Whose Saint Crispins' day is it?: Shoemaking, holiday making, and the politics of memory in early modern England

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2001 by Alison A. Chapman

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.

Early modern literary texts that feature shoemakers depict them in strikingly consistent fashion. Quick to carouse and quick to disrupt social hierarchies, shoemakers are also, paradoxically, associated with spiritual assisrance and edification; in the language of a popular early modern pun, these "sole menders" often become "soul menders." Most surprising, however, is the frequent literary association between shoemakers and holidays. Typically, texts that feature these sole/soul menders also raise questions of festal observance, most often by showing the shoemakers creating, or attempting to create, new holy days. These literary shoemakers repeatedly cobble together new templates for experiencing time in which annual remembrance is marked by artisanal holidays. The recurrence of such depictions of shoemakers suggests that the trade had become symbolically associated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with questions of calendrical and ritual order, and this stereotype is all the more remarkable given the shoemaker's symbolic place at the foot of the body politic. Literary representations of the lowly shoemaker making new holidays would have likely reminded readers and theater audiences of the very unfixedness of contemporary calendrical practice, a mutability persisting despite various attempts to "fix" an official calendar of annual remembrance. (1) For instance, the calendar prefixed to the 1578 Holy Byble (Bishops) omits most of the traditional Catholic holidays, and as if to preclude the reintroduction of the excised feast days, it lists the allowed saints under the heading "These to be observed for holie dayes, and none other" (fol. ***3r). Similarly, the Book of Common Prayer details the penalties for deviating from "the order and form" of worship laid out in the text, an "order" exemplified in the text's introductory liturgical calendar. (2) The literary shoemaker's proclivity for making holidays, however, would have unsettled any conception of annual calendrical observance as a stable entity estab lished "from above" by England's political and religious authorities. Indeed, the stereotype of the shoemaker as a calendar maker highlights the tension between elite control over the pattern of ritual memory versus a popular impulse to reframe annual commemorations. The calendar transforms specific historical events -- such as the birth of Christ or the accession of Queen Elizabeth -- into ritual observance, and the one who controls the calendar powerfully regulates what will be remembered and when. By depicting shoemakers who change the calendar and create new holidays, early modern texts raise pressing questions about who should be the custodians of England's historical and liturgical memory.

As this article demonstrates, early modern texts variously represent the shoemakers' holiday-making energies. While Deloney's Gentle Craft, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday and Rowley's A Shoemaker, A Gentleman all implicitly celebrate the shoemaker's right to remake festal observance in his own interests, the opening scene of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar denies the cobbler his new holiday, sending him and his followers offstage "tonguetied." Henry V offers the most complex treatment of shoemakers-as-calendar-makers. The play's climactic pre-battle speech centers on Saint Crispin -- the patron saint of shoemakers -- and on the importance of his holiday. Yet instead of the customary image of shoemakers creating their own holiday, Shakespeare presents a king who creates one for them. Although Henry does not create Saint Crispin's Day in the sense of inventing it, his speech imaginatively recreates it: instead of commemorating the patron saint of shoemakers, Saint Crispin's Day will primarily celebrate Henry and his arm's triumph over the French. The Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows the shoemakers' holiday-making prerogatives being displaced onto the royal person of Henry himself, and thus the play depicts the nation's king -- not its shoemakers -- as the lawful shaper of England's liturgical and commemorative practice.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions of shoemakers repeatedly associate them with a general disruption of the social order. The title page of Thomas Deloney's 1597 tribute to shoemakers, The Gentle Craft, promises to show the reader "what famous men have been Shoomakers in time past in this Land, with their worthy deeds and great Hospitality," and the stories that follow celebrate the virtues and remarkable achievements of various English shoemakers. Most of Deloney's tales feature cobblers who earn fame and fortune, thus rising above the rank of mere artisan. (3) One such story tells of a shoemaker, Tom Drum, and a gentleman, Harry, who actually exchange social positions, each assuming the guise and garb of the other. Penniless and cast out of his family, Harry lies beside the road bemoaning his lack of money and occupation when he is befriended by the passing Tom. Moved by Tom's account of the legendary hospitality and good fellowship of shoemakers, Harry cries, "I would spend part of my gentle blo ud, to be of the gentle Craft: and for thy curtesie, if thou wouldst teach it mee, I would annoint thee a gentleman forever." In return for the gift of cobbling tools, Harry smears Tom's forehead with his blood, assuring him "this blood did spring from a Gentleman" (223). Each dressed in the other's clothes, the two men walk to the nearest tavern where Harry shows off his new tools, and Tom boasts, "this face can shew, that I have gentle blood about me (224). Swapped in fair trade, the gentleman's blood and the cobbler's tools are figured as currencies of equal value, and in most of the tales in The Gentle Craft, the trade of shoemaking becomes symbolic of an inverted social hierarchy. Stories of shoemakers becoming gentlemen are, in fact, common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century popular literature. Deloney borrows the title of his work from the common nickname for shoemakers, "the gentle craft." By punning on gentle as an epithet meaning "well born" and indicating those "with the rank or status of a gent leman," (4) this label confers "gentility" on mere craftsmen, and it underscores the early modern shoemaker's symbolic social mobility.