ONE has a " tenderness " for the gentle Dekker,
as Macaulay might have put it. Gentle and also childlike, he had evidently an extraordinary sympathy with the common people of the London he knew—the London of Stowe's Syrvay. And this compassion seems to have been born of participation in their labours and sufferings and merriment.
In The Shoemaker's Holiday, jovially played and uproar- iously received this past fortnight at the Old Vic, the suffering is reserved for the simple journeyman, Ralph—played, with a true sense of the quiet pathos in the part, by Mr. Neil Porter. This patient, helpless creature of the shoemaking craft, who is pressed for a no doubt idiotic war in France ; who is maimed and returns as a cripple to find that his young wife has dis- appeared—how he lives for us to-day, in little, like one of the lightly touched " characters " in the Microcosmography of Earle, or in one of Dekker's London pamphlets ! Would that the Elizabethan dramatists had given us more of these sketches, instead of following, as Dekker too often did, the mediaeval or Marlovian vein which delighted (childlike again) in fan- tastic fairy-tales like Old Fortunalus : in pseudo-moralizings like those that abound in The Honest Whore ; or in tedious ribaldries, intended perhaps to make the cant go down more easily, or to support Dekker's doctrine that Hell comes before Heaven, and that, " if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last." " The DeVil is in it," indeed, when the good fellow gets on to that line, and we like The Shoe- Maker's Holiday so well, just because the Devil stays at home—leaving only the fairy-tale element in the foolish upper plot to bore us. Plot is here so unimportant, however, that it leaves the stage nearly free for the shoemakers.
Theirs was a Merrie England, if you like ! True, they rise at dawn. But little work, as we see it, gets done in the shop of their master, Simon Eyre. It is mainly ale-drinking, and going on lightning-strike at a moment's dissatisfaction with the trade-union policy of the shoemaker, and a jolly squab- bling between him and his wife. And if merriment seems to be a little tediously prolonged, if it makes us want to remind the shoemakers that " one cannot live by keeping holiday," that is perhaps our fault or misfortune. We live in an age too much depressed to believe in Dekker's gospel (which was also William Morris's) of light-heartedness in labour.
The merriment of Mr. Baliol Holloway's Simon Eyre was incessant. Nothing disturbed him—certainly not the failure to get poor Ralph out of the army. Indeed the iteration of Ho, Ho, Ho, in Mr. Holloway's deep-chested tones might conceivably have got on the nerves of those who lived with him. But journeymen and apprentices had no nerves in 1599. Falstafilan in appearance, Mr. Holloway made Simon seem a bit of a fraud ; but a fraud who succeeded wondrous well in life. As his wife, with her " let that pass," Miss Evans was hardly robust enough. The part would gain in humour by being played with lesS of a refinement that is at times almost plaintive with her. Apart from these stand the very winning and happy Rowland Lacy of Mr. Frank Vosper, the gentle Jane (Ralph's wife) of Miss Nell Carter, Miss Cicely Oates's coarse brained maid, and the Firk of Mr. Horace Sequeira, who, in this part of a typically rebellious and opin- ionated cockney, wag loudly 'taken to the great heart of the Old Vic audience. There was something very refreshing in the cheers that sainted his rogueries. One heard this huge worried Modern London of 1926 rejoicing over its counterpart of 1699. Well, much has happened since then to perplex us !
Yet one thinks that the admirably cheerful Dekker, with " ill the weather that bringeth no gain " for his motto ; with " cast away care " ; with the " let's be merry while we are young " of his own Simon, would have survived, by force of native disposition, even our troublei ; especially as he might have made much' of that money he called " trash," in these days: From pamphleteer he would have proceeded journalist, and a certain operatic tendency in his grouping of merry crowds
and his clinking of jolly- choruses. suggests-that he might have- done well at revue. But there he is, as we salute him at the-
Old Vic, far back in the sixteenth century ; lovable, cheerful, poor ; but with " golden slumbers." R. J.
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