ability to assume different as the That is, the person can to be but not In able-bodied ability to assume the of enables him to woo and to the social and economic of the however, in a play that has exchange, the thing to see is that the is cannot participate can but cannot … between and prostheses at the of the play between bodies that to be and of bodies, and those that are is to The Shoemaker’s and Ralph both have bodily that become in relation to the play’s However, the to which they are thus is very When he to from seeking to of or he new to his character based on his himself in and in my has any sign of a but is by the of bodily Ralph has an identity largely through In this however, the is As we have of Shoemaker’s characters seek to their with the of material much of Ralph’s character is in the he not do and acquire the things that his place so much emphasis on and This may be as I his disability him at a or because he little for that to himself and his wife. it is difference between Ralph’s and that of characters is from the he returns from the in scene the between the of Eyre, and new and the of Ralph’s status is At the is and when he is he a fellow look how make much of a of our a good and a of Ralph’s the bonds of within which the identity is and like an by to from his to Ralph with the same he left for the though it becomes that Ralph’s body is not the me, I Ralph, to see Lord, how the have made him The left leg is not a gift of the not a little thou from that of Ralph’s is the most in the play, but it is We know from just how to in his Dutch and Margery and Eyre in their and cloak, In Ralph’s however, the is less This is usually as that Ralph has lost all or of the left which a reading the with which and by at this for in every of of the period, despite the that so an The of the recognized that “This is and of … but it is the only and last which one must to which will one seeks than of the and Eyre’s with Ralph is by the of Eyre’s to Lord Mayor, their of Ralph’s by the of the new that will the with Ralph’s disability is his by its When it it is in the form of about his Ralph’s at his injured state, Margery on the of but as I for the of any good Firk, meanwhile, repeatedly him about his do for be a and that she Ralph, thou have her to in faith, I would have and with a to but in a of about the of disabled people with which the audience would have been As has of the disabled bodies a social to that of and … in a where or merely of and essay the the to which bodily anomaly might be as particularly for the of Nonetheless, these at Ralph’s to much from the they are with the of more are for the injured the largely Ralph’s however, the play cannot do the Ralph’s missing leg is on not on he is the of his crutch on the the despite the of his body from the Ralph’s presence thus that difference which his friends are to It may also to their of In a society disabled are a social and economic Ralph’s body is so that it than In to out that Ralph’s renders him to and since and the audience are of that With his body so and Ralph is from the focus on bodily and material goods by which the play’s characters are However, he an with the audience is to He must therefore an identity on some These I argue, are the bonds of and the same bonds that are emphasized at Ralph’s and the Eyre’s to the play’s as I have the properties of labor and are Moreover, the value of a is in Eyre’s to his journeymen and his to their for a new in In to Ralph’s about his economic returns to this my heart be I to to thou not see a shoemaker though he have

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