Lantern and Candlelight (1608) (review)

Given the very considerable amount of critical attention to rogue literature over the past two decades, Viviana Comensoli’s edition of Dekker’s most popular rogue pamphlet is timely. Her long footnotes listing publications in this area (80 and 102) would provide an excellent reading list to start off any graduate student keen to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on the subcultures of early modern England and its marginal communities. When Dekker wrote Lantern and Candlelight in 1608, he had already tested the waters to ensure that this kind of subject matter, popularized by Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets in the early 1590s, was still saleable; the success of The Bellman of London, also 1608, which went through four editions in the year of its publication, left him in no doubt, and he produced a sequel only a few months later. Lantern and Candlelight or, The Bellman’s Second Night’s Walk went through eight editions in the next forty years under various different titles, and is agreed to be the longest lived and most popular of all the rogue books, as well as of Dekker’s many pamphlets.

Although Comensoli emphasizes Dekker’s place in a tradition of rogue writing going back to the early sixteenth century, this pamphlet broadens out its subject matter well beyond cony-catching, and after the opening chapter ‘Of Canting: How long it hath been a language; how it comes to be a language; how it is derived, and by whom it is spoken,’ the cony-catching terminology is used mainly as a fund of metaphor for other kinds of malpractices. Dekker examines, for example, how improvident gentlemen are cheated through dishonest credit transactions, how horse-dealers fob off their customers with diseased or broken-down animals, and how would-be patrons of literature are fooled by travelling peddlers into paying for dedications that are inserted into old books made to look new. His chapter on ‘Moon-men’ or gypsies describes a kind of rogue scarcely mentioned by Greene and his predecessors, which Dekker seems to regard as a special threat to the social health of the nation. He calls them ‘Egyptian grasshoppers that eat up the fruits of the earth,’ hell-hounds, tawny devils, and members of a monstrous body swelling daily. The writing here typifies the strange intensity of Dekker’s social vision, evoking a horrific urban hell of endlessly proliferating crime and corruption. The preliminary verses addressed to the author, which Comensoli usefully includes, position him as an anatomist of social evils who will apply ‘med’cine well-compounded, cheap, and sure’ to cure a diseased society. Postmodern critics like to see Dekker and the cony-catching writers as taking pleasure in what they condemn, but Dekker in his prefaces sees himself rather as a satirist who lets blood in order to effect a cure.

Comensoli’s edition has an extensive introduction with an excellent short account of Dekker’s life and times. Her discussion of canting, the rogue language, rightly stresses Dekker’s ‘delight in verbal playfulness,’ though her section on ‘style and narrative technique’ is shorter than one might have hoped in view of this emphasis. Her text is the only free-standing edition of this work, and, unlike any of the other modern editions, includes all of Dekker’s paratext, which is especially interesting for its marginalia, much of which is in Latin, as well as extracts from the enlarged version of Lantern and Candlelight, published as O per se O in 1612. In the new material included from this pamphlet Dekker reverts to quasi-factual descriptions of country rogues of the type first described by John Awdeley in The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561?) and Thomas Harman in A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors (1561?). Comensoli provides detailed and scrupulous annotations, as well as helpful glossing of Dekker’s vocabulary. She notices errors in Dekker’s Latin transcriptions, and she gives a list of textual variants between Q1 and Q2 of the pamphlet. This edition...