Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer Doyeeta Majumder Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820. By Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. xv+323 pp. £26.49. ISBN 978–0–19–874449–8. Thomas Keymerʼs monograph is a wide-ranging, incisive survey of the libellous literature occasioned and disciplined by the punitive practice of pillorying during the long eighteenth century in England (and Ireland). It shows how the 'unique combination of disgrace and danger' (p. 5) symbolized by the pillory led to the cultivation of literary strategies of indirection and ambiguity by the English writers of the period bookended by the Stuart Restoration and the official abolition of pillorying. This spectacular form of punishment paradoxically, as Keymer demonstrates, also often backfired on the authorities and became a radical 'festival of fourth estate defiance' (p. 5), as mobs were as likely to murder the pilloried as to exalt and cheer them. As such, pillorying itself, in terms of its outcomes, becomes as indeterminate as the politically encoded texts it prosecuted. The book takes up the study of political encoding in literary texts where Annabel Pattersonʼs ground-breaking study of censorship in early modern England had left it (Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)). The events described are under the constant shadow of the pillorying and brutal mutilation of radical parliamentarian William Prynne ordered by the Star Chamber court in 1634. For more than a hundred years after, references to ear amputation haunt the works of polemicists; even if actual mutilation had ceased to be prescribed by the court, the threat of mob violence was a real one. Chapter 1 takes up the career of John Dryden and his ruses of indirection as the turbulent milieu he inhabited underwent one radical regime change after the other. Plausible deniability becomes the leitmotif not just of Drydenʼs work, but of the publications of all the others who write in the shadow of the pillory. From his early pro-Royalist poem in Lachrymae Musarum (1649) to panegyrics to Cromwell, and from a veiled critique of Charles II in Mac Flecknoe to the anti-Whig Duke of Guise, Keymer shows how dissent is encoded even into the works of the 'literary mouthpiece of Stuart monarchy' (p. 27). Chapter 2 begins with the end of the 'enabling discipline' of the Licensing Act in 1695 (p. 22), which, contrary to Voltaireʼs naive faith in English freedom of speech, was precisely what engendered the crypto-antinomian creativity of English poets. Pre-publication restraints made way for a sudden proliferation of post-publication punishment, which was far more insidious and disorderly, often meted out to booksellers and printers more than authors for bringing sedition into the public sphere (a chilling parallel to the present as authoritarian governments have started prosecuting Twitter for providing [End Page 286] a platform to 'sedition'). The central figures here are Pope and Defoe—the latter being the only canonical author actually to be pilloried, for his pamphlet Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), and the formerʼs Dunciad revealing the shifting lines between libel and counter-libel. In Chapter 3 we see that with the threat of physical harm dwindling, the pillory becomes 'promotional as much as punitive' (p. 178) and booksellers often use it as an opportunity to advertise their wares.The unpopularity of the Hanoverian Succession ensures a surge of sympathy for libellers. Walpoleʼs Stage Licensing Act (1737), another crucial legal intervention in this history, leads to the prolonged face-off between Walpole and Fielding. The final chapter is on the effects of the cessation of censorship on Romantic poetry, and also the schism between the 'transcendental' (p. 285) category of imaginative literature and Realpolitik, rendering redundant strategies of political encoding. A final legislation, in this era of burgeoning print capitalism, leads to the loss of intellectual copyright (and therefore income for the authors and sellers) for radical texts such as Queen Mab, Wat Tyler, and Don Juan. The study derives a substantial part of its vitality from...