UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title In danger of undoing: The Literary Imagination of Apprentices in Early Modern London Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1fx380bc Author Drosdick, Alan Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California In danger of undoing: The Literary Imagination of Apprentices in Early Modern London by Alan J. Drosdick A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Joel B. Altman, Chair Professor Jeffrey Knapp Professor Albert Russell Ascoli Fall 2010 Abstract In danger of undoing: The Literary Imagination of Apprentices in Early Modern London by Alan J. Drosdick Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Joel B. Altman, Chair With the life of the apprentice ever in mind, my work analyzes the underlying social realities of plays such as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho!, and Shakespeare’s Henriad. By means of this analysis, I reopen for critical investigation a conventional assumption about the mutually disruptive relationship between apprentices and the theater that originated during the sixteenth century and has become a cliché of modern theater history at least since Alfred Harbage’s landmark Shakespeare’s Audience (1941). As a group, apprentices had two faces in the public imagination of renaissance London. The two models square off in Eastward Ho!, where the dutiful Golding follows his master’s orders and becomes an alderman, while the profligate Quicksilver dallies at theaters and ends up in prison. This bifurcated image of apprentices arises, I argue, from the national implementation of apprenticeship as a means of social control intended to create a supervisory system over masterless men in response to a century-long expansion of vagrancy. To reinforce this system, there arose a literature of apprenticeship, which included conduct manuals, popular ballads, prose works such as those of Thomas Deloney, and plays like those mentioned above. However, I have found that the crown’s encouragement of apprenticeship was not without its perils. If the government wanted young men without better prospects to sign away their freedom for seven years or more, those men needed truly to believe that serving an indenture would elevate their socioeconomic station. If that promise proved false, apprentices would abandon their posts and revert to vagrancy. If it proved true, the widespread upward mobility enabled by apprenticeship would contribute to the formation of a proto-middle class that could exert pressure on the gentry. Thus, apprentices posed a double threat to the traditional societal hierarchy: they were in danger of undoing old lines that divided rulers from the ruled, either by undermining normative power structures through vagrancy or by ascending the social ladder, a prospect offered to induce them not to be vagrants. Critics have long understood apprentice literature as instructive paeans to the redemptive power of honest work and the presumptive realization of individual potential. 1 Characters such as Golding, Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, and Dekker’s Simon Eyre are extolled as exemplary figures meant to be imitated by audiences and readers, their meteoric success the carrot to entice young men patiently to endure the often grueling labor of apprenticeship. However, that carrot seemed increasingly to recede, as over half of the many thousands of apprentices who began indentures failed to complete them, producing large scale systemic frustration. To stem the tide, a number of conduct books appeared which instructed young men merely to act like good apprentices, with an eye toward future independence and prosperity. This performative aspect might facilitate the rise from apprentice to master, but it also helped masters keep their apprentices content. By falsely acting in a fashion that reinforced a causal link between compliant service and inevitable success, masters could safely enjoy the cheap labor of apprentices without threat of revolt. My work explores how suspicion of the perfidy of apprenticeship and the performance of artisanal identity quietly inheres in the very literature thought to celebrate apprenticeship by providing examples of honest labor and fit reward. 2 Table of Contents Introduction: Dick Whittington and the Story of Apprentices……………………………………ii Chapter One: What is an Apprentice?……………………………………………………………..1 Chapter Two: Bringing Down the House: Theater Riots and Conduct Books……………………..32 Chapter Three: Performing Artisan Identity: Ambition, Industry, and Imitation in Thomas Deloney and Thomas Dekker…………………………….53 Chapter Four: “I hope I am my father’s son”: What Gentle Apprentices Can Learn………………………………………………..88 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..110 i Introduction: Dick Whittington and the Story of Apprentices Dick Whittington is the most famous apprentice in English history. Despite the fact that he was born in the 14th century, English schoolchildren today can attend pantomimes each Christmas season featuring the adventures of Dick Whittington and his famous cat. A film version of the pantomime was released in 2002. Whittington, an adaptation of the legend of Dick Whittington for young adults, won a Newberry Honor Award in 2006. The instructive power of the Dick Whittington story—trumpeting the benefits of determination, hard work, and loyalty—remains as potent today as it did during the 16th century when it first arose. For while Dick Whittington was a real figure in London’s social and political history, “the historical Richard Whittington and his mythical cat were first united in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I”1 in the form of popular ballads and a now lost play entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1605. The figure of Dick Whittington represents the definitive example of what I identify as the literary imagination of apprentices during the early modern period. He is a fiction constructed out of slivers both of the real experience of apprenticeship and of the social function apprenticeship was designed to serve. He also provided a convenient but ultimately illusory blueprint for the tens of thousands of Englishmen who set out to earn their fortunes in London. If the legend of Dick Whittington provided an inspirational fiction to young boys during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his true story reveals many of the hurdles that would come to face those young men as they served their indentures with established shopkeepers hoping to emulate the famous Lord Mayor’s ascendance. The appeal of the Dick Whittington legend resonated with those in the early stages of their careers, for it held up an example of what perseverance and obedience might bring to a lowly apprentice. On the other hand, the historical figure of Dick Whittington demonstrates that the concerns of a man who achieves great wealth and power after serving an apprenticeship do no necessarily include preserving those same opportunities for following generations of apprentices. Dick Whittington, legend and man, provides a microcosm of the state of apprenticeship in early modern London, as both display the true potential for social mobility available in England’s burgeoning capital, but both also reveal potential problems with the apprenticeship system and the emergent concept of crafting one’s identity through industrial urban labor. Though the legend adopted variant forms, the basics of the story provided easy morals for its audience to digest. Dick Whittington, a poor lad from the country, makes his way to the great city of London, where he had heard the streets were lined with gold. Upon his arrival, he discovers that, beyond a lack of golden thoroughfares, London proves a very hostile environment for a young man such as himself. Eventually, he procures a position as an apprentice to a wealthy merchant, but hates the grueling menial labor that comprises his duties. His only solace is his loving cat, which he has either brought from his country home or befriended in the city, depending on the version. One 1 Barron, Caroline M. “Richard Whittington: the Man behind the Myth.” Studies in London History. Eds. A. E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969. 197-248. p. 197. ii day, his merchant master, organizing a trading expedition to an exotic foreign land, demands all of his people contribute something to the venture, and all Dick can give is his beloved cat. Distraught at both the loss of his cat and his unpleasant work, Dick begins to run away from his apprenticeship back to the country, but hears church bells ring out and somehow speak to him. They tell him to turn back, as he will one day be thrice elected Lord Mayor of London. As it turns out, the prince of the land where the ship arrives has a tremendous rat infestation in his palace and buys Dick’s cat for a fortune. The merchant returns to London and gives Dick the money his cat has fetched. With his newfound riches, Dick becomes a successful merchant in his own right, marries the daughter of his former master, and goes on to fulfill the church bells’ prophecy by thrice serving as Lord Mayor. The most salient moral to be drawn from this legend stipulates an apprentice’s loyalty to his master as a necessary condition for his future success, even if he does not understand or appreciate his master’s actions. The legend gained currency in the late sixteenth century with apprentices because Dick, though he had to endure some hardship, proved a poor boy from the country could rise to the highest social and financial ranks; it gained currency with merchants because it instructed their apprentices to behave obediently. However, the story also glosses, often speciously, the subtler challenges an apprentice faced during his years of servitude.