From a period I’m very interested in, an interesting character…
“Like his contemporary Shakespeare… Deloney left the town he grew up in to try his fortune in London, working as a silk-weaver, living in England’s first Grub Street, where an entry in the parish register of St Giles, Cripplegate, dated 16 October 1586 records the baptism of his son, Richard. Here, in the terrible 1590s, he wrote ballads and one-sheet storied and stereotypes, news-sheets and the like, which were highly ephemeral and very popular. By 1598 he was the acknowledged ‘general’ of the London ballad-mongers, a “ballad journalist who was “installed as the poet of the people” by the publication, in 1596, of a piece entitled The Ballad On The Want of Corn”.
His work was seen as “presumptuous”, because its heroes and heroines were clearly common people, only suitable, 17th-century thought at least considered, for comedy or farce.
“All of his best known works were written between 1596 and 1600, when the fabric of English society was shaken by a general crisis the like of which would not be experienced again in England until the time of Paine and Wollstonecraft, exactly two centuries later.”
From Rollison, David A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 330
(Complete works)
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