Placing Thomas Deloney
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: Placing Thomas Deloney John Carpenter (bio) Literary texts offer a representation of contradictory principles of construction of the social world and of the categorizations by means of which individuals, in a given situation, act to classify others and, by doing so, classify themselves.1 Roger Chartier The purpose of this study is to position Thomas Deloney relative to Elizabethan England's print culture given an awareness of the age's preoccupation with placement of self relative to others. The first step in doing so is to acknowledge several factors that complicate this task. First, increasing social mobility in nascent capitalism created anxiety over and extreme preoccupation with the concept of the social places one might occupy: the concepts of identity and position weighed heavily on Elizabethan psyches. Second, within this atmosphere of positional anxiety, Deloney complicated his identification on the basis of form by producing variously categorizeable printed material; in particular his long-term production of broadside ballads before writing the four prose romances for which he is best known today adds complexity to this type of categorization. Third, the extant early modern texts by others characterizing a place for Deloney do so from varied perspectives. It is tempting to lump together Deloney's output under the problematic "popular" heading or to pigeonhole Deloney as a spokesman for the artisanal position or as an authorial variant of the 'bourgeois hero." However, positioning Deloney involves acknowledging [End Page 125] his play among early modern social and market tensions, particularly observable within the peritextual dedications of his translations and prose romances. In part because Deloney takes pains not to limit his potential market, attempting to determine a "niche" for Deloney becomes less a matter of placing him categorically on scales of class and genre than of identifying relationships between his printed output and multiple potential positions. Critical/theoretical Approach Over time, the focus of appraisal of Deloney's output has evolved from aesthetic evaluation to social placement. Earlier critics tended to evaluate Deloney's prose narratives positively and his ballads less so. F.O. Mann, who in 1912 edited the first and only volume of Deloney's complete works, describes his prose narratives as "the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel" (xiv) while characterizing the ballads as attempts at poetry marred by the ballad form (xliii). Swinburn is less generous, dismissing Deloney as a "ballad-writing hack" (336). Venerable ballad scholar Hyder Rollins frames Deloney as one of a few "distinguished" ballad writers, many propagators of the genre having done so anonymously, but frames ballads more as material venture than artistic endeavor (274). More recent criticism has focused on Deloney's association with a particular segment of English society. Alexandra Halasz describes him as "the writer most conspicuously identified with the artisanal position" (117), and Mihoko Suzuki, Roger Ladd, and Theo Stemler approach Deloney's prose narratives from similar angles. Halasz's informed reading of Deloney calls for specific attention.2 Halasz justly warns against oversimplifying Deloney's association with the artisanal position, and especially relevant to my own argument are Halasz's observation of Deloney's repeated staging of "complex representations of shifting social and economic relations" and his complication of "artisanal identification," which she cites as both "a fact" of the fiction's "historical moment" and "a strategy Deloney adopts precisely to examine the dispossession of the artisan that an inclusive notion of the artisan seems to efface" (118). My concern is with the placement of Deloney and his output in an age of anxious self-location rather than with his fictions as strategic examinations of artisanal placement. Deloney's use of strategy [End Page 126] implies an acute awareness of self-image and relative positioning, and his presentation of the "fracturing of the artisanal position" occurs within a fictional fantasy designed at least in part to sell pamphlets. Deloney's production of texts reflecting artisanal positioning for anyone who might buy them complicates his own position relative to Elizabethan social and economic place. Halasz ultimately argues convincingly that "Deloney's use of an artisanal thematics . . . addresses the accumulation of capital—economic and symbolic—and especially the ways in which that accumulation shapes access to the means of (re)production...
Source: Journal of Narrative Theory
Author: John Carpenter
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2075728941