The gentle-born apprentice, generally a younger son in training within a London Trade Company, was generally perceived as downwardly mobile, and discursive contestation surrounded the privileges, duties, and status of that figure, including whether or not he lost his gentle status as a result of what some perceived as his “bondage” within the apprenticeship contract. As a liminal figure who complicated traditional divisions between commoners and the gentry, the gentle apprentice offers new routes into understanding class and status formation, as well as modes of civic and urban masculine identity. While apprenticeship was a temporary identity for all within an apprenticeship contract, it was one that altered fundamentally the adult identity of a gentle-born young man, a transformation that some gentleman apprentices resisted vehemently. I propose to examine the young, urban, masculine subjectivity of the gentle-born apprentice of the seventeenth century, seeking both an historical explanation for the existence of this figure and an understanding of his place within masculine culture of seventeenth-century London. My sources will include a wide range of archival documents, but my primary dramatic text will be Jonson, Marston, and Chapman’s Eastward Ho (1605). 

—Ronda Arab, Simon Fraser University