disguises and all realize how close to disaster their perversions and fears had brought them. Democles sees that their adventures have paralleled the oracle, and suddenly humble, he resigns his kingship to his regal grandson. Sephestia and Maximius return to honor. Menaphon, meanwhile, gives up his courtly wooing, returns to his sheep, and marries his rustic sweetheart.

While a plot summary demonstrates the typical movement of the Greene romance from chaos to harmony, distortion to clarity, Greene is more interested in the mental steps by which each character determines and justifies his actions. Greene’s characters come to be known through their soliloquies, which always strike one by their logical order, so that the reader often ignores how distorted the character’s perspective is until the decisions that arise lead to disaster. Because Greene so fully presents his characters’ motives and thought processes, he rarely creates a character with whom the reader cannot to some degree sympathize. In Menaphon, for example, the tyrant Democles seems, as a result, more pitiable than odious, even though Greene details his slaughters. It is this sympathy, this feeling which causes the reader to believe that, as fearful and selfish as these figures may be, they are capable of a charity and trust, that keeps the ending’s sudden harmony from seeming contrived.

A Notable Discovery of Cozenage

Greene set himself a more difficult task when he tried to show that the whores and thieves of his connycatching pamphlets were deserving of the sympathy of his bourgeois, puritanical readers. He increased the potential for his success by putting himself forward in the first pamphlet, A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, as an avowed foe of “those pernitious sleights that have brought many ignorant men to confusion.” Once having won his readers’ confidence that he was on their side, however, he began to discriminate gradually between the lesser evils of nipping purses and prostitution and the greater evils of judicial bribes and merchant fraud. As the connycatching series proceeded, Greene’s nips, foists, and whores become more lively personalities, often speaking directly to the reader not so much to defend their trades but to attack what could be called “white-collar” crime. In these monologues, the rogues come across as witty, practical, and satiric while their victims appear to be greedy, fat upstarts trying to pass themselves off as gentlemen. A willing reader might find himself identifying with the thief against the merchant, and that seems to be Greene’s purpose, although he continued throughout the six works to call himself the rogues’ foe.

A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher

A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher, the fifth pamphlet in the series, takes the reader most deeply into the underworld and into the minds of the rogues by making the reader an eavesdropper on an alehouse debate between “Laurence, a foyst, and Nan, a traffique.” Authenticity and intimacy are provided by the slangy, joking speech of the pair and by their reference by name to others of their professions. The subject of the dispute—that of which of them more endangers the commonwealth—seems set up by Greene to allow the reader to indulge his self-righteous anger at the evils of the criminal world; but not far into the dialogue Laurence and Nan take aim at their victims. Nan credits her success as a prostitute to the insatiable lust of her clients; this appetite, she continues, also supports the respectable commercial world:the Hospitall would want patients, and Surgians much worke, the Apothecaries would haue surphaling water and Potato roots lye deade on theyr handes, the Paynters could not dispatche and make way theyr Vermiglion , why Laurence, [the taverns] would be moord if we of the Trade were not to supply [their] wants.

She spits her choicest venom at the “good auncient Matron” who sets her “faire wench her daughter out to sale in her youth” to draw on “sundrie to bee suters.” To Nan and Laurence the underworld has no limits.

This blackening of all humanity by the connycatching pair recalls the similar process in Greene’s romances, whereby each character perverts love in some way and thus endangers society. The rising action of the romances, wherein souls and society are reformed, has its parallel in the sequel to Laurence and Nan’s dialogue, “The Conversion of an English Courtizan,” which makes up the second half of A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher. Greene presents this as the true story of a country girl, made vain and greedy by her doting, ambitious bourgeois parents, who never learns humility or loyalty and thus takes to crime. Having gone from bad to worse, she eventually meets a young merchant who differs from all other Londoners she has met by neither buying her nor scorning her; this quiet fellow respects her, wins her confidence, promises his loyalty, and marries her. The community of the story is harmonized, at least for the time being.

“The Conversion of an English Courtizan”

Not until “The Conversion of an English Courtizan” has Greene suggested in the pamphlet series that his rogues have the potential for reform—in fact, he explicity denies it in the first pamphlet. As in the romances, Greene will not allow the rebuilding of his fictional society until all parties have acknowledged their share in the earlier destruction. Since the connycatching series begins as an indictment of one element of the city, Greene will not depict repentance by that element until the entire society has been implicated in the evil, as it is most vehemently in A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher. In Greene’s Christian vision, repentance can be accepted only by a penitent, whose forgiving includes the desire to be forgiven. For Greene, “The Conversion of an English Courtizan” cannot succeed as a story unless the reader understands that the courtesan represents each segment of society, not merely the stereotyped criminal.