No idle fancy: Labor and writing in early modern England

Critics of English Renaissance literature have devoted a prodigious amount of scholarship to exploring what J. W. Saunders has called the "stigma of print"---a discourse that managed writers' participation in the market for print by encoding publication as an act of vulgar economic necessity in contradistinction to elite coterie production. While almost all writers were aware of this stigma, some represented their market participation as a conscious alternative to aristocratic habits of writing and being. This embrace of print market relations results in a subtle critique of aristocratic behaviors that gained assistance from the destabilization of class-based occupational categories in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I discuss this development with respect to the writings of four non-aristocratic authors---Isabella Whitney, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, and John Taylor---to argue that the unsettling of hierarchies of intellectual and manual work permits these authors to imagine and promote their writing as "labor" in a positive sense. The result of these self-presentations in an affirmation of skill in producership over traditional notions of ascribed status. We witness early constructions of a "modern" subject who retains and promotes its own virtue within a market context.