SOURCE: “The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker's Holiday,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 357-72.

In this essay, Straznicky asserts that The Shoemaker's Holiday “enacts an imaginary appropriation of civic authority and commercial wealth by a group of industrial laborers for whom both privileges were largely a matter of fantasy.”

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) is one of only three Elizabethan comedies named after specific festive occasions.¹ While most critics have duly noted the importance of the festival to the play's structural and thematic design, their accounts employ a vague and moralistic vocabulary that is strangely out of keeping with the concrete, even materialistic language of the play itself. Michael Manheim, for example, sees the Guildhall feast as a “victory for the forces of humility and good will,” and Arthur Kinney calls it “the still centre where passion and reason are themselves advanced, but...