사기의 기술: 로버트 그린의 불한당 팸플릿과 일탈의 미학

Abstract

Rogue pamphlets which became popular in early modern England scrutinize the criminal underworld growing along with economic expansion in London. The popularity of the rouge pamphlets shows that they kept exciting people`s curiosity about the threatening underworld by marketing public fear of crime. The criticism of the pamphlets has thus revolved around whether the depicted criminal world is real or fictional. Reading the rogue pamphlets as creative non-fictions, this paper, however, focuses on the pamphlets` social satire that explores the analogy between the market economy and the criminal world and transgressive aesthetics of the pamphlets as a literary form. In particular, Robert Greene`s A Disputation between a Hee Cony-catcher and a She Cony-catcher can be read as a literary work that dramatically represents cony-catchers and whores. A dialogue between a male cony-catcher and a whore shows that criminals are professional workers rather than lazy bodies living off the sweat of others. Above all, Greene represents whores as transgressive yet autonomous subjects, who challenge patriarchal gender norms and actively engage in business with their wits and beauty. Green`s characters criticize the bleak society in which those who cannot dissemble cannot live and at the same time provide theatrical pleasures by their dynamic performativity in dissembling. Readers can enjoy the world of cony-catching, secure in the knowledge of a safe distance between the representation and the reality. Greene does not sacrifice humor and dramatic energy for a moral lesson and a social warning, and this is why his pamphlets fascinate readers.