SOURCE: Burnett, Mark Thornton. “Henry Chettle's Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship: Contexts and Consumers.” In Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, edited by Constance C. Relihan, pp. 169-86. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Burnett offers a detailed reading of Piers Plainness' Seven Years' Apprenticeship, arguing that the work has a densely allusive design, explores important topical questions about master-servant relations, and should be read in relation to an Elizabethan apprentice culture.

For a variety of reasons, Henry Chettle's picaresque tale, Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship, first published in 1595, has invariably been denied a sustained critical treatment. Generally overlooked in accounts of Elizabethan fiction and the development of the novel, the work has attracted few admirers.¹ In a tradition that has tended to underscore the interest of dramatic texts and the vitality of the theater, Piers Plainness has fared poorly...