The shoemaker’s holiday, or a Pleasant Comedy of the Gentle Craft, was first published in 1599, as we learn from a passage in Henslowe’s Diary; but the earliest known edition is the quarto of 1600, which describes the play as “acted before the Queen’s most excellent Maiestie New-years day at night last, by the right honourable the Earle of Nottingham, Lord High Admirall of England, his seruants.” Other editions followed in 1610, 1618, and 1657. Of modern editions, Germany has produced the only one which is at all reliable, and upon this edition, admirably collated and edited by Drs. Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt, and published at Halle in 1886, the present reprint is based, the excellence of text, notes and introduction, leaving little beyond the modernising and some elucidation here and there to be done.
Dekker appears to have had a collaborator in the play in Robert Wilson, the actor, who is said to have created the part of Firk on its performance, but although Wilson may have provided some of the situations and dialogue, the credit of the play as a whole is undoubtedly Dekker’s. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is the first of Dekker’s plays, in order of publication, which has survived, although according to Henslowe he began to write for the stage in 1596.
The conception of Simon Eyre, the Shoemaker, is taken from a real person of that name, who, according to Stow, was an upholsterer, and afterwards a draper. He built Leadenhall in 1419, as referred to by Dekker in Act V., Sc. 5, became Sheriff of London in 1434, was elected Lord Mayor in 1445, and died in 1459. About his character nothing certain is known. “It may well be,” say the editors of the Halle edition, “that long after Eyre’s death the builder of Leadenhall was supposed to have been a shoemaker himself, merely because Leadenhall was used as a leather-market. This tradition was probably taken up by the poet, who formed out of it one of the most popular comedies of the age.”
