Corporate Nationalism in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

This essay examines the intertextuality between Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Shakespeare’s Henry V and situates their relationship in the military context of 1590s England. It argues that Dekker’s play responds directly to Shakespeare’s by renegotiating contemporary issues of nation and national identity that Shakespeare deploys. Specifically, The Shoemaker’s Holiday rejects Henry V’s monarchic and martial nationalism and replaces it with a more open and tolerant corporate nationalism based on occupation: Dekker’s shoemakers form a “band of brothers” who redraw traditionally national as well as class boundaries and focus on occupation and communal values over individual honor and conflict against other nations.