Drinks, Ballads, and the Logic of Commerce Revisiting Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday is frequently read as a festive celebration of London civic life, artisanal fellowship, and social mobility. Its drinking rituals and civic feasting have likewise been interpreted as expressions of carnivalesque community or patriotic pageantry. This essay argues that these convivial practices perform a significant economic and social function that has been largely overlooked, operating as means through which labor relations, social status, and civic recognition are negotiated within an increasingly commercial society. Through Hans’ drinking ballad, Fork’s wage-drinking rituals, and Eyre’s civic feasts, Dekker demonstrates how commercial participation enables citizens to acquire, perform, and negotiate forms of privilege traditionally associated with hereditary rank. The play’s drinking scenes thus reveal a gradual displacement of hierarchical privilege by a monetized system of exchange, in which urban citizens gain social standing through economic participation rather than inherited status, marking The Shoemaker’s Holiday as a typical City Comedy.