Thomas Dekker

A Lord Mayor fears his daughter’s suitor is too high-born—then learns the young gentleman has squandered his fortune and taken up shoemaking in Wittenberg.

On the bustling Elizabethan stage of Thomas Dekker, London’s merchants and courtiers collide amid love, money, and the demands of war. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Rowland Lacy longs for Rose, while her father resists the match and Lacy’s uncle sends him to France. At the same time, the shoemaker Simon Eyre makes a noisy plea to save newly married Ralph from being pressed into service. This collection, edited with an introduction and notes by Ernest Rhys, brings together Dekker’s comedy, realism, and poetic flair. Can Lacy outwit the plans laid for him—and what will become of the shoemaker’s appeal?

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