ABSTRACT
THE BEST PLACE TO BEGIN a cultural history of subcultures (although medievalists may disagree) is in mid-sixteenth-century London, with the emergence here of an ‘Elizabethan underworld’ and the popularisation of a genre of pamphlet-writing loosely referred to as ‘rogue literature’, devoted to the chronicling of criminal types and criminal activities in and around the city. Criminal underworlds certainly existed before this time and in many other places. However, early modern London saw not only the rise of a myriad of discrete, underground criminal networks but also a proliferation of imaginative narratives about them. Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of the most vile and detestable use of Dice-Play, and other practices like the same (1552) was an ‘exposé’ of card and dice cheats, while John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (probably 1565) was an account of various criminal orders (‘Cozeners and Shifters’, ‘Knaves’) and criminal types (the ruffl er, the whipjack, the forgerer, the ring-faller, and so on). We might also think of the playwright Robert Greene’s various ‘Cony-catching’ pamphlets from the 1590s, concerned with thieves and blackmailers and confi dence-tricksters. Thomas Harman, a Justice of the Peace and author of A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabonds (1567), is credited with coining the word ‘rogue’, a broadly applicable term describing vagrants and thieves who ‘used disguise, rhetorical play, and counterfeit gestures, to insinuate themselves into lawful and political contexts’ (Dionne and Mentz 2004: 1-2). The term thus already carries with it imaginative possibilities: implying a kind of performative act, the creation of a fi ctional self, as well as linguistic display. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the sixteenth-century London rogue
has attracted the attention of literary scholarship in particular, going back as far as Edward Viles and Frederick J. Furnivall’s The Rogues and Vagabonds of Shakespeare’s Youth (1880) and F.W. Chandler’s two-volume Literature of Roguery (1907). In 1930, on the other hand, an especially infl uential anthology of rogue literature was compiled by a Professor of the History of Education from King’s College, London: A.V. Judges’s The Elizabethan Underworld. ‘The tendency in literary criticism’, he complained, ‘has been, on the whole, to overlook the historical value of these descriptive writings. Historians themselves have hardly glanced at them…’ (Judges 1965: xiii).
