Gulls, Cony-Catchers and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld

Summary

The age-old ploy of practising deception upon one’s fellow for material profit and/or vindictive amusement, known as gulling, cozenage or cony-catching in the rogue literature of the Elizabethan period, figures prominently in the contemporary drama where its principal exponent is, of course, Ben Jonson. In Volpone and The Alchemist deception is treated as an art-form in itself. This is gulling on a grand scale, where the theatricality of deceiving and the deception inherent in the theatrical illusion find their finest expression. In Shakespeare’s plays, gulling rarely occupies centre-stage as in Jonson (Othello may be the one exception to this), although it frequently surfaces as an incident in the main plot, for example, the double gulling of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, or the cozening of Falstaff by Hal after the Gadshill episode in 1 Henry IV. The term itself, however, occurs infrequently in Shakespeare’s plays. Unusually, in Twelfth Night the text designates two characters, Malvolio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, as ‘gulls’, the instigator of the trap set for the steward, Maria, is addressed as ‘my noble gull-catcher’ by Fabian (2. 5. 180), and there may be an implicit reference to ‘gulling’ in the title of the play, since the prologue of Gl’Ingannati, a likely source, has a reference to la notte di beffana, a phrase usually rendered as ‘Epiphany’ or ‘Twelfth Night’ in English but which, literally translated, may be understood as The Night of Gullings.