SOURCE: "Conny-Catching Pamphlets," in The Literature of Roguery, 1907. Reprint by Burt Franklin Reprints, 1958, pp. 93–110.

In the following excerpt, Chandler examines Greene's "conny-catching" tales of the underworld and their influence on his fellow dramatists.

Conny-catching Pamphlets

… Greene the Bohemian is one of the few Englishmen of standing in letters who furthered the development of the romance of roguery prior to the eighteenth century. Yet until within two years of his death he had won fame in fiction only as a love-romancer in the tradition of Lyly. From such romantic stories as "Mamillia," "Arbasto," "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and the delicate "Pandosto,"—source of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale,"—Greene turned to realistic conny-catching pamphlets and repentances. The change came in 1590, when he began to show signs of contrition for the wild life he had led; and this frame of mind continuing until his death in September, 1592, he filled the interval...