Deloney, Thomas

Deloney, Thomas (dəlō`nē), c.1543–c.1600, English ballad writer, fiction writer, and pamphleteer. He was a silk weaver. Deloney's chief works are three prose narratives—Jack of Newbury, Thomas of Reading, and The Gentle Craft (all c.1597)—relating to the clothier's, weaver's, and shoemaker's crafts respectively. Vivid and humorous, they reproduce bourgeois scenes of contemporary London. Their popularity indicates a certain fatigue with the elaborate prose of authors like John Lyly.

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Deloney, Thomas 

(also Delone). Born circa 1543 in London; died 1600. English writer. Worked as a weaver.

Deloney was the author of ballads on historical and everyday topics and of novels about the lives of artisans: Jack of Newberie (1597, published in 1619; Russian translation, 1926), The Gentle Craft (1598), and Thomas of Reading, or The Sixe Worthie Yeomen of the West (published in 1612; Russian translation, 1926). The significance of his novels lies in their democratic tendencies and interesting sketches of everyday life.

WORKS

The Works. Oxford, 1912.

REFERENCES

Grossman. L. “Proizvodstvennyi roman v epokhu Shekspira: Tomas Delone i ego zabytaia epopeia.” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1927, no. 1.
Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, issue 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
Lawlis, M. E. Apology for the Middle Class: The Dramatic Novels of T. Deloney. Bloomington, 1960.

IU. I. KAGARLITSKII