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THE title of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday refers to the staging within the play of a civic holiday celebration in the name of the shoemakers' guild.1 The celebration is of common artisan men, who are staged throughout engaged in praiseworthy activity. What Shoemaker's Holiday presents as worthy of praise and celebration makes the play an interesting historical artifact and an important register of social, cultural, and economic change in early modern England. At the center of the play, and at the center of its system of values, is a workshop—the typical household production unit of the late medieval and early modern English world, which was typically represented in a humble place outside the complex circulations of power, prestige, and national affairs. In Shoemaker's Holiday, however, the household workshop and the artisan men who inhabit it are represented as the energy and strength of England and the source of the major assets of the emerging nation: work, productivity, and patriotism.
The politics of a play that displaces age-old social hierarchies to insist that it is artisans who matter, not aristocrats and gentlemen, are worthy of notice in and of themselves. The play is particularly significant, however, in that its displacements of high and low are expressed in terms of the body in a move that runs against the grain of what we know about dominant and emerging early modern social and cultural constructions of the body. The bodies of the lauded artisans are foregrounded again and again, and are usually found engaged in some kind of vigorous activity. They feast with gusto, they require large volumes of beer to quench their thirst, they make bawdy references to their sexual activity, they dance morris dances with such vigor that as one journeyman expressively puts it, their buttocks go “jiggy-joggy like a quagmire” (13.30–31).2 And of course they work, with hammers and awls and leather and other rough tools and materials. But whereas common artisan bodies and the activities they engage in are generally
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written as “low” in early modern discourses, here the artisan body is inscribed into the sphere of elite power and written as vigorous, vital, and crucial to the nation; it is, in fact, the measure of national value,...