Afterword: Re: connaissance

Abstract

In the first place, by theater. Early modern actors were infamous in their own time as con-men. Their stock in trade was deception: they pretended to be people they were not. Sir Francis Bacon speaks for many of his contemporaries in condemning the sleights of hand, voice, and genitals that turned commoners into nobles and boys into women: “You shall now see them on the stage play a king, or an emperor, or a duke; but they are no sooner off the stage but they are base rascals, vagabond abjects, and porterly hirelings, which is their natural and original condition” (qtd. in Ashley 171). In the eyes of civic authorities, con-men actors attracted con-men criminals who plied their trades among the spectators while the actors plied their trade on the stage. In a petition dated 28 July 1597 the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London asked the queen’s Privy Council to intercede and stop stage plays in the suburbs that lay beyond the city’s jurisdiction. Among the several “inconveniences” caused by plays the mayor and aldermen cited the fact that playhouses “are the ordinary places for vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason and other idle and dangerous persons to meet together and to make their matches to the great displeasure of Almighty God and the hurt and annoyance of her Majesty’s people” (qtd. in Ashley 167). Cozeners and coney-catchers, if not whoremongers and treasonous rabble-rousers, depended, like the actors, on securing the complicity of their victims. In Transversal Enterprises Bryan Reynolds and his collaborators have seized on this early modern social anxiety and made it the groundwork for a postmodern critical enterprise. “The transversal influence of the theater,” Reynolds says in Chapter 1, “was most manifest in the workings of criminals and social deviants, such as individuals who disguised themselves as gypsies in order to extort money, sell herbal remedies, and read palms; conmen who pretended to be different people in order to perpetrate crimes; and people who practiced transvestism, whether male-to-female in the theater or female-to-male on London’s streets” (13 in this book). The con-man/contra-man and his “mark”/victim come to particular prominence in Chapter 3, when Reynolds and Anthony Kubiak find in Hamlet a startling instance of “the con-man/contra-man, who remains largely unconcerned with the mark’s recognition of being-conned. It is of no consequence to the con-man whether the mark ever finds out. It is the game that gives pleasure — the play.” If Hamlet is the con-man, then the audience — that’s you and me — are his mark: “We are, Hamlet (or Shakespeare, or Jacobi, or someone …) tells us to our faces, fools” (72 in this book).KeywordsOxford English DictionarySocial DeviantTransversal TheoryOrdinary PlaceSider SpiratorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.