Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England. By Bryan Reynolds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; pp. 195. $41.95 cloth; Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. By Jeremy Lopez. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 216. $60 cloth.

Extract

Bryan Reynolds's fascinating book, Becoming Criminal, contributes to the growing scholarly work that examines relations among early modern literature, theatre, and legalism. Reynolds identifies a distinct late sixteenth-century criminal culture that operated according to its own aesthetic, ideology, language, and lifestyle. This culture's proximity to state official culture was a crucial part of its own identity and also of its power to undermine and dissent from that official cultural identity. “Self-defined by the criminal conduct and dissident thought” of its members, and “officially defined by and against the dominant preconceptions of English cultural normality,” this culture “constituted a subnation that illegitimately occupied material and conceptual space within the English nation” (1). In this view, it sought not to destroy the dominant system but to feed off of it, possessing in itself a paradoxical coherence and chosen way of life that “transverses” official culture: that lies athwart of it, crosses into it, and is fetishized by it.