A Different Thomas Deloney: Thomas of Reading Reconsidered
[In the following essay, Domnarski maintains that Thomas of Reading offers a penetrating, realistic analysis of the social tensions created by radical changes in the Elizabethan economic system.]z7While Greene wrote for the young gallants, 'how young gentlemen that aim at honour should leuel the end of their affections',34 and Petty for 'Gentle Readers, whom by my will I would haue only Gentlewomen',35 Deloney dedicated his novels to the 'famous Cloth Workers in England'36 or 'To the Master and Wardens of the worshipfull company of Cordwaynors',37 and wrote as an artisan for the jolly companions of his craft, with whom he had worked at his loom in Norwich or tramped the high roads of East Anglia. But he by no means breaks away altogether from the traditional separation of realism and romanticism. In Thomas of Reading the bourgeois history of the clothiers is interwoven with, although not blended with, the romantic life and love of the Duke of Normandy and the Fair Margaret, and the story of St. Hugh in the First Part of the Gentle Craft is a knight-errant romance of the most ordinary kind, preceding the hearty domestic story of Sir Simon Eyer. But these are his least successful work; his hand is out when he deals in such bloodless abstractions as St. Hugh and St. Winifred, and Margaret is only real as the servant of Gray of Gloucester. The story of Crispine and Crispianus (Gentle Craft, I) owes its merits to the vein of healthy realism which breaks through the plot of a sentimental story, and Deloney's artistic mastery only finds full scope in the handling of such realistic themes of bourgeois life as the Historie of Iacke of Newberie and the love affairs of Florence with her foreign suitors (Gentle Craft, I). It is here that the influence of the jest-book on the shaping of his novels is most apparent, betraying itself in the matter used, and the happy unrestraint of attitude. His use of the material of the jest-books can be amply illustrated, not only in the signal reconstruction of Long Meg of Westminster but also in the many comic episodes which he slenderly links together upon the thread of a personality, incidents such as the adventure of Dr. Burcot (Gentle Craft, II), the disappointment of Benedict (Iacke of Newberie), and the deception of Sir William Ferris (Thomas of Reading). Elizabethan novels, usually discursive and unformed, are apt to become even more shapeless when based upon materials such as these, but Deloney, while never aiming at the size and structure of the modern novel, none the less attains a clearness of construction and homogeneity of atmosphere which is missing in most contemporary fiction, for he writes straightforwardly from a simple point of view, fitting his stories into an appropriate framework, and informing them with the same vivid life, so that the whole novel is one in atmosphere, if not in connected incident—a book like Iacke of Newberie, for 'all famous Cloth-Workers in England',38 or like The Gentle Craft, 'for the worshipfull company of Cord-waynors'.39 Further, the single biographical aim 'to set to sight the long hidden History' of the bourgeois heroes of the loom and the cobbling last removes much of the temptation to irrelevancy; nor were Deloney's readers likely to be of that class which Lyly and Greene edified with endless digressions on nice points of morals and manners, while the introduction of historical matter gave a background and solidity to his narrative as a whole. Lodge had drawn on history in his feeble William Longbeard (1593), and Nash had introduced historical events and characters into the Life of Iacke Wilton; but Deloney, endowed with a democratic facility for the fabulizing of history, could more successfully blend the matters of fact and of fiction. His life as a travelling artisan had led him from town to town and county to county, and, chatting with fellow artisans and chance travellers picked up on the way, he had gathered local tradition and history first hand from incidental gossip, and thus history was to him, even more than to other Elizabethans, a garner-house of stories, and the printed pages of Holinshed and Grafton only further material for weaving into pleasant romances. To folk tradition belongs a vivacity and colour unmatchable even 'in the great Chroniclers', and the vigorous personality of Iacke of Newberie is the vivid figure of countryside gossip preserved to us by Deloney's literary skill, while Thomas of Reading is probably a blending of the history of Holinshed with a now lost Berkshire tradition. In the tales of Simon Eyer, Richard Casteler, and Master Peachey it is impossible to decide how much is taken from the printed page, how much from tradition, and how much is Deloney's own invention. Certainly he commonly took familiar phrases and customs, the origins of which had been forgotten, and wove around them his own stories of explanation, 'Tom Drum's entertainment'40 suggesting the rough courting of Mistress Farmer, and the quaint usages at Bosoms Inn41 Cuthbert of Kendal's intrigue with the host's wife. The jest-book of itself tended towards characterization and biography, but in dealing with the heroes of weaving and cobbling, and elaborating the more or less commonly known circumstances of their lives, Deloney was bound to develop this tendency further, and the happy mingling of traditional history and the matter of the jest-book resulted in the creation of such characters of flesh and blood as Richard Casteler, Simon Eyer, and John Winchcombe, who, unlike the heroes of the early jest-books, really dominate the situation and occupy the real interest.
Deloney's excellence lies in his faithful and sympathetic rendering of commonplace human life. Where he attempts the romanticism of subject and language fashionable in his time, he is as successful as his contemporaries in wearying the modern reader, but the straightforward pleasures of a healthy middle class he presents with a gusto and vivacity which is an ample apology for an occasional coarseness. He understood thoroughly the artisan class of whom he wrote; his pity was for the 'poore people' 'who laboured to get their owne bread', 'whom,' as he quaintly says, 'God lightly blesseth with most children'42; and he gave a willing admiration to the master-workmen and successful merchants who paid a fair day's wages for a fair day's work, to Iacke of Newberie who would not have his people 'pincht of their victualls', and to Simon Eyer who remembered from prentice days his debt of 'pudding-pies' and 'feasted all the Prentices on Shrove Tuesday'. He describes with faithful enjoyment the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop, how the widow woos her man, or how the sparing Richard Casteler marries a Dutch maiden who 'could doe diuers pretty feates to get her owne liuing'. He tells us of that warm-blooded bourgeois life of Elizabethan times with a spirit and wealth of detail to be found in no other author, describing a phase of society which most contemporary literature chose to overlook contemptuously. His delight in telling his stories is that of a man who describes what he has enjoyed; his railing conversations between Long Meg and Gillian of the George, or Tom Drum and the cobblers of Petworth, have all the point and good-humour of the dialogue of the market-place, while the description of how Iacke of Newberie's servants were revenged on Mistress Franks glorifies the content of the jest-book into excellent prose comedy. Nor is he less successful in dealing with more tragic material. It would be hard to overrate the art of that chapter43 where Old Cole is murdered at his inn, and where circumstance is made to follow on circumstance and so to culminate in inevitable catastrophe, but with a restraint and sureness unsurpassed by any work of more ambitious contemporary novelists. A masterpiece of bourgeois pathos, it may well be suggested44 that Shakespeare was indebted to it in those scenes of Macbeth where a host and hostess similarly plot together to murder a guest, or where Lady Macbeth sees the visionary blood on her hand as Old Cole saw it on the hands of his hostess at the Crane.
Deloney has no problems of life or conduct to discuss as his modern successors in fiction are apt to have, but simply holds 'the mirror up to nature' without the interposition of himself or his views. Hence, however slightly his characters be sketched they are shown to us in a clear and transparent medium, and his worthies move freely and vividly in the pleasant atmosphere of their own occupations, honest craftsmen of the Elizabethan workshop or good housewives of the Elizabethan home. How popular his novels were may be judged from the long period in which they held the public estimation, often reprinted through the seventeenth century and surviving plentifully in chapbook form into the eighteenth.45 'The Book of the Gentle Craft hath had a general acceptance of the Cordwainers, and the History of the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West, and Jack of Newbery the like from the weavers', wrote Winstanley in 1668 in the preface to The Honor of the Merchant Taylors; and Winstanley's own book, servilely founded on the novels he mentions, is only one specimen of a whole class of popular literature that sprang up in the tradition that Deloney created. But the spontaneity and vigour of the original were not to be repeated by meaner hands; the novels of his imitators may be allowed to rest on the library shelves for the curious, but his own have a permanent literary value and deserved a recognition less belated….
Notes
1Dict. of Nat. Biography, art. Thomas Deloney.
2Haue with You to Saffron Walden (1596), Works (McKerrow), vol. iii, p. 84.
3Beauties of England and Wales (Norfolk), p. 132; Bloomfield's History of Norfolk, vol. iii, p. 282.
4Survey of London (Stow, edited Strype, 1720), bk. v, p. 233.
5 p. 7, 1. 25, and note.
6 p. 24, 1. 40, and note.
7 pp. 333–8, and note.
8The Works of Robert Greene (Grosart), vol. xi, p. 49.
9The Works of Gabriel Harvey (Grosart), vol. ii, pp. 280–1.
10Survey of London (Stow, edited Strype, 1720), bk. v, p. 333.
11 Quoted in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. i, p. 106.
12 Prothero's Statutes and other Constitutional Documents, p. 69.
13Kind-hartes Dreame (N.S.S. Shakspere Allusion Bks.), pt. i, p. 43.
14 Ibid., p. 47.
15Anatomy of Abuses (N.S.S.), p. 171.
16 Note on Sources of Thomas of Reading, infra, pp. 547–8.
17 p. 176, 1. 1; p. 178, 1. 31; p. 185, 1. 39, and notes.
18 p. 222, 11. 5–10, and notes.
19 p. 97, 11. 31, 45, and notes.
20 Note on Sources of Thomas of Reading, infra, p. 549.
21 e. g. p. 227, 11. 34–8; p. 244, 11. 20–7.
22 p. 27, 1. 6; p. 32, 1. 33; p. 33, 1. 12, and notes.
23 e. g. p. 5, 1. 21; p. 6, 1. 8; p. 15, 1. 36, and notes.
24 p. 22, 1. 10, and note.
25 p. 24, 1. 5, and note.
26 p. 22, 1. 11, and note.
27 Note on Sources of Gentle Craft (II), infra, pp. 532–3.
28 p. 10, 11. 5–7.
29Victoria County History of Berks, vol. i, p. 395.
30 See note on p. 33, 1. 12; also Note on Authorship of Canaans Calamitie, infra, p. 593.
31The Works of Thomas Nash (McKerrow), vol. iii, p. 84.
32Social England Illustrated (An English Garner, pp. 159, 160.
33 Ibid., vol. vii, p. 36….
34Tullies Love, title-page.
35Pettys Palace, 'To the Gentle Gentlewomen Readers.'
36Iacke of Newberie, p. 2.
37Gentle Craft (II), p. 139.
38 p. 2, 1. 2.
39 p. 139, 1. 2.
40 Note on Sources of Gentle Craft (II), infra, p. 535.
41 Note on Sources of Thomas of Reading, infra, p. 549.
42 p. 213, 11. 18–9.
43Thomas of Reading, chap. II.
44 By Professor Sir Walter Raleigh.
45 e.g. The British Museum and the Bodleian together contain seven eighteenth-century chapbook versions of the Gentle Craft (I).
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Introduction to The Works of Thomas Deloney
Thomas Deloney and the Virtous Proletariat