¹ Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 241. I am indebted to Walter R. Davis and Joan Hartman for carefully reading and judiciously criticizing this article.

² See Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516; rpt. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936); Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531; rpt. London: Dent, 1907); Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528; rpt. London: Dent, 1928); Roger Ascham, 77;e Schoolmaster (1570; rpt. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967).

³ For a discussion of that tradition relevant to a romance Deloney seems to have been familiar with, see Walter R. Davis and R. A. Lanham, Sidney's Arcadia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 137–66.

⁴ These treatises culminate, in the Renaissance, in Erasmus' The Education of a Christian Prince, which appears to be the immediate source for Elyot's The Boke Named the Gouernour. See Lester K. Born's introduction to Erasmus'treatise, pp. 44–124. Deloney's motifs indicate his knowledge of Erasmus, either in the text or through Elyot. Hereafter, I shall use the term Erasmian as synonymous with the traditional tenets of these books of conduct.

⁵ Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), p. 2.

⁶ (1926; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), p. 198. See also Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05; rpt. New York: Scribners, 1958), p. 172.

⁷ R. W. Baldwin, The Unity of the Canterbury Tales (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955), p. 106.

⁸ Weber, p. 180.

⁹ Jack of Newbury (1597); the edition used is that of Merritt E. Lawlis, The Novels of Thomas Deloney (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961). All subsequent references to Deloney's works are included in the text.

¹⁰ My understanding of “symbolical” and “allegorical” follows that of most modern scholars, who agree withNorthrop Frye: “The contrast is between a ‘concrete’ approach to symbols which begins with images of actual things and works outward to ideas and propositions, and an ‘abstract’ approach which begins with the idea and then tries to find a concrete image to represent it” (italics mine). See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 89; also C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), p. 44; Graham Hough, A Preface to the Faerie Queene (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1962), pp. 102–11: Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit, the Making of Allegory (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 3–16. For a historical analysis of these modes in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 3–55.

Specifically, then, I observe a distinction between an “allegorical” event or device and straight allegory, since by “allegory” one would rather mean a “full length, inclusively figurative work” (e.g., The Faerie Queene, Pilgrim's Progress; see Honig, p. 11). The beast fable about the ants and the butterflies is part of a larger work which is not itself allegorical—hence it can hardly be termed allegory. Yet the fact that it is used to incarnate an idea or abstraction, i.e., a middle-class kingdom, makes it an allegorical event. The same is true of the emblematic beehive and the pageant. The two songs are symbolical, however, because they imagistically depart from an actual existing state of affairs (e.g., weaving, or a maid's lament) and thence try to relate to a larger abstract notion (weaving as indicative of archetypal nobility, or the maid's lament as omen for the fall of Princes).

¹¹ Sir Philip Sidney, The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967) 331; see also Davis and Lanham, p. 148.

¹² Evarchus is described as an “orderer of disorders,” in the Arcadia, p. 338.

¹³ Davis, Idea and Act, p. 252.

¹⁴ H. E. Rollins has pointed out that this gallery is “copied verbatim from Fortescue,” the compilation of stories current in Deloney's time, and which served, pre-sumably, for the less educated as “a ready and easy way to establish freely a reputation for erudition.” See H. E. Rollins, “Thomas Deloney's Euphuistic Learning and 'The Forest,' ” PMLA, 50 (1935), 679–86, who is evidently concerned to show how Deloney's veneer of culture is just that; consequently, Deloney would hardly be aware of the tradition I have been discussing, and, moreover, incapable of writing a novel controlled by its inverted tenets. Interestingly, however, while describing the parallel texts, Rollins wonders whether it is out of “ignorance” or “intention” Deloney mistook the occupation of both Parti-nax' and Marcus Aurelius' fathers for that of weaver. (While in The Forest it says that the former's father was an “artificer” and the latter's occupation remains unspecified.)

That Deloney borrowed freely from Fortescue is no fault, since it was a matter of common practice for the Elizabethans, as is well known. But that he translated the borrowing to fit his bolstering of the middle class is what is important here. What seems, to Rollins, indicative of Deloney's lack of culture, on the contrary, seems to illustrate better the design we have been unraveling.

¹⁵ See Davis and Lanham, pp. 143–44.

¹⁶ Thomas Deloney, le roman des metiers au temps de Shakespeare (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1926), pp. 240–43.

¹⁷ Margaret Schlauch, Antecedents of the English Novel, 1400–1600 (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1963), p. 237; Chevalley, p. 40; see also F. O. Mann, who says that Deloney seems to have been knowledgeable in French as well, The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), p. viii. The reading of Sidney is presumed from references to the Arcadian myth in Jack of Newbury, p. 62; Gentle Craft II, pp. 225–26.

¹⁸ Queenie D. Leavis alludes to these popular commonplaces known to Deloney's audience. See Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), p. 86.

¹⁹ The aristocratic pyramidal structure of society is discussed by Davis and Lanham, pp. 137–38. Plato, of course, is the source for this conception of the State; see The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Airmont, 1968), ix, 359–62.