ABSTRACT
Dramatic works are one of the sites where the struggles and consensus of culture are recorded and worked out.1 Dramatic productions played an active role in cementing the stereotype of the gypsy. In the first half of the seventeenth century, playwrights produced a spate of plays that focused on gypsies. The rogue literature, discussed in the previous chapter, was used extensively as a resource. In fact, sometimes the same authors who penned the rogue literature wrote the plays. The role of the gypsy became one of several stock characters in the theatre. The use of fixed character types became more popular after the Restoration when the English started to copy the Italian commedia dell’arte companies that were performing at Charles II’s court.2 Even before the performances at the Restoration court, the cony-catching pamphleteers presented their works in similar ways to the commedia dell’arte. Not only were the various fraudulent ploys described of a scripted nature, but the rogues’ costumes played a role in their cons as well.3
