SOURCE: "Thomas Deloney and Middle-Class Fiction," in Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 238–80.

In the excerpt below, Davis provides a detailed analysis of each of Deloney's novels. The critic discusses Deloney's adaptation of his sources; his structural methods; his idealized heroes; and significant differences between Thomas of Reading and Deloney's other prose fiction.

The only point of positive contact between the university wit Thomas Nashe and the silk-weaver turned balladeer whom he scorned is their common reliance, probably through the influence of Greene, on material from the sixteenth-century jest books.¹ Nashe presented Jack Wilton at the outset of The Unfortunate Traveller as a witty rogue like Scoggin or Peele, and went on to document by a string of witty jests Wilton's pride in his ability to cozen his companions. The opening of Thomas Deloney's first work of fiction, The Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb...