Idleness, Apprentices and Machines in Deloney and Dekker

Abstract

Cautionary texts warning of the social, emotional and spiritual hazards of idleness were virtually omnipresent in 1590s London; this was a consequence of the common view that idleness itself had become omnipresent, a kind of sister-epidemic to the ‘Elizabethan malady’ of melancholy. The shifting, multiple connotations that attached to both melancholy and idleness enabled each concept to become a site of dispute over meaning. In London during the sixteenth century’s turbulent final decade, control over the definition and interpretation of idleness were at a premium. Authorities seized upon the concept with renewed vigour as a didactic, cautionary or punitive tool during the apprentice riots of that decade; it was then wrested back by London’s notorious ‘idle apprentices’, who rejected this constraining label as inaccurately implying that their behaviour was a cause of London’s problems, rather than a symptomatic effect resulting from serious social, economic and political causes. Didactic or legal documents such as sermons and proclamations asserted a rigid sense of virtue, classifying idleness as a sin and a crime and connecting the concept back to religious sloth or acedia. Such documents endeavoured to busy the mind with fearful contemplation of the disastrous consequences of idleness, emphasizing the importance of avoiding idleness, and of banishing from the mind the kind of inchoate, imaginative, affective idleness that might give rise to the questioning of authority. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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