Dekker, Thomas | David Scott Kastan (essay date 1987)
David Scott Kastan (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker's Holiday,” in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 3, Summer 1987, pp. 324-37.
[In the essay below, Kastan maintains that The Shoemaker's Holiday is “a realistic portrait only of Elizabethan middle-class dreams—a fantasy of class fulfillment that would erase the tensions and contradictions created by the nascent capitalism of the late sixteenth-century.”]
Nothing is proposed but mirth,” Thomas Dekker assures his readers in the dedicatory epistle to The Shoemaker's Holiday. “I present you here with a merry conceited comedy,” he says, a play that had recently been acted before the Queen, that ever enthusiastic though hyper-sensitive theatre-goer, whose pleasure Dekker presents as evidence of the innocence of his offering: “the mirth and pleasant matter by her Highness graciously accepted,...
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