In this book Bryan Reynolds argues that early modern England experienced
a sociocultural phenomenon, unprecedented in English history, which has
been largely overlooked by historians and critics. Beginning in the
1520s, a distinct "criminal culture" of beggars, vagabonds, confidence
tricksters, prostitutes, and gypsies emerged and flourished. This
community defined itself through its criminal conduct and dissident
thought and was, in turn, officially defined by and against the dominant
conceptions of English cultural normality.
Examining plays, popular pamphlets, laws, poems, and scholarly work from
the period, Reynolds demonstrates that this criminal culture, though
diverse, was united by its own ideology, language, and aesthetic. Using
his transversal theory, he shows how the enduring presence of this
criminal culture markedly influenced the mainstream culture's aesthetic
sensibilities, socioeconomic organization, and systems of belief. He
maps the effects of the public theater's transformative force of
transversality, such as through the criminality represented by
Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, on both Elizabethan and
Jacobean society and the scholarship devoted to it.