Press Censorship in Jacobean England by Cyndia Susan Clegg (review)

Abstract

960 Reviews the essence of 'romanticism' and its katharsis as a form of transformation and reintegration . Jonsonian 'old' comedy won the field, and city comedy became its slightly more civilized sister. Both poets continued needling each other on these matters of 'poetics' after 1602 (e.g. in Pericles, Winter's Tale, and Tempest). Bednarz, to my view, underestimates the necessity of rethinking the position of the poet in the context of the growth of commercial theatre. Jonson made the case, along lines set out by Sidney, for the artist's autonomy and the poet's moral responsibility. He does not claim to be the only monarch in poetry. He wanted poets to speak their mind regardless of 'time, place, or opinion', in the tradition of the ancients. Marston's and Shakespeare's counter-case, that the aim of art is the consumer's pleasure, is rather poor. The two views are and must be complementary, so that plays 'as you like it' are stopped from aesthetic ifnot moral deterioration by authors who dare say 'by God 'tis good and if you like it,you may'. Jonson deserves more respect. Not only did he write some of the best comedies in English, but without his 'arrogant claims' for stage plays as serious poetry, the Shakespeare folio might never have been there to compare them with. Bednarz reminds us that the Poets' War was no nineteenth-century fiction. Yet he tries too hard to confine itin time and scope, makes too much ofa 'formal debate' out of it, and clings to a nineteenth-century view of personal portrayal, where it would have sufficed to point out that the poets continually needled each other, and that the vogue of verse satire influenced this habit. The evidence does not allow for much more. University of Utrecht Henk Gras Press Censorship in Jacobean England. By Cyndia Susan Clegg. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xi + 286 pp. ?40; $59.95. ISBN 0-521-78243-0. Censorship has become such a site of contention in studies of the early seventeenth century largely because it has become one of the dominant tropes through which we read political culture. Revisionists in the 1970s began an assault on a Whig model of repressive state censorship that aimed to silence all dissent to argue for a state that lacked the political will and effective mechanisms of control to impose a programmatic censorship. Instead the internal market of the book trade more often motivated press control, and the rare occasions of print censorship were not the result of a wider ideological agenda but were isolated events determined by local interests. Cyndia Susan Clegg's Press Censorship inJacobean England is both part of and strives to look beyond a revisionist model. Her aim is to draw attention to the varied, contradictory, and competing interests informing censorship practices, how they are shaped locally by economic, religious, and political events, and, following on from the work of An? thony Milton, to demonstrate the way that censorship practices were appropriated by competing interest groups. Clegg criticizes previous studies of censorship for not sufficientlydistinguishing between different monarchs. While James inherited the mechanisms put in place by the Elizabethan government for controlling the press, detailed in Clegg's earlier study Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), the practice of censorship under his rule differed significantly from the more unified Elizabethan style of political censorship. The Calvinist households of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, and the Bishop of London, John King, effectivelycontrolled ecclesiastical authorization in the early years of James's reign, and their interests and those of the Crown did not necessarily coincide. The argument unfolds through a series of careful and detailed case studies. She develops Kevin Sharpe's work on James I to argue forthe King's ceremonial and propagandist MLR, 98.4, 2003 961 use of censorship to act out royal power within a national and, more importantly, international context. This very public mode of censorship contrasts with the King's 'secretive' use of censorship in matters that touched on his personal honour. His style of personal censorship becomes a model for acts of individual and...