The Shoemaker's Holiday / Edition 3

by Thomas Dekker, Jonathan Gil Harris

Overview

'I know the trade: I learned it when I was in Wittenberg'

Thus speaks Lacy, the gentleman who disguises himself as a simple shoemaker in order to win his true love, the grocer's daughter Rose. The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of the most engaging citizen comedies of the 17th century. Written and first performed at much the same time as Hamlet, it has an unexpected affinity with Shakespeare's tragedy: both feature a leading character who has spent time in Wittenberg, where he has learned something that has changed him. But whereas Hamlet's Wittenberg philosophy steers him into the realm of the individuated self, Lacy's Wittenberg trade directs him and his fellows into the world of the collectively crafted commodity. In the process, the play offers fascinating insight into the evolution of fashion and the growth of consumer culture in newly capitalist London.

This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, the play's major preoccupations, and stage history.

The editor, Jonathan Gil Harris, is Professor of English at George Washington University. he is the author of Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, Sick Economies, and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780713673784
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/27/2008
Series:	New Mermaids
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous essays on the drama and culture of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He has also co-edited, with Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge).

Table of Contents

	General Editors' Preface	vii
	Preface	ix
	Abbreviations	x
	List of Illustrations	xii
	Introduction
1	Dekker's career: the play in its biographical context	1
2	Date: the play in its historical and literary context	8
3	The use of source material	17
4	The play	26
5	The play on the stage
	The original staging	44
	Later stage history	47
6	The text
	Early editions	53
	Later editions	58
	The present text	62
	Act-and scene divisions	63
	The Shoemaker's Holiday	71
	Appendices
A	Dekker's use of The Gentle Craft	203
B	The play's title	219
	Index to the Commentary	222

Editorial Reviews

A popular comedy in Shakespeare's day, The Shoemaker's Holiday was temporarily removed from the repertory during the Restoration for being too racy. Here, Bernard Sahlins, a founder of Chicago's acclaimed comedy troupe, the Second City, has updated the text to make it more accessible to modern actors, sans editorial glosses or scholarly apparatus. It's all Dekker, except for about 450 words that have disappeared from the language or changed meaning. The adaptations made by Sahlins are invisible to anyone who is not intimately familiar with the text. For example, he has replaced sundry in the first line with several; later, "I'll o'erreach his policies" becomes "I'll outscheme him." The language of bawdy and insult is mostly untouched. While this is a legitimate effort, this reviewer is unconvinced of its virtue. Wanting to make a 16th-century play available to a general reading public is commendable, but altering the text is part of a dangerous trend that can lead to horrific writing when the original, if played well, is perfectly clear. That this play is intended for adults rather than teens who might have more trouble with the language makes the need for an adaptation all the more questionable. For specialized theater collections only.-Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Dekker's is one of the most popular Elizabethan plays. It reveals a vital portrait of Elizabethan London and the interaction of social classes within the city. In addition to the complete text of the play, the editors offer a study of the text, a historical and critical introduction on the play's relationship with contemporary life and drama and its place in Dekker's work, a stage history, a detailed commentary, and a reprint of source materials. Smallwood is deputy director and head of the education department at The Shakespeare Center at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Wells is general editor of . This is a reprint of an edition first published by Manchester University Press in 1979. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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