Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature

Sophie Chiari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138366534
• eBook ISBN: 9780429684203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Broadening the notion of censorship, this volume explores the transformative role played by early modern censors in the fashioning of a distinct English literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In early modern England, the Privy Council, the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Stationers' Company, and the Master of the Revels each dealt with their own prerogatives and implemented different forms of censorship, with the result that authors penning both plays and satires had to juggle with various authorities and unequal degrees of freedom from one sector to the other. Text and press control thus did not give way to systematic intervention but to particular responses adapted to specific texts in a specific time.

If the restrictions imposed by regulation practices are duly acknowledged in this edited collection, the different contributors are also keen to enhance the positive impact of censorship on early modern literature. The most difficult task consists in finding the exact moment when the balance tips in favour of creativity, and the zone where, in matters of artistic freedom, the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. This is what the twelve chapters of the volume proceed to do. Thanks to a wide variety of examples, they show that, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, regulations seldom prevented writers to make themselves heard, albeit through indirect channels. By contrast, in the 1630s, the increased supremacy of the Church seemed to tip the balance the other way.

Part I

Burning, Forbidding, Controlling

The Power of Censors

1 An Incident in the History of English Book Burning

Edward Paleit

On 15 August 1595, ‘by commaundement from my lordes grace of CANTERBURY’, a number of books were burnt in the Hall of the Stationers’ Company. The entry in the Company’s Registers goes on to specify their titles:

Thesaurus Principum

Ministromachia

ROSSEUS de re publica

Little French bookes in 8

SURIUS Chronicle

(Arber 1875–94, II: 40)

The event has passed almost without remark in modern discussions of Elizabethan censorship: it goes unmentioned in Cyndia Clegg’s well-known study, for example (1997). Indeed, most of the works themselves, with the partial exception of ‘Rosseus de re publica’, are virtually unknown to English-language scholarship.¹ This is perhaps unsurprising. They were all written by now rather obscure figures. More importantly, they were printed abroad and not—at least not directly—aimed at an English readership or English affairs.

Why were these texts burnt? And why were they burnt? Answering these apparently straightforward questions will take most of this chapter (and involve a certain amount of speculation). Nonetheless, doing so takes us right into the heart of modern debates surrounding the nature of, and links between, censorship, religious politics and the literary ‘public sphere’ in the Elizabethan fin-de-siècle—a ‘public sphere’ which, even its most insightful historians are prone to downplay, was as much about the dissemination of texts printed abroad as the production of domestic opinion.² It also has the potential to frame new ways of discussing late Elizabethan censorship, for example (as I suggest in conclusion) by using Francis Fukuyama’s recent works on the origins and decay of political order alongside Donald R. Kelley’s 1981 contention that late sixteenth-century Europe witnessed ‘the beginning of ideology’ (Kelley 1981, passim; Fukuyama 2012, 2014, passim).

Setting aside the ‘little French bookes in 8’ for a moment, let us consider the four works recorded by title in the Registers. What were they about—and does this explain why they were burnt? At one level, the answer is obviously affirmative. All were strongly pro-Catholic texts, containing polemical, sometimes vituperative, commentary on the Elizabethan government and its Protestant Church.

The first work mentioned, Ministromachia (a title which translates roughly as ‘Preacher-struggle’), refers to a work published in Köln in 1592.³ It was a work of satirical heresiology by a Polish Catholic, Stanislaw Reszka, which gleefully catalogues the calumnies heaped on each other by different Reformation sects. Amidst the heap of accusations and counter-accusations are a few descriptions by Reszka of the vitriolic quarrels between ‘the Puritans [Puritani]’ and the Anglican Church. These are invariably second-hand, drawing on existing polemical literature in English, notably the Puritan tract The Second Admonition to the Parliament (1572) and the reply by John Whitgift, or the hostile reports of an English Catholic, Thomas Stapleton (Reszka 1592, sigs. F3^v–F4^r, G^r–G2^r).⁴ Rezska also finds occasion to mention the dislike of Lutheran writers and rulers on the continent for English Calvinists (1592, sigs. C6^v–C7^r, D5^r-v).

The work known as Thesaurus Principum—its full title was Thesaurus Principum hac aetate in Europa viventium (‘The Treasury of Princes Alive in Europe Today’)—was a genealogical catalogue of Europe’s ruling dynasties compiled by an Austrian, Michael von Aitzing, also known as Eytzinger. It too had initially been published in Köln, in 1590; a second, somewhat expanded edition appeared from the same press in 1591.⁵ It is probable, however, that the book burnt in Stationers’ Hall was not this work, but von Aitzing’s Thesauri Principum… Paralipomena (‘Supplement to the Treasury of Princes’) of 1592.⁶ This is because the original Thesaurus fails, with one minor exception, to discuss England or the Tudor dynasty at all. The omission could be construed as an oblique insult; there are no other comparable absences among major European monarchies. The sole mention, during a discussion of the rulers of Scotland, significantly concerns ‘Mary Stuart killed by Isabella [sic] queen of England [Mariae Stuartae, ab Angliae regina Isabella interfectae]’ (von Aitzing 1590, sig. K^r). But the Paralipomena seems a much more likely candidate for combustion, as it indulges in explicit denunciation of England’s Protestant regime. Now including Elizabeth I and her Tudor forebears among contemporary dynasties, it delivers a gratuitously extended and systematically hostile narrative, stretching to nearly ninety pages, of her treatment of Mary Stuart up to the latter’s execution in 1587 (von Aitzing 1592, sigs. Q6^v–Y5^v). While Mary is praised as a woman ‘in which all ornaments seemed to come together [in quam omnia ornamenta videntur contulisse]’, Elizabeth—whose status as a heretic denounced by the papacy has already been underlined—is suggested to have complied in the cruel and illegal murder of the legitimate heir to the English throne (von Aitzing 1592, sigs. Q5^r, Q6^v).

The third work, described by the Registers as ‘SURIUS Chronicle’, refers to the well-known, chronologically ordered history of Europe from 1500 to the present day by the Carthusian monk Lorenz Sauer (1523–78), whose Latin name was Laurentius Surius. First published in 1566—again in Köln—Sauer revised and updated the history in later editions, the last of which, according to the Universal Short Title Catalogue, appeared in 1574.⁷ His work was, however, continued and translated by others. The most recent version had appeared in 1586 with a continuation up to that year by Michael ab Isselt, a Dutch Catholic living in Köln who also wrote other works recording contemporary events.⁸ It is not exactly clear which version of Sauer’s work was burnt in 1595. The work’s Latin title was Commentarius brevis rerum in orbe gestarum (‘Brief commentary of things done in the world’), with the addition of the dates covered within. There was no English translation. However, it had been rendered in German as the Kurtze Chronik, and this in turn was published in a French translation as the Chronique Abregée (in 1586), although the translations of Jacques Estourneau, printed in France from 1570 onwards, call it Histoire ou commentaires de toutes choses memorables depuys 70 ans. Nonetheless the term ‘chronicle’ accurately describes its general format. All versions offer an unambiguously hostile discussion of English Protestantism, concentrating on the recent sufferings of Catholics. Van Isselt’s continuation to 1586, for example, invites the reader to compare the Anglican ‘persecution’ (as it is called in the work’s index) of English Catholics to the Spanish Inquisition, while terming executed Catholic priests ‘martyrs of Christ’: in England keeping a crucifix about you, he argues, is sufficient to invite the charge of traitor (Surius and ab Isselt 1586, sigs. Qqq^v–Qqq2^r, Vvv3^r).⁹

The fourth and last named text was the De Justa Reipublicae Christianae contra Reges Impios et Haereticos Authoritate (‘On the Just Authority of a Christian Commonwealth against Impious and Heretical Kings’), a work of French Catholic political thought principally aimed at justifying armed resistance by the Ligue to Henri of Navarre. First published in Paris in 1590 without a stated author, it was the second, lightly altered Antwerp edition of 1592 which first ascribed the text to ‘Guilelmus Rossaeus’ (Rainolds 1590; Rainolds [Rossaeus] 1592). ‘Rossaeus’, contemporaries were swift to deduce (modern scholarship agrees), was in fact the English seminary priest William Rainolds, who had died in exile in 1594.¹⁰ In staking out his argument, Rainolds/Rossaeus often moves beyond a strictly French context to make a number of scathing assaults on English Protestants—whom he considers ‘Calvinists’—as well as the country’s ruling Tudor dynasty (Rainolds 1590, sigs. D.i^v–D.ii^r, R^r–R.vii^r, Lll.vi^v–Mmm.v^v, Rrr.iii^r–vi^r). It is clear from how he refers to Elizabeth I that she is included in the categories of heretical or tyrannical rulers which Catholics were urged to resist, depose or indeed assassinate on both theological and juristic grounds. At issue was not only her heretical Protestantism—worse than paganism, in Rainolds’s view—and conduct towards Catholics but also the fact that, as he put it,

she was excluded from the legitimate succession to the monarchy by several obstacles both peculiar to that kingdom as well as universal in the Christian world: heresy, adulterous birth, statutes of parliaments, and edicts of her father and brother repudiating her as spurious.

(Rainolds 1590, sig. Rrr.iii^r)¹¹

Another tirade condemns Elizabeth’s supposed perfidy towards the crowns of Spain, France and Scotland, which for Rainolds simply confirms the evil, consciously Machiavellian political morality of all Calvinist rulers.¹² The end of De Justa Christianae is an exhortation to the French nobility—that is, the leaders of the Catholic League—to rescue France from Navarre’s wicked and heretical grasp; yet it is also clearly a general call to arms against Protestant rulers anywhere (Rainolds 1590, sigs. Ooo^v–Xxx.iv^r).¹³

The content of these texts clearly placed them in breach of several measures and, in particular, a series of royal proclamations stretching back to the 1560s aimed at preventing the importation and circulation of ‘seditious’ texts from abroad which either questioned the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s regime and England’s Protestant Church or could be thought to dissuade subjects from their allegiance.¹⁴ They also come under the general category of Catholic texts which provoked retaliatory action from the Elizabethan authorities, not always in the form of censorship. It is reasonable to assume that the ‘little French books in 8’ (i.e. octavo pamphlets) were of a similar type. Yet this is not, in fact, sufficient to explain their burning in August 1595. For one, when the English government acted to suppress foreign texts it tended to do so rapidly, in a (perhaps vain) attempt to prevent copies getting into the hands of English readers, or at least to give them a pre-emptive notoriety. Yet, none of these four works were that recently published: in the case of Surius’s chronicle, for example, the last known date of publication was 1586. It can be assumed that anyone who really wanted to get hold of these texts already had them and had read them. In addition, while clearly containing much prejudicial anti-Protestant or anti-Elizabethan commentary, none of the works in question was specifically aimed at or motivated by the English situation. This puts them in a different category from those works which ignited the most ferocious, or indeed panicky, clampdowns by Elizabeth’s government: John Leslie’s Treatise of Treasons, for example, or William Allen’s Sincere and Modest Defence (with its explicit critique of Burghley’s Execution of Justice), or indeed Allen’s hugely inflammatory Admonition, published to accompany the attempted invasion of 1588.¹⁵ All of these texts were written for English readers and were indeed centrally about English religious politics.

It is just about possible that Rainolds’s work, at least, was caught up in a contemporary scare involving a different text. From early 1594 onwards, the Privy Council had become aware that a work of English Catholic polemic was underway which, besides explicitly discussing potential candidates for the English throne, also advanced the theory that the royal succession was ultimately elective in character, requiring the consent of the people or commonwealth. Now firmly attributed to the Jesuit controversialist Robert Persons [or Parsons]—as it was by many at the time—A Conference about the Next Succession was first printed in Antwerp, in 1594–95, under the pseudonym ‘R. Doleman’ (Persons [Doleman] 1594–95).¹⁶ Copies were intercepted; Burghley’s own notes on it survive.¹⁷ The work has received a great deal of attention in recent scholarship, not least because it was written in English.¹⁸ What chiefly links A Conference to Rainolds’s De Justa Reipublicae is the former’s exposition of the nature and authority of commonwealths. An intercepted letter from the disaffected Catholic priest William Gifford (who loathed Persons), deciphered and transcribed by Burghley’s agent Thomas Phelippes, claims that ‘the first part is general and stollen quasi ad verbum owt of the first three Capita of Mr. Renoldes book’.¹⁹ The charge is accurate: the early arguments of A Conference do indeed rely heavily on unacknowledged paraphrases and indeed sometimes translations of De Justa Reipublicae. Unfortunately, there is very little about the other texts burnt in August to suggest a similar link. It is furthermore unclear why the appearance of A Conference should stimulate the burning of another text which had influenced its arguments.

A further and perhaps decisive problem concerns the fate of the works in question. Burning was and is an obvious way to destroy illicit printed material. It is sometimes mentioned in Elizabethan censorship proclamations as one way to dispose of harmful publications.²⁰ Yet while many texts were doubtless used as fuel, or for other waste purposes, such acts of physical destruction were rarely recorded. This is not that surprising when the rhetorical intent of most such measures is understood. They were far more concerned with readers and their loyalties than the physical texts. Similarly, measures regulating the domestic print trade such as the 1566 Star Chamber decrees (more on this shortly) talk of making ‘waste paper’ out of offensive publications, but their main focus is on rogue printer-publishers threatening the privileges of the Company, not their texts (Arber 1875–94, I: 322). The entry in the Stationers’ Registers of August 1595, however, suggests a much more official, if not ceremonial, act—on this occasion, public burning was very much the point. This is enough to make the incident atypical. As David Cressy shows in one of the few studies devoted to the subject, the public burning of offensive texts was a relatively rare occurrence, at least during Elizabeth’s reign (it became a more popular measure under James I) (Clegg 2001, 68–89; Cressy 2005, 364). By far the best-known example is the so-called ‘Bishops’ Ban’ of 1599 when a number of printed satires as well as the Ovidian translations of Marlowe were consigned to the flames. Yet those were works printed in England, not foreign texts like those of 1595. Why was a public burning of this kind not the fate of other anti-government publications printed overseas, including not only Persons’s A Conference, as we have noted, but a whole stream of Catholic propaganda works stretching back to the 1570s, alongside various similarly offensive ‘Puritan’ works? Doubtless many such works were destroyed by the authorities upon discovery or after confiscation. Some may well have been burnt. But not, it would seem, in Stationers’ Hall in a manner worthy of recording in the Registers.

The content of these works cannot, therefore, fully account for why they (and not other works) were burnt in 1595, and where, nor why burning was chosen or the incident recorded. A different strategy of inquiry is, therefore, necessary, moving away from the texts themselves towards the possible motives of those involved in the decision. As the entry in the Registers makes clear, the order to burn these texts came from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, John Whitgift. On what authority was he acting? Now, as is well known, the Archbishop of Canterbury was a member of the ecclesiastical High Commission, which under the terms of the 1559 Act of Supremacy had been granted general powers to inquire into ‘all and singular heretical opinions, seditious books, contempts, conspiracies, false rumours, tales, seditions, misbehaviours, slanderous words or showings, published, invented or set forth’ against the government’s peaceable rule (Elton 1982, 227). The crown’s published Injunctions of the same year had charged that no book be published without the queen’s consent or under licence from her ‘commissioners’, to whom she also referred the ‘prohibition, or permission’ of ‘all other bokes of matters of religion, or polycye, or governaunce’ printed ‘either side of the Sea’. By ‘commissioners’ Injunctions meant, primarily, members of the Privy Council, the Archbishops of York and Cante...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Textual Note
• General Introduction: “To be seen and allowed”: Early Modern Regulation Practices
• Part I Burning, Forbidding, Controlling: The Power of Censors
• Part II Dramatic Constraints, Dramatic Freedom: Case Studies
• Part III Censorship on the Page: Translation, Poetry, and Editorial Practices
• Coda: Early Modern English Censorship in European Context
• Bibliography
• Index