Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England

THREE: Communal Departure, Criminal Language, Dissident Consolidation

i n a r e m a r k a b l e and ingenious transversal movement, early modern England’s criminal culture of gypsies, rogues, vagabonds, beggars , cony-catchers, cutpurses, and prostitutes transgressed the sociolinguistic hegemony of oYcial culture by inventing its own language, called “cant.” Among other sociocultural variables, criminal culture was uniWed by this unique spoken language. In eVect, cant was analyzed, commodiWed , and fetishized in the period’s popular, commercial, and state literature . It was imbued with a mysterious and alluring nature and history that heightened both criminal culture’s infamy and the conduction of the transversal power for which this culture was a manifestation and vehicle.1 Through a social semiotic analysis of cant’s literary representation, I hope to show that cant worked in a complex fashion to connect criminal culture not just on the level of communication but also on aesthetic, ideological , and practical levels; and that by facilitating crimes and inspiring dissidence, cant signiWcantly aVected English society. My approach reXects Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress’s understanding of Michael Halliday’s concept of “antilanguages.” In purely linguistic terms, antilanguages are highly developed jargons: languages spoken by subcultures that have the syntactical and morphological structure of the dominant language but use essentially diVerent lexical words (those carrying meaning), often with no recognizable etymology. Like Halliday, Hodge and Kress maintain: “These are languages generated not by agents of the state but the opposite: criminals, prisoners, groups that have been c h a p t e r t h r e e Communal Departure, Criminal Language, Dissident Consolidation marginalized by the state, who express their opposition by creating a language which excludes outsiders.”2 But, unlike Halliday, who insists that the “interpersonal function” of antilanguages “predominates over the ideational,” Hodge and Kress maintain that antilanguages “simultaneously exclude outsiders, and express the ideology of the antigroup” because this “antigroup” developed the antilanguage to articulate and promote its ideational, and thus its ideological, diVerences in the Wrst place (87). My own comprehension of “antilanguages” diVers from Hodge and Kress’s as well as Halliday’s understanding. In general, I see the use of “antilanguages” by alternative groups as expressions of diVerence and resistance and not of antithesis to the dominant or oYcial group. I also want to argue that although cant meets Hodge and Kress’s criteria for an antilanguage insofar as it served criminal culture’s need to create internal solidarity and exclude others, in a very real way cant eludes the binary opposition that drives their view. Cant is not about negation. It is about assertion and promotion. Whereas for Hodge and Kress “antilanguages characteristically are built up by a series of transformations whose meaning is negation, opposition, inversion,” cant promoted a culture that both thrived on diVerence from and dependence on oYcial culture even as it rebelled against it.3 The Language Imperative The early modern English state perceived vernacular multilingualism as a threat to state power and national integrity, instead promoting monolingualism as the ideal.4 Like most governments, especially in Europe, where language diVerences have historically been associated with the distinguishable territories of individual nation-states, that of England pursued a standardized language as a symbol and instrument for the sociopolitical uniWcation and maintenance of its nation-state and oYcial culture. With the idea of “one nation, one language” as its goal, the state sought, by means of its sociopolitical conductors (juridical, religious, and educational structures) to increase literacy and thereby further standardize the East Midlands dialect of Middle English that had already surfaced Communal Departure, Criminal Language, Dissident Consolidation | 65 as England’s oYcial language.5 Commonly referred to today as the “London standard,” this dialect acquired superior status over the many other dialects spoken in England at the time because the Midlands region was most important in terms of wealth and population. It contained the commercial center of London, with its Xourishing middle class and mercantile elite; the court, with its royalty and aristocracy; and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the leading ideological assemblages for higher learning and technological advancement. Like most standardized languages , the London standard arose, together with the upper layers, in a stratiWed, hierarchical arrangement of sociopolitical determinations. It was the speech variety advanced by the state and oYcial culture (the dominant speech community), for it was the linguistic medium through which this culture articulated and disseminated its ideology. The English state Wrst addressed the issue...