SOURCE: "The Narrative Strategies of Robert Greene's Cony-Catching Pamphlets," in Cahiers Élisabéthains, No. 37, April, 1990, pp. 9–16.

In the following essay, Relihan discusses the significance of the complex narrative approach of The Defence of Conny-Catching.

In 1591 and 1592, Robert Greene published a series of pamphlets which purported to expose criminal life in London. These cony-catching pamphlets have long been considered an interesting source of information about London life both by critics who stress Greene's familiarity with the kind of life the pamphlets describe, and by those critics who stress the tradition of criminal and rogue literature which precedes Greene's work.¹ What I would like to discuss here is not the relation of these pamphlets to any reality Greene may have witnessed, or their relation to John Awdeley's The Fraternity of Vagabonds or any other earlier work of rogue literature,² (Lawlis 396) for it seems to me that the connections to both...