What Work Should Be

: Idealized Labour in Early Modern Literature from Deloney to Milton

Abstract

As England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed rapid changes in the nature and organization of work, writers and their audiences became eager to explore their place in the changing social landscape. The theme of labour, traditionally eschewed by the elite, started to become a subject for literature. While works of fiction could be employed to reinforce conservative ideals about labour, they were also uniquely positioned to explore what work should be. My thesis attempts to address this question by tracing various imaginings of idealized labour across four literary case studies published between the 1590s and 1670s. Chapter One investigates the late-Elizabethan prose works of Thomas Deloney, whose stories about the adventures of shoemakers and clothiers are a fruitful starting point for discussion about labour and industry in the period. Chapter Two explores how ideas about work and working relationships were tested and challenged in varied stagings of idealized labour in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – in particular The Shoemakers’ Holiday by Thomas Dekker, Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Chapter Three turns to the didactic visions of utopian writers of the 1640s and 1650s, specifically the writings of Samuel Hartlib and his correspondents (the Hartlib circle), and the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers. Finally, Chapter Four explores John Milton’s imaginings of labour in the idealized environments of Heaven and the Garden of Eden, and of Heaven’s inversion in the degraded space of Hell in Paradise Lost. What emerges from the writings in my study are different strategies of idealization, and mixed attitudes and emotional responses to labour and its projected future: a sense of both ‘transition’ and ‘translation’ when traditional ideals are met with the prospect of technological progress.

Date of Award	17 Mar 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Sponsors	SWW Doctoral Training Partnership Panel
Supervisor	Matthew Steggle (Supervisor), Nicholas McDowell (Supervisor) & Edward W Holberton (Supervisor)