William Prynne Research Articles

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

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...

Foreword: Early Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43

ForewordEarly Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43 Christopher Highley (bio) in one of early modern england's most unlikely volte-faces, the notorious antitheatricalist William Prynne penned a tract defending the public stage. Published in 1649, Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays reversed the same author's landmark denunciation of theater in his Histrio-mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (1633).1 Prynne's reference in the earlier work to "Women-Actors, notorious whores"2 was widely seen as glancing at Henrietta Maria's participation in court plays; as a result, he was quickly condemned by the court of Star Chamber to stand in the pillory and have his ears "trimmed." Prynne's outrage in the 1630s at what he considered the growing authoritarianism of the king, and the threats from bishops and a Catholic queen, had turned by 1649 into alarm at "a Tyrannical, abominable, lewd, schismatical [and] hæretical Army"3 that not only held the king captive but also controlled Parliament following Pride's Purge of its moderate members in December 1648. The specific occasion for Prynne's defense of the stage was the removal of the "Players from their Houses"4 by groups of overzealous soldiers. For [End Page 11] Prynne, this was a violation of the king's prerogative, an attempt to silence Charles I's allies in the theater and to deny him a form of royal solace. From the beginning of hostilities in 1642, Prynne had upheld royal authority and worked for a reconciliation of king and commons in defiance of more radical voices, many of which emerged from the army. In retrospect, Prynne regretted his earlier comparison of Charles I to Nero for "loving of Stage-playes," as well as his attack on Henrietta Maria "with the bitter and cruell words of whore and strumpet" for performing in plays. He now recognized that "Playes are lawfull things, and are to be allowed as recreations for honest men." Prynne claimed that when he wrote Histrio-mastix, he was unaware of the nature of the plays "as were written and acted in England of late, for the Recreation of our most gracious King and Queen, and many of their best friends."5 Although Prynne remained hostile to "lewd" plays, he recognized that "honest Playes may be tolerated," and he even disavowed his earlier objections to cross-dressing on stage.6 By 1649, then, Prynne had come to the startling conclusion that, as Sir William Davenant later put it, "they that would have no King, would have no Play."7 Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays is one of a few printed defenses of the stage in the years between 1642 and 1660. In this essay, I examine defenses of the stage in the years immediately after the playhouses were shut, a period when we might expect a flurry of protests to this unprecedented parliamentary action. Here again, defenses of the stage are rare, although The Actors Remonstrance, or Complaint: For the silencing of their profession is one notable and well-known exception (January 1643). In particular, I want to suggest that in order to gauge resistance to the closure, we need to look beyond formal defenses of the stage. I will argue that the republication in 1643 of Thomas Randolph's play The Muses Looking-Glasse is part of a counteroffensive against the ban on plays that also reveals something about the role of local politics in motivating the parliamentary prohibition.8 There are several possible reasons why no printed defenses of playing appeared before The Actors Remonstrance of January 1643. This absence is all the stranger when [End Page 12] we recall that a tract called The Stage-Players Complaint, published in 1641 shortly before the official closure, offered a precedent and template of sorts for theater supporters and personnel. The Stage-Players Complaint is a "pleasant Dialogue between Cane of the Fortune, and Reed of the Friers" in which the two actors lament "the sad and solitary conditions for want of Imployment . . . [during] this heavie and Contagious time of the Plague in London." Whereas Cane, the pessimist, thinks that public...

Dreaming of Death and the Dead in the Stuart Political World Imaginary

Abstract William Laud played a critical role in the politics and religion in the reign of James I and especially that of his son, Charles I. There was great antagonism toward him by Puritans, and Laud’s close friendship with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, made Laud even more controversial, as did his fight with the king’s jester, Archy Armstrong. Dreams were seen as having great significance at time of Laud, and Laud recorded his dreams in his journal. Dreams also played a role in the early Stuart political world. This essay examines how Laud’s enemies used his own dreams against him in the work of William Prynne, once Laud was arrested during the English Civil war. It also looks at how Laud was compared to also despised Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey in a number of political pamphlets that used dreams, such as Archy’s Dream and Canterburie’s Dream. Laud also appeared as a character in a dream of Charles I’s attendant Thomas Herbert the night before the king’s execution, where Laud came to comfort Charles.

John Goodwin on Zechariah 13:3

This article on an early modern pamphlet which can be found in the John Rylands Library Special Collections asserts the importance of John Goodwin’s analysis of Zechariah 13:3 in A Post-Script or Appendix to […] Hagiomastix (1647). I argue that this pamphlet’s significance is not only its emphasis on toleration, but also that it is a striking example of Judaeo-centric millenarian thought in which Zechariah 12–14 is understood as prophesying a future time in which the Jews will be restored to the Land of Israel. I also analyse the pamphlet’s relationship to supersessionism and compare Goodwin’s interpretation with those of Samuel Rutherford, William Prynne, John Owen and, in particular, Jean Calvin. I explain that Goodwin’s use of the analogy of Scripture hermeneutic helps to explain his belief in Judaeo-centric eschatology. I then show how one of Goodwin’s followers, Daniel Taylor, used Judaeo-centric biblical exegesis to petition Oliver Cromwell for Jewish readmission to England.

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Matthew T. Shifflett Antitheatricality and the Body Public. By Lisa A. Freeman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Cloth $59.95, Paper $29.95. 376 pages. In the heady days of the 1990s culture wars, my college mentors presented the history of antitheatrical thought as a grand historical struggle, as if there were an unbroken line from Plato/Ion to Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown. Central to this narrative was The Antitheatrical Prejudice, a 1981 book by Jonas Barish that took a philological approach to the matter, locating a fundamental "ontological queasiness" (Barish 3) in mimetic practices. Barish's book became the point of departure for the next generation's exploration of historical conflicts between performers and what Barish called the "unmistakably crackpot streak" of "hard-shelled, mole-eyed fanatics" (Barish 2). Lisa A. Freeman's Antitheatricality and the Body Public reins in some of the essentialist excesses that Barish's approach has inspired and points the way toward an even more urgent homology between the Jeremy Colliers and the Jerry Falwells: that their denunciation of dramatic representation is aimed at the legitimacy of sovereign authority itself. Antitheatricality and the Body Public uses well-known instances of anti-theatrical fervor in Anglo-American history as occasions for richly detailed analyses of what Barish dismissively called "local considerations" (Barish 4). Throughout, Freeman harnesses not just the strategies of theatre and performance studies, but also a deep fluency in the historiographical tools of cultural, intellectual, and legal histories. While each chapter offers a well-researched, persuasively-argued case, the cumulative force of the chapters illustrates a "repertoire" of antitheatrical rhetoric, replacing Barish's "ontological malaise" with an instrumental (and [End Page 174] performance-inflected) citationality. To read Freeman's book solely as a corrective to Barish would be to miss the book's more significant contribution: the articulation of a "body public" as a term that expands upon queer theorist Michael Warner's formulation of a "public" as an entirely discursive phenomenon. Warner's Publics and Counterpublics offered a crucial model for understanding the ways a "public" could be constituted and mediated through the participation of its constituents. However, Warner used theatrical audience only as a metaphor for how a public operates, as a totality witnessing itself in a shared visible space. Freeman shows the crucial role that "concrete, visible, and embodied forms" play in the dynamic by which discursive publics were articulated and challenged. Freeman's first chapter, on William Prynne, is a significant contribution on its own, and at eighty-five pages, it comprises nearly a third of the book. Freeman offers a close reading of Prynne's mammoth Histrio-Mastix, an obsessively thorough antitheatricalist tract from 1633. Freeman's reading goes beyond prior treatments by looking past an anachronistic binary between print and performance, showing instead how print worked performatively within Jacobean society and was understood as such. Freeman offers a careful, yet innovative, evaluation of the documents surrounding Prynne's Star Chamber trial for sedition. By comparing previously undiscovered manuscript sources, Freeman shows how the trial itself and the competing transcripts of the trial worked performatively to "create" the constituencies they purported to represent. The next three chapters reframe well-known controversies of the long eighteenth century as conflicts stemming from the divergence of public policies and practices from religious doctrine. Chapter 2 reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View… as a rebuke to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which replaced the Catholic James II with his Protestant cousin, William of Orange. In this reading, Freeman convincingly shows that Collier was notorious at the time for his Jacobite provocations, and that his antitheatrical views were an extension of that position. Moreover, the eventual absorption of Collier's critique by the public sphere transformed regressive provocation into forward-thinking debate, as William Congreve highlighted the stage's capacity as a social corrective. The third chapter situates John Home's Douglas and the debates it inspired among the rivalries between secularist Scottish enlightenment writers (with their general optimism about the human capacity for reason) and the more pessimistic view of human depravity found in Presbyterian orthodoxy. Freeman shows how a growing...

Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons

AbstractCharles I's Star Chamber prosecution of the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician John Bastwick generated both contemporary and historiographical controversy, mostly concerned with their writings, their trial, and their punishment in London. This article turns attention to their unusual offshore incarceration on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scillies between 1637 and 1640. It examines the material, social, and spiritual circumstances of island detention, and shows how the “puritan martyrs”1coped with separation from the world. Though the discourse of martyrdom invited a compilation of miseries, invoking scriptural comparisons, this triumvirate experienced isolation that did not necessarily incapacitate them. Prynne savored the hospitality of his jailers, Burton smuggled out polemical tracts, and all three found inspiration in the book of Revelation, written by St. John while a prisoner on the island of Patmos. Each returned to the fray in the 1640s, writing works of witness and justification. Their experience of island imprisonment provided a model and an inspiration for dozens more who were similarly confined during the Protectorate and the Restoration.

“Fair Persuasions”? The Implementation of Laudian Altar Policy in the Diocese of Bath and Wells

This article investigates the implementation of Archbishop William Laud’s restoration of the altars in England in the 1630s, using the Diocese of Bath and Wells, where Laud’s ally William Piers served as bishop, as a case study. In so doing, it raises questions about the character of the Laudianism more generally. William Prynne’s history of the 1630s continues to influence historiography to the present day, but was constructed to portray Laud and his allies as tyrannical ideologues insensitive to the law, especially regarding the altarwise communion table. Churchwardens’ accounts, which allow the Laudian Reformation to be tracked at the parish level, offer an alternative proposition. Here it is argued that Piers, in contrast to certain other ‘Laudian’ bishops but like Laud himself, was acutely conscious of his precarious legal situation. He adopted a nuanced approach to implementation, moving quickly to enforce the erection of table rails but playing the long game on the altarwise positioning.

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Shawna Mefferd Kelty Antitheatricality and the Body Public. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 361 pp. £36.00/$55.00 cloth. In Antitheatricality and the Body Public, Lisa A. Freeman situates her study beyond the borders of Jonas Barish's suppositions of antitheatrical mistrust, presenting an innovative and valuable argument that antitheatricality is not a response to the public harm of theatre but rather a means to challenge and question, claim, reclaim, and shape power and authority. Her book demonstrates an integrated and complex conversation with historical and theoretical scholars ranging from Barish to Phelan. Contextualizing antitheatrical events as complex cultural performances, Freeman carefully and painstakingly traces the multiple threads of political power that pervade the antitheatrical debates that span from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. According to Freeman, theatre has "ever been located at the center of … broad cultural movements and conflicts and … antitheatrical incidents … provide us with occasions to trace major struggles over historical shifts" with regards to power and authority. It is through her careful examination of evidence—both original documents and the narratives that arose from the historical incidents—that she illuminates the broader cultural movements at play in these five case studies (2). The five case studies, at first glance, hold only cursory connections in terms of religious fervor against playing, immoral behavior represented and lauded in plays, and attending the theatre: William Prynne's Histrio-mastix, Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, John Home's Douglas, the Richmond Theatre fire, and the National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. However, through her careful and thorough dissection of the evidence of each case study, Freeman reveals a long history of those using antitheatrical sentiment along with theatrical form, genre, and performance techniques to create a body public who, in turn, could become a body politic. Each chapter and case study establishes the foundation and framework for the one that follows, building from William Prynne's not-so-subtle attack on monarchic rule in the 1630s to the Christian conservative attack and Supreme Court ruling on the NEA Four in the 1990s. These case studies create an antitheatrical history that brings the readers to the present-day United States in which a conservative Christian body public is still working to marginalize other bodies public in the name of "American" values. Each chapter is useful on its own, but the real argument of the book is the history Freeman constructs between all five cases studies. The reach of her work goes beyond the field of theatre into journalism [End Page 340] and political science, resonating with current media mistrust and culture wars. Freeman demonstrates how a body politic can silence the marginalized bodies public to maintain religious, cultural, and racial privilege and superiority. Freeman's book demonstrates the craft of a meticulous and rigorous scholar, who is exhaustive in her examination of the evidence, no matter how seemingly tangential, that intersects with her argument. Even her chapter notes not only present a thorough and sensitive critique of other scholars' work but also invite readers to further research, if they are so inclined. A reader could easily lose themselves in the archives of her case studies, but she deftly guides her readers through labyrinthine controversies, meticulously working through each facet and returning the reader to the larger landscape of the case studies and the overall book itself. The author provides a rich and open-ended history of each incident, and the book is intended for an audience beyond theatre scholars. A small, but important critique on verbiage: the far-reaching scope of her study is quite evident; however, some language is too discipline-specific or obscure and, as such, may exclude or turn away a general readership from engaging in her study. In particular, the introduction is quite weighed down with complicated terminology that may not be welcoming to a layperson. Freeman's writing style oscillates between rigorous exploration of her argument within the evidence and her experience of encountering the evidence of pamphlets, court documents, transcriptions, and playbills, placing the reader in...

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman W. B. Worthen ANTITHEATRICALITY AND THE BODY PUBLIC. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; pp. 376. Lisa Freeman's rich study Antitheatricality and the Body Public should take a privileged place alongside the most influential work in the field, ranging from synoptic literary studies like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), to broadly sociological landmarks like Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1976), and to historically localized studies like Martin Puchner's Stage Fright (2003). Freeman's book takes an alternative, case-study approach, as each of five detailed chapters traces a moment when some dimension of "theatre" broadly conceived provides the occasion to trace "major struggles over historical shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and political authority" (2). While Freeman examines "the particular ways that the theater as both physical space and metaphorical realm" has been a "site of contestation for positing and projecting publics" (5), the emphasis here is largely on the latter: plays and performances, the stuff of making theatre, fall below a richly considered discursive horizon on which theatre figures as an instrument for contesting state sovereignty, for negotiating the role of religion, for tracing the legal standing of the state's patronizing of the arts. A theatrically inflected body public does emerge here, evolving practices of dissent, often dissent from the law, working along the interwoven axes of class, religious sect, race, gender, and sexuality. After a brief introduction, the first chapter treats an obligatory figure in the history of English anti-theatricalism, William Prynne, whose "vertiginous" (32) and massive Histrio-Mastix (1632) has long been regarded as an obsessive catalog of antitheatrical mania. Although it landed the author in jail when his comment "women actresses—notorious whores" was taken as a slander of Queen Henrietta Maria's performance of a speaking part in a court masque, Histrio-Mastix, in Freeman's deft reading, undertakes a searching inquiry into the theatricalized abuse of state power. Paying particular attention to Prynne's appropriation of the performative technology of print, she charts his outline of the consequences of the "growth of a theatrical body public, unmoored from either church or state and in possession of a distinct political consciousness" (43). Although the theatre images the antitype of a legitimate public, Prynne uses the "theatrical" rhetoric of acts and scenes, prologues and choruses to marshal the Calvinist community against the overweening power of the church episcopate, personified by Bishop Laud and Charles I. The centerpiece of the chapter is Freeman's meticulous reading of Prynne's trial for sedition, in which the government did not mount the charge of Puritanism (which would galvanize Prynne's low church support), appealing instead to the godliness of the sovereign's transcendent responsibility for the body politic. Freeman's brilliant analysis of trial records shows Prynne and the state vying to appeal to sovereignty over sect, claiming the same high ground of public-minded authority that gentlemen of the Inns of Court asserted in the public masque performed just prior to Prynne's trial, a performance distancing them from their sometime colleague. In the end, the charges against Prynne of libeling the king and the queen, and—more centrally—to being a "stirrer vpp of the people to disobedience" (12) were prosecuted: he was disbarred, fined, degraded at Oxford, had his ears clipped in the pillory, and was imprisoned for life; as the result of his second trial, his ears were again cropped and his cheeks branded, singed by the authority of a theatricalized state. In the second chapter, Freeman reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) not as a complaint against the scurrilous wit of Restoration drama, but instead as an indictment of the church's involvement—conspiring against the claims of the Catholic James II—in the Williamite Glorious Revolution, where Collier's animus against the satirical treatment of [End Page 423] clergy in Restoration drama is part of a wider animation against "levelling," the resistance to established forms of social and moral authority. In Freeman's hands, Collier...

The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton by Kathy Lavezzo

Reviewed by: The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton by Kathy Lavezzo Peter C. Herman Kathy Lavezzo. The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Xiii+ 374 pp. Cloth $65.00. ISBN: 9781501703157. The title of this book does not mean what you might think it means. By "accommodated," Lavezzo does not mean, as the term usually does today, acceding to wishes or desires. Instead, Lavezzo returns the word to its original sense of "housed." In a sweeping analysis that ranges from the Anglo-Saxon period through the early Restoration, The Accommodated Jew looks at how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews through buildings, e.g., houses and latrines. In her last chapter, for example, Lavezzo looks at how Menasseh ben Israel, the Dutch rabbi who came to England to argue for the readmission of the Jews, used his accommodations as a polemical tool. The thing is, Jews are not supposed to have houses, to be "accommodated." Houses connote a long-term, if not permanent, residence, and Jews are supposed to be eternally in exile. Lavezzo, however, focuses on the necessarily tense and unstable relations that result when Jews "are accommodated, that is, [found] lodging in a host country," (4; emphasis in the original) in this case, England. The fascinating fact is that a recognized Jewish community existed in England for only a relatively short time. William the Conqueror brought with him Jews from Rouen in 1066, and in 1290, England had the dubious honor of being the first country to forcibly expel the Jews. But during their brief sojourn, "Jews in medieval England lived a life defined not by architectural and other kinds of geographical separation, bur rather spatial contiguity and intimacy." (17) Which is fancy way of saying, Jews and Christians lived next to each other. But as Lavezzo shows, "spatial contiguity" did not lead to understanding and empathy. Instead, the popularity of antisemitic myths about Jews murdering Christian children in their homes revealed the deep suspicion attending Jewish structures: "Under the cover of a house or synagogue, the imagined Jews of [these myths] wage war against Christianity by reenacting Christ's death and violently defying Christian ritual." (66) Still, as Lavezzo shows in brilliant detail, the relations between Jews and Christians were more reciprocal than the antisemitic myths would allow, and they lasted long after the Jews' expulsion as she shows in chapters on Chaucer's The Prioresse's [End Page 300] Tale and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Chaucer's tale repeats the myth of a Jew murdering a Christian boy and then throwing him into his privy. The body is then recovered and taken (still covered in Jewish excrement) to the nearest church. But by doing so, Chaucer emphasizes the "money trail" by which churches were built with the explicit aid of Jewish financiers. Similarly, Marlowe's play emphasizes the fragility of the structures meant to keep out the enemy, whether Jewish or Turkish. My favorite chapter, however, is the one on Milton and the debate over the readmission of the Jews into England (which was left unresolved). I had not known that William Prynne's A short demurrer to the Jewes long discontinued barred remitter into England (which is anything but short), packed as it is with now-lost records, served as the "chief printed source" (214) for the history of medieval Anglo-Jewry well into the nineteenth century. Prynne, entirely unintentionally, "paradoxically created an archival space for Jews in English print culture." (230–31; emphasis in the original) His antagonist, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, used space in a different way. By choosing to live in a fashionable house on the Strand, surrounded by townhouses owned by aristocrats and across the street from the New Exchange (essentially an early modern luxury shopping mall), Rabbi ben Israel wanted to make a point: "By living on such a prominent thoroughfare, the rabbi hazarded on a small scale the larger-scale project promised by readmission: ending the hidden nature of current Jewish habitation and allowing Jews to live openly as Jews among Christians." (220) Milton, however, did not support the rabbi's bid for readmission, and...

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Susan Bennett Lisa A. Freeman. Antitheatricality and the Body Public. U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. 361 Pp. IT IS REMARKABLE THAT FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (U of California P, 1981) has remained the definitive, go-to reference for scholars who wish to address or simply cite matters of antitheatricality. It is, therefore, a bold—but certainly timely— move by Lisa Freeman to analyze antitheatricality anew. She delivers on this task with a thorough and thought-provoking investigation realized in a compelling series of case studies that demonstrate the pervasiveness of antitheatrical onslaughts across theater history. She considers the “contentious discursive environment, political, religious, philosophical, literary, and dramatic,” in which antitheatricality is produced and understood, looking at both familiar and less well-known examples from “Anglo-American archives” (5–6). While the book is a must-read for researchers working on any period of British or American theater, she hopes that it might also be “a model for further research on the political and cultural significance of antitheatrical attacks in other nations, places, and states” (6). I am confident that scholars interested in those “other nations, places, and states” will find Freeman’s work productive and inspiring. Of most interest to early modernists, chapter 1 is a remarkably detailed interrogation of evidence related to the 1634 Star Chamber trial for sedition of William Prynne, author of the 1000-plus-page antitheatrical volume Histrio-Mastix. Freeman opens with James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace, a masque written as a repudiation of Prynne and his publication, performed at the Banqueting House for the King and Queen a mere four days before the trial began. As she persuasively demonstrates, the performance of 3 February 1634 started well before The Triumph of Peace addressed its audience at court: “a magnificent, torchlit procession filled the streets of London” and wowed crowds along its route from Chancery Lane to Whitehall Palace, led by “one hundred Gentlemen of the Inns of Court” and accompanied by pages, footmen, dancers, musicians, and four Roman-style chariots (each pulled by six horses) (11). For Freeman, the procession across the city made “popular cause” with its urban spectatorship, staging “a reciprocal interest in the power of the common law to curb monarchical overreaching” (22). The Triumph of Peace not only appeared to deliver a conventional “show of submission” to the king (30), but also addressed, “as a competing locus [End Page 155] of authority, judgment, and interpretation,” the gallery reserved for the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court located directly behind the royal party (29). Moreover, it was a pre-trial intervention equally directed to a reading public: three thousand copies “were printed ahead of time and made immediately available for sale. The masque became one of the most talked-about spectacles in London, and more copies had to be printed” (29). Freeman argues that the lawyers’ various strategies were effective in shaping public opinion, a concept “just beginning to emerge and to be recognized for its political and rhetorical efficacy” (30). Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix was another, if more protracted, attempt at shaping public opinion. As Freeman suggests, no critical account of such a massive and intricate text can realistically claim to be comprehensive, and thus she chooses to focus on “the practical concerns and rhetorical effects of the paratexts,” observing a “rhetorical dramaturgy of call and response” intended to persuade its readers to embrace “Calvinist proscriptions” (39). Through analysis of the different elements that structure the enormous volume, Freeman elucidates how and why the book was held seditious. Both The Triumph of Peace and Historio-Mastix serve as critical background to her scrutiny of records of the court proceedings. While these court proceedings have received significant scholarly attention, Freeman’s account has the advantage of a recently discovered manuscript, Eng 1359, the “most exhaustive account of the trial and what appears to come closest to a complete, though not necessarily official, transcript of the proceedings against Prynne” (63). This manuscript, held in Harvard’s Houghton Library, provided the author with “an unprecedented opportunity” to examine and illustrate “the distinct rhetorical posturings and...

Lame Jack his haultings: J. H. Hexter, the ‘middle group’ and William Prynne

This article examines the historiography of J. H. Hexter's ‘middle group’, arguing that current trends in historical scholarship have revived the need for a convincing scheme of faction in the Long Parliament. Hexter's evidence is discussed, and his supporters and critics addressed, before the hypothesis of a moderate, secular, constitutionalist lobby is subjected to scrutiny through a tract by William Prynne, commissioned by the Commons at the height of middle group ‘ascendancy’. In light of this, it is argued that Prynne represents a body of opinion within the Commons that was radical, religious and essentially Anglo-Saxon, which has implications for neo-whig, bicameral and ‘Three Kingdoms’ interpretations alike.

The Drama of Reform: Theology and Theatricality, 1461–1553 by Tamara Atkin (review)

Reviewed by: The Drama of Reform: Theology and Theatricality, 1461–1553 by Tamara Atkin Clifford Davidson Tamara Atkin. The Drama of Reform: Theology and Theatricality, 1461–1553. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. Pp. x + 195. €23.70. Tamara Atkin’s book opens with a quote from the Histrio-Mastix (1633) by the anti-theatrical writer William Prynne, who translates a passage from Honorius Augustodunensis (twelfth century) that affirms a connection between the priest celebrating Mass and acting in the theater; for example, “by the stretching out of his hands, he denotes the extension of Christ upon the Crosse.” Prynne, like Protestant polemicists of the first half of the sixteenth century, saw Roman Catholic ritual to be empty shows disconnected from substance and lacking in integrity. Actors in his view are hypocrites, who pretend to be what they are not. Atkin then sets out to provide an extended examination of how early Reformation dramatists, similarly distrustful of the liturgy and especially of the Eucharist, were happy to use drama “to undermine the rituals, symbols, plays, and processions of the Roman Church and promote reformed alternatives” (9). Chapter 1, however, takes up the late medieval Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a Host desecration drama involving the skepticism of some Jews concerning the real presence in the Eucharist, and in so doing once again revives for discussion Cecilia Cutts’s view of it as anti-Wycliffite polemic. The drama, like other Host miracles such as the popular Mass of St. Gregory so often appearing in iconography, is a strong affirmation of transubstantiation, and at the conclusion the perpetrators (their blasphemous act is described as like a “new turmentry” or repetition of the Crucifixion), on account of the seriousness of their crime, will require baptism and absolution by the higher authority of a bishop. The miraculous appearances shown in the play are nevertheless not real but only signs, revealed in the rubrics when a cauldron is described as boiling over with what is “apperyng to be as blood,” that is, not actual blood (55). Atkin compares the staged events, seemingly miraculous, to the miracles claimed by the monks of Hayles Abbey at the display of their relic of the Holy Blood, which would be revealed by reformers to be false (“it is but duckes bloode,” 61). Having myself witnessed a showing of a relic of the Holy Blood at Bruges many years ago, I [End Page 95] cannot see a direct comparison here. The blood in the Croxton play is not an actual devotional image, but rather is like one, albeit designating a purported fact: the ability of the Eucharist to perform miracles. The chapter ends with the suggestion that the mid-sixteenth-century manuscript of the Play of the Sacrament might have been copied from its fifteenth-century original for a Protestant who wished to show its theatrical “tricks” in order to reveal the deceptions practiced by the Catholic clergy upon the ignorant (63). While this supposition seems highly unlikely to me, it does provide a rationale for including Atkin’s discussion of this play in her book. The odd placement here of her comments on A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (55–59) does also serve to tie her discussion better to the subsequent chapters in which plays by Protestant playwrights and anti-theatricalism are discussed. More pertinent to the Play of the Sacrament is Margaret Aston’s convincing argument that “not all illusions were to be equated with delusion” and that spectators “could both revere the miraculous and respect the limitations of physical enactment” (quoted 58). Bale’s polemic in his Three Laws and in King Johan is designed to link Roman Catholic ritual with deceptive and delusional play-acting, the perversion of biblical and theological truths, and the subversion of social order and religious values. His views are characterized by psychological splitting, dividing social and personal reality into good (represented by himself and the Protestant faith) and extreme evil (invoking the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, the Devil, and Antichrist). Thus, as Atkin points out, “Bale’s extant plays are less concerned with the instruction of religious truth than they are with the exposure of erroneous belief and custom” (67), with the...

'Wanton Females of All Sorts': Spectatorship in <em>The Antipodes</em>

Focusing on Richard Brome's presentation of the theatre in The Antipodes (1638) as a force for social stability and sexual regulation, this essay reads the play as a response to the attack on the stage in William Prynne’s 1633 Histrio-mastix , particularly in terms of the increasingly prominent female playgoer in the 1630s. Satirizing assumptions about the sexually predatory spectacle and the emotionally liquid playgoer that underlie anti-theatrical anxieties of early modern London, The Antipodes also suggests a larger model for relations between theatre audiences and theatrical spectacles. This model ultimately places authority with spectators rather than players or playwrights and imagines the audience, like the chaste and witty Diana, asserting its control over the private theatres of Caroline London.

A WHIPPER WHIPPED: THE SEDITION OF WILLIAM PRYNNE

ABSTRACT‘A whipper whipped’ is a thoroughly new account of the 1634 Star Chamber case against William Prynne for publishing the seditious work Histrio-mastix. It is based upon a hitherto unused manuscript account that provides previously undisclosed information about the proceedings and especially about the intentions of the prosecution. This case is one of the most celebrated events of the 1630s, often viewed as the watershed event in the history of Caroline censorship. It has also become a prime example of Archbishop William Laud's attack against puritan conformists. This article argues that Laud played little role in the case; that the issue before Star Chamber was primarily the charge of sedition; and that Prynne received every possible legal advantage during his hearing. Through a careful reconstruction of the legal proceedings, the case is seen in an entirely new light. Though historians and literary critics have accepted Prynne's self-serving accounts of his prosecution, this fuller record demonstrates their inadequacy.

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock. Michael Scrivener.

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during Romantic period. Although it was once routine (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around notion of ambivalence. The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on the Pedlar, the Moneylender, and the Jew's Daughter as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about fact that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are era of Jewish emancipation (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in first chapter, chapter 2 reviews 17th century debates over readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up analytical parameters at work through chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is the first Anglo-Jewish is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, writer seeks To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as biblical Stranger already existing learned and pious community of (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …

Anxious Audiences and the Early Modern English Transvestite Theatre

Anxious Audiences and the Early Modern English Transvestite Theatre Robert I. Lublin (bio) Intersecting the interests of theatre historians, New Historicists, and feminist scholars, the early modern English convention of having boys play the women's roles has proven a compelling subject of analysis, drawing considerable attention over the last thirty years. Despite the broad range of methodologies employed to address the issue, one aspect of cross-gender casting has not been fully considered: the importance of audiences. This is significant because our understanding of the convention during the early modern period is tightly connected to the practice of spectatorship. To begin with, extant historical responses by those who attended the theatre inform our notion of how cross-gender casting was understood at the time. Additionally, along more theoretical lines, audiences, in the act of engaging the convention, helped to construct its meaning. Within theatre studies, we needn't invoke Barthes's notion of the "death of the author" to acknowledge the importance of audiences to the making of meaning in a performance.1 I plan briefly to survey the responses to cross-gender casting that came out of the period. Then, I wish to reflect upon the nature of the available evidence to consider the range of arguments it supports. Finally, I hope to consider how audience responses shaped the experience of cross-gender casting when it was employed in performances of early modern English drama. Despite the extraordinary amount of recent scholarship devoted to the topic, the practice of having boys play the women's roles actually elicited very little commentary at the time. In his book Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, Andrew Gurr attempts to record all of the significant comments on the theatre that survive from the period. Among the wide variety of references to playgoing Gurr has unearthed, discussion (or even mention) [End Page 66] of the ubiquitous practice of having boys play the women's parts is almost conspicuously absent.2 That stated, the convention did elicit responses, rather strong ones, from a particular demographic: individuals who found the practice opprobrious. Antitheatrical writers published a number of tracts during the early modern period that attacked the institution of theatre, and some of them specifically mention the iniquity of transvestite drama in the theatrical enterprise. The primary members of this group are Stephen Gosson, John Rainoldes, and William Prynne.3 The commentaries these writers offer on the theatrical practice of cross-gender casting are not identical, but share the general opinion that the convention breaks with religious orthodoxy and inappropriately inspires lust in the observer. Gosson, for instance, in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), first invokes the argument from Deuteronomy (22:5), which states that men who put on the apparel of women are an abomination to the Lord. He takes this further by arguing that, if merely wearing a woman's apparel is damnable, how much worse is the actor who puts on "not the apparrell onely, but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman?"4 In Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), Dr. John Rainoldes, a leading Oxford divine, argues that having boys play the part of women inspires sexual desire in the audience. "The appareil of wemen is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie . . . A womans garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the rememberance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr up the desire."5 Dressed as a woman, a male actor stirs up lust by provoking the audience's imagination and memory of a woman. Rainoldes further asserts that the spectator experiences homoerotic lust for the boy beneath the apparel: "an effeminate stage-player, while he faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love."6 William Prynne, in Histriomastix (1633), expands upon the fear that cross-dressed boys would elicit homoerotic desire: "players and play-haunters in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamored with players' boys thus clad in woman's apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them."7 Taken...

Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England by Ellen MacKay (review)

Reviewed by: Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England by Ellen MacKay Tessa Morrison MacKay, Ellen , Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010; hardback; pp. 242; 9 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$40.00; ISBN 9780226500195. Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England examines the long history of disaster in the English Renaissance playhouse. Ellen MacKay argues that the various disasters that afflicted the English theatre during this period were no accident but were an anticipated end to a practice built on disappearance and destruction. She reveals how the Elizabethan playwrights added plague and punishment to their preoccupation with 'soundrie slaughters and mayheminges of the Quenes subject' caused by 'engynes, weapons, and powers used in plays' (p. 11). The catastrophes that led to the demise of English Renaissance theatre were persecution, particularly by the Puritans, plague which decimated the theatres' audience, and fire that destroyed the theatres' buildings. Each disaster seemed to offer a metaphor that gestured towards a decline in the influence and effectiveness of the theatre. Fire was the most absolute of the theatres' practices of obliteration and the number of theatrical fires - such as those that destroyed the Paris Garden, the Globe, the Fortune, and Whitehall in the Renaissance and Restoration - suggests that theatre buildings were particularly vulnerable. But these structures were never built for longevity and were under constant change and repair. There is very little documentation that surrounds the early theatre and MacKay does not add to it but instead builds her argument on well-known material, from theatre scholars such as E. K. Chambers and A. M. Naglar, and from collected anecdotes, such as that related in a letter from the English courtier Philip Gawdy to his father in 1587. From Gawdy's anecdote - a [End Page 276] mother and baby in the audience were shot and killed by an actor on stage whose gun was loaded with live ammunition - she claims that although there is no such thing as theatre history before Richard Flecknoe's Short Treatise of the English Stage in 1664 'it is certainly not the case that there was no such think as theatre history in the age of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and their cohort' (p. 3), the 'golden age' of early modern theatre. Gawdy's anecdote reveals the long-standing tendency for stoppage and loss; it also was a fulfilment of the early modern England's anti-theatrical prejudices of the time. The end of the 'golden age' came with the eventual closure of the theatres by Oliver Cromwell in 1642, the ultimate anti-theatrical act. Seven years after these closures, William Prynne lamented the removal of the players from the theatres claiming that the wicked and tyrannical army of Cromwell had acted inhumanly, cruelly, roughly, and in a barbarous manner. MacKay points to the difference 'between the unresolved nature of the theatre that comes down to us and the history made of it' (p. 196). Both pro- and anti-theatre critics agreed that the theatre could not remove guilt or impress faith; it could not make judgements for either man or God. The re-enactment of crimes on stage could prompt an impulsive confession or some acknowledgement of their offence from anyone in the audience who witnessed their own crime. Although in Hamlet the play-within-a-play established the evidence of Claudius's guilt, MacKay suggests that by using a play-within-a-play, Shakespeare was challenging the effectiveness of such a device for detection, and that he was undermining the moral claims of the theatre. The foisting of this role of judgemental advocate onto the theatre only led it further down the path of disaster. Persecution, Plague, and Fire is an immensely interesting book but it has problems. First, it is by no means an easy read. The language can be dense and unnecessarily complex, making it difficult to follow. In many cases the analysis does not stand up to close scrutiny, particularly 'think as theatre history' which appears to rely on the anecdotes rather than the facts that stimulated...

Christophe Tournu, Milton, Rights and LibertiesMilton, Rights and Liberties. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

<i>Christophe Tournu,</i> Milton, Rights and Liberties<i>Milton, Rights and Liberties</i>. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

The divorce tracts of John Milton: texts and contexts

In a span of only 18 months from August 1643 to March 1645 John Milton published five tracts on divorce: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, a much enlarged edition of that tract, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion. This book presents all five full-length pamphlets and documents in order to fully represent Milton's views on divorce, liberty, gender, and social institutions. Van den Berg and Howard also present Milton's work in the context of his contemporaries by including four other publications that represent the first wave of engagement with Milton's divorce tracts: the anonymously written An Answer to a Book, intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644); William Prynne's Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644); Herbert Palmer's The Glasse of God's Providence (1644); and Daniel Featley's The Dippers Dipt (1645). The current volume is unique in that it is the first in the field to showcase Milton's writings on divorce side by side with these related documents, and it provides the first modern transcription of An Answer. Milton's argument that divorce could be to the good of both sexes makes this often intimidating writer and his era accessible and compelling to contemporary readers. Indeed, his claim for divorce on the basis of mutual incompatibility established the groundwork for the justification of divorce in late twentieth century Anglo-American law. Milton's rhetorical methods from cogent advocacy to speculative commentary and poignant vignettes, from citation of authorities and carefully reasoned biblical exegesis to defensive vituperation demonstrate the range of debate in seventeenth century pamphlet warfare.