… Robert Greene was as good an authority on London sharpers and conny-catchers as was Thomas Harman on wandering beggars. He wrote five pamphlets describing their tricks…. He had lived among the conny-catchers and perhaps practised their tricks himself in his wild days following his travels in France and Italy. The pamphlets exposing them he wrote during the violently repentant years (1591–1592) just before his death. They show evidence of great haste in composition, and are somewhat haphazard in their arrangement; one of them, The Second Part of Connycatching, seems to have been garbled in the printing, since the paragraphs apparently intended to begin the pamphlet occur somewhere in the middle.¹

The Notable Discouery of Coosnage is evidently an experiment undertaken with the double intention of satisfying his conscience and attracting the public. It contains a table giving the principal methods of cheating, a few of which Greene describes in detail, and a long discourse at the end on the 'Coosenage of Colliars'. The Second Part of Conny-Catching is manifestly the result of the success of the Notable Discouery of Coosnage, and the best part of it is an enlargement on matters merely outlined in the first pamphlet. The Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching is a continuation of the series as a result of the great success of the first two parts. It is composed entirely of stories illustrating the methods which Greene has just been describing. One is tempted to say that here Greene leaves fact and begins with fiction, according to the words of his confession quoted below.

The same criticism applies to the Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher and the Blacke Bookes Messenger. The first is a discussion between a thief and a whore as to which can do the most harm. They maintain their arguments by describing their various tricks, telling many stories in illustration, till the woman finally wins the day. The Blacke Bookes Messenger was intended by Greene to herald the publication of a Black Book containing the names of all the conny-catchers and cozeners which were then operating in London. The Messenger is a pamphlet narrating the wicked life and shameful death of Ned Brown, a cut-purse, whom Greene represents as practising all kinds of conny-catching tricks. It shows carelessness in composition: on the title-page we are told that Brown died unrepentant, but the event is different, for he ends piously enough with a long exhortation to those disposed to follow in his footsteps.

It is evident that Greene, finding that conny-catching pamphlets paid well, worked them during that wretched last year of his life for all they were worth. In the address to 'The Gentlemen Readers' prefixed to his Vision (the address was probably written in 1592, though it is clear, as Churton Collins points out, that the Vision itself was written in 1590) Greene says, 'I haue shotte at many abuses, ouer shotte my selfe in describing of some; where truth failed, my inuention hath stood my friend.'² I believe that this statement was meant by him to apply especially to the fantastic stories and 'laws' of the Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching, Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher, and Blacke Bookes Messenger; but there is no reason for making from Greene's morbid confession too sweeping a condemnation of the three pamphlets. Their atmosphere is that of the earlier exposures which he gives himself so much credit for making, and a hundred details in them help to fill out the picture of rogue life. One can only guess which stories were true and which imaginative; this conjecture is hardly worth the trouble, since no importance attaches to the decision. One of them, the story of the 'Cutler and the Nip', was apparently told about the town for true, since Greene tells it a second time in the Thirde Part of Conny-catching, because he had made a mistake in his version of it in the Second Part. Although his pamphlets are not to be taken in the same literal way as Harman's Caueat, they are far more valuable than Harman's in suggesting the atmosphere of rogue life. Harman's book is plain, honest matter of fact: Greene's pamphlets are a part of the literature of roguery.

Greene's exposures seem to be made from the life, but in two or three places, as we have noted, he copies from an earlier work. The description of 'Barnard's Law', in the introduction to the Notable Discouerie of Coosnage, follows practically word for word the account in the Manifest Detection.³ But Greene introduces this passage as a quotation (or at least as history), prefacing it with the words: 'There was before this many yeeres agoe a practise put in vse by such shifting companions, which was called the Barnards Law,' &c., and he quotes it only to show how much worse is the modern practice of conny-catching.

Later in the same pamphlet his explanation of the word 'law' as used for a method of cheating, and his connycatcher's speech in self-justification, on the ground that there is deceit in all professions, are likewise borrowed word for word from the Manifest Detection.⁴ These plagiarisms are all in comparatively unimportant passages, and, considering the standards of the time, it would be a mistake, it seems to me, to argue from them any general impeachment of the truth of Greene's exposures.

Greene was a queer compound of idealist and rogue. He began, evidently, with aristocratic notions of literature, writing his early love pamphlets in elegant euphuistic language. For the Elizabethan popular drama he had a contempt for which we should have much more sympathy if we knew that stage only as it was in the early '80's. In a general way Greene's position at the beginning of his literary career was that of the classicists of his day, Webbe, Puttenham, and Sidney. But a reckless and dissipated life soon brought him to terms with the stage, and he became a fairly popular dramatist. His plays brought in money, but money only increased his dissipation, and he sank a step lower, from writing plays to roguery, or at least to association with rogues. From Euphuist to playwright, from playwright to conny-catcher: the second descent seemed no greater to him than the first. Dissipation soon played havoc with his bodily health, and at length, two years before his death, out of money, estranged from his wife and from whatever of good reputation he may have had, he began to write his confessions and his exposures of low life. He was prompted, perhaps, by a real, although sentimental repentance, perhaps by want of money, perhaps by love of notoriety—who shall untangle his motives? In any event the result was the conny-catching pamphlets, which, in spite of their carelessness and occasionally improbable stories, bear on their face the stamp of truth and are the most vivid and brilliant works of the kind which the age produced. So much for his work. Regarding the man himself—too brilliantly talented to be called unfortunate, and too weak to be called tragic—no sentence fits so well as Stevenson's comment on Villon: 'the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.'…

Notes

¹… At p. 88 of vol. x of Grosart's edition.

²Greene's Vision, 'To the Gentlemen Readers' (Grosart, xii. 195–6).

³ Compare Manifest Detection, sig. D3 verso f. (Percy Society, vol. xxix, p. 37 ff.), with Greene, Notable Discouerie of Coosnage (Grosart, x. 9 ff.).

⁴Manifest Detection, sig. B4, f, and B7 verso (Percy Society, xxix, pp. 17 f. and 22 f.); Greene, Notable Discouerie of Coosnage (Grosart, x. 33–5)….