A Shoemaker a Gentleman  A Shoemaker a Gentleman is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by William Rowley. It may be Rowley's only extant solo comedy. Nineteenth-century scholars and critics generally classified four plays as solo Rowley works — the tragedy "All's Lost by Lust" and the comedies "A Shoemaker a Gentleman", "A Match at Midnight", and "A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed". Twentieth-century researchers have questioned Rowley's sole authorship of the latter two dramas. "A Shoemaker a Gentleman" was entered into the Stationers' Register on 28 November 1637, and first appeared in print in 1638, in a quarto printed and published by John Okes and sold by the stationer John Cooper (or Cowper). This 1638 quarto was the only edition of the play in the seventeenth century. Authorship is assigned to "W. R." on the title page. The date of the play is not known with certainty, and its early performance history is largely a blank. The title page of the 1638 quarto states that the work was "sundry times acted at the Red Bull and other theaters, with general and good applause." Okes' dedication of the play to the guild of shoemakers also mentions the play's popularity, and states that "some twenty years agone, it was in the fashion." This suggests a date c. 1618 for the play's origin, though the "twenty years" figure could be only an approximation. Commentators have suggested dates of authorship as early as c. 1608. The comic subplot of the play was extracted and performed as a "droll," and was often staged at Bartholomew Fair and Southwark Fair during the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century. The play was revived at least once during the Restoration era. Rowley drew upon several sources for the plot of his play, notably William Caxton's "The Golden Legend" and Thomas Deloney's "The Gentle Craft". (Deloney's work also inspired Thomas Dekker's famous play "The Shoemaker's Holiday".) Rowley depended on the "Chronicles" of Raphael Holinshed for his account of the early Christian martyr St. Alban ("Albon" in the play). "A Shoemaker a Gentleman" shares a range of resemblances and common features with other plays of its era. Its general ambience is strongly similar to Dekker's "Shoemaker's Holiday".