SOURCE: "Thomas Deloney and the Virtous Proletariat," in The Cambridge Journal, Vol. V, No. 1, October, 1951, pp. 34–50.

In the following excerpt, Mackerness contends that Deloney's novels affirm the rigid stratification of Elizabethan society. He points out that historical records clearly show that sixteenth-century cloth workers were exploited by their masters, yet Deloney portrays them as members of a "virtuous proletariat, " content with their lot in life.

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In the voluminous pamphlet literature of the sixteenth century, expressions of professional jealousy are relatively common. It is not surprising, therefore, that the activities of a part-time author like Thomas Deloney should have provoked sarcastic utterances from energetic practitioners such as Greene and Nashe. Neither Greene nor Nashe, however, had any cause to envy the obscure East Anglian ballad-maker, whose literary efforts were (in their opinion) so inferior to their own. In his notes to the Everyman volume which contains two of Deloney's...