Sources and Influences
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. Its setting in ancient Britain, and its plot device of the two British princes living humble lives in disguise and under assumed names, suggests Shakespeare's Cymbeline. The play also bears a significant inter-relationship with The Birth of Merlin, another play in the Rowley canon.
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