abstract: sabina amanbayeva

“Cony-caught into Belief: Early Modern Cony-Catching Pamphlets and Thomas Middleton’s City Comedy”

The paper follows the publishing success of Robert Greene’s series of cony-catching pamphlets, sensational stories revealing the “art of cony-catching,” or various tricks and deceptions that London criminals use in order to defraud naïve citizens of money. A total of at least five pamphlets published within a year (1591-1592), Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets demonstrate remarkable “adaptation” to the medium of commercial pamphleteering: they progressively become more comedic, openly advertising the “strange cunning” of London criminals for their exotic appeal. The next step in the “adaptation” story is the pamphlets’ transfer to theatrical stage, as they appear in a different form in Thomas Middleton’s city comedies about fifteen years after Robert Greene’s publishing success (1604-1606). The paper argues that there is a structural affinity between the comic and the forms in which it was expressed. It describes how Greene’s print pamphlets become more comedic, moving towards performance and away from the humanist values of permanence, knowledge, and education. It also considers the pamphlets’  last act of “adaptation,” Middleton’s city comedies, in light of theater’s medium specificity – theatrical emphasis on presence (physical presence of actors/audience and in-the-now immersion in the present) that is so vital to comedy. Thus, the paper shows how comedic ephemerality is tied to “cheap” pamphleteering and ephemeral performance.