Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England. .

Richard Dutton. Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000. xx + 218 pp. index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-23624-7.

Richard Dutton's very well-written Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England consists of nine chapters, the first three of which are "the nub" (xx) of the book, laying our Dutton's account of "the processes of control" (xx). Durton notes that the author's intention did not govern the censors' reading of a work, and that the same text could be read as inoffensive and then reread at a much later point as the opposite: a change in the political context could change the meaning of the text. Hence, for Dutton, it is the text's reception as well as authorship that matters, how, inverting Michel Foucault's terms, many playwrights want to give birth to the author in order constrain the meaning of their work. The following chapters focus on individual authors (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Jonson), and there is also a chapter on the licensed fool and a final chapter on theater and printing censorship that focuses on Sir John Hayward's Life of Henry IV. Like Leah Marcus, whose work on topicali ty he does nor cite, Dutton wisely refrains from trying to read an entire play as did earlier Old Historicist critics such as Barbara De Luna in his study of Catiline. "One of the besetting sins of attempts to find topical meaning in early modern drama," Durton rightly points out, "has been a determination to make the parallels too thorough and exact, explaining every detail" (xvii). Dutton's more modest claim is that early modern English readers and censors did read parts of a given play "analogically" for their topical applications. Equating textual and performative indeterminacy with deniability, Dutton explicitly endorses Patterson's account of the hermeneutics of censorship developed in her book Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (1984, rev. 1991; see 190-91).

Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (1984, rev. 1991; see 190-91).

Although well over half of the book's chapters have appeared previously in published form, it is quite useful to have them easily accessible in a book, and the volume makes a nice bookend to Dutton's earlier book on early modern theater censorship, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (1991). The stellar chapter on Ben Jonson's use of censorship to legitimate his criticism in the epistle to Volpone shows us Dutton at his strongest, erudite and imaginative. The chapter wonderfully illuminates Jonson's complex relation to competing authorities over his work. The chapter on Shakespeare is rather weak, however, largely because Dutton's point, namely, that Shakespeare may have written for a readership as well as for theatrical spectators, has long been a commonplace. While the prose is a marvel of clarity and reveals the careful precision and judiciousness of Dutton's fine mind, his cautiousness and modesty have the rather curious effects of making both the readings of t he literature he examines and the practice of censorship seem like relatively trivial concerns. Explaining a topical application may illuminate a small part of a play, but it obviously leaves the rest of the play unread. And by substituting (without comment) a Revisionist, court-patronage centered historiography patronage for Patterson's Whiggish, free-speech-centered historiography, the issue of theater censorship pales in significance; Dutton argues that censorship rarely happened and had little or no consequences when it did. The lengthy and new chapter on A Game at Chess suffers particularly in this regard, as Dutton's thorough to the point of being somewhat slogging account of the play's unusual place in the history of early modern dramatic censorship makes Middleton's play and its censorship or non-censorship seem of little more than antiquarian interest. Readers unfamiliar with Dutton's work in its previous forms will find this book of particular interest. Readers expecting an engagement with recent tr anshistorical and interdisciplinary work on censorship such as Robert Post's collection, Censorship and Silencing (1997), a special issue of diacritics entitled "Writing Between the Lines (Censored)" (Summer 1997, vol. 27, no. 2), or even a refinement of Dutton's earlier account of theater censorship will, however, be sorely disappointed.