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

Bryan Reynolds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0801868084 | ISBN-13: 978-0801868085

In this book Bryan Reynolds argues that early modern England experienced a sociocultural phenomenon, unprecedented in English history, which has been largely overlooked by historians and critics. Beginning in the 1520s, a distinct "criminal culture" of beggars, vagabonds, confidence tricksters, prostitutes, and gypsies emerged and flourished. This community defined itself through its criminal conduct and dissident thought and was, in turn,officially defined by and against the dominant conceptions of English cultural normality.

Examining plays, popular pamphlets, laws, poems, and scholarly work from the period, Reynolds demonstrates that this criminal culture, though diverse, was united by its own ideology, language, and aesthetic. Using his transversal theory, he shows how the enduring presence of this criminal culture markedly influenced the mainstream culture's aesthetic sensibilities, socioeconomic organization, and systems of belief. He maps the effects of the public theater's transformative force of transversality, such as through the criminality represented by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, on both Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the scholarship devoted to it.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A very useful introduction for those interested in the ways in which the Renaissance is frequently introduced to today's students... [Reynolds] is unusually attuned to the ways in which acts of speech depend upon their context and their assumed audience, and his analysis impressively focuses upon the cultural and literary importance of writing outside the canon. His book never fails to be interesting.

(Dennis D. Kezar Tennessean 2003)

[Bryan Reynolds] frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of 'transversal theory,' which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience... Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an 'official' language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520's, continued beyond the Puritan's rise to power in the early 1640's, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture.

(Studies in English Literature 2004)

A valuable contribution both to the study of early modern criminality and to theorizing the period's social and political relations more broadly.

(Tanya Pollard Renaissance Quarterly )

Becoming Criminal's transversal theory performs a valuable service in reconceptualizing early modern English criminality and linking it to some of the period's most important institutions and discourses.

(Stephen Cohen Sixteenth Century Journal )

Becoming Criminal is ambitious Althusserian analysis of the criminal subcultures of Renaissance England. For Reynolds—who was, as he tells us, initiated into a fascination with criminality when he was a high school student in Scarsdale—the rogue pamphlets, anti-theatrical tracts, and repressive legislation of the late sixteenth century are not the expression of paranoia in high places. Rather, they disclose the existence of a strange 'transversal power,' an alternative, oppositional culture whose values threatened the established order and whose visionary energies continue to haunt our own world.

(Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University )

Reynolds has some very new and valuable reconceptualizations of the rogue pamphlets and criminal literature of the late Tudor—early Stuart period in England, and he has provided the best analysis I know of their language. He expands Félix Guattari's term 'transversal' to something far more suggestive, to point towards a conceptual and experiential expansion of boundaries. Becoming Criminal is a valuable and significant contribution to scholarship.

(Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts )

From the Publisher

"Becoming Criminal is ambitious Althusserian analysis of the criminal subcultures of Renaissance England. For Reynolds—who was, as he tells us, initiated into a fascination with criminality when he was a high school student in Scarsdale—the rogue pamphlets, anti-theatrical tracts, and repressive legislation of the late sixteenth century are not the expression of paranoia in high places. Rather, they disclose the existence of a strange 'transversal power,' an alternative, oppositional culture whose values threatened the established order and whose visionary energies continue to haunt our own world."—Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University

"Reynolds has some very new and valuable reconceptualizations of the rogue pamphlets and criminal literature of the late Tudor–early Stuart period in England, and he has provided the best analysis I know of their language. He expands Félix Guattari's term 'transversal' to something far more suggestive, to point towards a conceptual and experiential expansion of boundaries. Becoming Criminal is a valuable and significant contribution to scholarship."—Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (February 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801868084
• ISBN-13: 978-0801868085
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,895,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bryan Reynolds grew up in Scarsdale, New York. After a short career racing motorcycles, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his bachelor degree in English Literature. He then went on to receive his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Reynolds is currently Professor of Drama and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), and coeditor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive (2011), Critical Responses to Kiran Desai (2009), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). Reynolds is also the Artistic Director and resident playwright of the Transversal Theater Company, a collective of American and Dutch artists, which has toured many of his plays internationally in addition to runs in the United States and The Netherlands. Reynolds has held visiting professorships at the University of London, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University-Frankfurt am Main, University College Utrecht, and the University of Cologne; and he has taught at a range of academic and performing arts institutions worldwide, including philosophy at Deleuze Camp at the University of Cologne and acting at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Becoming Me, March 30, 2004

By 

Jennifer Killingsworth (San Francisco, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Hardcover)

I never thought that a book about criminal culture in early modern England would help me to change my own life. I bought the book because I am a historian, but ended up reading the book as a self-help book. Reynolds develops a theory of identity formation and social history that he calls "transversal theory." While reading the book, I came to realize that everything he talks about, except the crimnal stuff, relates to me and my life. Having minority status on a number of levels, and therefore constantly scrambling for agancy and affirmation, I immediately took to Reynolds' ideas. He supplies not only a methodology for academic reasearch, but also for negotiating one's life within their social worlds. By showing me how I came to be subjectified, and how sociopolitical conductors work to constrain me, and by demonstrating how I can become what I'm not as a means by which to become what I am such that the worlds around me comes to respect and celebrate my differences; and, most importantly, by providing me with both the theory and method by which to become whatever I want, Reynolds has inspired me in ways I never imagined possible. In many ways, this is a manifesto for improvemnt through alternative thought and social performance. For me, Reynolds is like an Emerson for everyone today looking to be more self-reliant and to grow in unexpected, creative, and life-inspiring ways. The book is also a fine work of social history, about the relationships among crimnals, space, language, and theater in the time of Shakespeare.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transversal Reading, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Hardcover)

Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England is revolutionary for many reasons and will contribute invaluably to research in the humanities. The big word of the last twenty years has been "interdisciplinarity," and, in my opinion, it has not produced the kinds of studies it implies. While there have been theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization within the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences, the borders between these fields are rarely self-consciously traversed. Such traversing of borders is among the many things that distinguishes Reynolds' transversal approach -- a theoretical framework he initiated in his 1997 Theatre Journal article, "The Devil's House, `or worse': Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England," that is now taught in all theatre theory and performance theory courses. The fact that Becoming Criminal is truly cross-disciplinary and theoretically-driven in both scope and methodology, and thus important to scholarship in a number of fields (literary criticism, history, sociology, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, performance studies, and critical theory) greatly distinguishes it from other books on the representation of rogues, vagabonds, and gypsies in early modern English literature. This book has been hugely helpful to me, someone who is currently writing a book on the dramatic and literary representation of highwaymen in the long 18th century. (Look for it in 2006!)

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Become what you aren't, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Hardcover)

In Becoming Criminal, with remarkable ingenuity, Reynolds develops and demonstrates an original, purposeful, and conscientious critical approach, what he calls "transversal theory," that is simultaneously poststructuralist, performance-oriented, humanist, and materialist (the book teems with evidence from early modern texts of all genres: plays, pamphlets, poems, state documents, and personal letters). In effect, Reynolds' work is at the cutting edge of the next generation of literary-critical-performance studies, and thus Becoming Criminal may be as important to the next twenty years of early modern studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning has been to the last twenty. But Reynolds's "transversal poetics," I predict, will not just replace the new historicism as the dominant critical paradigm; it will continue to be a major influence well beyond the next two decades, especially given that its methodology is subsuming (manifesting and expanding on much of what the new historicism had to offer), processual (self-aware and open-ended), and necessitates evolution in response to both the changing environments through which the transversal critic travels and the various subject matters she/he pursues. As Reynolds' transversal slogan emphasizes, "Become what you aren't."