Thomas Deloney
born 1543?, Norwich?, Eng.
died 1600
writer of ballads, pamphlets, and prose stories
that form the earliest English popular fiction.
By trade a silk weaver, probably of Norwich,
Deloney wrote topical ballads and, through his
pamphlets, took part in religious controversy.
He was proscribed in London for alleged sedition
but, as an itinerant weaver and ballad seller,
collected material in the provinces for his
prose stories. His “many pleasant songs and
pretty poems to new notes” appeared as The
Garland of Good Will (1593). His Jacke of
Newberie (1597), The Gentle Craft, parts i and
ii (1597–c. 1598), and Thomas of Reading (1599?)
furnished plots for such dramatists as Thomas
Dekker. The Gentle Craft is a collection of
stories, each devoted to glorifying one of the
crafts: the clothiers, the shoemakers, the
weavers.
Though widely read, Deloney was condemned by
the university-educated writers as a mere ballad
maker and purveyor of plebeian romance, and his
literary merits went unrecognized until the 20th
century.
