front cover of
Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press
"Arthur Kinney has made so many contributions to the study of English literature, in so many different roles, that it can be difficult to reckon with the true sum of his achievement. . . . His curiosity encompasses an entire world and all the things in it, the very world that English Renaissance thinkers inhabited and approached with the same comprehensive spirit of inquiry. . . . Every topic to which he turns in these pages is pursued with impeccable scholarly rigor. . . . To pursue new approaches as Kinney has done year after year and decade after decade requires the nerve to risk failure, even repeated failure. It demands that the scholar constantly explore unfamiliar ground where the feet are still unsure and use analytical tools before they have grown familiar in the hand. It asks the thinker to move outside the security of expertise, the writer to advance arguments that may not succeed. . . . [Kinney] has provided us a wholly different model of a distinguished scholarly career, spending decades in pursuit of intellectual risk and adventure."—James J. Marino, author of Owning William Shakespeare: The King's Men and Their Intellectual Property
[more]

front cover of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars
A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld
Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990
The Elizabethan age was one of unbounded vitality and exuberance; nowhere is the color and action of life more vividly revealed than in the rogue books and cony-catching (confidence game) pamphlets of the sixteenth century. This book presents seven of the age's liveliest works: Walker's Manifest Detection of Dice Play; Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds; Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds; Greene's Notable Discovery of Cozenage and Black Book's Messenger; Dekker's Lantern and Candle-light; and Rid's Art of Juggling. From these pages spring the denizens of the Elizabethan underworld: cutpurses, hookers, palliards, jarkmen, doxies, counterfeit cranks, bawdy-baskets, walking morts, and priggers of prancers.

In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter