The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe

Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Brendan Dooley, Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Brendan Dooley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134630738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In its various European contexts, the invention and spread of newspapers in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on early modern culture and politics. While recent research has explored the role of the newspaper in transforming information into ideology in various European countries, this book is the first to bring this work together into a comprehensive and comparative survey.

Part 1
The English model

Early modern English men – and women – exhibited an innate thirst for information of all sorts, and perhaps especially for information about current events, better known as news. This thirst consumed information and news from across the spectrum of availability – from the most trivial to the most earthshattering, whether rumour, personal experience, gossip, official report, slander, eye-witness account, royal proclamation, stage portrayal, or fantasy. The thirst for news was slaked from a variety of fountainheads, among them conversation, official communication, eavesdropping, public debate, acting, private correspondence, social gatherings, observation, and the printed and written word. All human faculties were involved in the absorption and digestion of news.

News, then as now, was the ‘common currency of social exchange.’¹ From slanderers and libellers to gossipmongers, from prostitutes who traded sexual favours for news to polite dinner conversation at high noble tables and in the queen’s withdrawing chamber, from broadside ballads to politically partisan newsbooks, news fuelled the interactions of most if not all early modern communities. Indeed, our own early twenty-first century greeting, inveterate icebreaker, and accepted avenue of approach ‘What’s new with you?’ is not far removed from the common hailing of the early seventeenth century: ‘What news?’ Dissemination of news was a direct route to social contact, intellectual stimulation, and political ferment. The thirst for news was innate and enduring – a craving never fully satisfied over either time or geographic location.

In early seventeenth-century England, one particular current event served to focus this natural English thirst for information in a new and different way, and in so doing, elevated social and political awareness to unprecedented levels. As was also the case on the Continent, this pivotal event was the Thirty Years’ War, and it was intense interest in the progress of the war that originally fostered the emergence of a printed news publication industry in England.

Printed news reports of the war in the form of gazettes, or corantos (often rendered as ‘currents’ by contemporaries) began to be imported into England from the Low Countries from the outset of hostilities in 1618. The corantos were single-sheet broadsides printed in Dutch. Readers with no competency in that language soon began to get translations of the corantos’ contents reported in manuscript newsletters. However, by 1620 it was clear that there was a growing market for information about the war among English readers, and that there was money to be made in larger, vernacular editions. London Stationers set out the first English translations in 1620–21, and by the end of 1621, Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne had established a regularly weekly quarto newsbook, selling for 1–2p. per issue, which appeared in numbered instalments. Soon, Butter employed editors who compiled unique English news publications from the accounts available in a variety of imported Continental corantos and letters of intelligence.

The English corantos printed only foreign news, fluctuated in popularity and success, were closely monitored by the Privy Council, and were suspended completely between 1632 and 1638. Nevertheless, they provided the first regular quencher of the English thirst for news, and pace Joad Raymond, they also provided a model for the printed books of domestic news that quickly emerged out of the chaotic domestic political situation which enveloped England in the 1640s, and prefigured the modern newspaper.

The regular and plentiful dissemination of information about current events which first emerged in the 1620s had an effect also on the English political psyche. News publication provided information upon which opinions about political events and the actions of governors and their administrations might be founded and developed. Being presented with a variety of information from a variety of sources allowed for fellow-feeling and comparative analysis. News contributed to the formation of partisan political opinion, designed to further a particular point of view and accomplish a particular goal. This is less obvious in early news publications, except perhaps for Butter’s 1620s newsbooks which carried the Elector Palatine’s coat of arms on the title page – but by the 1640s, the intent of newsbooks was no mystery at all. Every political perspective had its own, often multiple, newsbooks to support and promote it. Ben Jonson and other early critics of printed news publication were proven prescient – printed news was recognized to be malleable and manipulatable for whatever purposes its creators or its consumers wanted it to serve. It could be dangerous enemy or powerful ally, or both. The provision and analysis of news became over time a necessary, forward-looking need of the political process in shaping public opinion as a means of garnering popular support. What had once been fresh and immediate and inspiring news, would, through the agency of print publication, endure to become backward-looking, fixed and permanent, history, and equally necessary to modern conceptions of acceptable foundations for politicized public opinion.

The chapters in this section offer three ‘present time’ glimpses into the nature of news and its dissemination in early- and mid-seventeenth century England; the general impact of news upon early modern readers and their actions; and the interaction between information and politics in early modern contexts.

Stuart Sherman explores the relationship between theatre and contemporary reality – the ‘two-way’ transfer of information from ‘page to stage’ – laid out in dramatic works of Ben Jonson, a contemporary observer and satirist of the rise of the corantos and the accompanying all-consuming, incautious thirst for news. Sherman calls attention to the necessity of using multiple human faculties to absorb news – eyes, ears, mouth especially – in a world where oral transmission, manuscript transmission, and print dissemination were interdependent and equally vital. Sherman’s analysis addresses the tangle of early modern ‘convergent media’ and the need for the contemporary consumer to sort through information, to throw out rumour, gossip, and fabrication while holding on to the more substantive news – if possible. Jonson set out to argue that what is seen and heard is closest to reality and truth, more fixed and less ephemeral, freely offered and freely absorbed, but what he actually illustrated was that print provided fixity and endurance, as well as accuracy, in transmission of information – and that information in the form of news could be successfully ‘commodified.’ In other words, it was possible to achieve both profit and reliability in the early modern English printed news industry, a situation belied by contemporary commentary. Sherman details a ‘competition between modes of authority’ in early seventeenth-century England, a competition from which, in his view, print – in particular, the printed news – emerges a clear winner.

Sabrina Baron also addresses the relationship between different modes of dissemination of information in early seventeenth-century England through an examination of the forms and texts of news publications. She argues that if print was coming into its own and attitudes toward printed news were becoming more positive during that period, manuscript newsletters simultaneously continued to satisfy a crucial need in dissemination and consumption – namely providing information about domestic current events. In contrast to Sherman’s view, Baron sees manuscript newsletters and oral transmission of news as just as vital as, if not more important than, printed news publications in the formation of popular opinions which inspired political stances and actions. She focuses on the organizational and informational connections between news published in print and news published in manuscript before 1641, alluded to by Jonson, and, as Baron emphasizes, in fact central to understanding the motivations of the news industry. Because the state recognized those qualities of print that Jonson came to recognize – enunciated by Sherman as permanence, uniformity, and pervasiveness – the state exercised close supervision of the printed news industry which, paradoxically, caused manuscript publication rather than the burgeoning pre-Civil War print culture to function as the conduit for disseminating politically inflammatory information. Had Jonson lived longer, he, like the duke of Newcastle, would have recognized as well the political impact, and therefore the danger, that was more inherent in oral and manuscript transmission of news than in printed news.

Michael Mendle contributes to this examination of the development of the seventeenth-century English news industry, and its role in disseminating information crucial to political opinions, an analysis of the ultimate maturation of printed news within the ‘anything would sell’ print market of mid-century when state restrictions on print publication disappeared. Mendle describes a ‘news-driven pamphlet culture’ from which arose two other intimately connected developments that once again transformed the dissemination of news – the use of shorthand and the emergence of the reporter. Shorthand writing empowered reporters through real-time, verbatim coverage to perform events immediately and freshly for readers of printed news, in the manner advocated by Jonson for hearers of his plays as well as for hearers of news. In Mendle’s analysis, the fixity and pervasiveness of print had come full circle, obtaining the most valuable qualities of oral transmission and manuscript newsletters, and exceeding their advantage as modes of dissemination. But if printed news was less retrospective recollection and reconstruction of past events in this era, it was also increasingly recognized ‘as the raw material for history.’ Mendle writes that news was both ‘momentary scoop and enduring record.’ The cheap little long-despised ephemeral pamphlets of news were collected in great assemblages which have, as the original collectors intended and Mendle illustrates here, shaped posterity’s perceptions of mid-seventeenth-century events, perhaps more than any other source. It was also out of the rapidly changing attitudes of mid-century that the printing press evolved into a means for conducting state business as well as challenging state authority. Ultimately, in Mendle’s analysis, printed news and its malleability were crucial to both the overthrow and the restoration of the Stuart dynasty between 1640 and 1660.

The final chapter in this section, by Daniel Woolf, is an overview of the social and political constructs of news and history from the mid-sixteenth to the earlyeighteenth century. Woolf argues that the forward-looking view of seventeenthcentury news as a product of oral transmission and the backward-looking view of early modern news as the precursor of modern print media must be synthesized into a more appropriate ‘present time’ view of news as a pivotal element in the emergence (for the first time) of something resembling a ‘public sphere’ in late Stuart England. Woolf ’s long-view analysis tempers some of the claims made for the achievements of printed news in the other chapters which concentrate more intensively on the early and mid-seventeenth century. He argues that printed news could not have had too significant an impact on the formulation of public opinion, in the Habermasian sense, until technological and transportation advances of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were achieved. Prior to those developments, the superiority of print dissemination resided only in its capacity for ‘mass-reproduction.’ He places news further outside the realm of history than does Mendle, although Woolf sees conceptions of the role of news in history going back to the corantos. Echoing Baron’s conceptions of the vitality of manuscript newsletters and the enduring centrality of oral transmission, Woolf describes manuscript and oral dissemination surviving the Civil War to keep the mouth and ears engaged in consuming and dispersing information well into the later period. He sees no collision, such as Sherman searched for, between traditional transmission of news and the mediation of print.

Woolf concludes, however, as do the other authors in this section, that there was a discernible ‘collective response of readers to the news’ in early modern England; in other words, some formulation of public opinion based on dissemination of information – information in the form of news, which elicited ‘possible resolutions’ to situations that varied greatly, but which were all, in the final analysis, political.

Notes

¹ Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), p. 1.

1 Eyes and ears, news and plays

The argument of Ben Jonson’s Staple

Stuart Sherman

At Drury Lane Theatre one evening in late October 1779, the curtain fell on a performance of Hamlet only to rise again some minutes later, as the playbill had foretold, on the debut of a new afterpiece by the playhouse’s manager/ proprietor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Here, in the words of the text published two years after, is what greeted the audience’s eyes and ears:

Mr. and Mrs. Dangle at breakfast, and reading newspapers.
Dangle (reading headlines): Brutus to Lord North. – Letter the second on the State of the Army. – Pshaw! To the first L–dash D of the A–dash Y.¹

The play was The Critic, and those spoken dashes are worth pondering. In reading the day’s headlines aloud, Mr Dangle might easily fill the blanks with their obvious content (‘first Lord of the Admiralty’); he adheres to the orthography by way of expressing his distaste for this kind of news (he will make his own preferences clear in a moment). But he also accomplishes for the playwright a little layering of perceptions on the part of the audience. The eye beholds the breakfast table and its occupants; the ear absorbs Dangle’s disdainfully scrupulous rendition of the news text, dashes and all. The mind’s eye, in consequence, conjures up the text as Dangle sees it, close up: a line of print, not speech. Sheridan has arranged things so that merely by looking at the stage and hearing the voice, the audience must almost perforce imagine a product of the press.

An ephemeral product – mere newsprint – deployed here for an ephemeral but pointed effect: it ushers in a satire on the news business that will culminate in the arrival of Mr Puff, arch-publicist and aspiring playwright. At the same time, The Critic’s opening stages a striking moment in the long history of an intricate relationship – between stage and page, between play and print. The reconstruction of that history has produced extraordinary scholarship, most of it mapping the route by which the evanescence of live performance moves towards the comparative permanen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: The English model
• Part II: The Continent
• Part III: Pan-European trajectories
• Postscript