Dorothy Auchter. Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England.

Dorothy Auchter. Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. xxxiv + 403 pp. append, index. $91. ISBN: 0-313-31114-5.

Andrew Hadfield, ed. Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Houndmills, England and New York: Palgrave, 2001. xii + 234 pp. index. $62. ISBN: 0-333-79410-9.

Cyndia Susan Clegg. Press Censorship in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 286 pp. bibl. index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-78243-0.

Paul J. Voss. Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and the Birth of Journalism.

Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. xii + 256 pp. illus. append, index. $60. ISBN: 0-8207-0321-4.

Twenty years ago the prevailing view of censorship practices in early modern England posited a state authority repressing oppositional discourses, punishing writers and printers, and generally inhibiting the freedom of the press. In literary studies today, an alternative paradigm of censorship assumes multiple sites of institutional and individual authority and an often local, sometimes erratic application of existing mechanisms for the suppression of particular texts or agents of publication. The ground work for this change in understanding was laid by the publication of Annabel Patterson's Censorship and Interpretation (University of Wisconsin Press) in 1984 and the near simultaneous publication of two books focusing on the office of the Master of Revels, Janet Clare's Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority (Manchester University Press) in 1990 and Richard Dutton's Mastering the Revels (Macmillan) in 1991. Patterson's argument broadened the discussion of censorship by allowing for more or less successful oppositional discourses. In the hermeneutics of interpretation she advanced, the state's capacity to censor brought with it particular conditions of "functional ambiguity" within which writers and readers, including censors, operated according to the prevailing code or rules of censorship. Clare's and Dutton's sustained attention to the Office of Revels further opened the discussion by their common focus on a particular institutional site of censoring authority and their disagreement about how that authority to censor was mediated. For Clare, the rules of censorship were shifting and unclear, the authority to wield them harsh and unpredictable, the potential inhibition of discourse severe. For Dutton, the Master of Revels was a consensus figure, his office the site at which the differing agendas of crown, courtiers, writers, and playing companies were negotiated into the permissible and the impermissible. Taken together these three books provided two seminal revisions in the understanding of censorship: first, the authority of censorship was not monolithic but dispersed throughout the system of public writing; and second, the "rules" of censorship were not fixed, making both censors and writers complicit in the process of censorship. In the years since this initial work, the study of censorship has become increasingly rich and complex, though not necessarily more coherent as a field of inquiry, as the four books under review here attest.

The current range of work on censorship is immediately evident in the juxtaposition of the essay collection, Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England, and the reference compendium, Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England. In his introduction to the collection of essays, Andrew Hadfield argues that there is common agreement on the "key cases," naming half a dozen instances of censorship between 1579 and 1624. Auchter's compendium presents short individual discussions of ninety-two "significant" cases of censorship between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of Stuart rule in 1714. Auchter's book is a treasure-trove of introductory studies, each presented in an identical format: a headnote listing author, date of issue, date of censorship, "type of work," and "offending issue," followed by three discussion headings (historical context, synopsis, and censorship), and a bibliography. Each entry is 3-5 pages. Drawn from existing scholarship, some of which is quite old, the individual entries are uniformly sensible and informative, pretending to no more than their introductory nature. Reading the headnotes serially, especially the "offending issue" lines, makes abundantly evident how complex the study of censorship is or should be. As might befit a reference book, the introductory framing discussion is limited, but it is also limited in its notion of censorship. Like the scholars of fifty years ago, Auchter assumes that censorship was a repressive event administered by a relatively monolithic state on the basis of promulgated law. A series of appendices lists various relevant proclamations and decrees. Another appendix attempts to bring order to the whole by indexing the ninety-two works according to "censored topics." The entries themselves are organized alphabetically by title. The multiplicity and richness of the material Auchter surveys in her entries reveals the inadequacy of both her untheorized framework and Hadfield's assertion of a few "key cases." Fortunately, the essays in Hadfield's collection and the overview of recent work on censorship he offers by way of introduction sketch theoretical models that are or could become adequate for the investigation of all kinds of cases and for a clearer theoretical understanding of the place and practices of censorship.

Several major figures in literary critical studies of censorship contribute to Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Janet Clare's essay tests the paradigm of censorship as a complex negotiation between interested parties. Reviewing a number of often discussed cases, she engages with her critics, finding a greater degree of productive "interaction" between dramatists and the conditions of censorship than her earlier work allowed, but still arguing that early modern censorship foregrounds a confrontation between a system of state censorship and the "free speech and poetic liberty" of individual dramatists. Richard Dutton reexamines the case of A Game at Chess, famously licensed for performance and then suppressed after nine days. He argues that the suppression responded to a complaint made by the Spanish ambassador about the stage personation of the former Spanish ambassador. Because the complaint was entangled in the foreign relations of England and Spain it rose to the level of the Privy Council and thus produced a documentary archive destined, it seems, to make A Game at Chess a "key case" in the history of censorship. But Dutton convincingly suggests that the licensing of the play is more significant than its suppression. Its satire, intended by Middleton and recognized by the Master of Revels, among others, potentially implicates various English as well as Spanish courtly figures and practices, but in ways that were judged permissible on the basis of the text. Censorship, in the sense of suppressing a text or discourse, in this case was very local. Richard McCabe takes up another "key case" of censorship, the Bishops' Ban of 1599, arguing that the ban at once suppressed individual texts and sent a clear signal from the Court of High Commission about their intention to monitor seditious speech acts and prescribe the range of topics and modes that might be judged seditious. Arguing against the position that censorship was more often than not very local, Dutton sees the Bishop's Ban and the authority of the High Commission as evidence that matters of state, broadly interpreted, underwrote censorship in early modern England. But the Bishops' Ban, by its relative lack of effect on the subsequent publication of the material it sought to ban or control, suggests that Dutton's argument begs the question of a limited definition of censorship. In an essay on Andrew Marvell, Annabel Patterson understands censorship to be a "cruel fact" and rehearses a version of her earlier argument about the ways in which the fact of censorship stimulated writers to articulate the issues of "the freedom of political speech and the people's right to know." Taken together these essays demonstrate how slowly critical paradigms change. Each of these critics has been attentive to the ongoing debates, made adjustments to their positions and, for the most part, worked to sketch their version of a consensus position. That no consensus emerges is not a failure so much as a sign of a need to move beyond the terms that have defined the debate.

As Richard Burt noted in Licensed by Authority (Cornell University Press, 1993), censorship in the limited sense is only one of the means of regulating the production and circulation of discourses. Criticism, he argues in the book's study of Ben Jonson, is another, as is commodification. His proposal that censorship be considered "broadly, as a mechanism for legitimating and delegitimating access to discourse" (12) posits a theoretical model in which censorship in the limited sense is but one moment in the nexus of relations and practices by which early modern public discourses emerge and circulate, or don't. The remaining essays in Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England demonstrate in practical ways the implications of Burt's theoretical point. Arnold Hunt examines the licensing of religious books between 1560 and 1640, noting the rationales offered by individual licensers in relation to the system and the texts before them and tracing the changes in orthodoxies and practices that defined the system in the 1630s. Alison Shell takes up post-Reformation religious verse and the problem of distinguishing a Catholic poem from a Protestant one. Stephen Longstaffe addresses the Protestant history play, demonstrating how the activities of the High Commission under Whitgift against the Puritans shaped both the representation of religious history on the stage in plays like Sir John Oldcastle and Sir Thomas More and the development of the stock figure of the stage Puritan. David Loades discusses the publication history of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, never censored but continually revised and edited even as it was reissued and adopted as a quasi-official text of the English church. Andrew Hadfield surveys the relative absence of published texts on Ireland between 1580 and 1603 and considers the factors--genre, topicality, and timing, for example--that enabled some texts to be printed. In an essay that forms a chapter in her book, reviewed below, Cyndia Clegg argues that James I used censorship as a means of royal propaganda.

These essays attest to the myriad ways in which the flow and content of public discourse was shaped, allowed, and disallowed. Suppressing, editing, licensing discourses--the activities conventionally associated with censorship are performed by multiple agents occupying differently inflected positions of authority and/or power with various ends in mind. Shifting orthodoxies, historically distanced rereadings, choice of genre--these conditions enable and constrain not only writers but also licensers and would-be censors. In the final essay of the collection, positioned by way of afterword, Richard Burt stretches the notion of censorship as far as it will go and then some, developing a case study of the censorship of Elizabeth I's image from her own involvement in its production and suppression to its circulation in modern mass media novels and films. By enlarging the focus to include images as well as print and by locating censorship in relation to questions of gender, sexuality, the relation between private and public, and unconscious investments and fantasies, Burt opens the terms of discussion. He suggests that though no act of censorship is susceptible to definitive explanation, no matter how extensive the documentary archive, acts of censorship offer signal moments in analyzing the discursive and representational processes and structures of the historical world. Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England aptly captures the current state of affairs in censorship studies. On the one hand, the tenacity with which critics hold to a limited notion of censorship inhibits a broader and more theorized understanding of the production and regulation of discourse; on the other hand, the use of "censorship" to describe the complexity of practices and relations involved muddies the analytic project of positioning punctual acts of censorship appropriately in their cultural nexus.

Cyndia Clegg's book, Press Censorship in Jacobean England, begins with a lucid survey of the routine practices in the production of public discourse, the institutional sites of authority over the circulation of discourses, and the ways in which individuals in positions of authority could use and reshape the various means of configuring public discourse. Of all the books reviewed here, hers is most attentive to the disciplinary overlap between history, especially political history, and literature and to the richness of recent work in print trade practices, textual studies, and the longevity of scribal circulation. The book presents five studies, each of which uses a cluster of cases to analyze a particular mode of, or set of tensions in, the use of censorship. The first of these studies, which examines the public burning of books, is included in Hadfield's collection. Unlike other royally-ordered book burnings, the burning of books at James' request, Clegg argues, was aimed not so much at suppressing their discourse (the contents of each book were publicly described and refuted as part of the burning event, she notes) as a staging of official royal disapproval in order to promote and protect the careful equipoise of James' self-representation in religious matters. James used censorship as a performative act of royal propaganda. The second study presents a contrasting use of censorship whereby James or private individuals sought and often secured censorship of texts in as quiet a manner as possible, to avoid drawing attention to the text at issue or the offense that was perceived in it. Clegg's third study addresses institutional rivalries and insecurities that shaped the process of censorship. Texts caught in the political tensions between parliamentary privilege and the royal prerogative, and between civil, ecclesiastical, and common law demonstrate how Jacobean institutional sites--The Crown, the High Commission, Privy Council, and Parliament--sometimes cooperated and sometimes clashed in their efforts to censor texts like Coke's Reports or John Seldon's Book of Tithes.

The last two studies shift the book's direction slightly toward a narrative focusing on issues in the later part of James' reign. That shift does not diminish the exemplary analysis each chapter affords of the range of practices within which censorship operated. One chapter addresses the efforts to control the public discussion of policy, particularly foreign policy, in relation to the crisis in Bohemia and relations with Spain. The institutional modes of deploying censorship analyzed in earlier chapters remain active, but the intensity of interest in the issues of the Thirty Years' War foregrounds the print trade as an active shaper of public discourse. The market for news, the internal practices and governance of the Stationers' Company, and the interplay between printed and scribal means of publication all figure as another set of constraints and enabling practices that impact the effort to censor. Clegg's final study focuses on the writings of Richard Monatagu and the theological and politico-practical debates within Protestantism and in relation to Catholicism. Here Clegg enters most directly into the historians' debates about the causes of the Civil War. But the argument she makes about how factions within the ecclesiastical establishment used silence as a strategy of inhibiting public discourse as well as the more obvious strategies of silencing (censoring) or engaging debate presents yet another model of the complexity of vectors and motives that shape any given act of censorship as well as the production and circulation of public discourse.

Clegg's book is at once an intervention that addresses political history and historians, presenting a sustained narrative about James' absolutism (and its practical absence) and the unfolding of conditions that formed the matrix of the Civil War, and an intervention in the study of censorship per se, intended, by the weight of its evidence and the variety of models of censorship it proposes, to put to rest any notion of a "state authority" to censor. The latter argument is continuous with that of Clegg's earlier book on Elizabethan press censorship, and it achieves impressive force with the evidence from James' reign. That the efforts of censorship, under James, differed from those under Elizabeth goes without saying given Clegg's premise that censorship is shaped by varied, competing, and often contradictory interests. The book's firm closing emphasis on James and Jacobean political culture privileges the historical argument at the expense of drawing out the implications of her case studies for theorizing censorship, or, rather, for theorizing the modes of censorship and their impact on the production and circulation of discourses.

The final book under review, Paul Voss' Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe & the Birth of Journalism, doesn't address censorship at all. Voss examines an archive of about sixty pamphlets published between 1590 and 1594 offering "news" from the civil war in France and foregrounding the figure of the Protestant king, Henry of Navarre. On the basis of this archive, careful examination of the bibliographic evidence, and close attention to the conventions of textual presentation in print and the operations of the book trade in pamphlets, Voss develops two lines of argument. The larger argument makes the claim that by their sustained common focus, their concern for objectivity, their timeliness, and their appearance of seriality, this particular archive attests to the beginnings of journalism. The second argument arises out of a close reading of the pamphlets' focus on the figure of Henry of Navarre as a hero, which abruptly ended, along with the run of pamphlets, when Henry converted to Catholicism. Here Voss' bibliographic and trade evidence yields such nuggets as the use of the same woodcut of St. George to represent Henry in the civil war pamphlets and Red Cross Knight at the end of book 1 of The Faerie Queene. Voss argues that the pamphlets shaped Navarre's fictive representation as an oath-breaker in the work of Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare. In the book's final chapter Voss argues that by their sustained attention to the civil war in France and the English contributions to that war, the pamphlets were active agents in shaping English national identity.

Voss' larger argument that the archive of civil war pamphlets heralds "the birth of journalism" cannot withstand the challenge offered by the larger archive implied by the book's title, Elizabethan news pamphlets, or the even larger archive of Elizabethan texts that circulated news publicly, but its inability to do so is instructive. Voss offers a case study in topicality as it enters into, is (re)shaped by, and exits, public discourse. To think about journalism avant la lettre or censorship before "freedom of the press," we need to find terms appropriate to analyzing a contested and contestable discursive space in which generic forms, rhetorical strategies, ideological positions, claims of authority, material formats, and material interests compete and intermingle. Topicality is one such term.

The books reviewed here only begin to suggest how productive the scholarly crossings between history, literature, bibliography, and poststructuralist theory can be in understanding not only the early modern conditions of discourse, but also our own. The suppression of a discourse can take the form of burning or calling in all copies of a text, but it can also take the form of declaring that money is a form of speech. Only the former is censorship, but the latter equally implies a forceful suppression of discourse. Perhaps the time is ripe for redefining the field of inquiry, positioning censorship not as the object of inquiry in and of itself, but as a variable mode, among others, in the shaping of public discourse, and hence, the historical world we inhabit.

ALEXANDRA HALASZ

Dartmouth College