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Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Laura Stevenson O'Connell
Laura Stevenson O'Connell*
Affiliation:
Santa Barbara, California
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Extract

It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan “work ethic” and the development of an entrepreneurial spirit were related to each other. Tawney suggested that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labor and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. Thus, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier religious reform movements:

in its later phases [it] added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation …. It insisted, in short, that money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God.

Tawney was speaking of the “later stages” of Puritanism; he took his examples entirely from post-restoration works.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Spring 1976 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976

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References

1. H. R. Trevor-Roper has disputed this idea in “Religion, the Reformation and Social Change.” See his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change and Other Essays (London, 1967), pp. 1–45Google Scholar. Christopher Hill has suggested that the doctrine of individuality of conscience may have had more to do with the reconciliation of Calvinism and capitalism than the “work ethic.” See “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” in Fisher, F. J. (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, in Honour of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge, Eng., 1961), pp. 15–39Google Scholar.

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19. Ibid., pp. 77-78.

20. Hill, , Puritanism and Revolution, p. 230Google Scholar. David Little has pointed out that the quotations Hill uses to support his idea are misleadingly abbreviated (Religion, Law and Order, p. 119). Hill, in fact, neglects to quote all of Perkins's qualifying words on wealth; it seems unlikely that the “good bourgeois” in Perkins's congregation could ignore his qualifications so completely.

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38. Ibid., I, 300.

39. Ibid., I, 301. On “conspicuous expenditure”, see Stone, , Crisis, pp. 547–86Google Scholar.

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46. Ibid., p. 8.

47. Ibid., p. 15.

48. Kurt-Michael Pätzold has pointed out that none of the characters who rise to social prominence in Jack of Newbury do so because of their diligence and thrift: Randoll Pert, the children in Jack's “factory,” and the maid Joan all “make good” because of the generosity of their social superiors. See Historischer Roman und Realismus Das Erzählwerk Thomas Deloney in Sprache und Literature: Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglislik und Amerikanistik (Regensburg, 1972), pp. 62–63Google Scholar.

49. Deloney, , Works, p. 113Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., pp. 113-15.

51. Ibid., p. 117.

52. Ibid., p. 121.

53. Pätzold maintains that Eyre's story, like Jack's, indicates that Deloney does not think diligence is enough to make a man wealthy (Historischer Roman, pp. 64-65). But he does not point out that Eyre is very nearly an entrepreneur, whereas Jack is not. It seems possible that the entrepreneurial aspect of Eyre's rise disturbed Deloney. Between the chapter in which Mistress Eyre outlines her plan and the ensuing chapter, there is a strange break: the chapter which should present Eyre's dealing with the merchant and his invitation to the lord mayor's banquet is left out. This leaves the story oddly unfinished; the omission suggests Deloney's ambivalent attitude towards Eyre's success. When Thomas Dekker adopted Eyre's story in making his play, The Shoemaker's Holiday, he followed Deloney in making the transaction by which Eyre rises very vague. The audience knows that Eyre will get a good deal on the ship's cargo, and it sees Eyre put on fine clothes before talking to the merchant, but there is nothing in the play which suggests that Eyre's transaction will be dishonest. The audience does not see the transaction itself. Dekker treats the whole episode without considering its entrepreneurial aspects. See The Shoemaker's Holiday, Act II, scene iii, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Bowers, Fredson, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), I, 40–44Google Scholar.

54. On the chronology of Deloney's novels, see Lawlis, , Apology, pp. 5–6Google Scholar. The early editions of the novels were read out of existence; it cannot, therefore, be said positively that The Gentle Craft, Part II was written before Thomas of Reading. Lawlis and Mann agree, however, that Thomas was probably Deloney's last novel. See Deloney, , Works, p. 547Google Scholar.

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57. Ibid., p. 143.

58. Ibid., p. 152.

59. Ibid., p. 145.

60. Ibid., p. 162.

61. Ibid., p. 170.

62. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W.et al. (New Haven and London, 1964), p. 164Google Scholar.

63. Defoe, Daniel, The Complete English Tradesman, in Familiar Letters (1727: reprint, 2 vols., New York, 1969), I, 45–46Google Scholar.

64. Ibid., I, 48.

65. Ibid., I, 50. A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), in The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, Vol. 10 (Oxford, 1927), 61Google Scholar.