ABSTRACT
As several scholars have indicated, the projection of objectionable commercial practices and values onto rogues served both "to relieve the public of the promptings either of pity or of responsibility" for the poor, and to deflect social resentments away from merchants (Woodbridge 19). Regardless of the crucial social consequences this scapegoating eventuated for vagrants and other figures identified as rogues, the removal of economic practices and principles to the "profane" context of the underworld enables the pamphleteers to examine subtle questions about commerce free from many of the ideological complications that cluttered its representation in alternative literatures. Insofar as the rogues are excluded from the prospect of redemption (and thus exempted from theological and moral imperatives), the pamphleteers can "anatomize" their motives and "abuses" (which shadow those of legitimate economic actors) in a unconstrained, "secular" mode. The rogue "subculture," in this sense, serves as an ideal conceptual space for a candid examination of a market-oriented society, "a harmless outlet for criticism of ('the right') order and for the open presentation of alternatives" (Slack 25).2
