The first paper, “‘This needs must be a practice’: Trickery and Truth in Measure for Measure” by Laura Kolb, interrogates Isabella’s turn to trickery. Initially a figure whose very presence amounts to effective rhetoric—a “mute and speechless dialect / such as moves men”—by the play’s end, she orchestrated a bed trick and publicly lied about her sexual history. The pivot point between these radically different Isabellas comes in her encounter with Angelo, who asks “Who will believe thee?,” pointing to the insubstantiality of her word against the weight of his. To be believed, she has to lie; to reveal the truth, she has to manufacture a fiction. Using Measure for Measure as an anchoring example, Kolb’s talk offers a feminist reevaluation of large-scale trickery in Shakespearean drama. Ultimately, the play suggests that “practice” is woven through the fabric of ordinary social life, which constantly demands that women perform credible selves and produce plausible stories for individuals and institutions who cannot ‘hear’ them directly.
Katherine Walker turns to the ruses of fortune-telling and scams in the next presentation. In “Scamming in the Stars: Fortune-Telling Manuals and Tricks,” she shows that there were ample opportunities in the early modern period to consider the affordances—and potential for fraud—of the vatic arts. Walker’s talk proposes to study the under-examined manual literature that guided individuals in how to predict the future alongside the many historical instances of fortune-telling scams. Walker locates the genre of how-to predictions in the real practices of a growing magical industry in the period, one that came increasingly to be identified with the Roma peoples, who were called, erroneously, “gypsies.” These contexts for fortune-telling, identity, and economics underline Walker’s contention that there were unique forms of knowledge-making and identity politics associated with prediction in early modern culture.
While the first two papers focus on early modern England, the final panelist presents work that serves as a key influence in the period, the Spanish picaresque. Elena Peña-Argüeso will present a paper titled “Tricks in La vida de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor (1646)” As Peña-Argüeso shows, the picaresque genre has been widely studied, with scholars such as Bataillon, Castro, and Rico theorizing how realistic motives invade fiction through derisive and cunning characters. However, scholars have largely ignored La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, a novel set in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Specifically, Peña-Argüeso shows how this picaresque story questions traditional “moral values” and treats them as devices to exercise control over the lower classes. By closely examining the epistemologies of scamming, Peña-Argüeso sheds new light on the unacknowledged issue of how the European wars provide the background for the pícaro to fight his personal needs through a performative upside-down morality.
What renders cheats and scams so compelling is the fact that they have a hint of verisimilitude about them, one that enables these narratives to reappear in different guises. We will conclude in the Q&A of 20 minutes by addressing the exigency of understanding tricks as moments of knowledge-production. Our goal is for this special session to foster discussions and future cross-cultural publications on trickster texts in the early modern period. What all papers in the session share is the conviction that scams and cheats can challenge existing narratives and point instead to their role in epistemology and literature.