Bonded Leather binding

Jack of Newbury is an incisive yet remarkably entertaining work of narrative prose—and one that was extremely popular when it was published in the 1590s. The title character, an apprentice weaver, marries his former master’s wife, expands her cloth business into an enormous enterprise, refuses Henry VIII’s offer of a knighthood, and confronts Cardinal Wolsey; meanwhile, his servants find themselves in a range of comic situations. While amusing, Jack of Newbury also carries a serious and subversive political message: as Peter C. Herman puts it in his introduction to the volume, “the truly valuable subjects” in Deloney’s narrative “are not the nobility, but the merchant class.” The range of contextual materials included with this edition help to set it in the broader context of its economic and political as well as literary culture.

This anthology contains five of the most important short works of Elizabethan prose fiction: George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Robert Greene's Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, and Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury. Paul Salzman has modernized the texts for easier comprehension.

In this book, Alex Davis argues that the paradigms that have governed our ideas about the historical consciousness of the English Renaissance for more than half a century must be re-evaluated in the light shed by the Renaissance historical fictions of Philip Sidney, Thomas Deloney, and Thomas Nashe.