Missing Parts in the Shoemaker's Holiday

The early modern binary of the virtuous City of London versus the sinful suburbs clashes with an older binary pitting the countryside against the city. At the same time, the forces of urbanization along with early capitalism were undermining both binaries. This article traces how this is reflected in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The play not only represents the City of London under Simon Eyre’s rule as, potentially, possessing all the virtues of the pastoral, but also suggests that the surrounding countryside, in particular the village of Old Ford, was being corrupted by city values. Dekker’s play, therefore, deconstructs simple dichotomies between country and city, showing how the two inevitably influence each other.

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2006

In a recent book on Shakespeare and genre, Lawrence Danson writes that most Elizabethan plays labeled as histories represent "a tiny sliver of the past," and "deal mainly with the public realm, with political events, and specifically with the things that happened to or because of a few English kings." 1 As Danson implies, such a reductive definition of the genre denies the full breadth of the dramatic historical field in this period. Closer examination of the performance of pastness in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean theaters indeed suggests a historical imagination among popular playwrights that was open to more than the "tiny sliver" that is most often recognized as historical drama. The commercial stages were wide enough to accommodate visions of the English past in which housewives, merchants, and citizen figures dominated. In plays such as Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Roaring Girl, the early modern stage tapped into historical subject matter that complemented the kind of state history Danson describes by focusing on what can be broadly called the "middling sort." 2 Perhaps the best-known play to feature a middling-sort history is Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599). Dekker recounts the story of Simon Eyre, a figure from the English chronicles, who becomes Lord Mayor of London in the fifteenth century. The Shoemaker's Holiday presents a multilayered plot, and features, along with this historical story, a prominent romantic narrative in which Eyre is only peripherally involved.

Textual Practice, 2016

A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange both deploy characters who use prostheses in order to interrogate the emergent capitalist societies depicted in the plays. ’Stump’ and ’Cripple’, the heroes of these plays, are defined not by their bodies, or by the apparent limitations of these bodies, but by a sense of vocation, a messianic calling which dislocates them from the normative identities operating in their societies. In these plays, I argue, those who try to possess are ineffective, while those who eschew ownership, even of themselves, and seek instead to put their identities and bodies to use - those, in other words, for whom identities and bodies are fundamentally prosthetic - are able to bring about alternative forms of community.

Revue LISA / LISA e-journal, 2005

La Revue LISA/ LISA e-journal, Vol. III n°2 / 2005 : <http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/anglais/lisa>. I IS SS SN N 1 17 76 62 2--6 61 15 53 3 © LISA 2005. Conformément à la loi du 11 mars 1957, toute reproduction, même partielle, par quelque procédé que ce soit, est interdite sans autorisation préalable auprès de l'éditeur. Abstract Le théâtre contemporain à travers Kilt, la pièce de Jonathan Wilson, se prête admirablement à une réflexion sur les diverses approches liées à la question de l'identité. Kilt ne parle pas simplement de Tom, le personnage principal, en tant que « danseur exotique » dans une boîte de nuit du quartier gay de Toronto, mais évoque aussi son héritage familial et ses racines écossaises. Au cours d'un voyage en Ecosse à l'occasion de l'enterrement de son grand-père, Tom apprend que les différentes facettes de son identité, qui jusqu'alors semblaient s'exclure, fusionnaient. Son identité de Canadien gay d'origine écossaise devient vitale quand il commence à découvrir le passé de son grand-père. Cet article se propose d'examiner diverses notions telles que la construction de la famille et de son histoire, les relations familiales, l'héritage, les identités nationale et sexuelle, la façon dont on construit des stéréotypes et les moyens pour les déconstruire. La pièce s'étend non seulement sur un grand espace géographique, mais aussi sur trois générations, créant ainsi un mélange subtil du passé et du présent.

International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature, 2017

Thomas Dekkar was a professional Elizabethan playwright. He understands the middle-class life with its ups and downs, aspirations and its compromises. The shoe makers's Holiday is his supreme contribution to this class of literature, and of its type it remains an unique example. The play consists of two stories, the romantic story with the characters from high class like Row land, Lacy and the story that concerns its ordinary citizens. The shoe makers, like Eyre, Thodge etc. The two stories are closely interwoven in the structure of the play.

Journal of History Culture and Art Research

The purpose of this study is to discuss the space for a marginalized feminine identity in contemporary British feminist dramatist Timberlake Wertenbaker's play. The play New Anatomies dramatizes the life of a historical woman called Isabelle Eberhardt, who disguised herself as an Arab man called Si Mahmoud living among Algerians. The focus of the play is the construction of a marginalised identity through dislocation of a woman from the European culture. Finding no space for her radical identity, she disguises herself as an Arab man to escape the constraints imposed on women by European ideals of femininity. Eberhardt disrupts the conventional gender codes by showing how gender is dramatized within the space of the salon. In contrast, Eberhardt is received as a man in male attire when travelling in Algeria trying to find out a space for her radical identity. She achieves a certain kind of freedom by her dislocation although this eventually leads to her death in desert.

Literature, 2022

Citizenship is popularly associated with able-bodiedness, both physically and cognitively. However, disability studies over the last few decades has revealed the extent to which the idea of the nation as composed of able-bodied constituents is little more than fantasy, one that can create or galvanize barriers to full political and social participation. Part of this task has involved re-evaluating key works of canonical literature through the lens of disability. In the following paper, I apply this approach to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and argue that Beckett’s play disrupts not just the fantasy of a nation composed of able-bodied citizens but the language of able-bodiedness itself, which has implications for how we conceive of citizenship and participatory politics. While impairment has been critiqued in Beckett before, the extensive examples of pained and impaired characters in his works have often been subsumed under broader philosophical themes, such as existentialism, nihilism, or Cartesian dualism, and rarely linked to issues of citizenship, politics, or the social and built environment. I explore how Beckett’s approach to theatrical and linguistic performativity contributes to how he staged the experience of pain and disability that has implications for how we conceive of and practice citizenship.

2009