Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:09:09.819Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Whose Saint Crispins Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Alison A. Chapman
Alison A. Chapman*
Affiliation:
University of Alabama, Birmingam
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article demonstrates an early modern association between the trade of shoemaking and the act of altering the festal calendar. It traces this link through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary texts including Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and — most notably — Henry V. The article argues that the depictions of cobblers making holidays resonated with the early modern English politics of ritual observance, and its concluding discussion of the Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows how the play imagines king and cobblers vying for control of England's commemorative practice.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 4-Part2 , Winter 2001 , pp. 1467 - 1494
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, Thomas. 1828. History of London. London.Google Scholar
Altman, Joel. 1991. “'Vile Participation': The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42: 1–32.Google Scholar
Ayers, P. K. 1994. “'Fellows of Infinite Tongue': Henry Kand the King's English.” Studies in English Literature 34: 253–77.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington.Google Scholar
Baldo, Jonathan. 1996. “Wars of Memory in Henry V” Shakespeare Quarterly 47: 132–59.Google Scholar
Baker, David J. 1997. Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell and the Question of Britain. Stanford.Google Scholar
Barton, Anne. “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry Kand the Comical History.” In Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price, 92-117. University Park.Google Scholar
Bate, Jonathan. 1984. “The Cobbler's Awl: Julius Caesar, 1.1.21-24.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35: 461–62.Google Scholar
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. 1966. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 3 vols. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Booty, John, ed. 1976. The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book. Charlottesville.Google Scholar
Brentano, Robert. 1968. Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century. Princeton.Google Scholar
Bright, Samuel, ed. 1831. Excerpta Historica, or Illustrations of English History. London.Google Scholar
Bright, Thomas. 1922. The Romance of the Shoe. London.Google Scholar
Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. 1962. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 5 vols. New York.Google Scholar
Cairns, David and Richards, Shaun. 1988. Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture. Manchester and New York.Google Scholar
Camp, Charles. 1924. The Artisan in Elizabethan Literature. New York.Google Scholar
The Cobler Turned Courtier. 1680. London.Google Scholar
Cressy, David. 1989. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. London.Google Scholar
Dekker, Thomas. 1958. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 4 vols. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Dekker, Thomas. 1990. The Shoemaker's Holiday. Ed. Anthony Parr. New York.Google Scholar
Deloney, Thomas. 1961. The Novels of Thomas Deloney. Ed. Merritt E. Lawlis. Bloomington.Google Scholar
Duffy, Eamon. 1992. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven.Google Scholar
Edwards, A. S. G. 1994. “The Appearance of Saint George Above the English Troops at Agincourt: The Source of a Detail in the Historical Record.” Notes and Queries n.s. 41: 304–07.Google Scholar
Farmer, David Hugh. 1978. The Oxford Dictionary of the Saints. Oxford.Google Scholar
Finucane, Ronald. 1977'. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. Totowa.Google Scholar
Gaspar, Julia. 1990. The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker. Oxford.Google Scholar
Hazlitt, William. 1905. Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles. New York.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. and Scott, Joan Wallach. 1980. “Political Shoemakers.” Past and Present 89: 86–114.Google Scholar
Holinshed, Raphael. 1965, reprint. The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. 6 vols. New York.Google Scholar
The Holy Byble. 1578. London.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Lisa. 1997. “Neighborhood in Henry Vf In Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, and Culture, eds. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 9-26. New York.Google Scholar
Hutton, Ronald. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700. Oxford.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. 1927. Works of Ben Jonson. Eds. C. H. Herford and Percy Simson. 11 vols. Oxford.Google Scholar
Lamentable Tragedy ofhocrine: A Critical Edition. 1981. (Garland English Texts, no. 7), ed. Jane Lytton Gooch. New York and London.Google Scholar
Liebler, Naomi Conn. 1995. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The ritual foundations of genre. London and New York.Google Scholar
Liebler, Naomi Conn. 1981. “Thou Bleeding Piece of Earth': The Ritual Ground of Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Studies 14: 175–96.Google Scholar
Maley, Willy. 1997. “'This sceptred isle': Shakespeare and the British problem.” In Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin, 83-108. Manchester.Google Scholar
Mander, C. H. Waterland. 1931. A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Guild of Cordwainers for the City of London. London.Google Scholar
Marx, Steven. 1995. “Holy war in Henry V” Shakespeare Studies 48: 85–99.Google Scholar
McClelland, David. 1961. The Achieving Society. Princeton.Google Scholar
Moisan, Thomas. 1991. “'Knock me here soundly: Comic Misprision and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42: 276–90.Google Scholar
Neill, Michael. 1994. “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45: 1–32.Google Scholar
The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, 1997. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York.Google Scholar
Parr, Anthony. 1990. Introduction to The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker. New York.Google Scholar
Pleasant Conceyted Comedie of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. 1599. London.Google Scholar
Rackin, Phyllis. 1990. Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles. Ithaca.Google Scholar
Reau, Louis. 1958. Iconographie de L'Art Chretien. Paris.Google Scholar
Rowley, William. 1638. A Merrie and Pleasant Comedy: Never before Printed, called A Shoo-maker a Gentleman. London.Google Scholar
Saint Crispins triumph over Pope Innocent: or the Monks and Friars Routed. 1678. London.Google Scholar
Stallybrass, Peter. 1997. “Footnotes.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 313-25. New York.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. 1966. “Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700.” Past and Presently. 16-55.Google Scholar
Stow, John. 1908. A Survey of London. Ed. Charles L. Kingsford. Oxford.Google Scholar
Strong, Roy. 1958. “The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21: 86–103.Google Scholar
Swanson, Heather. 1990. “Artisans in the Urban Economy: the documentary evidence from York.” In Work in Towns, 850-1850, eds. Penelope J. Cornfield and Derek Keene, 42-56. Leicester.Google Scholar
Tennenhouse, Leonard. 1986. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres. New York.Google Scholar
Thurston, Herbert and Donald Attwater, eds. 1963. Butler's Lives of the Saints. 4 vols. New York.Google Scholar
Timms, L. D. 1985. “'Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday and Elizabeth's Accession Day.” Notes and Queries n.s. 32 : 58.Google Scholar
Ward, Nathaniel. 1969. The Simple Cobler ofAggawam in America. Ed. P. M. Zall. Lincoln, NE.Google Scholar
Wasson, John. 1986. “The Secular Saint Plays of the Elizabethan Era.” In The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Clifford Davidson, 248-61. Kalamazoo.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard. 1987. “'Is this a Holiday?': Shakespeare's Roman Carnival.” English Literary History 54: 31–44.Google Scholar