Rogue-Sirens: Urban Seduction and the Collapse of Amicitia

Abstract

In his 1630 courtesy treatise, The English Gentleman, Richard Brathwaite observes that “the life of man… is a continuall temptation”—there is “neither time, place, sexe nor condition exempted from temptation.”¹ According to Brathwaite the impulse to stray from gentlemanly decorum must be resisted if civilization is to survive the changes he and many others imagined infecting the realm. The chapbook literature of roguery, which appeared in England from roughly the mid-sixteenth century through the first two decades of the seventeenth, directly engaged with (and likely help to foment) this perceived crisis. These popular narrative accounts of the criminal underworld repeatedly emphasize that for the young man about town, illicit temptation is immensely difficult to resist. Especially in London, one is constantly at risk of falling prey to the seductive dexterity of Machiavellian rogues who are able to take a “cony” (the term, in cant parlance, for a hapless victim) and lay him “upon the Anvil of their wits, till they have wrought him like wax.”² Malleable to seductive tempters, conies can be reshaped or “versed”³—that is, emotionally and physically turned from the upstanding life they once knew—to a host of debased desires and practices.