Performing Historicity in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday

This essay considers Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday as a history play rather than as a comedy, and so seeks to situate it among other works from the late-Elizabethan area that focus on the lives and actions of what can be broadly termed the "middling sort." I argue that the part of the play devoted to the rise of Simon Eyre to the office of Lord Mayor of London seeks to historicize the city and its citizens, a narrative effect that is reinforced through the physical dynamics of performing London history on the edges of London itself.