DELONEY, THOMAS

One of the most voraciously read writers of the Elizabethan Grub Street, Thomas Deloney was a translator, an epic poet, a fiction writer, and the king of the London ballad makers. Deloney's career is an example of Elizabethan middle-class versatility. His grammar-school education grounded him in Latin and French, introduced him to contemporary literature, and versed him in crisp writing. A silk weaver by trade, he penned historical, moral, and religious bal­lads for a living. Yet his trademark was protojournalistic balladry concerning journalistic events, such as "A Joyful Song of the Royal Receiving of the Queen's Majesty into Her Camp at Tilbury" (1588), registered the very day after the event, or the "Lamentation of Page's Wife of Plymouth" (1591), a "human-interest story" about a husband-murderer.In 1593 he collected his ballads in The Garland of Good-Will, which was soon followed by a second popular col­lection, Strange Histories (1602).

Yet Deloney was not simply a vulgar, profit-driven entertainer. He voiced the cries of the working Londoners, urging, in 1595, protection against the appren­ticeship malpractices of immigrant weavers. A year later, he wrote against the scarcity of grain in England. For this, he got in trouble with the lord mayor of London and had to escape to the countryside. There he gained firsthand knowl­edge of local customs, dialects, stories, and the settings for his novels.

These four novels, Jack of Newbury, the two parts of The Gentle Craft, and Thomas of Reading, are Deloney's chief claim for remembrance. Written be­tween 1597 and 1600, they glorify the English artisan. His characters are busy city folk, jolly men and women, and there is always a solid foundation of fact in their dramatic portrayal. Deloney's novels went through multiple seventeenth-and eighteenth-century editions, while contemporary dramatists borrowed from his plots.

E. P. Wright, Thomas Deloney, 1981.