The "Shoemaker's Holiday" (New Mermaids)

by ThomasDekker (Author), Anthony Parr (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.27

  The rise of Simon Eyre, shoemaker, to the office of Lord Mayor provided Dekker with the material for one of the most festive of London comedies. This is no urban satire in the Jonsonian vein, but a cheerfully idealistic - yet by no means naive - celebration of civic social ethos and the culture of the Elizabethan 'middling sort'. Set largely in and around Eyre's workshop, the play provides a happy ending for the earl's son who disguises himself as a Dutch artisan to woo Eyre's daughter; the journeyman who comes home crippled after the wars in France is reunited with his destitute wife; and Eyre himself - the handicraftsman whose 'heart is without craft' - who invites King Henry V to join in the artisans' Shrove Tuesday revelry. This edition provides maps of the Rose theatre, in which the play was first staged in 1599, and of Elizabethan London, the immediate backdrop of the action.