SOURCE: Introduction to The Works of Thomas Deloney, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1912, pp. vii–xxxi.

[In the excerpt below, Mann provides an overview of Deloney's career, calling attention to his straightforward style and his depiction of working-class men and women. The critic asserts that Deloney's prose fiction represents "the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel."]

The recorded facts of Deloney's life are very scanty. His earliest venture appears to have been A Declaration made by the Archbishop of Cullen upon the Deede of his Mariage (1583), and Kempe in April, 1600, refers to him as having just died. Thus his working literary life lasted about seventeen years, but it is impossible to give even a rough guess at the date of his birth, although Ebbsworth suggests (apparently capriciously) 1543.¹ He appears to have drifted into literature from the more substantial occupation of silk-weaving, and his novels show the most intimate acquaintance with London life, but Nash's epithet 'the Balletting Silke Weauer of Norwich'² seems to point to that town as the place of his birth, and it is significant that one of his earliest ballads—The Lamentation of Beckles (1586)—was printed 'for Nicholas Coleman of Norwich'. His name may indicate French ancestry, and this, combined with his strong Anti-Catholicism, perhaps points to descent from a Protestant silk-weaving family, one of those which took refuge in East Anglia from Continental religious persecution. From the earliest times Norwich had been colonized by Flemish and Walloon refugees, and in 1571 there were 3,925 aliens dwelling within the city.³ The number of silk workers (Deloney's own craft) seems to have increased considerably during the latter half of the sixteenth century. 'Among the trading Strangers', writes Strype, 'that came over into England from Flanders and those Parts for their Religion, in the said Queen Elizabeths Reign, there were divers of this Sort that dealt in dressing and preparing Silk for the other trades';⁴ and it may be remembered that alien artisans figure very prominently in Deloney's novels.

Of his earlier life and education nothing is known, but his translation of the proclamation and letters in the Cologne tract … show him to have had a good working knowledge of Latin. There is some probability that he knew French, for in Iacke of Newberie he apparently refers to a passage⁵ in Montaigne's Essays, which were not Englished by Florio until 1603. Similarly the 'Spirit of Mogunce'⁶ may have been remembered from Belleforest's Histoires Prodigieuses; the story of the Kings daughter of France⁷ seems definitely drawn from the Histoires Tragiques; while even the French-English of John in The Gentle Craft (I) is of some importance in this connexion. He was at any rate a man of some culture, and had probably received such education as an Elizabethan Grammar-school allowed, adding to it a knowledge of the Continental languages, acquired either from the foreign artisans with whom he rubbed shoulders, or perhaps from his own family.

Elderton of the 'ale-crammed nose', so famous in contemporary pamphlets, was the king of the London Ballad-makers until his death in 1592, and him Deloney seems to have followed and finally succeeded as the popular ballad-journalist of the day, at first combining the weaving of good silk with the production of popular poetry. His earliest extant performances in this direction are of a rather lugubrious description, such as The Lamentation of Beckles and The Death and Execution of Fourteen Most Wicked Traitors (1586). About this time he appears as a married man, living in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, for the baptismal entry in the church registers can scarcely apply to any but him:

Richard the son of Thomas Deloney. Weaver, bap. Oct^r 16^th1586.

Although little of the work of his next eight years is extant, there can be no doubt that during this time he was writing prolifically, and had become one of the most notorious authors of the Elizabethan Grub Street that catered for the 'groundlings'.

Greene, in apologizing for the matter of his Defence of Conny Catching (1592), singles him out as a typical ballad-writer:

Such triviall trinkets and threedbare trash, had better seemed T.D. whose braines beaten to the yarking up of Ballades, might more lawfully have glaunst at the quaint conceites of conny-catching and crosse-biting.⁸

Gabriel Harvey, in Pierce's Supererogation (1593),⁹ classes him with 'Philip Stubs, Robert Armin, and the common Pamfleteers of London', advising Nash 'to boast lesse with Thomas Delone, or to atchieve more with Thomas More'.

Strype, in his edition of Stow's Survey, notes that 'abusive Ballads and Libels were too common in the City in Queen Elizabeth's Time, therein reflecting too boldly and seditiously upon the Government, particularly in case of Dearth'. His relation of an incident of 1596 throws light both upon the activities of Thomas Deloney and the difficulties of sixteenth-century popular journalism.¹⁰

In the next Year [1596] Sir Stephen Slany, Maior, in the Month of July was brought to his Hands a certain Ballad, containing a Complaint of great Want and Scarcity of Corn within the Realm. And forasmuch as it contained in it certain vain and presumptuous matters, bringing in the Queen, speaking with her People Dialogue wise in very fond and undecent sort (as the said Maior in his letter, wrote also to the Lord Treasurer shewed) and prescribing Order for the remedying of this Dearth of Corn; which was extracted, as it seemed, out of a Book, published by the Lords the last Year, but done in that Vain and indiscreet manner, as that thereby the Poor might aggravate their Grief, and take occasion of some Discontentment: therefore he thought fit to acquaint the said Lord, that he called before him both Printer and the Party by whom it was put to print; who pretended a License for it. But that finding it to be untrue, he committed him to one of the Counters, and took Sureties of the printer himself for his appearance.

…..

The Maker of this scurrilous Ballad was one Delonie, an idle Fellow, and one noted with the like Spirit, in printing a Book for the Silk Weavers: Wherein was found some such like foolish and disorderly matter. Him the Maior also was in Search for, but could not yet find him; as he signified also the said Lord, and sent him a Copy of the foresaid Ballad.

The Ballad on the Want of Corn has entirely disappeared, together with the 'Book for the Silk Weavers'. But it seems fairly certain that Deloney was now installed as the poet of the people, and his voicing of popular cries was beginning to bring him into trouble. Slany's letter to Lord Burghley is still extant and is the original source of Strype's information. It is dated the 25th of July, 1596, and may be read in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times (vol. ii, p. 462).

'I loathe to speake it', says the author of the Epistle to Martin Mar-Sixtus (1592), 'euery red-nosed rimester is an author, euery drunken man's dreame is a booke, and he whose talent of little wit is hardly worth a farthing, yet layeth about him so outragiously, as if all Helicon had run through his pen, in a word, scarce a cat can look out of a gutter, but out starts a halfpenny chronicler, and presently A propper new ballet of a strange sight is endited'.¹¹ The ballad-singer was a common enough figure of popular Elizabethan life, and Tudor legislation had found it necessary to include him in a sweeping scheme of social reform. By the 14th of Elizabeth, Cap. V,

All fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realm or towards any other honourable personage of greater degree; … which … shall wander abroad and have not license of two justices of the peace … shall be deemed rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.¹²

Chettle, in Kind-Hartes Dreame (1592), describes the ballad-singer's peculiar garb.

His head was couered with a round cap, his body with a side skirted tawny coate, his legs and feete trust vppe in leather buskins,… his treble violl in his hande, assured me of his profession. On which (by his continual sawing, hauing left but one string) after his best manner, hee gaue me a huntsup.¹³

With this we may compare Deloney's own account of Antony Now-now in The Gentle Craft (II). But Chettle goes on to describe the ballad-singers further:

A company of idle youths, loathing honest labour and dispising lawful trades, betake themselues to a vagrant and vicious life, in euery corner of Cities and market Townes of the Realme, singing and selling of ballads and pamplets full of ribaudrie, and all scurrilous vanity, to the prophanation of God's name, and withdrawing people from Christian exercises, especially at faires, markets, and such publike meetings.¹⁴

Northbrooke and Stubbes attacked them with the proper dignity of Puritan morality, and Stubbes denounces their indifference to moral issues with rhetorical fervour: 'Who be more bawdie than they? who vncleaner than they? who more licentious and loose-minded?'¹⁵

To this honourable fraternity Thomas Deloney, the fervent Puritan-Protestant, joined himself, rising to more prominence in proportion as he left silk-weaving behind him. His novels show the closest acquaintance with the life of travelling craftsmen, with the legends, customs, and topography of certain districts, and especially those round which the Elizabethan textile industries were centred,¹⁶ an acquaintance which could scarcely have been gained except by personal experience. He writes of Petworth and the high road thence to London,¹⁷ of Gloucester,¹⁸ Canterbury,¹⁹ and Coin-brook,²⁰ with the casual accuracy which betokens familiarity, and his skilful imitation of the Northern dialect²¹ indicates a very real knowledge of its peculiarities. There cannot be the slightest doubt that he must have lived at Newbury long enough to have become well acquainted with its traditions and customs,²² with the surrounding countryside and the names and reputations of local gentlefolk. Probably Berkshire as a whole was well known to him, for both Iacke of Newberie and Thomas of Reading seem largely derived from traditional sources. His knowledge of Newbury streets and suburbs is remarkably detailed and correct.²³ Parry,²⁴ Englefield,²⁵ and Hungerford²⁶ in Iacke of Newberie, and Nevel, Abridges, and Rainsford²⁷ in The Gentle Craft (II), are the names of Berkshire county families adopted boldly into fiction. 'It was her lucke vpon a Bartholomew day (hauing a Fayre in the toun) to spy her man Iohn giue a paire of Gloues to a proper maide for a Fayring,' he writes in Iacke of Newberie;²⁸ and Ashmole, in the Antiquities of Berkshire (sub Newbury), mentions five yearly fairs, one upon August 24th, Bartholomew day. Hence Deloney is here referring to an actual fact of local topography, the casual nature of the reference making it all the more certain that he speaks of a custom familiar to him by continued experience. He may have frequented Newbury with his ballads on fair days, an Autolycus among the villages of Bohemia, but more probably he worked there at his trade of silk-weaving. The silk industry reached considerable importance in Berkshire in Elizabeth's time, especially at Reading, and at Newbury itself it survived until the early nineteenth century.²⁹ Deloney's knowledge of Newbury customs and people appears too detailed to have been acquired in any other way than by actual residence in the town, and Canaans Calamities is actually dedicated to Richard Kingsmill of Highclere, near by.

Nash's Haue With You to Saffron-Walden (1596) gives a list of Deloney's pamphlets, some of which have entirely perished or cannot be identified with certainty.

—as Thomas Deloney, the Balletting Silke-Weauer, of Norwich, hath rime inough for all myracles, and wit to make a Garland of Good will, more than the premisses, with an epistle of Momus and Zoylus; whereas his Muse, from the first peeping foorth, hath stood at Liuery at an Alehouse wispe, neuer exceeding a penny a quart, day or night, and this deare yeare, together with the silencing of his looms, scarce that; he being constrained to betake him to carded Ale: whence it proceedeth that, since Candlemas or his Iigge of John for the King, not one merrie Dittie will come from him, but the Thunder-bolt against Swearers, Repent, England, repent, and the strange iudgments of God.³¹

Deloney's muse, from the first, was probably nourished on very small beer, and by 1596 the dear year and the slackness of trade seem to have driven him from his loom to rely entirely for sustenance on his ballads and romances. If this be the case, the issue was happy enough, for Deloney's chief claims for remembrance rest upon his novels, Iacke of Newberie, registered March 7, 1596–7; The Gentle Craft (I), October 19, 1597; and Gentle Craft (II) and Thomas of Reading, written between 1597 and 1600, all of which seem to be the product of enforced idleness from his loom.

The author of Skialetheia or the Shadow of Truth (1598) found Deloney a poet of sufficient importance to satirize, noting at once the great popularity of his ballads and his choice of dolorous subjects.

to deloney [8]

Like to the fatal ominous Rauen which tolls
The sicke mans dirge within his hollow beake,
So euery paper-clothed post in Poules,
To thee (Deloney) moumingly doth speake,
And tells thee of thy hempen tragedy,
The wracks of hungry Tyburne nought to thine.
Such massacre's made of thy balladry,
And thou in griefe, for woe thereof maist pine.

To Kemp's Nine Daies Wonder (April, 1600) is appended 'Kempes humble request to the impudent generation of Ballad-makers and their coherents, that it would please their Rascalities, to pity his pains in the great journey he pretends; and not fill the country with lies of his never-done-acts, as they did in his late Morrice to Norwich. To the tune of Thomas Deloney's Epitaph.'³² A further reference follows which fixes the date of Deloney's death as about March, 1600, and clearly shows that if he kept his position as 'general' of the ballad-mongers up to the last, it at least did little to fill his needy pockets.

I have made a privy search, what private Jigmonger of your jolly number hath been the Author of these abominable Ballets written of me.

I was told it was the great Ballad-maker, T. D., alias Thomas Deloney, Chronicler of the memorable lives of the Six Yeomen of the West, Jack of Newbury, the Gentle Craft, &c, and such like honest men, omitted by Stow, Hollinshed, Grafton, Halle, Froissait, and all trie rest of those well deserving writers.

But I was given since to understand, your late general, Thomas, died poorly (as ye all must do) and was honestly buried, which is much to be doubted of some you.³³

It is difficult to say much of a writer of whom so meagre details have been preserved, but Deloney's work to a certain extent betrays his character. He was doubtless an eager reader of such printed matter as came in his way, from the jest-book of Long Meg of Westminster to the Chronicles of Grafton and Holinshed, the Acts and Monuments of Fox, and The Golden Legend of Caxton. There are reasons to think he had dipped into some classical and foreign literature, nor did he neglect the contemporary stage, founding one of his ballads on the play of Edward III and often remembering Shakespeare in the plot and dialogue of his novels. Besides this, he had stored his memory with fragments of folk-songs and quaint local customs and sayings, picked up on his wanderings about the country; and out of this vivid information he spun much of the stuff of his prose and rhyme. None of the contemporary references to him are hostile or ill-tempered, and if the littérateurs of the day treated him with little respect, at least it was with good humour. Nash, although writing satirically in what he considered the vein of the 'Diuine Aretino', is pleasantly enough disposed to the alehouse muse; Harvey recognizes the unpretentious merit which is really present in Deloney's poetry, while Kemp's reference is a testimony to a respectability almost pathetic. He 'died poorly … and was honestly buried'.

From his surviving work we can gather his acquaintance and sympathy with trade and handicraftsmen of all sorts, his admiration and satisfied acceptance of blue blood and the established order of things, which particularly marks the bourgeois class to which he belonged. Simon Eyer and John Winchcombe, the successful merchants endowed with all the popular virtues of generosity and good spirits, were his heroes of real life, but his sentimental conviction was the pre-eminent virtue of an aristocracy, so that all his kings are truly 'royal' and their ladies 'gracious'. He had all the democratic value for the commonplace virtues, and the democratic enjoyment of sheer life, pathetic, ridiculous, or merely coarse. A strong patriot and Protestant, he hated Spain and the Catholic Church with an honourable virulence, while his pride in substantial aldermen and civic corporations bespeaks him a typical Elizabethan Londoner, by adoption if not by birth.

He is the chief representative of a host of writers (mostly nameless) who catered for that Elizabethan vulgar, eager for entertainment either in prose or verse.

In the work of Thomas Deloney we may justly find the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel; and yet to the modern reader fresh from the art of the great novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there must appear even in his work a lack of construction and seriousness which contrasts vividly with the great achievements of the same age in drama and poetry.

Before 1400 Chaucer had written Troilus and Criseyde, in method an almost perfect example of the novel, in spite of its poetic form. Yet in the late sixteenth century novelists are working out in the dark the very rudiments of their art and, almost incapable of construction, can scarcely fill in more than the simplest outlines of characterization….

Two main methods have been traced in the Elizabethan novel—the realistic, derived from the jest-book and popular satire, and the romantic, derived from mediaeval romance, both being reinforced to some extent by foreign influence as it filtered through in the numerous translations and imitations of that age. But these two streams of Elizabethan development cannot be strictly shut off, the one from the other, and realism and romanticism are seen running side by side in such novels as Greene's Never Too Late, Nash's Jack Wilton, and Deloney's Thomas of Reading. While, however, the two methods are not mutually exclusive in the same novel, nevertheless the romantic episodes usually break clearly away from the realistic, and the alternation of the one with the other tends to faulty construction and incongruity in style. As a rule the Elizabethan novelist preferred the abnormal and dealt with the sublimations of sentiment or the very crudities of fact. Nash is equally violent in his description of a 'greasy ale-knight', as in the alliterative raptures of the Earl of Surrey, and Greene only deserts the racy slang of the 'conny-catcher' to pour out the full flowers of euphuism in a love scene.

The exaggeration of Elizabethan romance has little charm for the modern reader, and Fenton's Tragical Discourses of Bandello prove how unreal the exaggeration of realism may become. What sixteenth-century fiction required was its direction toward the more normal phases of human life, and its riddance on the one hand of merely abstract sentiment and on the other of meaningless discordant detail. The romantic novel had sought its heroes and heroines in Arcadia, and found shadows and rhetoric; the realistic jest-book and novel had sought the stuff of life in taverns, and found hearty animals and some dirt. Romance required incident and reality, realism a saner ideal and sense of order. Both were defective inasmuch as they avoided the faithful delineation of normal life, but it was realism on the whole which was more fruitful for English literature. Lyly's Euphues and Greene's Mamillia have an interest for the literary historian, but The Caveat to Common Cursitors and the Hundred Merry Tales have a present and human value in themselves, and while romance was satisfied with the constant repetition of the same platitudes and situations, if only in a sufficiently pleasing manner, the progress of realism, in the jest-book and satirical essay alike, was towards characterization and construction, that is to say, towards the English novel as we know it to-day.

Riche, in his Farewell to the Militarie Profession (1581), had left on one side the exaggerations of romance and realism, and striven to a certain extent to represent in literature the more ordinary life of the times. But it is in the novels of Thomas Deloney that we find the first consistent attempt at drawing material for fiction from the everyday life of everyday people. Familiar with local gossip and tradition, and with a mind eagerly absorbent of such printed literature as came within his reach, he found the sources of his stories anywhere, but their characterization and colour are the accurate reflection of Elizabethan life in Cheapside and Westminster, among the cobblers of Whitehall and the drapers of Candleweek Street. The difference in the subjects and method of his work from those of contemporary novelists is perhaps to be chiefly explained by the circumstances of his life and by the audience he addressed. Unlike Lodge or Nash or Greene, he belonged to no circle of University wits; Renaissance ambition had touched him but little, and he aimed not at fine writing but profitable story-telling. The English writers Italianate would scarcely sink to the life of 'base mechanicals', their proclivities and culture led them much rather to the unsubstantialities of Arcadia and the brothels of Southwark.