SOURCE: "Thomas Deloney and Middle-Class Fiction," in Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 238–80.

[In the excerpt below, Davis provides a detailed analysis of each of Deloney's novels. The critic discusses Deloney's adaptation of his sources; his structural methods; his idealized heroes; and significant differences between Thomas of Reading and Deloney's other prose fiction.]

The only point of positive contact between the university wit Thomas Nashe and the silk-weaver turned balladeer whom he scorned is their common reliance, probably through the influence of Greene, on material from the sixteenth-century jest books.¹ Nashe presented Jack Wilton at the outset of The Unfortunate Traveller as a witty rogue like Scoggin or Peele, and went on to document by a string of witty jests Wilton's pride in his ability to cozen his companions. The opening of Thomas Deloney's first work of fiction, The Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb, in his younger yeares called Jacke of Newberie (ca. 1597), reads like a homespun paraphrase of Nashe's hyberbolical beginning. As he writes elsewhere, "expect not herein to find any matter of light value, curiously pen'd with pickt words, or choise phrases, but a quaint and plaine discourse."² Absent is all the comic stuffing we [find] in Nashe, and instead of a comic contrast between Henry VIII's high deeds and Jack Wilton's low jests, we have Henry providing a concrete context for John Winchcomb: "In the daies of King Henery the eight that most noble and victorious Prince, in the beginning of his reigne, John Winchcomb, a broad cloth Weaver, dwelt in Newberie, a towne in Barkshire: who for that he was a man of a merry disposition, and honest conversation, was wondrous wel-beloved of Rich and Poore, especiallie because in every place where hee came, hee would spend his money with the best, and was not at any time found a churle of his purse" (5).³ There is nothing of the jest-book tone here; Jack Winch-comb lays claim to our attention not by his wit in overcoming his companions but by his harmonious relation with his society, by his tact and a popularity based concretely on the prudent use of money. Nashe took jest material as part and parcel of a view of life as essentially ridiculous; the sober Deloney used it for quite different ends.

There is abundant jest material in Jacke of Newberie, one third of the book being in effect detached jests: the ruse by which Sir George Rigley is made to marry one of Jack's maids (Chapter XI); the gulling of the Italian merchant Benedick (Chapter VII); the flouting of Mistress Frank (Chapter X); or the maidens' avenging themselves on Will Summers (himself the hero of a jest book)⁴ for damaging their looms by flinging fistfuls of dog turd in his face in the manner of Owleglasse (Chapter IV). Moreover, the first chapter is largely a reworking of "the burnynge of olde John" in A C. Mery Talys (ca. 1545), transposing the man's attempt to get into his mistress' bed into the widow's attempt to get Jack into hers.⁵ Yet for all this, the tone of the whole book is far removed from that of the jest books, partly because Deloney's hero is himself seldom the perpetrator of the jests, and partly because Deloney emphasizes social comment and comic justice in the jests, whose victims, usually proud and haughty, richly deserve their comedowns.

Such a modulation of tone can frequently be observed in several books that exhibit the interrelationships between the jest book and serious fiction at the end of the sixteenth century. For example, some of the "jest biographies," wherein jests are gathered around a single hero like Skelton, Owleglasse, Scoggin, Tarlton, or Peele, often in a rough chronological sequence, approach the kind of biographical fiction we find in Jacke of Newberie.⁶ This fact has tempted some critics to label Dobsons Drie Bobbes (1607), the most unified of them, as "one of the truly significant Renaissance novels."⁷ A movement in another direction appears in The Tinker of Turvey (1630), an interesting revision of a Chaucerian jest book, The Cobbler of Canterbury (1590), which by embracing the novella manages to rise in an unbroken chain of tonalities from jest through romance to tragedy. Some nominal works of fiction, on the other hand, might just as well as be classified as jest books, such as Part II of Deloney's own The Gentle Craft or Nicholas Breton's Grimellos Fortunes (1604), which is really a series of jests framed by a satire on the five professions of scholar, courtier, soldier, lawyer, and farmer.

Moreover, it is not uncommon to find middle-class sentiment infiltrating some jest books so completely as to convert their heroes from witty rogues like Jack Wilton to admirable merchants, whose jests are not scurrile pranks but rather, as in Jacke of Newberie, witty exhibitions of common sense or comic justice. The hero of Richard Johnson's The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson the Merry Londoner (1607), for example, is "a homely plain man" admired for his equitable temperament as well as for his wit. A kind man, Hobson frequently uses the jest as a means of giving the haughty their well-deserved comeuppance or (as in his fifth jest, which is merely a humorous method of ensuring his prentices' attendance at church) for doing good. Long Meg of The Life and Pranks of Long Meg of Westminster (ca. 1590), who reappears in Part II of The Gentle Craft, is a widely celebrated folk-heroine. She is a militant champion of the distressed lower classes, "for whatsoever she got of the rich (as her gettings were great) she bestowed it liberally on them that had need,"⁸ and most of her jests involve raising the actual toward an ideal state by such charitable deeds as succouring poor soldiers, redressing the wrongs of highwaymen, putting down the proud oppressors, and so forth; her final act is to establish her own inn as a hostel for the oppressed.

Deloney's debt to the jest books extends beyond the incorporation of jest episodes, the use of the jest for social or moral commentary, and the establishment of a folk-hero. It extends to something more pervasive, a structural method. We might say that Deloney used the technique of the jest books not as a tool for criticizing or even destroying ideals, as Nashe had done, but as a means to structure an ideal.

Though Anthony Munday was the first writer of Elizabethan fiction to divide his book into distinct parts by chapters,⁹ Deloney was the first to make each chapter a discrete unit, and to build up an entire book by means of such units. Deloney thought in terms of the individual chapter, and he conceived of it in a peculiar way, as a miniature drama or dramatic scene. In Jacke of Newberie we have, instead of continuity, several vignettes from his life distinct from each other in time, place, and cast.¹⁰ Frequently a chapter will amount to little more than a brief sketch of the situation or setting followed by lengthy colloquial dialogue; on occasion it will be even more scenic, as in the abrupt opening of Chapter VIII, where we do not even know who is speaking:

Good morrow Gossip, now by my truely I am glad to see you in health. I pray you how dooth Maister Winchcombe? What never a great belly yet? now fie, by my fa your husband is waxt idle.

Trust mee Gossip, saith mistresse Winchcombe, a great belly comes sooner then a new coate. (69)

A major result of the fact that Deloney thought in terms of scenes is that each of his chapters has a distinct, well-rounded structure of its own. One of the most explicit instances of this is the eleventh and last chapter, whose structure is frequently mirrored in its verbal texture, as here: "to become high, she laid her selfe so low, that the Knight suddenly fell over her, which fall became the rising of her belly" (82). It is a structure based on reversal: the knight Sir George Rigley gets Jack's maid with child and abandons her. In order to see justice done, Jack exalts the maid by disguising her as the wealthy widow Mistress Lovelesse, and then encourages Sir George to become her humble suitor. Her rise and his humbling meet in marriage and solidify when the two join Jack's household; Jack gives the whole action social significance by assuring Rigley "that I account the poorest wench in my house too good to be your whore" (86). A structure of reversal from high to low or from low to high position in fortune is common to most of the chapters: the king's jester Will Summers is brought low by Jack's maidens (Chapter IV), the courtly Italian merchant Benedick is foiled when he joins a pig in bed (Chapter VII), the haughty Mistress Frank is made the laughingstock of the town (Chapter X), the bankrupt Randoll Pert is raised by Jack's help to the position of Sheriff of London (Chapter IX), and Jack himself is always rising, as when, within the compass of a chapter, he progresses from the position of a humble suitor of Henry VIII to his host, and overcomes Cardinal Wolsey in the process (Chapter III).

Deloney's chapter headings—such as "How Jack of Newberies Servants were revenged of their Dames tattling Gossip" or "How Jack of Newberie went to receive the King"—indicate quite clearly the origins of his structural technique, for their wording reflects the standard headings of jests: "How Tarlton plaid the drunkard before the Queene," "How George Peele became a Physician," or "How Scogin was shriven and hosted." The jests are short, dramatic, and telling, as are Deloney's chapters; and, moreover, their standard technique, like that of many jokes, is reversal, whereby the intended victim, who stands on his dignity at the beginning, is brought low by the rogue in a sudden turn of events. Such reversals abound in the jest biographies of Skelton, Scoggin, and others, for example in the jest in which George Peele gets revenge on a gentlewoman who had mocked him by seating her beside him at dinner: "as she put out her arme to take the Capon, George, sitting by her, yerks me out a huge ****, which made all the company in a maze one looking upon the other: yet they knew it came that way. Peace, quoth George, and jogs her on the elbow, I will say it was I. At which all the Company fell into a huge laughter, shee into a fretting fury."¹¹ Another conveniently succinct example is afforded by Number 42 of Tales and Quicke Answeres (which, because of its verbal emphasis, should be categorized as a quick answer rather than a merry tale): "A courtier on a tyme that alyghted of his horse at an Inde gate sayde to a boye that stode therby: Ho, syr boye, holde my horse. The boye, as he had ben aferde, answered: O maister, this a fierce horse; is one able to holde him? Yes, quod the courtier, one may holde hym well inough. Well, quod the boye, if one be able inough, than I pray you holde hym your owne selfe."¹² What Deloney essentially did with the struc ture of jest was to clarify it by extension: to prolong the reversal beyond a moment by dialogue and other means, to fix the reversal by making it important in the character's life, and to give it significance by introducing and stressing its social dimensions.

Deloney's inheritance from the jest books included a problem, that of total structure. By what means could a series of detached scenes be welded into a satisfying whole? The only one of the jest books that attempted to deal with this problem was Dobsons Drie Bobbes: Sonne and Heire to Skoggin (1607). This is genuine biography, in that it begins with George Dobson's childhood adventures and ends with his reform, and attempts continuity, especially near the beginning, by supplying purely narrative links between one jest and another. Most importantly, it attempts to trace the growth of a rogue's character by showing how one jest begets another, chiefly in that one jest is seen as revenge for another. The jests do not progress in complexity, but their motivations do, as Dobson progresses from victim to revenger and finally to a young man who commits his bobs merely in order to uphold his reputation as a merry wag.

Deloney devised a bolder way to create a whole out of detached scenes. He chose to retain the integrity of the distinct scene of dramatic reversal that he developed from the jest books, but emphasized the social consequences of each reversal to such an extent that a rise or fall represented not merely success or failure but a character's advancement or frustration in his progress toward a concretely realized social status. By doing this, he gave a thematic function to structure—as we saw, for example, in our examination of Chapter XI, where the emphasis on status in the verbal texture made Sir George's defeat and the maid's success issue in the establishment of a new social arrangement. In the main, Jacke of Newberie proceeds to reveal a world of values by means of a single repeated structural and thematic pattern.

This narrative pattern is set up at the outset in the wooing of Jack by his widowed employer in the clothweaving trade. Since love and marriage are presented throughout as social problems (this is true not only of Jack's marriage to his mistress, but of his second marriage and that between Sir George and the maid as well), the accomplishment of marriage consists in overcoming successive obstacles in order, hopefully, to rise to a higher position. Jack's mistress therefore seeks to establish in his mind by degrees the probability that he is meant to be her husband, and she does this by means of a stepwise or spatial motif. She has him sit beside her while she describes each of her current suitors—a tanner from Wallingford, a tailor from Hungerford, and the parson of Speenhamland—and then dismisses each in favor of "one neerer hand" (8), each time making it more apparent who that "neerer" one is. She repeats this pattern in a banquet scene, where, after all have eaten their fill, she sends the tanner, the tailor, and the parson packing, so that only Jack remains. The obstacles having thus been overcome, the way lies clear for Jack to climb into his master's bed and then to solidify his position; as he says to his former companions, "by Gods providence and your Dames favour, I am preferred from being your fellow to bee your Master" (21). This level having been reached, there now ensues the age-old struggle for sovereignty. Jack is technically his mistress' husband, but she still treats him as her laborer. In a series of tricks, he first locks her out of the house, then she locks him out (marital relations having centered on possession of goods), and they finally agree to treat one another as equals, each respecting the other's will.

The pattern established in the first chapter infuses theme into structure by making reversal a matter of overcoming obstacles in order to rise to a new level of action, and then, on that level, of redefining (or really creating) a new field of action, after which a new step "upward" will occur. At the beginning, the context which defines Jack's actions is a purely personal one: he has power over his own life only, and therefore seeks to improve his personal fortune. When he succeeds in doing this by rising to the position of husband and master of both the household and the home industry, the sphere of action broadens into a domestic context and Jack can expand horizontally (so to speak) by consolidating the marriage and improving the industry. The boundaries of this new level of operation are reached when, a few years after his wife's death, he has so improved the industry as to make it his own little community, containing well over four hundred laborers in livery, with its own butcher, brewer, baker, and so forth. Instead of finding his place in his wife's world, Jack now resides in a world of his own which reflects his concerns. It is a model community with plenteous food and lodging for all, and filled with singing.

In the security of the new context that Jack has created for himself, he can repeat his pattern of good fortune by raising one of his workers, a girl from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, to the status of his second wife. The moment of their wedding is also the moment when Jack takes a further step upward out of the domestic context and into a civic and county-wide one, for the local nobility as well as his neighbors grace the wedding; now Jack can operate more powerfully in the county affairs of Berkshire as magistrate and representative.

The final step upward will come when Jack faces Henry VIII, and his ultimate field of action will be the nation rather than the county. Such a rise must be accomplished with circumspection, and Jack chooses to rise chiefly by means of shows that draw the attention of others to him. By making himself into an emblem (as it were) he both solidifies his own opinion of his nature and status and holds it out to others, in the hope that they will grasp it and draw him into their orbit. The emblems he presents show an interesting progression. His first pageant is played before the queen on the way to Flodden Field with his "fiftie tall men well mounted in white coates, and red caps with yellowe Feathers, Demilances in their hands, and fiftie armed men on foot with Pikes, and fiftie shot in white coats also" (30). The dual stress on neatness of clothing and featness in arms shows Jack as the clothier-soldier, the humble merchant striving to show his sovereign that he can operate in the field of war as well as many another. When the envious spurn him, Jack smears his white coat with blood and the queen, grasping the nature of the case, takes him under her protection.

Protection having been established, he next strives for a more equal footing. He interrupts the king's progress through Berkshire by a show of himself as Emperor of Ants defending his anthill against the Prince of Butterflies, an emblem that both directs satire at Wolsey (who is oppressing the commons) and presents Jack as a kind of mock-image in his small context of what Henry represents in his larger one. Jack is really striving for a delicately balanced relation between himself and the king, for while he refuses to be absorbed into the court as retainer (he later refuses a knighthood), he still wants the kind of equal treatment such a position would entail; he wants the commons and the nobility separate but equal, as it were. He gets what he wants, for Henry comes to him and then promises, "God a mercy good Jack … I have often heard of thee, and this morning I mean to visite thy house" (37).

The visit of the King of England to the home of the Emperor of Ants constitutes the apex of Jack's career. In the highly favorable position of host, Jack can present to Henry another emblem, a golden beehive as the image of a commonwealth wherein each part labors harmoniously for the benefit of all:

Loe here presented to your Royall sight,
The figure of a flourishing Common-wealth:
Where vertuous subjects labour with delight,
And beate the drones to death which live by stealth.
(38)

It is notable that this image of an almost Edenic egalitarian commonwealth is reflected concretely in the orderly operation of Jack's household, and is announced clearly in the song that Jack's weavers sing to Henry:

What has happened here is that Jack has created for himself a sphere in which the domestic world he has created and the national situation he dreams of have merged, so that the household which before illustrated an ideal community now expresses the ideal common-wealth. With this, Jack finally takes the step up into a national context, where the field of possible actions again broadens. Now, as a figure famous throughout the nation, Jack can attack the national problems of the cloth trade and foreign affairs instead of local ones, and can even enlist Henry's help against the oppressions of Wolsey. Jack's major effort in this field is to lead the clothiers to London to seek repeal of Wolsey's edict against trade with the Low Countries. The terms in which Henry grants their suit show how persuasive Jack's image of the commonwealth as beehive has been: "As the Clergie for the Soule, the Souldier for defence of his Countrie, the Lawyer to execute justice, the Husbandman to feede the belly: So is the skilfull Clothier no lesse necessary for the clothing of the backe, whom wee may reckon among the chiefe Yeomen of our Land" (58).

At this point, the possibility of rising further is blocked and the field of vision firmly fixed in its limits, for Jack refuses the knighthood that would lift him into the realm of the court and politics. This plateau has been reached about halfway through the book, in Chapter III; what follows is a rather static and disjointed set of episodes illustrating Jack's activities in his new position. Though there is no sense of progression in this latter part, it achieves a kind of unity by repeating the thematic and structural motif used throughout Jack's rise to this final field of action. Chapter IV, in which Jack's maids requite the king's jester Will Summers, is a kind of low-life parallel to Jack's social defeat of Cardinal Wolsey in the anthill tableau and in the entertainments at his home. The fifth chapter, succeeding the king's visit, universalizes Jack's rise by pointing out parallels to it in chronicle history and by inviting imitation of the hero. Here Jack is presenter: "Of the pictures which Jacke of Newbery had in his house, whereby hee encouraged his servants to seeke for fame and dignitie." The theme of each of the fifteen portraits is Jack's theme:

In the first was the picture of a sheepheard before whom kneeled a great King named Viriat, who sometime governed the people of Portugal.

See heere quoth Jacke, the father a Shepheard, the sonne a Soveraigne. (52–53)

The series of emblematic analogues includes seven emperors of Rome and two popes, as well as sundry European kings.

In the series of episodes from Jack's later life which follows, the theme takes both comic and serious forms. There are the social comedies of Sir George coming down to the level of the maid and the carting of the haughty Mistress Frank, for example. The exposure of the Italian merchant Benedick by an ordinary English weaver has many levels of satire: the mere laborer overcoming the wealthy man, the simple, honest Englishman overreaching the subtle Italian, the triumph of honest virtue over courtly love, even a stylistic battle between good, simple English and Benedick's mad farrago of dialect and Euphuism. The main serious version of the theme is Jack's only action in his new national position, the successful petition to revoke Wolsey's edict. Another episode, subordinate to this one, is Jack's elevation of Randoll Pert from a bankrupt to a respectable merchant, from which position he eventually rises to become Sheriff of London. The effect of all these variations on a theme is to show Jack in the act of creating a set of values out of his own experience, as in Part II of [Samuel Richardson's] Pamela: raising others to positions analogous to his, drawing the prudent and hardworking into his orbit, and excluding the proud and pretentious. It was in this way that Deloney used the standard technique of the jest books—the emphasis on the single scene of reversal—to structure an ideal.

With each major narrative step in Jacke of Newberie, the range of possible activities open to its hero expands: at first he can only work hard and save his money, but finally he is able to operate in national affairs and safeguard the welfare of his class. At first glance, this may look like the sort of "process plot" we [found] in Nashe, but it must be noted that while the probabilities change, their grounds never change. In [Nashe's] The Unfortunate Traveller we [saw] the grounds of probability constantly shifting: rebels are objects of scorn, dead rebels are objects of pity; grave moral advice is nonsense, grave moral advice turns out to be true, and so forth. In Jacke of Newberie the possibilities are exactly the same on every level: Jack will show forth his virtue and be rewarded, whether by mistress, town, or king. In Pamela (to contrast Deloney's book with the novel that most closely shares its presuppositions), the action depends on our acceptance of the threat that virtue will not be rewarded through most of the book; Jacke of Newberie never allows us to entertain any such doubts.

Deloney's book is, in fact, an example of "constructivist" fiction, for the process of reading it is equivalent to the process of watching Jack build up a context for himself to operate in. In the terms we have used in examining the bulk of Elizabethan fiction, idea is not tested by action here, but rather action establishes idea, proves and elaborates it; and while Jack plays many roles, each is consistently assumed to be his real identity. He is what he plays: the local magistrate, the petitioner to the king, the complete success. The identity of role and actor, of idea and act, is part of the book's notable harmony of tone—and of its dogmatism as well. For Jacke of Newberie is essentially a return to the older Humanist mode of fiction, the fiction of building up an ideal out of the actual. What we see in it is the construction of a homespun Utopia, first in the image of the perfect home industry, then (through the emblems of anthill, beehive, and household) the image of the perfect commonwealth with all parts working in harmony. In the latter half of the book, we inspect this Utopia in detail.

Deloney presents the ideal as being constructed by the progress of a character, both because the ideal springs from the empirical experience of the character and because, having no preexisting status in an intellectual tradition, it must be defined as the book unfolds. Reality herein is defined as a thing more simple and exclusive than in many another piece of Elizabethan fiction: it is defined in terms of money and power. Any other factors in reality are either aspects of socio-economic position or qualities that it symbolizes. Love and marriage are means of gaining position, moral virtue is the quality rewarded by position.

John Winchcomb is an ideal of good nature, shrewdness, industry, and piety. He is as exemplary a figure as any of Forde's wooden heroes, and never suffers the kind of failure or even embarrassment (or the rise to wisdom consequent on failure) experienced by Pamela, Tom Jones, Pyrocles, Musidorus, Euphues, or F. J. His narrator dotes on him, and never allows any irony to interfere with his loving presentation. Any criticism of Winchcomb's actions is neutralized by being put into the mouths of the envious. If his ostentatious appearance with his troops before the queen makes him appear a designing arriviste, that judgment is immediately given unfavorable presentation by assigning it to "some other envying heereat" who "gave out words that hee shewed himselfe more prodigall then prudent, and more vaine glorious then well advised, seeing that the best Nobleman in the Countrie would scarce have done so much" (30–31); ostentation is turned to patriotism by the unconscious irony of their comment. The only people who accuse Jack of pride are the proud themselves: the haughty prelate Wolsey, who is trying to live down his origins as a butcher's son, and the comically proud Mistress Frank, who gets her comeuppance late in the book.

Merritt E. Lawlis has pointed out one trait that differentiates Deloney's idealized heroes from those of chivalric romance:

The tradesmen heroes are almost as idealized as the kings. They reward virtue and punish vice, but they themselves are allowed only a passive role in the action of the story. Young Jack of Newbury is wooed by a designing widow; Simon Eyre achieves great wealth through a rather shady plan engineered by Mistress Eyre. In each case the hero reaches a desired goal without having to turn a hand. Presumably if he had turned a hand, he would have soiled it.¹³

Perhaps another reason for the hero's curious passivity can be found in the informal Calvinism which suffuses Deloney's fiction. According to popular expositions, economic success was one of the surest evidences of election; as R. H. Tawney and others have shown, misfortune was a sign of reprobation, good fortune a sign of election.¹⁴ Therefore Jack's rise in the world is in his own eyes providential, each act proving after the fact (as it were) God's good will;¹⁵ as he says to his sometime fellow workers, "by Gods providence and your Dames favour, I am preferred from being your fellow to bee your Master…. you shall have no cause to repent that God made mee your master" (21). Because the fictional action partakes of the archetypal action of election, Jack's spiritual value increases as he ascends further up the socio-economic ladder, and makes that rise meaningful. Hence, too, Jack's action is equivalent to self-display, to showing forth his righteousness in prudent spending, in equipping a company of soldiers, or in presenting situations by means of shows; and the advancement of the plot is equivalent to others taking notice of his virtue and rewarding it by raising him to positions of new prominence and greater certitude. Where action is conceived of rather narrowly, as the showing forth of an ideal, the exemplary hero must perforce be passive.

The full force of Deloney's idealistic and constructivist impulse appears in Jacke of Newberie's successor, The Gentle Craft … shewing what famous men have beene Shoomakers in time past in this Land.¹⁶ Here the model is not jest biography but chronicle history, and one of some magnitude; for Deloney's ultimate plan was for a trilogy celebrating the shoemaking trade, the first part recording its origins and growth, the second its prominence in London, and a third (never completed) its acts and monuments throughout the countryside.¹⁷ Part I is especially chronicle-like, since it examines myths and origins, attempting to establish the source of the epithets "gentle craft" for shoemaking and "St. Hugh's bones" for shoemaker's tools, of the phrase "A Shoomakers sonne is a Prince borne," and of the annual Shrovetide feast of the London prentices. In three separate tales, arranged chronologically, it traces the honored craft from its first receipt of garlands to its contemporary eminence. Deloney drew upon diverse materials for his tales: the first two stem from The Golden Legend, the third from Stow's Chronicles.¹⁸ The resultant tales differ even more strikingly in genre, the first being saint's legend, the second romance, the third realistic history. It is interesting to note that in this way Deloney managed to contain in a single book three traditional phases through which literature has often passed: myth, or tales of the godlike; romance or epic, or tales of men in converse with the supernatural; and realistic fiction concerning man in his own human society.¹⁹ The three kinds of tale are so different that their only point of contact is their common goal of glorifying the trade and constructing a tradition for it; naturally, the values inherent in the trade and the ways in which these work are seen as entirely different in each tale.

The legend of St. Winifred and St. Hugh (Chapters I through IV) is set in the dim past, in the supernatural world of Winifred's Well and of ritual temptation like that undergone by St. Anthony (Hugh's voyage shows vestiges of the Odyssey). It proceeds by a kind of dialectic of love: when Hugh's quite human love for Winifred is thwarted by her conversion of love to charitas—"my love is fled to heaven," she avers (97)—he flees to the opposite pole, to the temptations of lust held out by the Sirens of Venice. But he flies from them in disgust. At last able to turn his love for Winifred into disinterested charity, he finally joins her as "a perfect Lover indeed" (109) on the scaffold of martyrdom. Hugh transforms his human love into charitas sometime during his sojourn as a shoemaker. His residence among the men of the "gentle craft," marking the period between his return from Venice and his joining Winifred in martyrdom, acts as a kind of catalyst whereby the amorous problems suffered by the prince are solved in the humble capacities of a shoemaker. The gentle craft is for Hugh a kind of retreat, as he says in his commendatory song: "The Gentle Craft is fittest then, / For poore distressed Gentlemen" (108). The craft has no intrinsic value in this tale; it is a humble place of retreat, and nothing more.

Hugh, at Winifred's Well, had appealed to his beloved by saying, "content dwells here, or no where: content me, and I will content thee," and she, in an answer, had held out a Bible to him, "read this booke, and there rests content" (97). The romance of Crispin and Crispianus (Chapters V through IX) locates content in a different place. When the two exiled princes hear some shoemakers singing at their work, they "wished it might bee their good hap to be harboured in a place of such great content" (117); and when Ursula, the king's daughter, contemplates marriage with her shoemaker Crispin, she says, "an homely Cottage shall content me in thy company" (131). Deloney's second tale envisions the gentle craft as a kind of pastoral world, a humble place of contentment to which the noble may retreat to live a happy life. Many of the standard motifs of pastoral romance and its received ideals are incorporated into this plot. The two princes, who must flee for their lives, disguise themselves and enter the shoemaker's trade; there they learn to be content, but thence they issue out again into the great world, in the dual plot of love and war so common to romance (as in Ariosto, Spenser, and Sidney): Crispin wins the love of Ursula, Crispianus wins glory on the field of battle. Aside from substituting shoemakers' virtue for shepherds', the tale glorifies the craft mainly by bringing its motif, the phrase "A Shoomakers sonne is a Prince borne," from metaphor down to the literal level, where it can operate to the honor of the craft. It starts as the inaccurate boast of Iphicratis, a shoemaker's son who rose to the throne of Perisa (128); it is then applied as metaphorical praise of the true nobility of Crispianus, the shoemaker who fights Iphicratis so valiantly (129); finally, it appears in the son produced by the clandestine marriage of Crispin and Ursula, where it becomes literal, "Now will I say and sweare … that a Shoomakers sonne is a Prince borne, joyning in the opinion of Iphicratis, and henceforth Shoomakers never shall let that terme die" (135).

It is only with the final tale of Simon Eyre (Chapters X through XV) that we get the kind of middle-class "realism" we usually associate with Deloney. The material this time comes not from The Golden Legend but from "Our English Chronicles" (139), and it concerns a fully historical person who was Lord Mayor of London in the mid-fifteenth century—a time close enough to Deloney's own and a setting like enough to his London to allow him to surround the hero with concrete contemporary detail. Eyre's story is John Winchcomb's in little, a story of socio-economic success. It is the only one of the three tales to locate virtue centrally in the trade by recording the well-deserved success of a tradesman rather than the condescension of the noble. Eyre, a moderately successful shoemaker, acquires great wealth as a result of deceiving a Greek merchant in linens, and is thereupon taken into higher social circles to become Sheriff, Alderman, and finally Lord Mayor. Like Jack, he attributes financial success to providential election after the fact: "The last day I did cast up my accounts, and I finde that Almighty God of his goodnesse hath lent me thirteen thousand pounds to maintaine us in our old age" (154). Even more strikingly than in Jack's case, his identity changes as he climbs the social ladder: "And now seeing that Simon the Shoomaker is become a Merchant, we will temper our tongues to give him that title, which his customers were wont to doe, and from henceforth call him Master Eyer" (149); when Eyre is made sheriff, a workman runs home to tell his wife, "you are now a Gentlewoman" (157); and finally, "within a few yeeres after, Alderman Eyre, being chosen Lord Maior of London, changing his copie, hee became one of the Worshipfull Company of Drapers" (167). It is part of the tale's social naturalism, which of course includes realistic dialogue and abundant reference to concrete things, that Simon Eyre's identity depends on his context, that he is what others think he is.

At the same time that the tale of Simon Eyre converts Part I of The Gentle Craft into a more realistic book, it also makes it a more exemplary book. Whereas the first two tales had located no value in the shoemaker's trade other than its worth as a pastoral retreat for the noble, Eyre's tale celebrates openly the tradesman's virtues of industry, thrift, and generosity. Hugh and the others, visitors from another world, are scarcely characters at all; good things happen to them, and they reflect credit on the craft, but they in themselves exhibit no virtues save that of humility. Eyre, on the other hand, is fully characterized and presented as an object for imitation, with his combination of wit, shrewdness, ambition, and piety. And yet, even though he is so fully characterized, he is a more exemplary figure than the saints. Hugh falls prey to lust, Winifred's choice of virginity is treated by the narrator as "overmuch superstitious" (96); but so unequivocally must Eyre stand as an ideal that, as Lawlis has pointed out, the one shady deal in his life is conceived and executed by his wife, lest he touch pitch and be defiled.²⁰ For Deloney, realism and idealism work hand in hand.

Part II of The Gentle Craft is the least unified of Deloney's books, being little more than a series of jests gathered around three heroes who in themselves scarcely receive any attention. As Deloney admits in his epistle, his original plan had come a cropper, and he had found so much material on shoemaking in London that he had been forced to gather it all together in a separate volume. To Part II, far more than to Part I, applies his warning that "the beginning shewes not the middle, nor the middle shewes not the latter end" (92); its only unity is unity of place. In the first of the three segments (Chapters I through IV), Richard Casteler merely serves as the motivation for several jests by Gillian of the George, Long Meg of Westminster (herself the heroine of a jest book), and his riming worker "Round Robin" (whose habit of extempore verse owes much to Tarifons Jests). The second segment (Chapters V through IX) has a unity approaching that we found in the latter half of Jacke of Newberie, for there we see the gallant London shoemaker Peachey becoming the center of a growing world as Tom Drum, Harry Nevell, and Sir John Rainsford gravitate to his shop at Fleet Street. But Peachey's set of values is not germane to his class and trade; rather, it pushes him out of his class, for what is notable in him and his followers is their ability at arms. They are shoemakers who are celebrated not for being good tradesmen, but for being gallant fighting men. The book fizzles out in two chapters celebrating "the merry feats" of a shoemaker called "the grene king" (256).

Along with the sense of total structure, idealism (which for Deloney depended so closely upon constructing a model) also collapsed. What we are left with in Part II is almost entirely jest-book material for merriment (as the title page promises) instead of eulogism, a loose string of entertaining adventures. Here we see the basic interest in telling stories, which will terminate in the structural masterpiece Thomas of Reading, starting to absorb exemplary interests and intents….

Ernest A. Baker gave this final judgment on Deloney:

In truth, there is always something lacking in Deloney which is fundamental, something that cannot be dispensed with in a story, as distinguished from what is at best only an amusing display of manners and peculiarities. There is nothing much going on in his tales; there is no real business, except business in the particular sense, and of that there is too much. Allowance must of course be made for one of his main incentives in writing. He put himself forward as the eulogist and defender of the trading corporations. Hence the economic element, which many writers tend to overlook, essential though it be in the structure of life, all but monopolizes the story interest.³⁸

In the main the verdict is a just one; we have seen many consequences of Deloney's sacrifice of narrative interest to eulogistic motives, and several reasons for it. But to this verdict must be excepted Deloney's masterpiece, Thomas of Reading (ca. 1600),³⁹ where the basic, vital impulse of telling a story and locating its own meaning in it rises above any didactic intentions.

In Thomas of Reading ideas of value are not established by action, but are discussed, and even modified by experience, as they are in the best work of Deloney's predecessors. A case in point is the minor incident of the Halifax hanging law. When Hodgekins of Halifax persuades King Henry I to issue an edict permitting summary hanging of cloth-thieves, he conceives of it as an economic necessity to remedy the heavy losses the clothiers have suffered at the hands of rogues. But when economics is put to the test, the case is altered: when, in Chapter VIII, the first thieves actually come before the citizens of Halifax, human feeling turns against the death penalty, the people are so moved with pity that no one will consent to be the hangman, and the thieves go free. Then a third and objective point of view enters, and it carries the weight of religious authority: a friar reproves Hodgekins, telling him that "compassion is not to be had upon theeves and robbers: pitty onely appertayneth to the vertuous sort, who are overwhelmed with the waves of misery and mischaunce" (310). We are not done yet, for the resolution of the conflict between economics and feeling by absolute precept is itself submitted to experiential scrutiny, but this time the testing is done indirectly, by analogy and juxtaposition. The chapter immediately succeeding this one is devoted to a short tale of two base-minded, cowardly, and foolish London catchpoles who are successfully bilked of their prey, Tom Dove, by the kindly giant Jarret. In this tale, where the victim of law is a man besieged by debtors rather than a thief, the defeat of the law by kindness is stressed, and much is made of the disgrace of the office of catchpole: "notwithstanding that it was an office most necessary in the commonwealth, yet did the poorest wretch despise it, that lived in any estimation among his neighbours" (312). The final position which Chapter IX reflects back onto Chapter VIII is that justice must be done, but that the just man will refuse to profit by it.

The dual attitude toward justice as both necessary and restrictive of normal human impulse crops up in several places in the book. The fabliau of Cutbert of Kendall and old Bosom's wife Winifred is dispersed between Chapters II and V, and is conducted from two different points of view. In Chapter II the planned adultery, as seen by Cutbert and Winifred, is justified by the naturalness of their desires, by the lighthearted wit they use to hide their intents, and by a view of old Bosom (which the narrator shares) as

… a foule sloven, [who] went alwayes with his nose in his bosome, and one hand in his pocket, the other on his staffe, figuring forth a description of cold winter, for he alwaies wore two coates, two caps, two or three paire of stockings, and a high paire of shooes, over the which he drew on a great paire of lined slippers, and yet he would oft complaine of cold…. This lump of cold ice had lately married a yong wife, who was as wily as she was wanton. (275)

But when the adultery is about to occur, in Chapter V, it is presented through the eyes of old Bosom, who quite understandably sees it as horrible: "O abominable dissimulation, monstrous hypocrisie" (289). The overdone tragical rant modulates to cool irony as Bosom catches them in the act and, with full comic and moral justice, hoists Cutbert in a basket, there to reveal him to all as a villain who buys his mutton too dear (293).

Deloney's fidelity to a chosen point of view is remarkable here, as it is in his various presentations of King Henry I. Henry is rendered in as objective a fashion as possible, mainly because the narrator refuses to offer comment, and puts opinions in the mouths of a variety of characters. In Chapter I, Henry's rather Machiavellian plan to support his position on the throne he has usurped from Robert, Duke of Normandy by cultivating the lower classes is presented flatly, without comment. Only in Chapter II do we get an opinion—the clothiers'—and then it is dual: dislike of the king's enemies but pity for their distressed families "turned out of doores succorlesse and friendlesse" (272). In Chapter IV the king speaks like an exemplar of fatherly concern, and is praised by Thomas Cole of Reading as "a most mild and mercifull prince" (287); but then we get his brother's unmediated view of him as well: "By me he hath received many favors, and never yet did he requite any one of them: and who is ignorant that the princely crowne which adorneth his head, is my right?" (316). In his final action, the pardoning of Margaret and the blinding of Robert, Henry is said to be "of nature mercifull"; but what we are permitted to see is his cruelty in forcing Margaret to witness her beloved's gruesome punishment—"let her not passe, till she see her lovers eies put out," he instructs his officer (334). Henry is de facto king, and must be obeyed; he is just, but a little cold and cruel. Deloney holds back nothing.

Perhaps enough has been said to show how different the world rendered in Thomas of Reading is from that of Jacke of Newberie. Few of its heroes are exemplary:⁴⁰ Thomas of Reading is likeable but is not held up as a model; Simon and Sutton are mainly seen through their wives, haughty and foolish women like Mistress Frank in Jacke of Newberie; Cutbert is a lecher, "for no meate pleased him so wel as mutton, such as was laced in a red petticoate" (274); Tom Dove, though lovable, is a prodigal; and Henry I, as we have just seen, is not undefiled. The only real models of perfection in the book are the tragic lovers Robert, Duke of Normandy and Margaret-of-the-white-hand, and they are wooden figures inherited from romance, not tradesmen-exemplars.

Moreover, Deloney is interested in his characters' fates as human beings, rather than merely in using them to point morals or adorn tales. Thomas of Reading is the only one of Deloney's books that is not a story of commercial success; the climax is the death of its titular hero, not his final attainment of status. Thomas Cole's death conditions the tone of the book's latter portions, for there we find a growing sense of life's futility. This tragic tone is a totally new departure for Deloney. Instead of a gleeful acceptance of material felicity as the reward for virtue, there is only contempt for this world, as Robert announces, "Life, why what is it but a floure, a bubble in the water, a spanne long, and full of miserie" (335–36) and submits to his blinding; as Tom Dove, like Job, discovers "the small trust that is in this false world" (338); as Margaret, smeared with ashes, cries out, "now farewell the world, farewell the pleasures of this life" (343). The book ends with the pious deaths of all. What is important to Thomas of Reading alone among Deloney's books is not "business" but the problems of life, love, and death in time.

Only once in his three previous books had Deloney presented his readers with a hero less than exemplary, in the case of the prodigal Green King of The Gentle Craft, Part I. And only once before had he stressed tonal complexity, in the Randoll Pert episode of Jacke of Newberie, where Pert is first presented as a pathetic fugitive, "ever looking behinde him, like a man pursued with a deadly weapon, fearing every twinkling of an eye to bee thrust thorow" (75), and then immediately as ludicrous, when his pants fall down: "his breech, being tyed but with one poynt, what with the haste he made, and the weaknesse of the thong, fell about his heeles: which so shackled him, that downe hee fell in the streete all along, sweating and blowing."⁴¹ What was before the exception is in Thomas of Reading the rule: relatively unidealized heroes, undeserved failure, questioning rather than assertions of value-structures, and complex tonal effects.

Perhaps, in the overall context of the middle-class fiction that we examined earlier, it will seem only mildly paradoxical that Thomas of Reading achieved its eminence as fiction by pulling romance—romantic matter and romantic structure—into the embrace of a realistic rendering of life. True, The Gentle Craft, Part I had contained both romance and "realism," but it had kept them separate, and had proceeded from romance to realism. Thomas of Reading combines the two, weaving them together so that they attain a working relation with one another. What we have in Thomas of Reading are two distinct levels of plot, the various doings of "the sixe worthie Yeomen of the West" and the noble love-tragedy of Margaret-of-the-white-hand and Robert, Duke of Normandy.

The main concern is the adventures of the clothiers: Henry's admiration of their wealth (Chapter I) and subsequent favor to them (Chapter IV) culminates in his visit to their homes (Chapter VII), and is interwoven with their experiences at various London inns, including Cutbert's seduction of Bosom's wife (Chapters II and V) and the experiences of the clothiers' wives (Chapter VI); the latter part of their adventures is dark, and includes the experiences with the hangman and the catchpoles (Chapters VIII and IX), Thomas of Reading's murder (Chapters XI and XII), and the misfortunes of Tom Dove (Chapter XIV). Interwoven with these adventures is the noble feudal tragedy of Robert and Margaret: her misfortunes as the outcast daughter of the banished Earl of Shrewsbury (Chapter III), his imprisonment (Chapter VII), their meeting and love (Chapter X), and its tragic end (Chapters XIII and XV). To the two plots belong two distinct styles (as in Chettle's Piers Plainnes, the book it most resembles). One is a high Euphuistic style: "Consider, faire Margaret (quoth he) that it lies not in mans power to place his love where he list, being the worke of an high deity. A bird was never seene in Pontus, nor true love in a fleeting mind; never shall I remove the affection of my heart, which in nature resembleth the stone Abiston, whose fire can never be cooled" (316). The other is the normal low colloquial style, where love can sometimes be conducted in these terms: "Come on, you puling baggage, quoth he, I drinke to you; here will you pledge me and shake hands?" (278).

To the two plots belong quite different views of life. Material things are of necessity important to the clothiers: their wives demand fine clothes, financial success or failure determines their ways of life, and success is achieved by hard work. To these concerns Deloney adds a vital sense of the enjoyment of life, a love of wine, women, song, and jests. In the noble tragedy of sentiment, things are quite different: Robert conceives of his duties in terms of love and honor and, in direct contrast to the sense of the nobility of labor available to the clothiers and to Henry, persists in finding labor demeaning; as he says to Margaret (and in complete ignorance of her nobility), "I muse thou canst indure this vile beseeming servitude, whose delicate limmes were never framed to prove such painefull experimentes" (314). Robert and Margaret sacrifice themselves to an ideal of fidelity in love; Jarman the innkeeper and his wife murder Cole for his money. So distant are the values of the two plots that they can make contact only through convention. Margaret has been taken in by Gray of Gloucester; she waits on table and joins the other maids in spinning. But when she meets Robert, she suddenly is made to seem a character out of pastoral romance: "It chaunced on a time, that faire Margaret with many other of her Masters folkes, went a hay-making, attired in a redde stamell petticoate, and a broad strawne hatte upon her head, she had a hay forke, and in her lappe she bore her breakfast" (314). And the scene between them is conducted in terms traditional to pastoral romance, he tempting her to love and high place, she defending the standard pastoral values: "whereas you alleage poverty to be a henderer of the hearts comfort, I find it in my selfe contrary, knowing more surety to rest under a simple habite, then a royall robe … such as are indued with content, are rich having nothing els: but he that is possessed with riches, without content, is most wretched and miserable" (316). Historically, of course, the two plots represent two worlds—the medieval world of love, tragedy, and honor, and the new world, where, as Henry says, middle-class wealth counts: "I alwayes thought (quoth he) that Englands valour was more than her wealth, yet now I see her wealth sufficient to maintaine her valour" (270–71).

Lawlis finds the interweaving of these two plots masterful. He points out that scenes from the lives of the clothiers are dispersed through the beginning, middle, and end of the book; that incidents like the Cutbert-Winifred episode are divided and placed in two separate chapters (Chapters II and V), so that they become part of the structure instead of being isolated like the Benedick episode in Jacke of Newberie; and that, "Since all the incidents, even those of a farcical nature, are clearly related either to the main plot or to the subplot, the result is a narrative density that is extremely rare in Elizabethan prose fiction" (though, we might add, it is common in pastoral romance).⁴² The two plots are carefully linked by characters: by Margaret, Gray's servant and Robert's mistress, and especially by Henry, who controls both of them by helping the clothiers (thus fostering their general success) and by hindering Robert (thus turning his tale to one of tragedy).⁴³ Full narrative unity is achieved in Chapters XI through XV, which form "one large climax and ending," tying up, chapter by chapter, the loose ends in the lives of Cole, the wives, Robert and Margaret, and Tom Dove, and "thus completing what no one could have expected from the author of Jack of Newbury—a well-made plot."⁴⁴

The book falls into two parts. The first nine chapters trace the growth and solidification of an alliance between the king and the clothiers (excluding the nobility), whereby Henry joins wealth to valor. The essence of this new society is seen as the establishment of order, especially through laws of measurement: the Halifax hanging law, the reform of currency, the establishment of the yard as universal standard of measurement (an interesting egalitarian touch); and these laws are examined, as we have seen, in Chapters VIII and IX. Margaret and Robert scarcely enter into this part of the book, for they—the daughter of the banished earl and the defeated prince—are the outcasts in this new social order.

With Chapter X the new and the remnants of the old begin to interrelate. The love story of Robert and Margaret (Chapters X and XIII) frames the two chapters devoted to Cole's murder. At first the relation is one of contrast, as noble love (Chapter X) is set against the covetousness and hate of Cole's murderers (Chapter XI); but then it turns to parallel, as Robert's plans for escape fail and the noble plot becomes as tragic as Cole's (Chapter XIII). The chapter on Tom Dove's failure (Chapter XIV) starts as a parallel to Robert and Margaret's, but then, when Cole's will saves Tom from collapse, is turned to a contrast by Tom's regeneration, a regeneration which is continued with a totally new tonality in the last chapter, where Margaret leaves the world for a nunnery and contemplation of the world to come.

More important than the interrelations of these two levels of plot is their interaction, the ways in which each influences the quality of feeling the reader apprehends in the other. The climax of Cole's murder takes place in a nightmare world, and this world is distorted further in the next chapter (Chapter XII), where the wives go so far as to imagine Cole's flesh being eaten. This nightmare quality (so reminiscent of Macbeth) seeps into the noble world of Robert and Margaret, so fully that Robert can announce that this life is but a bubble full of misery and then, turning his empty sockets toward Margaret, go "groaping for her with his bleeding eies, saying, O where is my love?" (336). And this tragic view of life, along with its proper high style, infuses as well the purely commercial failure of Tom Dove (perhaps even inappropriately), in a chapter that begins, "Such as seeke the pleasure of this world, follow a shaddow wherein is no substance: and as the adder Aspis tickleth a man to death so doth vaine pleasure flatter us, till it makes us forget God" (337). By means of such qualitative progressions the parts of Thomas of Reading become parts of a world where diverse modes of life and value meet to illuminate one another, as they did in the worlds of courtly fiction and pastoral romance.

Different concepts of the real constantly meet and change, as we saw earlier in the case of the Halifax hanging law, the affair of Cutbert and Bosom's wife, and the judgment of Henry. Deloney's rendering of Cole's murder in Chapters XI and XII is perhaps the finest thing in the book. Chapter XI heightens the normal sense of the real into a nightmarish unreality. Cole is treated like a pig to be butchered, the atmosphere is full of ravens croaking and the like, and Cole himself falls prey to uncontrollable melancholy and weeping, even to hallucination: "With that, Cole beholding his hoste and hostesse earnestly, began to start backe, saying, what aile you to looke so like pale death? good Lord, what have you done, that your hands are thus bloudy? What my hands, said his host? Why you may see they are neither bloudy nor foule: either your eies doe greatly dazell, or else fancies of a troubled mind do delude you" (325). But his nightmare turns out to be real, and all the distortions really forebode the actual horror of the death by boiling that he suffers. But even this complex view of the real is not allowed to stand without further distortion. To this succeeds Chapter XII, one of Deloney's masterful little dramatic scenes: amid the merriment of Mistress Sutton's churching the gullible women hear rumors of Cole's death, and in that context the affair appears as gruesomely comic:

… it is reported for truth, that the Inholder made pies of him, and penny pasties, yea, and made his owne servant eate a piece of him.

But I pray you, good neighbour, can you tell how it was knowne? some say, that a horse revealed it. Now by the masse (quoth Grayes wife) it was told one of my neighbors, that a certaine horse did speake, and told great things.

That sounds like a lye, sayd one of them. (329)

In this nonsense-world, death by boiling becomes inexorably linked with eating, and Cole's poor wandering horse becomes an entertainer, like Banks' horse.

This scene in itself constitutes a demonstration of the variability of opinion and the difficulty of establishing a single truth in a world of strange appearances. The book abounds in such passages illustrating the gap between intention and result: Cole cries in amazement, "I did verily purpose to write a letter: notwithstanding, I have written that that God put into my mind," which is his last will and testament (324). The difficulty of sorting out appearance from reality looms large: "What, my nose quoth he? is my nose so great and I never knew it? Certainly I thought my nose to be as comely as any mans: but this it is, we are al apt to think wel of our selves, and a great deale better than we ought: but let me see, (my nose!) by the masse tis true, I do now feele it my selfe: Good Lord, how was I blinded before?" (318). Though of course it is not true, Sir William Ferrers is blinded now by the illusion Margaret has foisted on him that his nose is so long that it sags down upon his lips.

Deloney moved away from a rather narrow form of middle-class "realistic" fiction toward a full exploration of all facets of reality. What is remarkable—and embarrassing to the literary historian enamored of neat categories—is that he did so by moving backward, so to speak: by reaching back to embrace Sidney and the romance, to catch up the traditional romantic themes of love and death, illusion and reality, and to combine them with his vivid sense of the contemporary scene.

Notes

¹ For Nashe on Deloney, see Works, ed. McKerrow, I, 280 and III, 84.

² Epistle to The Gentle Craft, Part II; in The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Merritt E. Lawlis (Bloomington, Indiana, 1961), p. 174.

³ Parenthetical page references to the works of Deloney throughout this chapter are to The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Lawlis.

⁴A Pleasant History of the Life and Death of Will Summers, the earliest surviving edition of which is dated 1637.

⁵ See Merritt E. Lawlis, Apology for the Middle Class: The Dramatic Novels of Thomas Deloney, Indiana University Humanities Series, Number 46 (Bloomington, 1960), pp. 39–45.

⁶ See F. P. Wilson, "The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Huntington Library Quarterly, II (1939), 121–58.

⁷Novels, ed. Lawlis, p. xvii; see also Wilson, p. 143.

⁸Long Meg of Westminster, in Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Mish, p. 92.

⁹ In Zelauto (1580), Part III.

¹⁰ See Lawlis, Apology for the Middle Class, p. 38: "If the medium of Deloney's novels is dialogue, the structural unit is the scene."

¹¹Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607), in Shakespeare Jest-Books: Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed to Have Been Used by Shakespeare, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (3 vols.; London, 1864), II, 310.

¹²Tales & Quicke Answeres, p. 57, in Shakespeare Jest-Books, ed. Hazlitt, Vol. I.

¹³Novels, ed. Lawlis, p. xix.

¹⁴ R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926), pp. 266–67.

¹⁵ Lawlis, Apology for the Middle Class, p. 89: "Promotion comes to those whom God elects to give it to, and there is no earthly way for us to know His will before the completely arbitrary promotion occurs."

¹⁶Jacke of Newberie was registered on 7 March 1597 and The Gentle Craft, Part I on 19 October 1597; we do not know when Part II of The Gentle Craft was published, or whether it was before or after Thomas of Reading.

¹⁷ This plan is announced in the Epistle to The Gentle Craft, Part II, in Novels, ed. Lawlis, p. 173.

¹⁸ See The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford, 1912), pp. 522–23.

¹⁹ See Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Sword from the Rock: An Investigation into the Origins of Epic Literature and the Development of the Hero (New York, 1954). Levy's three types are epic of creation (the gods), epic of search (man imitating the gods in a supernatural context), and epic of battle (men fighting among themselves).

²⁰Novels, ed. Lawlis, p. xix.

³⁸ … The History of the English Novel, II, 192.

³⁹ On the date, see Novels, ed. Lawlis, p. 379; that Thomas of Reading appeared after Jacke of Newberie and The Gentle Craft, Part I is fairly certain, but that it appeared after The Gentle Craft, Part II is only probable.

⁴⁰ The subtitle's promise of six heroes, "The sixe worthy yeomen of the West," is not accurate, there being in fact nine of them. We hear practically nothing of William of Worcester and Martin of Manchester, and most of the action devolves upon three of them: Thomas Cole of Reading, Tom Dove of Exeter, and Cutbert of Kendall.

⁴¹ See Lawlis, Apology for the Middle Class, pp. 93–95.

⁴²Ibid., p. 61.

⁴³Ibid., p. 58.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 67.