Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday - hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster

I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, the survivors mostly with better-known co-writers.  The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) appears to have been an early hit for him, a good example of the hack outdoing himself.  Hacks have their own kind of genius.

Dekker is not a great poet but he has a great ear, or perhaps an inventiveness, for speech.  The Shoemaker's Holiday has kept its interest because of its lively, outlandish speech by London’s shoemakers.

HODGE: How say’st thou, Firk, were we not merry at Old Ford?

FIRK: How, merry? why, our buttocks went jiggy-joggy like a quagmire.  Well, Sir Roger Oatmeal, if I thought all meal of that nature, I would eat nothing but bagpuddings. (IV.2, 103-4)

Firk gets a lot of the highlights.  The shoemakers generally speak in a jumpy prose, the upper-class characters, up to the king himself, in a rather less interesting verse.  Although Ralph gets a nice little verse speech for his wife when he is drafted and sent to France:

RALPH:  Thos know’st our trade makes rings for women’s heels:

Here take this pair of shoes, cut out by Hodge,

Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself,

Made up and pinked with letters for thy name.  (I.1, 65)

That is one plot, Ralph reuniting with his wife, who is pursued by a so-called gentleman.  Another is the usual romance plot – disapproving father, disguised suitor – except this time the disguise is as a Dutch shoemaker:

FIRK: … he’s some uplandish workman: hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster.  (II.3, 71)

And in the C-plot the master shoemaker becomes Mayor of London – based on a true story – resulting in the holiday and a big celebratory breakfast, attended by the king, to end the play.

EYRE: Come out, you powder-beef queans!  What, Nan!  what, Madge Mumble-crust!  Come out, you fat midriff-swag-belly-whores, and sweep me these kennels that the noisome stench offend not the noses of my neighbors.  (II.3, 69)

This is the guy who will be Mayor of London by the end of the play.

This fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne appears a few scenes before the breakfast:

FIRK:  There’s cheer for the heavens: venison-pasties walk up and down piping hot, like sergeants; beef and brewis comes marching in dry-fats [barrels], fritters and pancakes come trowling in in wheel-barrows; hens and oranges hopping in porters’-baskets, collops and eggs in scuttles, and tarts and custards come quavering in in malt-shovels.  (V.2, 124)

I have included Pieter van der Heyden print of Pieter Breugel’s “The Land of Cockaigne,” courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as an example of the kind of thing Dekker was looking at.

Not a great play but a lot of fun in its way and essential for readers looking for the London of the time.  Plenty more plays like that coming up.

Text and page numbers are from Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays (Modern Library).

Next up is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599 or 1600), a much trickier piece of business than I originally realized. 

What I Read in January 2026 – Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic.

I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual.  If only I wanted to write anything.

 

NOT SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William Shakespeare

Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598) &

Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben Jonson – discussed here.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – More of London on the London stage.  I will write this one up momentarily.

Poems (???, earlier than 1618 anyway), Sir Walter Ralegh

Nothing Like the Sun (1964), Anthony Burgess – Shakespeare via Joyce via Burgess, with everyone enjoying their puns.  Not quite my Shakespeare, but convincing enough.  My recent reading demystified Burgess’s novel – oh, he read G. B. Harrison’s Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), just like I did.  The quotation I the title is from Ch. IV, p. 26.  Young Shakespeare has been drinking.

 

FICTION

Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh – The British at war, but it is the Phoney War, when no one knew what was going on.  Easily worth reading for its humor and details, but post-war Waugh is a more conventional writer than the author of, for example, the outrageous Put Out More Flags (1942).

The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54), Yasunari Kawabata – please see this post.

The Kindly Ones (1962), Anthony Powell – More of the same.  The war begins in the next novel, thus my turn back to Waugh.  Addendum: more of the same, but the first long chapter moves back to the author's childhood, and could with tiny changes be published as a separate novella.  It is easily my favorite part of the series so far.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), P. D. James – A fine Cambridge-set mystery often taught by Rohan Maitzen.

 

POETRY

The Shield of Achilles (1955), W. H. Auden

For the Unfallen (1959), Geoffrey Hill

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'Ignorant (1958), Philippe Jaccottet

O Hóspede de Job (The Guest of Job, 1963), José Cardoso Pires – Perhaps about the exhaustion of a dictatorship.  Not available in English.  Possibly slightly too hard for me but I fought through it. The Ballad of Dog’s Beach (1982) is easy to recommend to readers of Leonardo Sciascia and similar anti-mysteries.

Les mots (The Words, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre – Sartre’s childhood memoir, with long sections on his love of reading and writing.  The classics came from his stern grandfather, rather more trashy stuff from his indulgent mother.  In a different life he would have been a pulp adventure writer.  Sartre, the adult, is often a repulsive character, but the childhood version is a sympathetic, charming little fellow.

I also read, while listening, the lyrics to Caetano Veloso 1968 and 1969 albums, both titled Caetano Veloso.  The former is especially rich in classics.  A valuable exercise I should do more often. 

Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain - He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery

Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month.  Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this year’s event.  Amazing.

The book is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain (1954, serialized 1949-54).  The sound of the mountain is a foreboding of death.  The novel is about an old man, Shingo, and his midlife crisis.  His friends are dying, his two adult children are running into marital difficulties, and he begins having vivid dreams.  The old man is in his early sixties, employed, healthy, sexually interested, if vaguely and politely so, in his daughter-in-law.  Not so old is what I am saying.

Life and events are the ordinary kind.  Melodrama is minimized.  The novel was serialized over five years, which fits the pace of the story perfectly, although I fear I would have had trouble remembering who was who.  Typical events of daily life are mixed with more symbolically meaningful material.

So Kawabata gives us, for example, a page of tedious chatter:

“No, please.”  He came out on the veranda.  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I was about to change his diaper.”

“Fusako?”

“She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.”  (170)

Etc., including weather small talk.  But then a pair of American military planes fly past. “They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope” (171) which leads to thoughts and talk of air raids and how children experienced the war, rather more poignant stuff, before returning to the trivia.  This is from a longer section titled “The Kite’s House,” which features the spring return of a kite to the house.  The same kite as previous years?  A descendant?  Is the kite returning to Shingo’s house, or does Shingo live in the kite’s house?  All of this, as is the entire novel, from Shingo’s point of view.

In a sense this is really a novel about how Shingo creates meaning from the world around him.

He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery.  The butterfly wings beyond the leaves of the bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.  (29)

Then on the next page he has one of his vivid dreams, this time about noodles.

Here are a couple of lines from different dreams.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.  (205)

From his body they took a great bucketful of mosquitoes.  (238)

The style of the novel is generally quite plain, plainer than Snow Country (1948), but the frequent dreams add a level of weirdness to the prose.

To my tastes, I would like more of that, and still find Kawabata’s early, fragmented, Modernist The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) his most interesting book.  But the dreams shake things up.

The Japanese context has its own interest, the occasional post-war intrusions, for example.  If the novel were about Shingo’s son it would be about the way the war and combat affected him, but the subject is kept at a distance.  The forthrightness about suicide always makes my eyes pop.  “’A man can always find another woman to commit suicide with him’” (245) – this is said matter-of-factly by Shingo’s sensible wife, about their son-in-law.

Maybe next year I will try to find a Japanese novel that is more formally or linguistically unusual.  I do not know what that might be.  Any recommendations are welcome. 

Thanks, Meredith!

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe.  More importantly, he was a born Londoner.  His best plays are full of London. 

Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but the earliest he put in the 1616 folio of his collected works, so the earliest play he claimed as his own.  It is just a comedy of types, characters with different monomanias knocking into each other.  It is meant to be current, although the types have never left us.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:

Which when you heartily do, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.  (Prologue, 8)

The “monsters” bit is a jab at the old-fashioned plays of five years ago, Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy and plays that

                                       With three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,

Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars;  (7)

That old stuff.  The poetry of The Spanish Tragedy, barely a decade old at this point, is used throughout Jonson’s play as not exactly an example of bad taste, since it is obviously great for its time, but rather a refusal to keep up.

Anyway, Every Man in His Humour is about men.  It is a hodgepodge of bits of Plautus and Terence but updated to the current moment.  I mean, there is a braggart soldier, and a jealous husband, stock characters going back to Menander, to the origins of theatrical comedy.  But there are also tobacco fanatics (Ralegh sparked a tobacco craze in 1586, again about a decade earlier):

BOBADILL: I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen before, of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.  (III.2, 72)

A long list follows of the ailments cured by tobacco.  But Jonson also gives us the anti-tobacconist:

COB:  It’s good for nothing, but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke, and embers: there were four died out of one house, last week, with taking of it, and two more the bell went for, yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne’er scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward, and downward.  (III.2, 73)

It’s bad poetry that really takes a beating, “idle poetry, / That fruitless and unprofitable art  (I.1, 9), noting that this line is from the utilitarian Kno’well, and even he is more tolerant than his friend Downright who flees when a poetry recital begins:

DOWNRIGHT: Oh, here’s no foppery!  Death, I can endure the stocks better.  [Exits]

KNO’WELL Jr.: What ails thy brother?  Can he not hold his water, at reading of a ballad?

WELLBRED: Oh, no: a rhyme to him, is worse than cheese, or a bagpipe.  (IV.1, 83)

Worse than cheese!  That’s pretty bad.  The poem turns out to be good, because it is just a plagiarized chunk of Hero and Leander.  The bad poets are not just bad, but thieves, and the play ends with the offending poems thrown in the fire.  Every Man in His Humour does not have much of a plot.

The play is a preview of Jonson’s great comedies from a decade later – Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair – lively and London-packed but structured more originally.  In a sense, the text I have been quoting is actually part of this run of plays.  In the 1598 version the characters mostly have Italian names and the setting is Italian, sort of, although a weirdly Londonate Italy.  The Italian version was a big hit, but at some point before 1616 Jonson completely rewrote it, making the setting and characters English, tightening the slacker scenes, sharpening the satire.  I find the later version superior in every way, so that is what I have been quoting.

Text and page numbers are from the 1966 New Mermaids edition.  The editor is obsessed with the idea that the jealous husband is an especially subtle portrayal, beyond his comic type, returning to the idea in note after note, as if he, the editor, has his own humour.  I will also not that if the use of commas in some of the quotations above seems odd, they belong to Jonson, who was unusually attentive to the punctuation in his 1616 folio.  What they are supposed to mean to the actor is up for interpretation.

Assuming I get my writing back on track the next play will be another minor play-as-such but great London play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

What I Read in December 2025 – We ain’t gonna eat that.

I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here.  Finishing the massive The Story of the Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake (here, continuing, ending) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things.  The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot.  I do not know what the best was. 

My time with Elizabethan writers and books about them has continued to be rewarding.  For example, in December:

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Edward the Second (1592?) &

The Massacre at Paris (1592?) &

Hero and Leander (1593? / 1598), Christopher Marlowe – On Edward II; on The Massacre.

The Old Wives Tale (1593?), George Peele – An hour of fairy tale fluff, a patchwork perhaps written for a wedding.  A cousin of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; just the kind of thing I like.

Edward III (1595?), ??? – One great act.

Titus Andronicus (c. 1593), William Shakespeare

Elizabethan Plays & Players (1940), G. B. Harrison – Well written and outstanding in its use of evidence.

The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), various

Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), Taylor Mac – Okay, now this thing.  Three minor (although they all have lines) characters murdered in Titus Andronicus turn out to have survived, and are given the task of cleaning up the results of the last act (“[t]here is the appearance of at least one thousand corpses on the stage,” 5).  A series of outrageous and disgusting events ensue, ending with “one of the more spectacular moments ever to be seen in the history of theater” (4), which may well have been true.  How I would love to see this travesty.  The line in the title of the post is said by Gary, played by Nathan Lane, p. 70.

FICTION

Lucifer (1654), Joost van den Vondel – Covered overhere.

Sod and Stubble (1936), John Ise – A novel of pioneer days on the Great Plains, set about 45 miles due south of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, and globally close to the setting of Little House on the Prairie.  Strongly recommended to anyone who loves Cather and Wilder for the details of ordinary life.  It is really Ise writing up his mother’s oral memoir, as close to a primary source as fiction gets.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), W. E. Bowman – A magnificent parody of the Himalayan mountain climbing genre in a classic Wodehouse or Douglas Adams-like English style.

My Death (2004), Lisa Tuttle – A fine little paradoxical time-shift novel.

MEMOIR

Girl to Country (2025), Amy Rigby – One of our greatest living songwriters tries to make it in Nashville, and succeeds, after making it in New York, as covered in the earlier Girl to City (2019).  Making it, succeeding, artistically.  The first volume of memoirs likely has more interest to people who are not already fans, but I will testify that it has been highly rewarding, for more than thirty years now, to be an Amy Rigby fan.

POETRY

On the Slaughter (1891-1933), Hayim Nahman Bialik – Peter Cole’s new translation of Bialik’s poems, an outstanding addition to Bialik’s presence in English.

Five Senses: Selected Poems (1963), Judith Wright – Australian, full of surprises.

That Swing: Poems, 2008-2016 (2017), X. J. Kennedy

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018), Percival Everett – “So, I kept saying to myself I was gonna write a novel entitled Percival Everett’s Long Overdue Slavery Novel, but this is what came out.”

The Khayyam Suite (2025), Charles Martin – Last seen here as Ovid’s translator.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne – I have gotten used to Verne rewriting Poe, but this is more of a Balzac novel, or an adventure novel with a sudden, surprising intrusion of Balzac.  Slow-paced, diffuse, thin in scientific ideas, yet highly entertaining.

L'Effraie (1953), Philippe Jaccottet – The war is over and Surrealism is over, so finally, some fresh ideas in French poetry!  Some resemblance to Rilke, maybe to James Merrill.  I read his second book, too, but it will show up in January’s list.

Uma mão cheia de nada outra de coisa nenhuma: historietas (1955), Irene Lisboa – Tiny little stories about children and their visionary moments by an important figure in Portuguese pedagogy.  These will be easy, right?  Ha ha ha, no, no.  But I guess that is good for me.

Cahiers de l'été 1944 (2025), Jean-Baptiste Duroselle – An angry essay written just before the liberation of Paris by the young man who would become the great historian of 20th century French diplomatic history, author of gigantic (“magisterial”) volumes I will likely never read.  This newly published book is an interesting companion to Marc Bloch’s L'Etrange defaite (1946, written 1940), which he could not have known.