Thomas Deloney

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The 'Art of Clothing': Role-Playing in Deloney's Fiction

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SOURCE: "The 'Art of Clothing': Role-Playing in Deloney's Fiction," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. II, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 183–93.

[In the essay reprinted below, Jordan focuses on role-playing figures in Deloney's novels. She points out that Jack of Newbury's role-playing is constructive because it allows him to distinguish between his desires and objective reality: by contrast, the role-players in Thomas of Reading are either forced into pretense or choose it as a means of deceiving others.]

Although they were published within a brief three-year period from 1597 to 1600, Thomas Deloney's three novels, Jacke of Newburie, The Gentle Craft I and II, and Thomas of Reading, show a marked change of mood. The ebullient play of the clothiers in Jacke of Newburie yields to the studied negotiations of the shoemakers in The Gentle Craft; these are displaced in turn by the disappointments of the merchants and gentry in Thomas of Reading. Deloney's characters become progressively less able to advance themselves in society and increasingly thwarted by the calculations of others. At the beginning of this development we find Jacke Winchcomb, the hero of Deloney's first novel, whose effortless rise from apprentice-weaver to Burgess and Member of Parliament fulfills his hopes for social and political success. At its conclusion, in Thomas of Reading, we encounter the unfortunate Lady Margaret, whose fall from the ranks of nobility to servant girl testifies to the precariousness of even wellestablished positions. In a sense, the growing debility of Deloney's characters registers their greater psychological sophistication; they become alive to the limits of human experience, to frustration, despair, and cruelty. Their maturity is matched by the development of Deloney's own narrative skills; in Thomas of Reading he advances beyond the simple jest-book sequences of Jacke of Newburie and The Gentle Craft skillfully interweaves the stories of Lady Margaret and Thomas Cole in the manner of romance.1 Despite its sophistication and artistry, however, Thomas of Reading pales before the greater vitality of Jacke of Newburie which, even with its obvious crudeness, is the more entertaining novel. Its chief interest lies in its portrayal of the figure of the role-player and the remarkable effects his play achieves. In the novel's succession of jests, tricks, and conceits, Deloney explores the curious and at times alarming double-nature of the role-player, the paradox of pretense and reality the role-player embodies. In this respect, he merits comparison with such notable contemporaries as Spenser and Montaigne to whom the idea of a complex self, public and private, ostensibly conformist and secretly subversive, was endlessly fascinating. Like them, Deloney is also concerned with the relationship between a character's appearance, often described in terms of his dress, and some more essential self who thinks and judges himself to be different than what he seems. But Deloney needs to be distinguished from his contemporaries in that he gives the role-player much more scope: he exposes aspects of the role-player's nature that more sophisticated writers merely point to. His depiction of this Renaissance type is often ambivalent, dramatizing the deceitful as well as the constructive potential of role-playing. These two attitudes reflect moral considerations less than they do developmental or situational ones; play is constructive when it takes place in its own space, marked off from ordinary life. At the same time, the very fact that play is constructive implies that its frame is, to a degree, fluid. The player retains certain aspects or features of his role after his play is over.

In Jacke of Newburie the hero first appears as an apprentice-weaver to a rich widow who sees him as a second husband. Fearful that she will never regard him as more than a servant, Jacke ignores her hints at marriage, but at last she tricks him into marrying her. Faced with the challenge of being master of her household, a position he had earlier doubted he could ever fill, Jacke discovers the advantages of conceiving of himself as a double. To his former friends and now servants he declares that while he will not forget what he was, he will act as master henceforth. They must regard him as such: '"I am not … so much puft up in pride that anyway I will forget my former estate: Notwithstanding, seeing I am now to hold the place of a master, it shall be wisedome in you to forget what I was, and to take mee as I am.'" That is, although he now acts as master, he is so only provisionally; his sense of his past will continue to remind him that he is also determined by what he was. While not yet engaged in overt role-playing, Jacke shows the doubleness characteristic of the role-player. He behaves as though he were composed of an original and a play-self: "'I am now to hold the place of a master.'"2

Jacke's new identity becomes even more complex when it is seen in relation to his wife's authority, as it is in the next episode. She determines to "try his patience in the prime of his lustinesse" (to show him the limits of his mastery over her) and habitually stays out late into the night (p. 17). Exasperated at her conduct, Jacke locks her out. But she tricks him into coming out too, whereupon she runs inside and locks the door. She points out that in locking her out he has insisted too literally on his authority as husband; he has been too much a "Judge on a Bench'" (p. 18). They conclude by agreeing that Jacke leave his wife to her willfulness but also that she not offend him with it. The terms of their reconciliation are interesting; they make it impossible that Jacke's identity as master and husband be thoroughly tested. He can behave as a master and husband, but he can never prove that he is master and husband; on the other hand, he will never be provoked to try to prove it. Jacke's new identity is thus established through his willingness to see it in terms of the play in which it was assumed and to continue to anticipate further play (his wife's inoffensive willfulness). As before, he is a double, both master and someone less authoritative who resembles a servant in that he possesses no real power to command. Considering that Deloney derives this episode from the Decameron,3 it is not surprising that he conceives of domestic life, and particularly marriage, as a play-space. More remarkable is Deloney's understanding that questions of identity are explored in the course of role-playing (an understanding which is missing in Boccaccio's tale).

If Jacke's first roles dramatize the nature of the roleplayer, his subsequent ones reveal the norms of his activity. His most important are played before the authorities he has to confront as a clothier: the neighboring gentry and finally the King and Queen. He produces his first play when he is required to furnish six armed men for her Majesty's Scottish war. In a show of largesse, he equips a hundred men and rides with them, in full armor, before the local justices. Acting a gentleman, he elicits scornful comments from his gentleman-neighbors, who call him '"more vaineglorious than well-advised, seeing that the best Nobleman in the Country would scarce have done so much'" (p. 23)4 When Jacke appears before the Queen, she addresses him as "Gentleman," whereupon he admits he is only playing a part: "I am … but a poore Clothier, whose lands are his loomes"' (p. 24). But the Queen maintains the validity of her term and asserts that Jacke's modesty (his willingness to be known as a clothier) certifies him as a double, a "Clothier by trade" and a "Gentleman by condition" (p. 24), that is, in his manners. Because he declares he plays a role, she augments the value of this role to a point at which it acquires a certain reality; thus she establishes his identity as gentleman by the same logic of paradox Jacke had earlier employed with respect to his position as master. In Jacke's world, a person's identity seems to be self-contradictory, predicated upon his admission that he is not who he seems. Because of the candor with which Jacke has played his part, he gains the good-will of the Queen, who later defends him against Wolsey; in his next play, in this case actually staged, he profits from the King's favor. On the occasion of the King's progress through Berkshire, Jacke directs his household in an elaborate pageant which portrays a "war" between busy "Ants" and idle "Butterflies." Just as his earlier play had defended him against the gentry, so this constitutes a thinly disguised protest against the excessive taxation of tradesmen by Wolsey. As "Prince of Ants" Jacke guards his industrious kingdom from the attack of Butterflies, particularly one who is "much misliked" but unapproachable because of his "golden apparell" (p. 28), and attracts the attention of the King's herald who reports the play to the King. Summoned to the King's presence, Jacke continues his ludicrous defense until Wolsey shows his irritation (and that he is the golden butterfly, approached at last through Jacke's play). Jacke then declares himself to be plain Jacke: '"now I intend to be no longer a Prince, because the majesty of a King hath eclipst my glory: so that looking like a Peacocke on my blacke feet makes me abase my vaine-glorious feathers'" (p. 29). Delighted with Jacke's wit and modesty, the King visits his house where he is magnificently feasted and entertained. Later, mindful of Jacke's hospitality, he grants Jacke the state of free trade the clothiers so much desire.5 True to his origins, Jacke refuses the King's offer of knighthood, but the children of the weavers of his house become gentlemen after Jacke casts them in a pageant representing the trials and glories of war. This, Jacke's second play before the King, causes the King to discern the children's "gentleness" and so to provide for their attendance at university (p. 38). Here Jacke's pretense comes closest to functioning as reality; that is, the boundaries setting off his play-space become most fluid: the children of his mock kingdom actually realize a degree of the nobility Jacke has pretended to. In playing the part of a Prince, Jacke achieves and dispenses some of the benefits of the station while he runs none of its risks.

That Jacke's role-playing is acknowledged as pretense, terminates in a gesture of disrobing or disclosing, and produces a new and better state of affairs suggests it has affinities with the play of children. Typically, a child begins to play because he responds to the illusion that what he encounters in reality corresponds to his own desires. In his play he remakes what he finds by distorting its true nature in the interest of maintaining his illusion. The play-object is a paradox, both what it is and what it pretends to be. The player must not be called on to decide what it really is; as long as it is part of a play its nature is double. The toleration of the ambiguity of play on the part of the player and the authorities he obeys is tantamount to the creation of a play-space. Play ends when its ambiguity is clarified; the end of play is this clarification. Through play the player comes to discriminate the wishes which he expresses in his pretense from the nature of the objective reality actually at his disposal, the reality whose distortion in play he can then acknowledge. The disillusionment he experiences at this time is, however, never complete; he never loses his belief in his own creativity and continues to test it in subsequent plays.6

Jacke's role-playing and its effects illustrate the process of play. Because of tolerant authorities, Jacke expresses his wishes in plays that permit him to discover and test the limits of his world. His play confronts him with his own ability to behave in ways he desires; it denies miraculous transformations while it fosters gradual and limited ones.

During the remainder of his story, Jacke assumes no further roles, at least overtly, though he continues to function in a gentlemanly manner. Eventually he is elected to Parliament. Nevertheless, he presides over the play of others, seeing to it that his friends and family play well and not abusively. He prevents the young Italian merchant Benedict and the rich squire Sir George Rigley from "playing" with his servant girls, yet he allows his servants to gull or put into a play a Gossip Frank, who tries to persuade Jacke's wife to forego holiday fare and so to limit opportunities for play in his household. His boldest support of play is directed at his friend, the former clothier Randolph Pert. Pert, who owes Jacke money, works as a ragged and starving porter in London. Recognizing Jacke on one of his errands and fearing debtor's prison, Pert pleads for pity. '"Passion of my heart man,'" declares Jacke, '"thou will never pay me thus: never thinke being a Porter to pay five hundred pound debt'" (p. 59). Jacke asks for a bill of hand, requiring payment from Pert when Pert is made Sheriff of London. The scrivener who drafts the bill derides Jacke's indulgence, but Jacke practices the "art of clothing," and equips Pert with a "faire sute of appareil, Marchant like, with a faire blacke cloak" and a draper's shop on Canweek street (p. 60). Of course Pert prospers, transforming his merchant's costume into the actual dress of a merchant, and when he is made Sheriff he repays Jacke his money. What Pert undertakes as play, as a reprieve from the harsh life of debt, actually functions as work and results in a second life of prosperity. His guilt is resolved not through punishment but more optimistically, through a playful innocence which provides him with a new chance.7

Over the play of his friends and members of his household, Jacke exercises an authority that both helps and hinders role-players; he assists them in discriminating their desires from what they need to recognize as objective reality. In this respect, of course, he can be seen as playing a second role: he is first a player and second a producer; he requires a play-space, but he also provides and limits it.8

The marked restriction in role-playing which characterizes Deloney's last novel, Thomas of Reading, is foreshadowed in The Gentle Craft, Part I. There Deloney's shoemakers also seek to advance themselves through role-playing, but their play lacks the grace and finesse of that in Jacke of Newburie. It is undertaken without the necessary good will; the end of the play is already in the player's mind before he starts, and it is expressive not of the player's desires but rather of his ambition. Simon Eyer, for example, begins life as a shoemaker, and though he is a '"squire of the Gentle Craft,'" as his wife says, he longs for a more solid title: '"those titles do onely rest in name, but not in nature; but of that sort had I rather be, whose lands are answerable to their vertues'" (p. 112). When his wife offers him forty shillings, he announces he will need three thousand pounds. She then arranges that he play the role of a servant to a fictitious "rich Alderman," bargain on this "gentleman's" behalf for credit, buy a cargo of textiles from a ship wrecked just off the coast, sell these goods and, with the proceeds, pay the shipmaster. By playing these roles Eyer becomes vastly rich, but his play is mere trickery. Eyer never reveals he is not the Alderman's servant, nor that the Alderman is a fiction; he does not claim a play-space and therefore puts himself and those he dupes in jeopardy. The difference between play and deceit becomes clear in the differences between the stories of Pert and Eyer. Play is play when it is accepted as such by players and non-players; without such acceptance, that is, in unframed contexts, it becomes deceit.

In Thomas of Reading role-players are also deceivers and, not having Eyer's luck, suffer in consequence. They assume parts from a wish or need to deceive, and the authorities they contend with become judgmental. This alteration in the nature and effect of play is also reflected in a deterioration in the conditions that make play possible: while Jacke's household enjoys an almost pastoral abundance, Thomas' Berkshire suffers from a scarcity of goods. The change is doubly remarkable because, at the outset of the novel, Deloney insists that the England he portrays is too rich to be plagued with beggars and thieves. Nonetheless, many of his characters fall into these categories. Often they engage in activity which seems motivated by sheer nastiness: the innkeeper at Bosom's Inn, a "foule sloven," nearly smokes his wife's lover (an unsuccessful role-player) to death in a chimney. On other occasions these clothiers get down to rather prosaic business: Thomas petitions the King to grant the clothiers uniform cloth measures and wins his suit. The spirit of calculation so evident in Eyer's story becomes pervasive and controlling in Thomas of Reading; its central character, Thomas Cole, is murdered for his money by a trickster innkeeper, and his friend, the clothier Dove, is deserted by all his servants in his first days of poverty. '"To stay with you is the next way to make us like you,'" they say as they depart to arrange for Dove's arrest (p. 268). When Dove is returned to prosperity by the generosity of Cole, he forgives his servants but never trusts them again.

Of all the unhappy role-players in this novel, the Lady Margaret, daughter of the exiled Earl of Shrewsburie, offers the most striking contrast with Jacke. Like Eyer's, her role is a deceit; unlike his, it is purely defensive. In playing she only seeks to stay alive. Pursued by the King's agents for her father's crime, she plays the role of servant in the household of the clothier Gray. She deceives everyone, despite her obvious lack of domestic skills, but she misses her chance to abandon her part when she and her betrothed, Duke Robert of Normandy, also Henry's political prisoner, are apprehended by Henry's police. Margaret is saved because she "is" a servant and could not know that to marry the Duke constituted a crime. Faced with a lifetime of roleplaying, however, she ends by revealing her true identity to the King. She resumes the rich and lavish dress of her station, but only for one brief moment before she dons a hair shirt and enters a nunnery.

All things being therefore prepared, the young Lady was in most princely wise attired in a gowne of pure white sattin, her kirtle of the same, embrodered with gold about the skirts, in most curious sort, her head was garnished with gold, pearles, and precious stones, having her hair like thrids of burnisht gold, hanging down behind in manner of a princely bride: about her yvory necke jewels of inestimable price were hung, and her handwreasts were compassed about with bracelets of bright-shining Diamonds….

The Lady Abbesse received her: where the beautiful Maiden kneeling downe, made her prayer in sight of all the people: then with her owne hands she undid her virgins faire gowne, and tooke it off, and gave it away to the poore; after than, her kirtle, then her jewels, bracelets and rings, saying Farewell the pride and vanity of this world.

The ornaments of her head were the next she gave away: and then was she ledde on one side, where she was stripped, and in stead of her smocke of soft silke, had a smocke of rough haire put upon her.

Then came one with a paire of sheares, and cut off her golden-coloured lockes, and with dust and ashes all bestrewed her head and face. Which being done, she was brought againe into the peoples sight barefoot & bareleg'd, to whom she said: Now farewell the world (pp. 271–72).

This detailed description of Margaret's two sets of clothing recalls the importance Deloney gives dress throughout his work; dressed up in costumes, his characters assume new roles which educate them to their talents and limitations. Moreover, their play is evidence of Deloney's own "art of clothing"; not only is this "balletting silk-weaver of Norwich" a clothier in a literal sense, and therefore capable of sympathizing with his fellow merchants, he is also a clothier in a figurative sense, empowered to "clothe" truth in the figures of rhetoric. Margaret's robing and disrobing is therefore charged with implications. Most obviously, her assumption of noble dress signifies her return to some original self and an acknowledgement of her pathetic deceit as Gray's servant. But her subsequent disrobing and rerobing in a hair smock, her rejection of any form of self-adornment, further suggests that she perceives all human activity, when compared with the otherworldly life of the faithful, as a kind of role-playing. In her extreme disillusionment she resembles such Renaissance skeptics as Erasmus who dare to doubt that a person has any self apart from his role and to see life as a matter of entering and leaving a stage. If one considers her in relation to Deloney's career, her nun's gown becomes symbolic of another kind of nudity, that is, the end to his "art of clothing," his silence as an author.

Deloney's rejection of role-playing in the last pages of his last book may reflect changes in his own circumstances. In 1597 his situation had become extremely difficult. In 1596 the Lord Mayor of London, Stephen Slany, issued a warrant for Deloney's arrest, and it is likely that Deloney had to remain in hiding from early in 1597, about the time Jacke of Newburie was entered in the Stationer's Register, to 1599 when he died. Although the Lord Treasurer William Cecil would hardly have been interested, Slany wrote him because he thought that Deloney had published a ballad in which Queen Elizabeth speaks "with her people in dialoguewise in very fond and indecent sort"9—more or less the situation of the Queen depicted in Jacke of Newburie. Deloney's preoccupation with role-playing may then reflect not only his hope that play is licit and effective, but also his need to disguise his own role. Correspondingly, his presentation of unsuccessful play in Thomas of Reading may reflect his experience of the futility of disguise in the repressive world of criminals and officers of the law.

But it is also possible to see a correlation between this novel's renunciation of role-playing and its particular literary style, its remarkably imitative quality. Fuller, in his Worthies, writes that in Thomas of Reading Deloney presents the kind of wildly improbable story that is traditional to romance, and he ridicules Deloney's naive imitation of a literature which so obviously distorts the reality it represents.

Thomas Cole, commonly called the rich clothier of Reading. Tradition and an authorless pamphlet make him a man of vast wealth, maintaining an hundred & forty menial servants in his house….

The truth is this; monks began to lard the lives of their saints with lies, whence they proceeded in like manner to flourish out the facts of famous knights (King Arthur, Guy of Warwick, & c.); in imitation whereof some meaner wits in the same sort made descriptions of mechanics, powdering their lives with improbable passages, to the great prejudice of truth….

However, because omnis fabula fundatur in Historia, let this Cole be accounted eminent in this kind; though I vehemently suspect very little of truth would remain in the midst of this story, if the gross falsehoods were pared from both sides thereof.10

Fuller is too severe, both on the monks and Deloney, but he does point to the source of the novel's weakness, especially when contrasted to the vigor of Jacke of Newburie. In writing his first novel, Deloney reworked the oral histories of his region and the tales in such simple jest-books as A. C. Mery Tales.11 The process of his composition thus finds an analogue in the effective play of his principal characters; in both cases, an original whose style is rough and vulgar (though lively) is improved to suit the requirements of a bourgeois sensibility. Jacke is both the effect and an embodiment of the composition that brings him into being. But in writing Thomas of Reading, Deloney draws his most compelling "matter" from the narratives of heroines in romance, and he has not to dress it up but down. In this novel, it is Lady Margaret, exchanging her noble dress for one in which she may serve bourgeois interests, who represents her author's literary effort. Her play is restricted because she actually expresses Deloney's own reluctance to reclothe and put into play figures he would find in romance so elaborately dressed and highly contrived. Deloney's fascination with romance was as fatal to his imagination as it was instructive for his sense of literary technique. The development of his novels shows the ambivalent effect a model can have on its imitation, particularly one that is "plainer" than its original. In Deloney's case, the weakness in his last novel is not hard to account for. Like the role-players he so clearly took pleasure in describing, Deloney worked under the vital illusion that his subject, the "matter" of his story, needed representation, and that he could reclothe and so recreate it.12 In the simple stories he first undertook to improve, he doubtless saw a certain indeterminacy which invited further elaboration, a conceptual "nudity" which required a rhetorical "suit of clothes." The crudity of the stories and their apparent potential for a second life guaranteed his own creativity. But faced with the representation of the stories in romance, he was simply incapable of seeing in his "matter" a comparable future, and his inhibited creativity is expressed in figures like that of Lady Margaret which point to their frailty and so to their author's. Her choice of a nunnery and silence, her retirement from the scene of play and discourse, testify to Deloney's inability to represent a subject that he had encountered in a literature which he perceived as sophisticated and refined. Had he been able to recast the "matter" of romance in the mode of satire, as Cervantes does in the first part of Don Quixote, he might have recovered his former vitality. But evidently such an analysis of the possibilities in romance was beyond him.

Notes

1 See Walter R. Davis' discussion of the style of Thomas of Reading in Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, 1969), pp. 270–77.

2 Thomas Deloney, Jacke of Newburie in Works, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, 1912), p. 8. This edition will be quoted throughout this essay.

3 VII, 4. An obvious source, although not closely imitated, Boccaccio's tale also shows husband and wife agreeing upon a mutual limitation of roles. But Boccaccio's husband is not a former apprentice and the issue of real and assumed identities is not raised.

4 Protest against class mobility often focussed on clothes. Cf. Philips Stubbs' complaint in 1583: "[there is] such a confused mingle mangle of apparell … that it is verie hard to knowe who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shall have those … go daylie in silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties and such like, not withstanding that they be base by byrthe, meane by estate and servyle by calling. This is a great confusion and a general disorder, God be merciful to us." Quoted in Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 27.

5 On this occasion Jacke embarrasses Wolsey by reminding him that he is the son of a butcher and so implies that his status as gentleman is fraudulent. Unlike Jacke, Wolsey does not declare himself a player (Works, p. 45).

6 This summary is based on D. W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality (New York, 1971), pp. 5–12. Also relevant are Johann Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1950) and Gregory Bateson's "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972), pp. 177–92.

7 See Jean Piaget on play as a source of "compensatory" and "liquidating" combinations, acting games in which situations are dissociated from unpleasant [real] contexts and thereby assimilated. The ego of the player is thus revenged on reality or can emerge victorious where it was threatened. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. by C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (New York, 1962), pp. 131–33.

8 Melanie Klein, describing personification in the play of children, notes that the player is often split between a character who is in a difficult or unknown situation and a second character who helps or hinders the first in discovering solutions. In the course of his novel, Jacke plays all three roles. "Personification in the Play of Children" in Contributions to Psycho-analysis, 1921–1945 (New York, 1964), p. 219.

9 Thomas Deloney, Novels, ed. Merritt E. Lawlis (Bloomington, Ind., 1961), pp. xxvii–xxix.

10Worthies (Works, 1840, I, 137), quoted in Mann, p. 548.

11 See Mann on Deloney's sources, pp. xiv–xxxi; Deloney's imitation of the Decameron, VII, 4, is exceptional.

12 The notion that a work of art possesses the double nature of a play-object is implicit in Winnicott; "It is assumed that the task of reality acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is 'lost' in play," p. 13.

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