The Shoemakers Holiday or The Gentle Craft

Abstract

Although he was involved in the making of at least 50 plays between 1598 — when his name was mentioned in Henslowe’s Diary in connection with the lost play Phaeton — and 1603, little is known of Thomas Dekker, other than that he appears to have been born in the early 1570s and that he spent most of his life working in London, the city which features centrally in most of his dramatic writing. A key member of Henslowe’s stable of journeyman writers, supplying material for the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Dekker evidently spent his time in and out of debtors’ prison, working meanwhile according to the customary pattern of early modern playmaking, as a collaborator with, amongst others, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, William Rowley and John Ford; he also turned his hand to pamphlet-writing and to scripting civic pageants. The Shoemakers Holiday was the first play associated with Dekker to incorporate his name on the title page of its Quarto publication; as this announced, it had enjoyed a successful performance at Court in 1600.