Lena Liapi wants us to read early modern English rogue pamphlets differently. They were not, she argues in Roguery in Print, intended to demonize the Elizabethan poor by depicting them as members of an organized and threatening underworld. Instead, they make up a long-lived and robust genre, with strong links to jest books and Robin Hood tales that explored the excitement and ambivalence of life in the early modern metropolis. Rogues—cardsharps, tricksters, and highwaymen—were creatures of London, the lawbreaking equivalents of greedy merchants, glib lawyers, and shortchanging shopkeepers. In the city, according to hack pamphleteers, people were witty and funny, but never fully trustworthy. Hard-up writers denounced clever urban tricksters, but they were proud of them, too.

Liapi's new perspective on rogue pamphlets results in part from changing the frame. Her study extends from 1590 to 1670, excluding Thomas Harman's bleak and influential Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), with its depiction of poor wandering vagrants’ brutal physical and sexual hierarchies, but including many crime narratives beyond the canonical Elizabethan years. She shows that, with the exception of the 1640s, rogue pamphlets were printed throughout the period. There were differences, though: Elizabethan and early Stuart pamphlets were more likely to be written by named authors, including well-known writers like Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, and were more likely to be discoveries of crime, explaining how criminals operated in London; later pamphlets were often anonymous and bore a closer resemblance to news, frequently focusing on the exploits of particular highwaymen.

Like many other authors of cheap print, authors of rogue pamphlets presented their texts as being both useful and delightful, but in the texts themselves, delight often seems to come first. Liapi argues persuasively that many trickster tales were intended to elicit laughter and that the laughs often came at the expense of the rogues’ victims—the country bumpkins and rich citizens who were bamboozled out of their money. These marks were often shown to deserve their ill-treatment; stories highlight how their own greed led them into con men's snares. The moral message was ambivalent: In a city where dishonesty was the order of the day, was it truly wrong for clever cozeners to swindle prosperous hypocrites?

Ambivalence also characterized the pamphlets’ representations of social life in London. The problem with thieves and tricksters was that rather than constituting a separate underworld, they were fully integrated into normal social networks. In the booming metropolis, everyone was eager to establish new contacts, seeking out countrymen and neighbors for sociable drinking, play, and conversation. Success in the city depended on networking: making friends and extending trust to customers and potential business partners were not optional, but one had to be discerning. Because trust was so essential, it could be exploited. Both in rogue pamphlets and in the archives of law enforcement, criminals were likeable “good fellows” not shadowy “others.”

A chapter on the politicization of rogue pamphlets after 1640 sits a little uneasily with Liapi's main focus on urban life. Parliamentary propagandists sometimes depicted Cavaliers as robbers, like their leader Prince Rupert, or “Prince Robber.” When, in the 1650s, notorious highwaymen were arrested, pamphlets about them often emphasized their real or supposed royalism: swaggering, theft, health-drinking, and dueling were all associated with the king's cause. More surprisingly, Liapi argues, pamphlets about Cavalier highwaymen could serve as more-or-less veiled polemic against the Commonwealth. In attacking excisemen and committee-men, these gallant rogues could easily be framed in the Robin Hood tradition—and their executions provided opportunities for final displays of defiance and allegiance to the king. In this chapter, Liapi brings out all the complexity of cheap print in the 1650s, conceding that evidence of political intent is much clearer in some cases than in others.

Liapi makes a compelling argument that rogue pamphlets can be read as a festive and merry genre, one that both celebrated and satirized the pleasures and dangers of urban life, probably attracting ordinary readers who were happy to laugh at others’ mishaps. The argument complements but does not replace darker readings of early modern texts about vagrants, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars. If moralizing texts about vagrants blamed the poor for their failures, these cheerful rogue narratives could not help but to celebrate successful tricksters. Liapi's rogues seem to be, for the most part, a fairly prosperous group, with access to good fellowship and strong drink, able to mix socially with monied citizens and naïve young gentlemen. Ragged beggars do not appear, and roguery seems to be an exclusively male occupation, though it was sometimes practiced at women's expense. It must have been harder to construct positive images of women who lived by their wits, or of the desperate poor. Then, as now, masculinity and money carried a certain charisma.