1. For Stow’s etymology, see Gillian Bebbington, London Street Names (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1972), p. 130. Harman’s etymology of “cursitor” appears in his prefatory epistle to A Caveat of Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, reprinted in Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 113. The semantic origin of Cursitor Street, however, most probably lies, as Bebbington suggests (p. 107), not in Harman’s preferred usage but in the fact that the early modern office of the Cursitors—the twenty-four clerks who wrote out in court hand (de cursu) the common-form writs— stood on the corner of Cursitor Street and Chancery Lane in Elizabethan London.
2. Modern critics writing on rogue literature include Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 49–52;
3. Barry Taylor, Vagrant Writing: Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991);
4. William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
5. and, most recently, Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).