The topical breakdown of these works depends, to a certain extent, on the decisions of the person who compiles the filing system. Should Foxe's Acts and Monuments be filed under ‘religion’ or ‘history’? Does Southwell's religious poetry belong under ‘religion’ or ‘poetry and fiction’? Are descriptions of Tudor voyages ‘essays’ or ‘history’? In each of these cases, I have opted for the latter choice, but I admit that the placement of such borderline works tends to be arbitrary. For the sake of clarity, then, I have compiled the following brief sketch of my filing system so that the reader can study the choices I have made if he wishes. Works are listed under their author's name only, except in cases where confusion might arise; in these cases, I have given the STC number as well. All the works referred to here appear in full in Appendix A.

When Elizabeth I became Queen of England, English merchants were figures of great importance in London and provincial towns, but in literature they were familiar only in two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in London chronicles, and in the works of preachers and satirists who portrayed them as grasping misers. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, merchants had become familiar literary figures, and they had acquired a new cultural image as men whose exploits served England well.

The original image of the merchant as usurer did not die out entirely as the more positive portraits of merchants became popular; to morality-play writers, the figure of greed was too interesting to ignore, and so merchants appeared as usurers in such plays as The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576), The Three Ladies of London (1581) and in Lodge and Greene's late morality play A Looking Glass for London and England (c. 1590). In the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare, however, the usurer took on sins beyond greed; and in the hands of Heywood and Haughton, usurers became ‘stock’ villains and outraged fathers. By the end of our period, the usurer had ceased to be criticized merely for lending at interest and was given a new list of characteristics.

As the usurer became increasingly weak and silly on the stage, some popular authors experimented with the flexibility of the medieval merchant stereotypes.

The material here is a distillation of the information available in standard biographical references and in biographies of individual authors. It is intended to serve as a brief guide to the status and occupations of the popular authors, not as a study of their lives or a bibliography of the works written about them.

In column 5 I have listed the standard source(s) available for a brief study of each author. An asterisk (*) indicates that a biography of the author exists, either in his collected works or in an individual study. An abbreviated title, other than those listed below, refers to a work referred to in the notes.

The DNB is generally reliable when it deals with the university training and professional careers of the authors it treats (with the exception of the article on John Norden, which has been proved wrong by A.W. Pollard); but it is not altogether trustworthy about family backgrounds, since the scholars who compiled it tended to attribute gentle connections to any author of note if it was possible to do so. It is always wise to consult modern biographies when they exist, or to consult the Alumni Oxonienses and the Alumni Cantabrigienses on matters of background.

Looking across the spectrum of prominent Elizabethan authors, one can see that several of them were the sons of merchants or craftsmen. Marlowe, for example, was the son of a shoemaker; Ben Jonson, the stepson of a brick-layer; Shakespeare, the son of a glover; Lodge, the son of a grocer who became lord mayor of London; and Munday, Chettle and Peele were, respectively, the sons of a draper, a dyer, and a salter. The familiarity of the backgrounds of these men led Louis Wright to imply that the majority of Elizabethan authors came from middle-class families; and his word on the subject has been accepted as gospel in later works on literary history, for the simple reason that it is the only word. This interpretation is, however, a by-product of the Marxist model of pre-industrial society – a model long since proved to be inaccurate. It is, furthermore, extremely misleading, for it encourages scholars to assume that Elizabethan authors came from like backgrounds, received roughly comparable educations, and adopted one profession – writing. No assumption could be further from the truth. Elizabethan popular authors emerged from a wide variety of backgrounds and adopted a wide variety of professions. While their educations were alike in some respects (for after a Tudor youth learned to read English, he embarked on a study of the classics that lasted until he left school), they differed greatly in thoroughness and in length.

A work appears on this list if it contains any reference to a principal citizen. The reference is usually a major one, occurring in the text (as in Browne's Merchant's Avizo, or plays and stories in which citizens have major roles), but occasionally it is not. If the reference to citizens appears only in the dedication (as in Chaderton's Paul's Cross sermon) or in a discussion of estates of the realm (as in Curteys' sermon), or in a minor dramatic scene, I have marked the work with an asterisk (*).

I have listed best-sellers and drama separately. Each play is listed according to the year in which Schoenbaum suggests it was probably first performed, in the revised edition of the Annals of English Drama. The reader who wishes to find the range of dates in which each play was probably first performed should turn to Appendix A, Part II.

The contrast between the Elizabethan businessman in armour and the merchant of the ‘moneyed interest’ described by Defoe and Steele raises a fundamental problem about the Elizabethan adherence to the Protestant work ethic. Half a century has elapsed since R.H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; and in spite of the debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, there is still generally scholarly agreement that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labour and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. In its original form, Tawney's thesis dealt mainly with the ‘later phases’ of Puritanism – the post-Restoration theology of Richard Baxter and his contemporaries. At this time, according to Tawney, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier reform movements:

The popular authors who celebrated the achievements of merchants also wrote about lesser men of trade – craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices. This is not surprising; there were many more craftsmen, journeymen and apprentices in Elizabethan England than there were merchants and rich clothiers, and the men who migrated to London and provincial towns in search of work, whatever their aspirations, were of this low commercial status (if in fact they were not merely unskilled rural labourers). The popular authors could attract an audience of these men by focussing their dreams of success – telling them how great merchants had once been poor men like themselves. Still, few apprentices and craftsmen could actually hope to rise to such economic heights, so the authors wisely balanced their stories of poor boys made good with others that asserted the innate worthiness of lesser men of trade who became neither rich nor famous.

When they approached craftsmen, the authors encountered a sociological problem rather different from the one they had faced in their stories about merchants. Merchants, as principal citizens, had a social position ‘next place to gentry’, formed one of the four major social groups of the hierarchy, and had a tradition of leadership which, along with the apocryphal tales of their wealth, could be used readily by authors who wished to replace the negative stereotype of the merchant as usurer. Craftsmen, however, had no such tradition; they were not the men by whom history was made.

It was no accident that the valiant principal citizen appeared in Elizabethan literature at the same time as the stereotype of the usurer was in decline; the authors who celebrated the virtues of merchants created the new image in a conscious effort to replace the old. Turning to the past for source material, Deloney, Heywood, Dekker and a handful of lesser writers brought the exploits of famous and semi-legendary men of trade to the attention of the Elizabethan audience; together, their works formed a popular history of merchants which showed that businessmen had a long tradition of service to the commonwealth and, more particularly, to the crown.

In portraying the close ties of merchants and their sovereigns, these authors depicted a continuing political and economic reality. Elizabeth was increasingly dependent on the loans of London merchants as her reign progressed, and the court, like the country, profited from England's trade. London's principal citizens also gave Elizabeth military assistance; they raised nearly one-tenth of all the troops levied during her reign. In return for this kind of support, Elizabeth's privy council honoured the autonomy of London's government and helped the City Fathers act effectively in times of need, obtaining such things as extra food for the city in times of scarcity. These are the kinds of ties one might expect to see reflected in the new works on merchants, those of political and economic understanding.

If one were to take seriously the portraits of mercantile activity which appeared in Elizabethan sermons and moral pamphlets, one would be forced to believe that the merchant's primary concern was lending money at an extortionate rate of interest. The moralists did not, of course, single out the financier as the only member of society who had chosen Mammon over God; they pointed out that the usurer kept evil company with the rack-renting landlord, the corrupt magistrate, the greedy lawyer, and the pluralist clergyman. One may doubt that Elizabethan readers seriously thought that all merchants were usurers, any more than they thought all gentlemen were greedy landlords. But in literary terms, the gentleman had an advantage over the merchant because he had alternate images as knight, courtier and governor, whereas the merchant's image, until quite late in Elizabeth's reign, was determined almost exclusively by the moralists. A few chroniclers might insert the good deeds of merchants in their works, but until these good deeds started to be portrayed on the stage, the merchant was most familiar to Elizabethans as a man who beggared the poor in order to enrich himself, a godless man who went to church only to arrest debtors, and a miser who thought only of his money on his deathbed.

In the middle of Elizabeth's reign, however, a statute was passed which complicated the moral context in which the stock merchantusurer appeared.