Thomas Dekker and the Spectre of Underworld Jargon

My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker’s handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral and literary cultures. The paper briefly looks at a play co-authored by Dekker and then examines two “coney-catching pamphlets” by him to see how he tries to appropriate cant or criminal lingo (necessarily an oral system) as an aesthetic/commercial programme. In these two tracts (namely, The Bellman of London, 1608; Lantern and Candlelight, 1608) Dekker makes an expose´ of the jargon used by criminals (with regard to their professional trappings, hierarchies, modus operandi, division of labour) and exploits it as a trope of radical alienation. The elusiveness and ephemerality of the spoken word here reinforce the mobility and deceit culturally associated with the thieves and vagabonds – so that the authorial function of capturing cant (whose revelatory status is insistently sensationalized) through the intrusive technologies of alphabet and print parallels the dominant culture’s project of in-scribing and colonizing its non-conforming other. Using later theorization of orality, the paper will show how the media of writing and print distance the threat inherent in cant and enable its cultural surveillance and aesthetic appraisal.