Thomas Deloney

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Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature

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SOURCE: "Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature," in The Journal of British Studies, Vol. XV, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 1–20.

[In the following excerpt, O'Connell discusses the relation between religion and capitalism in Deloney's novels. She contends that Deloney believed women are covetous by nature, and thus thought it was appropriate for them to pursue the accumulation of wealth while their husbands devoted themselves to piety and good works.]

It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan "work ethic" and the development of an entrepreneurial spirit were related to each other.1 Tawney suggested that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labor and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. Thus, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier religious reform movements:

in its later phases [it] added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation…. It insisted, in short, that money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God.2

Tawney was speaking of the "later stages" of Puritanism; he took his examples entirely from post-restoration works. But scholars of the pre-revolutionary period have been quick to suggest that the gospel of work was preached to a "bourgeois" congregation nearly a century before 1660. Louis Wright, for example, has written that the "glorification of diligence and thrift" in the sermons of the Elizabethan Puritan William Perkins give that preacher "unusual significance in the history of bourgeois ideas and ideals."3 Christopher Hill follows Wright's lead: Perkins, he says, preached what amounted to "justification by success," while his contemporaries Dod and Cleaver preached that "labour was a duty to one's neighbour."4 David Little, while disputing Hill's interpretations of Perkins's sermons, admits that there is in the preacher's works "a tendency to equate prosperity with the sign of God's blessing."5 Even the Georges, who argue that "'the spirit of capitalism' in its Protestant guise … simply does not exist in England before 1640," suggest that pre-revolutionary Protestants thought "the most obviously godly calling [was] the most obviously economic or productive one."6 According to scholars of Elizabethan literature, the Puritans' glorification of diligence and thrift did not stop with religious works; it influenced popular literature as well. Wright has pointed out that the plays of Thomas Heywood and the novels of Thomas Deloney were written to praise hard-working, thrifty, ambitious apprentices.7 Walter Davis has argued that a certain strain of "popular Calvinism" appears in the middle class heroes of Deloney's novels; he suggests that Deloney comes close to equating financial success with election.8

… Heywood presents his audience with poor boys who have made good and rich merchants; but we also find that he ignores the means by which they have become wealthy. The ability to work hard, to make a shrewd investment, is not a virtue in Heywood's eyes. It is in using money well, not in making it industriously, that the playwright's heroes prove themselves virtuous, and using money well involves engaging in charitable activities and gestures of loyalty which are far from thrifty. If we look for the "Puritan work ethic" in Heywood's plays, we will simply not find it.

We may turn to the novels of Thomas Deloney with more hope of finding the industrious hero we are looking for. Among modern scholars, Deloney is known as an "apologist for the middle class."42 His heroes are clothiers and shoemakers; and many of them become rich before our very eyes, for unlike Heywood, Deloney does not ignore the process of becoming wealthy. Deloney's presentation of his most familiar poor-boymakes-good hero, Jack of Newbury, has led Herbert Donow to say that the author has "unquestioning respect for the successful efforts of men to become wealthy."43 It has led Max Dorsinville to say that Deloney's hero is "the epitome of the rising Elizabethan mercantile class that wishes to counterbalance the power of the courtiers."44 But if we read Deloney's novels carefully, we can find many episodes which cast doubt upon the belief that Deloney praises entrepreneurs on the make. He recognizes the spirit of capitalism, to be sure, but he presents it with wry humor, not with approval.

The man for whom Deloney expresses the most unqualified admiration is the hero of his first book, Jack of Newbury (1596). As a young man, Jack is "of merry disposition, and honest conversation"; although he never drinks to excess, he is such a pleasant fellow that he receives the "good estimation" of all and becomes "every Gentleman's companion." But even as a drinking companion, Jack is thrifty; he limits his beer-expenditure to a shilling a week, and when it is spent, he leaves, reminding his companions: "twelve pence a Sunday being spent in good cheer / To fifty-two shillings amounts in the year." Jack is also diligent. His mistress, noting how careful a man he is, commits to him the "guiding of all her work-folks" when her husband dies, and he handles his obligations with such scrupulous care that her business prospers.

Jack's diligence and thrift serve him well—but not because they make him rich. His virtues bring him to the attention of people in a position to better his condition; Deloney still thinks in terms of preferment, not self-made men:

Thus was Jack's good government and discretion noted of the best and substantialest men of the Town: so that it wrought his great commendations, and his Dame thought herself not a little blessed to have such a servant, that was so obedient to her, and so careful for her profit …45

Jack's mistress, seeing that he is diligent in minding her "profit" and obedient to her as a good servant should be, decides that a man with such virtues might be a good investment as a husband. The decision is hers, and so is the courtship. Jack is completely passive in the matter, even though he (being a good businessman) is well aware of the conveniences of being provided with "a house ready furnished, servants ready taught, and all other things for his trade necessary."46 His mistress is his superior both in rank and in age; Jack decides that a marriage between them might not be a happy one. The mistress, however, plays the role of entrepreneur as she prepares to invest permanently in Jack's virtues. She wastes no time in striking the bargain: on a frosty night she crawls into his bed to warm her feet, and the next day she leads him to the altar and marries him.

The gentle bawdiness of the tale of courtship should not distract us from seeing how its humor enables Deloney to present Jack's rise to wealth. It puts Jack in the position of a man who is not at all aggressive when a clear chance for financial gain presents itself to him. Like William Perkins's ideal man, he does not labor diligently to get rich; he is merely a "kind young man," who, when he has wealth thrust upon him, will "not say her nay."47 Jack labors diligently, but he is not an entrepreneur; his virtue, by bringing him to the attention of his mistress, allows him to become rich, but it does not make him rich. In the opening chapters of the story of Jack of Newbury, Deloney has portrayed Jack as a virtuous man who has become rich demonstrably through no effort of his own; he can then spend the rest of the book showing how virtuously Jack employs his virtuously-acquired wealth.48

In a later novel, The Gentle Craft, Part I (1597), Deloney tries to treat Simon Eyre's rise to wealth and power in the same way he treated Jack's. Eyre is a diligent shoemaker; other heroes of this ilk in The Gentle Craft become wealthy because the king notices their good work and makes them his private shoemakers. Eyre, however, does not have to wait for this kind of recognition, for he hears from his journeyman that a great ship full of rare merchandise has been driven ashore and its merchant owner is willing to sell the cargo for whatever he can get. Eyre, well aware of the benefits to be had from buying the cargo of a ship at a low price, discusses his wish to buy it with his wife. In the discussion, the differences between Eyre and his wife emerge. When she hears that the ship could yield at least double profit on the investment, she

was inflamed with the desire thereof, as women are (for the most part) very covetous: that matter running still in her mind, she could scant find in her heart to spare him time to go to supper, for very eagerness to animate him on, to take that bargain upon him.49

When they have eaten ("and given God thanks"), she encourages him to bargain for the whole commodity. He, it seems, thinks he cannot do it because he cannot raise a proper down-payment. But she sees the possibilities of the situation with the practiced eye of an entrepreneur and outlines a plan to her husband which is shrewd and likely to work, albeit of questionable morality. Eyre, dressed as a shoemaker, will meet the merchant and bargain for the cargo, pretending to act on behalf of a rich alderman. He will leave his small down-payment with the merchant, promising that the alderman will give him a bill for the rest. Then Eyre will dress as an alderman, meet the merchant, give him the bill, and take possession of the commodity. He will then sell the goods for enough to repay the merchant at the appointed time. The scheme will be so artfully contrived, Mistress Eyre adds, that not even their journeyman will know that Eyre is acting on his own behalf and not that of the alderman; but Eyre must be careful not to leave his name in writing.50 The plan is executed as she outlines it, and Eyre, like Jack of Newbury, starts on the pathway to virtuous wealth.

By attributing all the ingenuity to Mistress Eyre, Deloney can celebrate Eyre's later achievements as a wise, just, and charitable rich man without having had to portray him at first as an entrepreneur who has sullied himself by conjuring up a questionably honest business deal. The plan is laid at the feet of Mistress Eyre; its naked capitalistic shrewdness is decently covered by attributing it to a failing in womankind: covetousness. Eyre conveniently remains unaware of the business aspects of his fortune: to him, the ship has come to him because of God's grace. Mistress Eyre is not so humble. After she and Eyre have been feasted by the lord mayor and the lord mayor has said jestingly that a man as rich as Eyre should be mayor, Mistress Eyre comments to her husband:

Yea (thought I) he may thank his wife for that, if it comes so to pass.

Nay (said Simon) I thank God for it.

Yea, and next him you may thank me (quoth she).51

She is quite right, of course. But her lack of piety and her inability to sit back and let God shed his blessings upon her are, in Deloney's eyes, faults in her, not virtues: they make her the weaker member of the partnership. Eyre's attitude toward his "gift" of wealth is the proper one: he is concerned to give God "eternal praise" for his money, and he humbly hopes that he may "dispose thereof, as may be to [God's] honor, and the comfort of his poor members on earth."52 And Eyre is diligent in his calling as a rich man: he is a good master to his servants, he gives a feast for all the apprentices in London, he founds Leaden Hall, and he serves the city first as sheriff, then as lord mayor.

There is, however, considerable tension in Deloney's portrait of Eyre and his wife. The Puritans' ideal is clearly visible, but so is the beginning of the spirit of capitalism. Mistress Eyre, in her covetousness, may design the scheme by which her husband becomes rich, but it is Eyre who carries it out. And while Deloney laughs at Mistress Eyre's ambition, he makes it quite clear that her business sense is responsible for Eyre's success. In spite of Deloney's efforts to mold the Eyres to accepted morality, the merchant and his wife appear as two aspects of the same phenomenon: pious capitalism.53

Having approached a recognition of the spirit of capitalism, Deloney investigates the possibilities of gaining wealth still further in his next novel.54 The hero of the first story in The Gentle Craft, Part II is Richard Casteler, the only one of Deloney's characters whose wealth cannot be attributed to God's mercy or his wife's aggressiveness. Unlike Jack of Newbury, Casteler is the epitome of ambitious industry:

The lovely Maidens of the City of Westminster, noting what a good husband Richard Casteler was and seeing how diligently he followed his business, judged in the end he would prove a rich man: for which cause many bore unto him a very good affection, and few there was that wished not themselves to be his wife.55

It is not altogether clear, however, that Deloney approves of Casteler's diligence; we must remember Deloney's attitude toward women who see a sure gain in sight. Deloney does not himself indulge in praising Casteler; he merely points out that the man's ambition wins him the admiration of Mistress Eyre's spiritual sisters in Westminster. The emphasis in the opening paragraphs of the story is not on Casteler but on the "lovely Maidens" who wink at him in church, curtsey to him in his shop, give him flowers, and stand in their doorways watching him pass while they decide he is bound to be very wealthy since he is so "wise and thrifty." Here again, Deloney is laughing at the aggressiveness and covetousness of womankind.

The smiles of the lovely maidens prepare us for another of Deloney's tales in which love and business are happily united. But in this story, Deloney treats fruitful marriage and devotion to business as being mutually exclusive. The plot concerns the industrious Richard's courtship by (not of) two Westminster maidens, Gillian of the George and Long Meg of Westminster. Gillian is an entrepreneur; she wants to marry Richard because he is a good businessman and is sure to be rich. She is, in fact, so sure that he is the best investment she can make that she has refused another man who is "wealthy, and therewithall of very good conversation."56 Meg, on the other hand, wants to share with Richard a life of good food, good wine, and abundant amorous delight. The ideal husband, as she describes him, is one who saves the best morsels of meat for his wife and spends the hours after supper "fetching many stealing touches at her ruby lips," until, when he hears the clock strike eight, he calls her to bed for a "sweet" night of pleasure.57

Richard, the object of these affections, is known to be "mightily addicted to the getting of money." His diligence is proverbial: he is known as the "Cock of Westminster" because he rises at four in the morning to be at work. It is also known that he does not shut his shop until ten or eleven at night. This industrious man is courteous to Meg and Gillian when they visit him, but his heart is obviously not in the courtship. When Meg and Gillian have left his shop, he expresses annoyance at the loss of his working time:

here is a forenoon spent to no purpose, and all by means of a couple of giglets, that have greater desire to be playing with a man than to be mindful to follow their business: but if I live, I will suddenly avoid both their delights and their loves.58

Richard's coldness is in part a result of his distaste for the forwardness of Meg and Gillian. But Deloney repeatedly suggests that his rejection, especially of Meg, is expressive of the same nature that makes him so passionately devoted to his work: a nature in which something is missing. In suggesting that Richard is a little imperfect in some ways, Deloney takes advantage of the sexual undertones of Richard's nickname. Long Meg, for example, tells Gillian that she fears "though he be a Cock by name, he will never prove a Cock of the game."59 Later, after Richard has married a coy but industrious Dutch girl, Meg reflects again on the possible connections between his working habits and his lack of virility:

by this good day I am glad I have 'scaped him, for I do now consider I should have never took rest after four o'clock in the morning, and alas, a young married wife would be loath to rise before eight or nine: beside that I should never have gone to bed before ten or eleven, or twelve o'clock by that means, what a deal of time should I have lost above other women: have him quoth you? now God bless me, I swear by Venus, the fair goddess of sweet love, in the mind I am in, I would not have him, if he had so much as would lie in Westminster Hall.60

This is certainly sour grapes; but Meg's suspicions are confirmed by Richard's matrimonial failings. Three years after Richard's wedding, his journeyman Robin teases him because he has no children. The ensuing dialogue, again playing on the implications of Richard's nick-name, relates his childlessness to his diligence:

Hold thy peace (quoth Richard) all this while I have but jested, but when I fall once in earnest, thou shalt see her belly will rise like a Tun of New Ale, thou knowst I am the Cock of Westminster.

Aye (quote Robin) you had that name,
More for your rising, than your goodness in Venus' game.

Everybody laughs, but Deloney adds that the joke was remembered for seven years after, for the Castelers remained childless:

Therefore Robin would often say, that either his Master was no perfect Man, or else his Mistress was in her infancy nourished with the milk of a Mule, which bred such barrenness in her …61

The marriage of Richard Casteler and his pretty Dutch wife is sterile. We do not know who is at fault, and we certainly do not have to believe (as Meg implies) that Richard works so hard he has no time for amorous delights. Whatever connection there is between his childlessness and his working is much more subtle. Richard is never openly condemned for working hard; Deloney says at the end of the tale that Richard is generous to the poor throughout his life and at his death. But he never relates the increase of Richard's wealth to the increase of his responsibilities; he merely relates his diligence to his empty house. The implication is that there is something a little wrong with a man who is so "mightily addicted to the getting of money" that he labors twenty hours out of twenty-four. Instead of using his Poor Richard's example to inculcate "Industry and Frugality, as the Means of procuring Wealth, and thereby securing Virtue," Deloney relates Casteler's gain to his spiritual and sensual loss.62

Having thus turned away from the capitalistic implications of his presentation of Eyre, Deloney stops experimenting with ways of reconciling gain and accepted morality. In his last novel, Thomas of Reading, he retreats to the technique of Heywood, ignoring his heroes' acquisition of money entirely and talking only of the charitable ways they spend it. Far from using the preachers' approval of abundant wealth and diligent work as a doctrine which encourages poor boys to make good, Deloney uses Puritan morality as a retreat from the spirit of capitalism. The ideal of the diligent rich man allows him, as it allowed the Puritan preachers, to ignore the problem of money-making and praise the spirit of liberality and social duty.

What is interesting about Deloney is that he comes very close to presenting the spirit of capitalism in terms of Puritan morality, but turns away from the possibility. Deloney does admire poor boys made good, but not poor boys who make themselves good. The capitalistic spirit, as he presents it in Jack of Newbury and the two parts of The Gentle Craft, is not a virtue but a flaw. The diligent pursuit of money is narrowing. It may be acceptable in a woman, but women are by nature narrow already; even the best of them think of nothing but financial security, social status, and love (in that order), so a talented woman loses none of her attractiveness by being good at accumulating material things. But devotion to making money is certainly not a good trait in a man, for men should be involved in the serious concerns of life: feeding the poor, caring for servants, filling public offices, defending the realm. The diligent man who has his priorities in order will leave the pursuit of abundance, as he leaves courtship, to attractive, entrepreneurial women. Thus, Deloney appears to recognize the "new concessions" to wealth which Hill says are implicit in Puritan theology, but he refuses to acknowledge these concessions as a liberating moral force. In his reluctance to approve the spirit of capitalism, he assigns it, as he would certainly have assigned the first bite of the forbidden fruit, to the sex that caused the Fall….

Notes

1 H. R. Trevor-Roper has disputed this idea in "Religion, the Reformation and Social Change." See his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change and Other Essays (London, 1967), pp. 1–45. Christopher Hill has suggested that the doctrine of individuality of conscience may have had more to do with the reconciliation of Calvinism and capitalism than the "work ethic." See "Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism," in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, in Honour of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge, Eng., 1961), pp. 15–39.

2Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; reprint, New York, 1954), p. 199.

3 "William Perkins: Elizabethan Apostle of 'Practical Divinity,'" Huntington Library Quarterly, 3 (1940), 182.

4Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (2nd. ed.: New York, 1967), pp. 129–30; Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1958; reprint, New York, 1967), p. 229.

5Religion, Order and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1969), p. 119.

6 Charles and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton, 1961), pp. 172, 143.

7 Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 637–38, 190–91.

8Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, 1969), p. 252….

42 See Merritt Lawlis, Apology for the Middle Class: the Dramatic Novels of Thomas Deloney (Bloomington, 1960).

43 "Thomas Deloney and Thomas Heywood: Two Views of the Elizabethan Merchant" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa, 1966), p. 36.

44 "Design in Jack of Newbury, " PMLA, 88 (1973), 236.

45The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford, 1912), pp. 3–4.

46Ibid., p. 8.

47Ibid., p. 15.

48 Kurt-Michael Pätzold has pointed out that none of the characters who rise to social prominence in Jack of Newbury do so because of their diligence and thrift: Randoll Pert, the children in Jack's "factory," and the maid Joan all "make good" because of the generosity of their social superiors. See Historischer Roman und Realismus Das Erzählwerk Thomas Deloney in Sprache und Literature: Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Regensburg, 1972), pp. 62–63.

49 Deloney, Works, p. 113.

50Ibid., pp. 113–15.

51Ibid, p. 117.

52Ibid, p. 121.

53 Pätzold maintains that Eyre's story, like Jack's, indicates that Deloney does not think diligence is enough to make a man wealthy (Historischer Roman, pp. 64–65). But he does not point out that Eyre is very nearly an entrepreneur, whereas Jack is not. It seems possible that the entrepreneurial aspect of Eyre's rise disturbed Deloney. Between the chapter in which Mistress Eyre outlines her plan and the ensuing chapter, there is a strange break: the chapter which should present Eyre's dealing with the merchant and his invitation to the lord mayor's banquet is left out. This leaves the story oddly unfinished; the omission suggests Deloney's ambivalent attitude towards Eyre's success. When Thomas Dekker adopted Eyre's story in making his play, The Shoemaker's Holiday, he followed Deloney in making the transaction by which Eyre rises very vague. The audience knows that Eyre will get a good deal on the ship's cargo, and it sees Eyre put on fine clothes before talking to the merchant, but there is nothing in the play which suggests that Eyre's transaction will be dishonest. The audience does not see the transaction itself. Dekker treats the whole episode without considering its entrepreneurial aspects. See The Shoemaker's Holiday, Act II, scene iii, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), I, 40–44.

54 On the chronology of Deloney's novels, see Lawlis, Apology, pp. 5–6. The early editions of the novels were read out of existence; it cannot, therefore, be said positively that The Gentle Craft, Part II was written before Thomas of Reading. Lawlis and Mann agree, however, that Thomas was probably Deloney's last novel. See Deloney, Works, p. 547.

55 Deloney, Works, p. [141]. Wright quotes this passage to show that Deloney's approval of diligence is unqualified. Middle-Class Culture, p. 190.

56 Deloney, Works, pp. 144–45.

57Ibid., p. 143.

58Ibid., p. 152.

59Ibid., p. 145.

60Ibid., p. 162.

61Ibid., p. 170.

62The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven and London, 1964), p. 164.

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