"The making of new gentlemen": Social Mobility and Ambivalence in Early Modern England

There was an ambivalent attitude to social mobility in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In this stratified society – where status was, at least theoretically, marked out by clothing – it was nonetheless possible to rise socially, for example through education or wealth. As William Harrison noted in 1577, ‘Whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, whoso abideth in the university (giving his mind to his book), or professeth physic and the liberal sciences, or […] can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by […] and reputed for a gentleman ever after’. However, Harrison also disparages this practice, observing that – as a result – gentlemen be ‘made so good cheap’. Using Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1611) as a starting point, this paper examines the cultural ambivalence towards social mobility. At the outset, the orphaned Posthumous is described as ‘poor but worthy’; his marriage to Innogen (the king’s daughter) would therefore seem to fit a model, like Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece (c. 1597), where true nobility is measured by behaviour rather than wealth or birth. Yet, counter to that we have the play’s kidnapped princes – brought up unaware of their true identity – displaying a ‘noble strain’. ‘Cowards father cowards and base things sire base,’ comments their adoptive father-cum-abducter Belarius. As such, Cymbeline encapsulates the conflicting strands of early modern attitudes to social mobility, and nature-versus-nuture. The paper will further explore the social mobility of stories, as they move between genres and different types of text, aimed at different audiences. Here again, Cymbeline can provide a jumping-off point, with the wager-plot drawn from both Boccaccio’s Decameron and its early sixteenth-century retelling as Frederyck of Jennen.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. Publications include Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2004); The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, co-edited with Mike Pincombe (Oxford University Press, 2009); an edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, co-edited with Raphael Lyne (Longman Annotated English Poets, 2017); and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia, co-edited with Phil Withington (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is one of the editors of The Oxford Works of Thomas Nashe and is currently completing a monograph on late medieval and early modern dialogue for Oxford University Press.