SOURCE: "The 'Art of Clothing': Role-Playing in Deloney's Fiction," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. II, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 183–93.

In the essay reprinted below, Jordan focuses on role-playing figures in Deloney's novels. She points out that Jack of Newbury's role-playing is constructive because it allows him to distinguish between his desires and objective reality: by contrast, the role-players in Thomas of Reading are either forced into pretense or choose it as a means of deceiving others.

Although they were published within a brief three-year period from 1597 to 1600, Thomas Deloney's three novels, Jacke of Newburie, The Gentle Craft I and II, and Thomas of Reading, show a marked change of mood. The ebullient play of the clothiers in Jacke of Newburie yields to the studied negotiations of the shoemakers in The Gentle Craft; these are displaced in turn by the disappointments of the merchants and gentry in Thomas of Reading...