SOURCE: Burnett, Mark Thornton. “Henry Chettle's Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship: Contexts and Consumers.” In Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, edited by Constance C. Relihan, pp. 169-86. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Burnett offers a detailed reading of Piers Plainness' Seven Years' Apprenticeship, arguing that the work has a densely allusive design, explores important topical questions about master-servant relations, and should be read in relation to an Elizabethan apprentice culture.]

For a variety of reasons, Henry Chettle's picaresque tale, Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship, first published in 1595, has invariably been denied a sustained critical treatment. Generally overlooked in accounts of Elizabethan fiction and the development of the novel, the work has attracted few admirers.¹ In a tradition that has tended to underscore the interest of dramatic texts and the vitality of the theater, Piers Plainness has fared poorly; it contains no scenes that parallel or anticipate the productions of contemporary playwrights, one possible reason for the minor status it occupies. But close attention to Chettle's prose reveals a complicated and densely allusive design, which is clearly distinguished in character and tone from its supposed literary antecedents. Moreover, Piers Plainness, in its idealization of Piers, the titular apprentice-hero, engages with contemporary constructions of master-servant relations and gestures toward the metropolitan culture of its historical moment, a dimension that lends the narrative a unique, topical, and political importance.

PRECEDENTS AND INFLUENCES

A brief consideration of the romance genre to which Piers Plainness belongs begins to show its departure from previous models and traditions. The main influence, The pleasaunt historie of Lazarillo de Tormes, a 1586 English translation of a Spanish novella, seems at times only obscurely related to Chettle's longer, multilayered fictionalized account. Whereas in Lazarillo de Tormes, the servant-hero, Lazarillo, suffers under a succession of mean and penurious masters, Piers in Chettle's work is specifically identified as an apprentice, and his period of employment (seven years) corresponds to the number of years an apprentice was obliged to serve. Few of the professions featured in Lazarillo de Tormes are described by Chettle; instead, he chooses to focus on particularly English and Elizabethan trades and presents them with a satirical edge. Eventually Lazarillo profits from his humbling experiences and becomes a corrupt official; in contrast, Piers decides to turn his back on the court and to settle upon a rustic existence as the most appropriate for his “plain” and honest nature.² To the bare outlines of the Spanish tale Chettle adds a series of interrelated adventures involving citizen and royal characters, which has as its point of reference the fluctuating fortunes of Piers himself.

At once, however, it might appear that Chettle has merely devised another collection of romantic entanglements with little connection to Elizabethan peculiarities or preoccupations. First presented as a shepherd of Thessaly, Piers reflects upon his past life and tells his master, Menalcas, of his previous employers, a jester, a gallant, a broker, a usurer, a customs officer, a usurping prince, and a fisherman. As his own adventures unfold, Piers's experiences are matched by those of the royal figures such as the king of Thrace (who is usurped by his son, Celinus) and Aemilius (the king's second son), who passes his exile rescuing and later falling in love with Aeliana, the queen of Crete. Yet it would be a mistake to claim that these developments are decorative or extraneous. Many of the concerns broached by Chettle have a contemporary resonance. In particular, the realization of Aeliana—she is described as “the vertuous and famous virgin”—is bound up with the cultural presence of Elizabeth I, and her similarity to “Diana” refers back to the sovereign's cult and the various chaste goddesses with which she was associated.³ Nor might it be too fanciful to recognize in the scene in which Aeliana is assaulted by her uncle, disguised as a wild man, a reminder of the mythological and fantastic creatures that greeted Elizabeth during pageants and national progresses. In addition, the reiteration of the idea that Thrace is threatened with “forren invasion” (126) must have struck a chord in the minds of Elizabethan readers whose recent experience was colored by the Armada and the routing of Spanish forces.

Piers Plainness can therefore stand as a romance with picaresque elements, which revises earlier ideas and fuses them with reflections upon sixteenth-century iconographic practices and pastoral themes. This is not the only point of contact between the text and its culture. It is equally marked by its more popular aspects, notably the rehearsal of precise questions touching upon master and apprentice relations. I do not contend that Piers Plainness was exclusively written for an apprentice audience, but I am struck by the correspondences between Chettle's account and the political activities of apprentices in the 1590s (such as rebellions against traditional and new objects of opprobrium), and it is certainly possible to locate in the work further negotiations with the problems and difficulties that affected contemporary youth, many of whom would have been in service. In its elaboration of dovetailed adventures, the narrative combines a range of conventions, reworking euphuistic situations in an appeal to specific social groupings. Piers Plainness can most helpfully be read in relation to what might be termed an Elizabethan apprentice culture, a phenomenon that the ensuing pages describe and contexualize.

APPRENTICESHIP, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY

Every year young men flocked to London to be apprenticed to one of the livery companies and to learn a trade.⁴ Normally working a term of up to seven years, apprentices agreed in their indentures to serve faithfully, to avoid fornication, to remain unmarried, and to respect their masters' secrets: apprenticeship thus represented one contemporary means whereby authority could be inculcated and gerontological niceties scrupulously observed. By the same token, the master was bound to instruct his apprentice in the mysteries of the particular trade (to which an educative and religious aspect was attached) and to be responsible for his accommodation and maintenance. There were some opportunities to appeal if training was insufficient, but generally apprentices occupied a marginal and sometimes anomalous position in the city company hierarchies: young men in their late teens to early twenties, they were dependents without fixed wages and were treated as children within their employers' households. The end result, it was hoped, was the promotion of the apprentice to the rank of journeyman; this would eventually lead to the freedom of the company and the former apprentice's assumption of the master's duties and prerogatives.

A host of related restrictions and obligations regulated the apprentice's daily training. Although in some respects beyond immediate adolescence, the apprentice was disallowed from expressing adult urges or inclinations, and the conception of the apprentice-child was circulated in pamphlets and treatises as well as in the minutes of urban corporations. Reformist preachers and puritan divines joined to agree that although servants performed important functions, they were also likely to prove irreverent, impressionable, quickly swayed from the path of morality, and easily persuaded to vice.⁵ In arguments adapted from scriptural traditions, senior guild members and moralistic writers maintained that servants and apprentices belonged to a kind of subspecies, tied to rigid economic practicalities and religious necessities and essentially disempowered until they left employment.

No doubt related to these stringent regulations were the numerous pursuits in which apprentices indulged during their rare periods of relaxation and leisure. A key feature of many of the forms of entertainment in Elizabethan London was the part played by the apprentices. Inevitably apprentices would protest when clerics or foreigners passed through the streets, and a pronounced sense of a discrete fraternity with its own codes and objectives distinguished apprentice agitations on these occasions.⁶ When in 1582 the lord mayor sent a precept to the companies ordering them to prevent apprentices from attending plays and interludes, he was responding to a long history of apprentice involvement in the playhouses.⁷ The injunction did not, however, put an end to the pastime. During the troubled years of the 1590s, when they were noted for their political activism, apprentices congregated outside the theaters to plan their campaigns, and authorities blamed stage plays for their insurgences.⁸ The discontent did not cease with the end of the decade, for in 1613 a group of apprentices arranged a performance of The Hog hath lost his Pearl, a satire lampooning the mayor, and in 1622, John Gill, a feltmaker's apprentice, sitting on the stage watching a drama at the Red Bull, was accidentally stabbed by one of the actors; he reacted by encouraging fellow apprentices in the theater to riot.⁹ Of the audiences that patronized the popular amphitheaters, apprentices made up a considerable proportion and exercised a powerful influence.

If the theaters operated as a release for apprentices' preoccupations, Shrove Tuesday functioned as a holiday during which their rampages were briefly tolerated. Traditionally on this occasion apprentices gathered to attack the bawdy houses, possibly because some of them demanded prohibitively high entrance prices. On one particularly unruly Shrove Tuesday celebration in 1617, the apprentices joined to destroy part of the Cockpit; because this was a private theater that appealed to more exclusive spectators, its performances, beyond the reach of most apprentices, must have stimulated a frustrated interest.¹⁰ Whether such disorders erupted spontaneously or were granted official license, the presence of apprentices was keenly felt and their actions could pose a serious threat to the city's economy and institutions.

Such incidents gained some of their subversive power because authentic and fantastic apprentice activities were commemorated in print. Indeed, the reading and writing skills expected of apprentices were almost certainly shaping factors in the production of a variety of texts—plays, ballads, and pamphlets—that identified apprentices as their primary consumers. Young men entering the goldsmiths' company were assumed to be able to read and write, and the ironmongers insisted upon would-be apprentices writing out a long oath in which they accepted company regulations: in the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign, 98 percent of 529 apprentices contracted were able to complete the requirement.¹¹ Furthermore, apprentices themselves were addressed in a range of popular publications, such as “The Honour of a London Prentice” (before 1598), a nationalistic ballad about an apprentice and his heroic exploits, and “Sir Richard Whittington's Advancement,” a 1612 account of the legendary apprentice's marriage with his master's daughter and rise to the mayoralty.¹² John Davies was probably expressing a typical sentiment when he remarked in 1625: “To reckon vp the verie Titles, which / Doe please new Prentices … would require a Masse / And Volume, bigger than would load an Asse.”¹³ Obviously the political activism of apprentices was one of the means whereby they communicated their grievances, but as readers and consumers of texts they enjoyed less immediate forms of release and the indulgence of their most extravagant aspirations.

Initially there would appear to be a clear-cut relationship between Piers Plainness and these literary and cultural traditions. In the course of the narrative Piers is situated as a loyal and abstemious servant who resists easy temptations; his behavior counters expectations about the waywardness of the dependent lower orders. It is not immediately evident, therefore, that Chettle writes only for the benefit of an apprentice audience because he concentrates on Piers's vicissitudes even as he endorses official views about service: the conservative tendency that the prose exhibits is one index of the competing ideologies it examines. At the same time, however, in the realization of Piers's honesty, of his sexuality, of his consciousness of his status, of his appetite, and of his part in political intrigue, contrasting imperatives can be noticed. Although Piers's dutifulness is stressed, this does not detract from the excitement or adventure that he experiences. Piers Plainness is finally a double-edged creation, both accommodating institutionalized forms of authority and catering to the particular ambitions of an apprentice population.

IDEALS OF SERVICE

When Piers is first presented, his origins are described in detail, and doubts are raised about the extent of his professed loyal intentions. This sets the scene for the rest of the work: Piers will overcome the handicap of his descent to move, albeit briefly, in elevated social circles. Menalcas, his master, tells Corydon:

we entertaind a new servant, plaine in condition for any thing I can gesse, of body strong, of wit prompt, of speech not altogether rude … his bringing up I know not, thence arises my doubt, seeing last weeke Damon, last yeare Lycostes (both my neighbors, and thy familiars) had by entertaignement of straglers strange misfortunes.

(123)

The passage illustrates how Piers Plainness operates in two directions at the same moment. It might be construed as a lesson in the dangers of enlisting servants from the vagabond classes, the roving and dispossessed groups that included many runaway apprentices as members. According to A. L. Beier, in the period from 1597 to 1608, dependent workers made up 56 percent of those taken into the Bridewell workhouse.¹⁴ Yet the introduction works, too, as an echo of the Dick Whittington story, available at least since the fifteenth century; like Piers, Dick was from an impoverished and obscure background and achieved success through his industry and intelligence. Despite the shortcomings of his birth, Chettle implies, Piers will not be prevented from winning for himself honors and a measure of independence.

It is striking that Piers actually sings before he speaks, at least at the start of the work. Before he takes over the business of the narration, Piers is overheard by his master addressing his herd in a lyrical vein:

Feede on my flocke securely,
Your shepheard watcheth surely;
Runne about my little Lambs,
Skipp and wanton with your Dams:
Your loving Heard with care will tend yee.
Sport on faire flocke at pleasure,
Nip Vestaes flouring treasure;
I my selfe will duely harke,
When my watchfull Dogg doth barke:
From Wolfe and Foxe wee will defend yee.

(124)

Of interest here is the way Piers celebrates his craft in rhyme, as if a space is being created for the apprentice to express a sense of the indispensability of his services. Certainly the song stresses the idea of Piers' faithful diligence, and this constitutes a motif that recurs at salient points; when he is employed by Ulpian, the usurer, he is anxious to make known that he has not been corrupted: “I trust ye thinke not Piers Plainnes so ill a husband to be idle” (157), he states. But his dedication to work, in addition to reflecting the charged importance he accords to his cultural place, is an indication of the power he wields. Within the institution of apprenticeship Piers takes on a protective role (he is his herd's defender) and demonstrates qualities of rule, preparing himself for the responsibilities he might later assume.

Although initially empowered by the duties he performs, Piers is still circumscribed by his position and is simultaneously constructed as the ideal servant recommended in moral and religious treatises, particularly puritan household manuals. For instance, he resists an association with deceitful servants and vigorously rejects the implication that he might prove unfaithful: “I gesse them to be hypocrites, which they knowe true, you doubt 15 The dangers of flattering and dissimulating servants are quickly spelled out in Piers Plainness; we hear of “the treacherous complot of a Persian Hand-maid” (125) who poisons the queen of Thrace, and Thrasilio, the retainer and jester, is said to be “so serviceable, as no slave could be more submisse … he was as all flatterers are, the very tennis ball of them he soothed, to tosse and bandie with at pleasure” (126, 132). The cumulative result of these implied comparisons is to show Piers to advantage. The humble swain has powers of greater constancy than his social superiors; he conspicuously manifests in his dealings the values that they fail to exhibit. This association does more than dismiss fears about Piers's waywardness, however; it also suggests that the arrangement of social roles is inherently unstable and points to the threat of dislocation and upset. Piers may act according to the domestic instructions elaborated by the preachers, but he does so in such a way as to highlight inequities and to prompt questions about the distribution of power and privilege.

A contradictory idea is emphasized in Piers Plainness: on the one hand, Piers is discreet and subservient; on the other, the pride he takes in his institutional attachment hints at the possibility of advancement and implies that the system of social relations is subject to change. He is granted a position of authority in that his conduct and commentary prompt the reader to identify injustice, and he plays a similarly essential part when the main action is initiated and he takes over the business of running the narrative. Part of Piers's function is to allegorize or situate the characters with whom he comes into contact, and this extends to noting their sexual transgressions as well as their political machinations. In addition to cultivating honesty and diligence, apprentices in sixteenth-century London were expected to remain sexually abstemious during the period of their education. Invariably, however, the practice belied the ideal, and erring apprentices were frequently presented before the courts of their companies for impregnating maidservants, for attempting to seek out the company of “lewd women” or for allowing prostitutes into their masters' houses.¹⁶ Piers, in contrast, is drawn in opposition to an apprentice type who is unable to control his sexual urges. His passivity and sobriety qualify him to resist and criticize possible enticements, as when he scorns the “loose … behaviour” of Ursula, the usurer's daughter: “For her part, shee was a right Anabaptist, all things were Piers Plainness, it seems, is responding to two expectations at one and the same time, presenting a servant who, in his imperviousness to women, fits the model described by the conduct book writers, and indulging rape-related fantasies, elements that may have found favor with a frustrated apprentice readership.

That distinctive slipperiness of approach is also detectable in the broader strategies enlisted to organize the narrative. The doubleness of vision is repeatedly demonstrated in the ways in which Piers's situation is aligned with that of the other characters, a procedure that produces a plurality of conflicting meanings. Several characters repeat the trajectory of Piers's own career: the enforced exile of the Thracian royal family invites comparison with the apprentice's unstable fortunes, and his origins are hinted at when Aemilius rescues Aeliana from the lascivious attentions of her uncle, only to cause her to worry about his “parentage unknown” (149). Menalcas's seven-year marriage recalls the period of Piers's employment: he is a version of what the apprentice may, in time, become. Once again the immediate function of such correspondences is to increase Piers's status in the narrative, but the juxtapositions can also generate a sense of muddle and placelessness. Piers is given an extended satire on the “mysterie” of brokery, and the vocabulary used is clearly borrowed from the rhetoric of city corporations. Brokers, Piers maintains, “cover their craft with charitie, pietie, pitie, neighborhood, frendship, equitie, and what not that good is … men of that trade … would have severed themselves into sundrie companies” (144-45). The indictment both parodies the structure of a guild and plays upon the philanthropic aspirations of contemporary merchants; its implied point, however, is that Piers is ill at ease among his livery company associates.¹⁷ Trade is a potential taint that prohibits fraternization with a royal circle, yet Piers is no more settled among his peers. It is as if his ideal behavior puts him at one remove from his immediate environment; he is neither of the corrupt city nor of the court, although both shape his attitudes and the course of his progress.

Cut off from the parental home, compelled to eschew personal relations beyond the household, and denied adult autonomy, apprentices did occupy ambiguous categories and were not fully settled until they became masters themselves. Particularly for those apprentices from privileged backgrounds, service in trade was assumed to be demeaning, and more than one conduct book writer felt obliged to clarify that an attachment to a livery company did not diminish an individual's gentle status.¹⁸ Many apprentices were acutely sensitive about their position, refusing to perform domestic tasks which they held to be beneath them and assembling to assault the pages and lackeys of gentlemen, as in 1576 and 1581, or to attack the Inns of Court and Lincoln's Inn, as in 1584 and 1590.¹⁹ As younger sons from gentle families undertook apprenticeships to learn a trade, this may have exacerbated already pronounced tensions between social groups in the later sixteenth-century metropolis. The prevailing climate of opinion was summed up by Sydnam Poyntz, in whose autobiography the 1636 entry runs: “To bee bound an Apprentice that life I deemed little better then a dogs life and base.”²⁰ Although Piers Plainness does not address these preoccupations explicitly, it does betray a fascination with identity, rank, and name, and particularly with the way they bear on Piers's own relations, suggesting that one of Chettle's imperatives is to interrogate the mechanisms whereby social positions and responsibilities are determined. Menalcas is described as “no meane shepheard of Thessalie” (122); Aemilius is impressed that Aeliana, whom he has just rescued, appears “no meane personage” (138), and Celinus the usurper affirms that he is a “Gentleman” (166), despite having just deceived the corrupt customs officer and pitched him into a river. Piers never experiences sustained contact with the royal characters, but he is lent a veneer of gentility, the effect of his occasional participation in the affairs of the court, and he is distinguished from a figure such as Celinus, whose dishonorable behavior demonstrates only a prostitution of a gentleman's prerogatives. Piers Plainness does not go so far as to conjure up the ghosts of servant brawls in which contemporary rivalries and resentments were expressed; it does, however, reverberate with questions about the acquisition of status, an area of concern that stimulated apprentices' most urgent anxieties.

THE POLITICS OF WANT

A range of views about apprenticeship is aired in Piers Plainness, although no single view is allowed to dominate. The narrative is organized to produce two contrasting versions of Piers's career: he is ennobled by his passing associations even as he is placed as a servant; he is granted an illusion of power and promised future success, only to find that society is not as flexible as it appears and that there can be more than one mode of advancement. Eventually the authority that he enjoys as a commentator is not matched by a smooth progress up the ladder of social achievement. And though conceptions of service are constantly negotiated, Chettle does not precisely identify his apprentice consumers or confine himself to a dialogue only with apprentice interests. Some of the situations represented, however, particularly those involving famine and rebellion, reveal Piers Plainness clearly invoking the contemporary activities of apprentices, and these aspects of the narrative carry powerful political implications.

In Piers Plainness food and consumption are highlighted as central issues. Time after time the action returns to questions about the supply of food and its distribution, and in ways that introduce taxing social criticisms. Even at the start the benefits of a full harvest are cataloged:

The Sunne had no sooner entred Gemini, but Natures plentie and Earths pride, gave the husbandman hope of gainefull Harvest, and the shepheard assurance of happie increase; the first cherished with the lively Spring of his deade sowne seede: The seconde cheared by the living presence of his late yeande Lambes.

(122)

The passage initiates a series of reflections upon fullness and largesse; with the new year, it is suggested, the land will yield spectacular abundance. These reflections give place to additional celebrations of rustic delights, such as “Phoebes plenty” (123), and when he attempts to determine the cause of Menalcas's gloomy looks, Coridon quickly rejects an obvious explanation: “Want which greeves you I knowe it is not” (123). Elaborated in the opening stages, therefore, are speculations about the relationship between food and behavior, and the insights gained are developed in the rest of the work. The corrupt practices of Petrusio, the customs officer, are crystallized in his illicit “transporting of vittels [and] … corne” (164), but shortages affect Celinus in a contrary manner; his conversion begins when he is shipwrecked on the Cretan shore and “pined welnere with famine” (171). For much of Piers Plainness, plenty and want, its opposite, act as sensitive registers of characters' conditions and guide the actions they consequently pursue.

In 1595, when Piers Plainness was published, descriptions of bountiful pastoral landscapes must have been tinged with a degree of ironic appositeness. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was constantly under the threat of harvest failures and crises of subsistence, and the 1590s were no exception. A run of poor harvests from 1594 to 1597 precipitated severe shortages in rural areas and some urban centers (the price of flour doubled, and food prices were increased by 46 percent), at times resulting (in some northern districts) in outbreaks of actual famine.²¹ In London the situation was so extreme that, in two separate incidents in June 1595, apprentices grouped to steal butter and fish from Billingsgate market and to sell them at reduced rates. A similar incident took place in October 1595, when apprentices in Cheapside made away with a cartload of starch, the property of the queen's patentee of an unpopular monopoly.²² Once again apprentices acted in concert to declare their solidarity and, on these particular occasions, to correct what were perceived to be magisterial injustices.

Glimpsed in Piers Plainness is a critical engagement with the problem of food and the social order, both in the pastoral fantasies that are the narrative's hallmark and in the attention devoted to diet: Piers's repeated complaint is that he does not have enough to eat. Describing Thrasilio's household, Piers comments: “In his diet he was very sparing, because he had small store of spare money to buy meate: and had not the scullerie at Court been my best ambrie, I must either have left my master, or lost my life” (128). On several occasions Piers waits vainly for his “supper,” and he is no less fortunate when he changes masters: Flavius is “spare in houskeeping” (140), and Ulpian is similarly frugal: “To describe our diet,” Piers states, “were inough to fill all the Countrie with a dearth: with remembraunce thereof, Famine it self hath seazed on me, and except I here feed I can proceed no farther” (158). Whether it is the lack of food or its availability, the narrative is primarily directed toward revealing the connections between diet and dependent relations. Piers's deprivation is not permitted to transform itself into open resentment; nevertheless, his hunger becomes an index of the failure of employers' responsibilities and acts as a focus for some of the anxieties that affected the servant classes in a period of unprecedented economic predicament.

FORMS OF REBELLION

Thus far I have suggested that Piers Plainness, although it allows the apprentice a brief authority and critical statements, generally reinforces a conservative view of service and espouses official ideals. The insistence with which Piers's honesty and his refusal to be corrupted is described is one example of this ideological tendency. In the same moment, however, the narrative broaches the political ramifications of servant disobedience, representing a host of related incidents that undermine establishment positions. The local transgressions of treacherous servants who attempt to shape the course of events are reproduced on a larger scale in acts of rebellion and in challenges to the security of the state.

One manifestation of this preoccupation is in the conspiracies that punctuate the action and culminate in the overturning of government. From Celydon's plot to claim the Thracian kingdom for himself the displacements of Piers Plainness are generated. Quickly identified in the narrative as the perpetrator of “vile treason” (129), Celydon launches his scheme: “Celinus (having gathered together a multitude of desperate unthrifts) seased violently on the ancient Nobles, slew some, forced others to flie: and possessing himselfe of the Regall ornaments, proclaimed himselfe King, and Celydon Protector of the Realme” (130). Striking in the sequence of events leading to the rebellion is Piers's own role in the proceedings. He dresses “like a tall squire” (131) to be a soldier in his master's private army, which is put to the service of the rebel cause, but he does not fight enthusiastically; indeed, Piers reserves most of his energy for an attack on the dangerous effects of civil strife:

for there everie cobler was a captaine, and he that had but a bat on his necke, thought himselfe a commander. O had you seene the miserie in those few houres of Insurrection, with what violence the giddie headed people were carried to ill, how easely disswaded from their alleagance, how willingly misled, no man scarcely knowing which part to take, the multitude were divided into so manie parts: you might have thought such happie, which had perished by one mans sword, and not lived the torment of so manie slaughterers: for in that broyle there perished sixe thousand persons, sonne, father and kindred, each by other murdred, and mangled with manie wounds.

(131-32)

The disorders are essentially discovered as a set of social and familial dislocations: the common people are abused with illusions of grandeur; family units destroy themselves in the confusions that rebellion produces. Behind the condemnation lies a lament for the abandonment of the hierarchical organization to which Piers attaches such importance. Civil unrest, Piers Plainness suggests, blurs boundaries and disintegrates divisions, and respect for institutional distinctions is a principle that Piers particularly honors. In his system of values there is no place for revolutionary insurgences, to such an extent that, when in Crete toward the end, he plays a small part in quelling a further political intrigue.

Piers Plainness intersects with its culture in ways that are contradictory and unpredictable. It rehearses specific Elizabethan anxieties but refuses to settle on any one position from which they might be interpreted. But the figuration of social disturbances in the narrative takes on an additional level of interest when we bear in mind that the late 1580s and the 1590s were chiefly remembered for apprentice disorders. Foreign workers in the capital were one focus of hostility (they were accused of increasing unemployment and causing a rise in prices), and apprentices in 1586 and 1593 communicated their grievances in a planned uprising and a series of libels.²³ The main object of apprentice discontent at this time, however, was probably the lord mayor, Sir John Spenser. On 6 June 1595, a silk weaver who faced punishment for having criticized him was rescued by a crowd of apprentices, and further rescue efforts by apprentices ensued later in the month when some servants who had fallen foul of the magistrates were being taken to the Counter. On 27 June, in revenge for the way their fellows had been treated after the butter and fish dispute, apprentices pulled down the Cheapside and Leadenhall pillories and set up gallows against the mayor's door, and on 29 June, they met outside the Tower in order, in their own words, to rob the wealthy inhabitants and to take the sword of authority from the governors. When the ringleaders were apprehended and arrested, they were executed on 24 July for their treasonable offenses.²⁴ It was, then, an extreme period of critical sensitivity, and Chettle does not make the mistake of drawing self-evident parallels between his fiction and apprentice agitation. Instead, he deflects the charge of treason away from apprentices, plays down the restlessness of the servant classes, and eventually presents Piers dispelling unrest and not expressing it. Piers Plainness still recalls a conviction shared by apprentices that they fought for just causes, but its treatment of what has been termed the “crisis of the 1590s” is antithetical toward violence as a political tool and makes the point that all forms of revolt carry in their wake potentially disastrous consequences.

In these sequences of events Piers's modesty is singled out as one of his most exemplary qualities. The apprentice disfavors rebellion because it upsets the system of deference and degree which he so highly prizes. And a regard for strictly gradated social arrangements is represented as a positive force, which rectifies inequalities and brings unruly elements to justice. When a “Ruffler” associate is arrested, Piers's master, the broker, attempts to persuade him to dress as a gentleman so as to secure the prisoner's bail. But Piers resents the deception: “he [was] very earnest to put me in a sute of satten, compasse my necke with a chaine of golde, and give me a name I never knewe, being indeed the name of a worshipfull Gentleman … I desirde them to uncase me again, protesting I was utterly out of league with the pillorie” (145-46). Proud servants were stock types in conduct books, and the master was frequently warned not to dress his dependents beyond their station for fear of provoking related forms of license, such as visits to dancing schools and alehouses.²⁵ The problem of the servant who dressed above himself was most usually linked to apprentices, and sumptuary legislation enumerated in considerable detail what was and was not permissible. In 1582 haberdashers' apprentices were allowed to wear on their heads only woolen caps “without any silk in or about the same,” and in 1611 James I sent a precept to the company of grocers objecting to the extravagant hats, collars, doublets, and stockings worn by apprentices: he highlighted the “abuse growing by excesse and straunge fashions of apparell, used by many apprentises, and by [their] inordynate pryde.”²⁶ In contrast, Piers's refusal to impersonate a gentleman not only establishes his satisfaction with his place but is also the prompt for a series of dramatic exposures. His decision to remain a servant throws into relief the rogues' dissimulations; his sensitivity to the niceties of class means that pretensions can be stripped away and his employer punished. Once the “Ruffler” is freed, therefore, another strategy having been devised for his release, Piers reveals the scheme:

Which injurie comming to my eare, I plainly uttered, discovered the shifters, the innocent were releast, the perjurde Broker and his forsworne companions promoted to the pillorie, their eares pared off, their heads crownd with paper, condemnd besides to restitution and imprisonment, their goods solde at open outcrie before all the people that openly cried out against their bad life and divelish practises.

(146)

It is only through an honest acceptance of position, Piers Plainness suggests, and not through rebellion or intrigue, that deceptions can be uncovered and wrongs corrected.

Despite the contradictions it manifests, it would therefore appear that Piers Plainness is centered upon situating servants as contented and dutiful and affirming the value of the institution in ways that run counter to instances of apprentice transgressions and abuses. The impression given by a survey of rural and urban court cases is that apprentices were rarely out of trouble, being reported for gambling, thieving, resisting or fighting with their masters, running away, or committing various unspecified “misdemeanors.”²⁷ No such instabilities color the realization of Piers, whose discretion and constancy assume, on occasions, the power of moral agency. Above all, it is his “plain” rather than “proud” features which are underscored. He loses his place with the broker because of his lack of criminal sophistication—“for I could not sweare, forsweare, lye deceive, and cog, I lost my service” (145)—and finally determines that he is also unsuited for the court: “My selfe might in either Court have served, but for my plaine condition I found them too curious: therefore hetherward I bent my course, intending to live Menalcas man if he accept it, or keepe my owne Heard, when I can get it” (174). Of the contradictions that inform Piers Plainness, this is perhaps the most arresting. By the close, Piers has advanced no further in his career. His exemplary behavior notwithstanding, he has suffered downward mobility in becoming a rustic swain, and the suggestion is that he is now forced to begin a new period of instruction. The trajectory that Piers traces is predicated on the assumption that apprenticeship can entail material advancement, but the final stages show that his progress has been a delusion and that he has merely circled back to his original starting point.

CONCLUSION

To some extent it can be argued that Piers Plainness culminates in a grand disappointment. Piers never becomes a master, fails to achieve material success, and enjoys independence only for a moment. The servant remains a servant, and, despite hints of social opportunities, hierarchies are unchanged by the narrative's close.

But the points of contact between Piers Plainness and apprentice anxieties cannot be easily discounted. Ultimately, Chettle's work is not univocal in the messages it embodies. His fiction entertains conflicting images of the apprentice, which could be appreciated by a range of potential consumers—the upper sort, tradespeople, and possibly servants themselves. Catering to competing interests meant that contradictory meanings were bound to arise, and Piers Plainness is certainly unpredictable in the effects it produces: Piers takes pride in professions that are clearly corrupt and is responsive to apprentice anxieties even as he refuses to allow them to dictate his conduct. Attitudes toward apprentices, however, were themselves contradictory, particularly from the perspective of the employing class, and the narrative takes on a subversive power in that it subjects such views to a dispassionate treatment.

Although Piers concludes his apprenticeships with a rustic retirement, the concerns he represents are still granted a prominent place. In a sense, Piers does not need to climb the social ladder because he has already passed through his education by the time the narrative begins. His voice consistently functions as a means of restoring a moral equilibrium, and it is Piers alone who judges characters and events with perspicacity. This ability privileges his role: he passes critical comment on his employers, and servant fantasies of elevation and superiority are indulged, if only partially. Essentially passive, Piers moves from one position of service to another on account of his masters' shortcomings, not his own. Errors and abuses belong with the employing class, and the apprentice, Piers Plainness suggests, is the agent of its reformation.²⁸ Chettle, who had himself served as an apprentice and worked as a printer, rewrites Lazarillo de Tormes for specific purposes. Through his fiction he creates a forum within which apprentices' frustrations and aspirations could receive covert but powerful acknowledgment.

Notes

1. One of the few assessments is Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1934) 42-48.

2. The edition I have used is The pleasaunt historie of Lazarillo de Tormes (London, 1586; S.T.C. 15336).

3. Henry Chettle, Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship, The Descent of Euphues, ed. James Winny (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957) 133, 134. All further references appear in the text. For the cult of Elizabeth, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989); Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Ark, 1985).

4. The details in this paragraph are taken from Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) 85, 100-108, 112, 114-26, 173, 210, 215-20; Steve Rappaport, “Reconsidering Apprenticeship in Sixteenth-Century London,” Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica, 1991) 239-62; Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 232-38, 295, 318, 320; Steven R. Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” Past and Present 61 (1973): 149-61.

5. For typical expressions of such sentiments, see Anthony Anderson, A sermon of sure comfort (London, 1581; S.T.C. 569) 22; Edmund Bunny, The whole summe of christian religion (London, 1576; S.T.C. 4096) 62r; Henry Holland, Spirituall Preseruatiues Against the Pestilence (London, 1593; S.T.C. 13588) A8r; Hugh Latimer, Sermons and Remains, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society (1845) 6, 79, 85, 87, 90, 119; William Whately, A bride-bush, or a wedding sermon (London, 1617; S.T.C. 25296) 17. The fullest account of these materials is Mark Thornton Burnett, “Masters and Servants in Moral and Religious Treatises, c. 1580-c. 1642,” in Arthur Marwick, ed., The Arts, Literature, and Society (London: Routledge, 1990) 48-75.

6. See Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 46, 132.

7. Rappaport, Worlds 189.

8. Carol Chillington Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984) 95, 114.

9. Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917) 300-301; E. K. Chambers, ed., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) 4:496.

10. On Shrove Tuesday, see Don Cameron Allen, ed., The Owles Almanacke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1943) 38; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia UP, 1941) 81-82; John Taylor, Jack a Lent (London, 1617?; S.T.C. 23765) B2r-B3r.

11. Sir Walter Sherburne Prideaux, Memorials of the Goldsmiths' Company, 2 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896-97) 1:26; Rappaport, Worlds 298. On apprentice literacy, see also Ben-Amos 161, 198.

12. The ballads are reprinted in Charles Mackay, ed., A Collection of Songs and Ballads Relative to the London Prentices and Trades (London: Percy Society, 1841) 4-10, 22-28. For a fuller account of these materials, see Mark Thornton Burnett, “Popular Culture in the English Renaissance,” Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996) 106-22.

13. John Davies, A scourge for paper-persecutors, or papers complaint (London, 1624; S.T.C. 6339.5) A2r.

14. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985) 24.

15. Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969) New Testament, 91v. For later opinions, see Thomas Carter, Carters christian common wealth (London, 1627; S.T.C. 4698) 244; John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A godly form of householde gouernement (London, 1598; S.T.C. 5382) 386-87; Thomas Fosset, The servants dutie (London, 1613; S.T.C. 11200) 24.

16. Ben-Amos, Adolescence 201; Thomas Girtin, The Golden Ram: A Narrative History of the Clothworkers' Company, 1528-1958 (Aylesbury: Hunt, Barnard, 1958) 16; Guildhall Library, MS. 4352/1, fo. 103v, MS. 5570/2, f. 99r; Rappaport, Worlds 209.

17. On the charitable endowments of merchants and the livery companies, see W. K. Jordan, The Charities of London, 1480-1660: Aspirations and Achievements of the Urban Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960) 47-86.

18. The office of christian parents (Cambridge, 1616; S.T.C. 5180) 147.

19. Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 3-4; Mark Thornton Burnett, “Apprentice Literature and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 35; Girtin 95-96.

20. The Relation of Sydnam Poyntz, 1624-1636, ed. A. T. S. Goodrick, 3d ser., vol. 14 (London: Camden Society, 1908) 45.

21. Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1978) 7-9, 95, 97, 113-16; R. B. Outhwaite, Dearth, Public Policy and Social Disturbance in England, 1550-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1991) 22-34; Rappaport, Worlds 14.

22. Hugh Alley's Caveat: The Markets of London in 1598, ed. Ian Archer, Caroline Barron, and Vanessa Harding (London: London Topographical Society, 1988) 25; Burnett, “Apprentice Literature” 36.

23. Archer, Pursuit of Stability 4; Burnett, “Apprentice Literature” 35, Rappaport, Worlds 8.

24. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 1-2; Burnett, “Apprentice Literature” 36.

25. Carter 235-36. See also Dudley Fenner, The artes of logike and rethorike (Middleburg, 1584; S.T.C. 10766) C3r.

26. Ian W. Archer, The History of the Haberdashers' Company (Chichester: Phillimore, 1991) 59; John Benjamin Heath, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, of the City of London (London: Privately printed, 1829) 86. See also Elizabeth Glover, A History of the Ironmongers' Company (London: Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, 1991) 47, 60.

27. Archer, Haberdashers' Company 124; Ben-Amos 129, 189; Essex Record Office, Q/SR 47/49; Goldsmiths' Company, Court Book K-L, fo. 333r; Guildhall Library, MS. 3295/1, 8 July 1607, 11 November 1618, and 3 February 1632; Somerset Record Office, Q/SR 53/238; Charles Welch, History of the Worshipful Company of Pewterers of the City of London, 2 vols. (London: Blades, East and Blades, 1902) 1:286.

28. Chettle may also be alluding to the potential for breakdown in master and apprentice relations, and cases of the mistreatment of apprentices were rarely out of the courts. See Ben-Amos 213; Guildhall Library, MS. 4329/3, fos. 188v, 189r-190r, 287v; Public Record Office, STAC 8/169/22; Somerset Record Office, Q/SR 86/82.

I would like to thank the Huntington Library, San Marino, for the award of a Fletcher Jones Fellowship, which made possible the research for this essay. I am also grateful to the Essex Record Office, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the Guildhall Library, the Public Record Office (Crown copyright), and the Somerset Record Office for kind permission to refer to manuscripts in their possession. These manuscript sources are as follows: Essex Record Office, Q/SR, Quarter sessions rolls; Goldsmiths' Company, Court Book K-L, 1566-73; Guildhall Library, MS. 3295/1, Court minutes of the Turners' Company, 1605-33; Guildhall Library, MS. 4329/3, Court minutes of the Carpenters' Company, 1600-1618; Guildhall Library, MS. 4352/1, Vestry Minute Books of Saint Margaret Lothbury, 1572-1677; Guildhall Library, MS. 5570/2, Court Ledger of the Fishmongers' Company, No. 2, 1610-31; Public Record Office, STAC, Star Chamber; Proceedings, and Somerset Record Office, Q/SR, Quarter sessions rolls.