Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Shakespeare Studies

Rogues and Early Modern English Culture.

Article Excerpt
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture Edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004

The literature of the Elizabethan underclass with its fascinating accounts of vagrants, peddlers, doxies, confidence tricksters, pickpockets, dissemblers, unemployed street entertainers, disabled veterans, masterless outcasts, beggars, and "upright men" (swindlers masquerading as respectable citizens) has attracted a formidable amount of scholarly attention in recent decades. Arthur Kinney's invaluable anthology of the major cony-catching texts by Walker, Awdeley, Harman, Greene, Dekker, and Rid (a second edition of Kinney's 1973 volume appeared in 1990) has contributed importantly to the trend; and a veritable battalion of literary critics, cultural historians, and sociolinguistic postmodernists have approached the subject with vigor and a bewildering complexity of attitudes and methods. The present volume, introduced by the editors with fierce awareness of their ideological valences, brings together some fourteen essays by contributors who fairly represent the discipline of vagabond-study as practiced in the academy today. Kinney contributes a learnedly insightful afterword, especially helpful in its acute discussion of the historiographical challenges that confront modern analysts of the material.

As is common with such collections, the value of the essays varies considerably, but what emerges from the book as a whole is the relentlessly reiterated conviction that writers such as Greene and Dekker, although seeming both to entertain and to moralize about the sorry state of social disorder in the realm, can no longer be read naively or taken at face value. Subjected as they are to strenuous historicizing, contextualizing, post-structuralist theorizing, ambiguating, and "problematizing," these somewhat slender writings, at once didactic and pleasurable to the common-sense reader, exemplify and embody contradictory "discourses," portray a world suspended uncertainly between fiction and fact or between affirmation and subversion of the established power structures, and reveal their authors as ventriloquists or equivocators, and sometimes as being more of the devil's party than they know or can acknowledge. The rogues they portray inhabit a world of "linguistic prowess and social dexterity" (1), defining a culture of gamesmanship and clever self-fashioning that evokes both "sympathy and disgust, admiration and fear" (8). Craig Dionne, for instance, views the Elizabethan con man as the prototype of the modern urban capitalist whose manipulative schemes of bartering, false advertising, and financial investment, skirting or co-opting the law when possible within a fraternity of like-minded entrepreneurs, was already implicit in the sixteenth-century...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!