Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011...

Author: Richard Dutton

35 downloads 1394 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20

Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England

10.1057/9780230598713 - Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England, Richard Dutton

Also by Richard Dutton BEN JONSON: To the First Folio

* BEN JONSON: AUTHORITY: CRITICISM JACOBEAN CIVIC PAGEANTS (editor)

* MASTERING THE REVELS: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama MODERN TRAGICOMEDY AND THE BRITISH TRADITION NEW HISTORICISM AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA (co-editor with Richard Wilson) SELECTED WRITINGS OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (editor)

THOMAS MIDDLETON: Women Beware Women and Other Plays (editor)

* A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM: A New Casebook (editor)

* From the same publishers



BEN JONSON: Longman Critical Reader (editor)

Buggeswords Richard Dutton



Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England

© Richard Dutton 2000

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 0–333–72184–5 In North America ISBN 0–312–23624–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dutton, Richard, 1948– Licensing, censorship, and authorship in early Modern England / Richard Dutton. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–312–23624–7 (cloth)

1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. Theater—Censorship—England—History—16th century. 3. Theater– –Censorship—England—History—17th century. 4. Drama—Censorship—England– –History—16th century. 5. Drama—Censorship—England—History—17th century. 6. Copyright licenses—England—History—16th century. 7. Copyright licenses—England—History—17th century. 8. English drama—17th century– –History and criticism. 9. Playwriting—History—16th century. 10. Playwriting– –History—17th century. I. Title.

PR658.C4 D868 2000

822'.309—dc21

00–040452

10 09

9 08

8 07

7 06

6 05

5 04

4 03

3 02

2 01

1 00

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Acknowledgements

vi

A Note on Texts

viii

Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

ix

1

The Regulation and Censorship of Early Modern Drama

1

2

Licensed Fools: the 1598 Watershed

16

3

Obscenity and Profanity: Sir Henry Herbert's Problems

with the Players and Archbishop Laud, 1632±34

41

4

Marlowe: Censorship and Construction

62

5

Shakespeare: the Birth of the Author

90

6

Jonson: the Epistle to Volpone

114

7

Middleton: the Censorships of A Game at Chess

132

8

Buggeswords: the Case of Sir John Hayward's

Life of Henry IV

162

Notes

192

Works Cited and Consulted

201

Index

211

v



Contents

I am grateful to the publishers and editors of the following items for permission to reproduce them, or material from them. Several of them have been revised almost beyond recognition to take their place in the scheme of the book. `Shakespeare and Marlowe: Censorship and Construction', Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993):1±29, was a much augmented and revised version of the essay which was co-winner of the Hoffman Prize for Distinguished Publication on Marlowe in 1990. `Buggeswords: Samuel Harsnett and the Licensing, Suppression and Afterlife of Dr John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry IV' first appeared in Criticism 35 (1993): 305±40. `The Birth of the Author' was published first in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, edited by R.B. Parker and S. Zitner (University of Delaware Press: Newark, 1996), 71±92; a revised version appeared in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, edited by Cedric C. Brown and Arthur Marotti (Macmillan: London, 1997): 153±78. `The Lone Wolf: Jonson's Epistle to Volpone' was published in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, edited by Julie Sanders with Kate Chedgzoy and Sue Wiseman (Macmillan: London, 1998), 134±54. `The Regulation and Censorship of Early Modern Drama' is a chapter in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999): 377±91. ` ``Discourse in the players, though no disobedience'': Sir Henry Herbert's Problems with the Players and Archbishop Laud, 1632±34' first appeared in The Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1999): 37±62. All of these were written, or published in those forms, at the invitation of their editors, and I would like to thank them for their support and encouragement throughout: Andrew Gurr, Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti, Brian Parker and Sheldon Zitner, Julie Sanders, David Scott Kastan, and Richard Harp. `The Birth of the Author' was specifically written for a Festschrift for Sam Schoenbaum, whom I never met, but whose work on Shakespearean biography I greatly admire. I am most grateful to the Huntington Library for a fellowship in the summer of 1992, and to the British Academy which paid for my travel out there. My work there led directly to the essay `Buggeswords', and contributed significantly to my edition of Women Beware Women and Other Plays by Thomas Middleton, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univi



Acknowledgements

versity Press, 1999). That in turn led me to further thoughts on the censorship of A Game at Chess, which appear here. Another legacy of my time at the Huntington Library is the number of friendships I made there which have left their mark on this and other work: I should particularly mention Cyndia Clegg, Paulina Kewes, James Knowles and James Riddell. I would also particularly like to thank Roslyn Knutson and Andrew Gurr for their invitation to participate in the Theater History seminar at the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles in 1996. This gave me the pleasure and privilege of sharing in the deliberations of a unique group of consummate professionals. I met many of them again at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Washington DC in 1997 and San Francisco in 1999. A developed version of my paper for the earlier seminar appears here as `Licensed Fools: the 1598 Watershed'. Here too I would particularly like to thank David Bevington, Barbara Freedman, Bill Ingram, Alan Nelson and Peter Roberts for sharing their thoughts with me on matters related to this book. A special word of thanks to Hans Werner, whom I have never met, but with whom I have corresponded a good deal. Some of the information he has selflessly shared with me appears below. And thanks to Steve Longstaffe for bringing to my attention the use of `buggs words' in The Troublesome Raigne of King John, which forms part of the epigraph at the head of the Preface.



Acknowledgements vii

Unless otherwise specified, quotations from Sir Henry Herbert, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare are from the following editions: The office-book of Sir Henry Herbert: N.W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: the Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623±73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Parenthetic references (Herbert) are to page numbers. Ben Jonson: Ben Jonson. Ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925±52). This includes the `Conversations with Drummond', 1, pp. 128±51, and `Timber, or Discoveries', 8, pp. 563±649. Parenthetic references within the text (Conversations, Discoveries) are to the line-numbering. All Jonson texts are silently modernised. William Shakespeare: The Riverside Shakespeare. Textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974). This book uses a Short Citation system for most of its references, to minimise distracting endnotes. All works from which quotations are taken, or to which reference is made, are collected alphabetically by the author in `Works Cited and Consulted'. Where an author is mentioned, either within the text or parenthetically, it is implicit that the reference is to that listing; where I draw on more than one work by an author there is a secondary reference to the date of publication (subdivided a, b, etc., if necessary). References without page numbers alert readers to the relevance of a work in general; citation of page numbers implies a more specific reference. The system includes references to early modern authors other than Herbert, Jonson and Shakespeare, in modern editions where practicable. So `Marlowe, 1976', for example, refers to the Everyman Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems, edited by E.D. Pendry and J.C. Maxwel, while `Marlowe, 1993' refers to the Revels Plays Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen.

viii



A Note on Texts

But husht, breathe not buggs words too soon abroad, Lest time prevent the issue of thy reach. (1 Troublesome Raigne of King John1) I have got you a transcript of it that you can pick out the offence if you can, for my part I can find no such buggeswords, but that everything is as it is taken. ( John Chamberlain writing to Dudley Carleton about Dr John Hayward's First Part of the History of Henry IV )

This book rather took me by surprise. My family still remembers a day in May 1990 when I let out a very loud whoop which signalled the last touch to the typescript of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. That was the end of seven years' work, and I thought I had said everything I had to say on the subject. But I was wrong. Just as surely as Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling, I had become the deed's creature ± the deed in my case being the central thesis of that book. My aim in Mastering the Revels was to relate the censorship of early modern drama in England (and by censorship I meant to comprehend all the structures of regulation and control) to the processes of patronage and licensing which informed the social structures of the day. I did this, in particular, by focusing on the Master of the Revels, the court official in the Lord Chamberlain's department who was most central to these operations. I examined the way the four men who held this post between 1579 and 1642 (Edmond Tilney, Sir George Buc, Sir John Astley and Sir Henry Herbert) acquired their powers and exercised their authority, within the wider structure of practices of their day. Not long into that study I realised that I was not alone in pursuing a subject which had been largely dormant for much of the century. When I started, the standard authority was still Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve's Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (1908), which had been complemented in 1917 by Joseph Quincy Adams's edition of some of the key documentation, The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623±1673. The great compendia of E.K. Chambers and G.E. Bentley had largely embedded this and other ix



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

material, without significantly reconceptualising its historical location. And in an era of largely formalist, moralist or a-historical New Critical literary scholarship few had been prompted to re-think the received picture. One honourable exception was Glynne Wickham who, in the course of his Early English Stages, 1300±1660 (1959±81), briefly but influentially attempted to tie the city- and court-centred structures which mainly preoccupied Gildersleeve and myself to the wider picture of provincial drama, especially the religious cycles, much of which was regulated into non-existence during this period. In 1984, however, Annabel Patterson's Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England decisively announced that new thinking was both needed and happening. A rehistoricisation of literary studies (particularly early modern literary studies) was taking place, within which critics ± Marxist, New Historicist, cultural materialist, feminist, revisionist ± were beginning to find `dangerous matter' in the most (on the surface) anodynely apolitical of texts. And this simply did not square with the processes of censorship which were supposed to prevent it. Patterson's solution was to posit coded understandings between writers and authorities, which normally allowed much more to be discussed (at a fictional distance) than was formally permitted. Philip Finkelpearl also wrote a perceptive essay on `The Comedians' Liberty' (1986), which in a private letter to me he described as a ground-clearing exercise for the book on Beaumont and Fletcher he was then writing; what he was finding in that drama was incompatible with the nature of the censorship which was supposed to operate, and he articulated more clearly than anyone before him how different in practice was what the Jacobean dramatists were able to get away with from the repressive conditions they supposedly endured. My own book in effect explored, as far as the drama was concerned, the social and political practices within which the Patterson and Finkelpearl hypotheses might be substantiated. But this was not the last word on the matter. In the course of my writing, Janet Clare and Richard Burt both published early earnests of what were to be book-length studies of early modern licensing/censorship ± the former actually appeared while mine was in proof. I shall address these in more detail later. Suffice it to say for now that neither saw early modern dramatic censorship in the relatively liberal, revisionist light that Patterson, Finkelpearl and I had done. And more work continues to be done. To mention only two major contributions: N.W. Bawcutt has brought out a much revised and expanded version of the work Adams had originally done, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Dramatic Records of



x Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623±73, and Cyndia Susan Clegg's Press Censorship in Elizabethan England offers a challenging revisionist account of press censorship in the period. A debate was opening up, paralleling the wider critical and theoretical debates of the period. In such a context, back in 1990, I had finished the book but not the argument. In particular, the scope of Mastering the Revels had not allowed me to discuss in any detail the implications of the processes of censorship I was exploring for modern readings of the texts affected. Nor had it given me room to consider the ways in which ideas of censorship, both then and now, have interplayed with the concept of authorship itself, consciously or unconsciously reinforcing certain definitions of `the author'. These became the subject of various articles and chapters, which are collected together here for the first time. It is a central contention in my arguments about the censorship of the period that early modern readers (and by this I mean to comprehend theatre audiences) read plays and other texts analogically, often àpplying' quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events. And that censors were quite aware of the fact, but usually chose to ignore it unless they deemed the àpplication' to be too transparent or provocative. So that when Ben Jonson piously decries the fact that àpplication is now become a trade' (Epistle to Volpone) he is both retaliating against the Earl of Northampton and Sir James Murray (who had recently denounced unwelcome àpplications' in, respectively, Sejanus and Eastward Ho) and encouraging readers to look for other àpplications' in Volpone itself and elsewhere. The most compelling evidence of the dramatic censors' collusion ± on his own terms ± in this game is, I have suggested, Sir Henry Herbert's treatment of Massinger's Believe As You List, while the clearest example of a line being drawn is Herbert's testimony of King Charles finding a passage in the lost The King and the Subject `too insolent'. (I discuss both of these in Chapter 1 `Regulation and Censorship'). There remains, however, some resistance to the idea that such politically-charged analogical reading was normal, the usual condition of writing and reading in the period, and not just something that happened when scandals such as those surrounding Chapman's Byron plays or A Game at Chess drew attention to it. Alert readers will have spotted in my phrasing an allusion to Annabel Patterson's book, which rehearses a good deal of the evidence for the practice, including George Puttenham's engagingly indiscreet acknowledgement of the fact that pastoral literature invited such a reading, being calculated:



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading xi

under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceived in the Eglogues of Virgill, in which are treated by figure matters of greater importance than the loves of Titirus and Corydon. (Puttenham, p. 38) It would be redundant of me to reproduce all her other examples. But I do want here briefly to review some recent additional evidence, further clinching what was already a case well made. There is, in fact, relatively little hard evidence about how people read specific texts in the period, and much of what does exist may well be prudentially discreet. But a useful starting point may be the passage from which I derive my subtitle (and which I discuss in context in Chapter 8 `Buggeswords'). It is the response of the indefatigable letter-writer, John Chamberlain, to the epistle dedicating Haywood's Life of Henry IV to the Earl of Essex. The epistle was the nub of the work's notoriety, but as Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton: Ì can find no such buggeswords, but that everything is as it is taken'. The OED rather unimaginatively defines `bug's-word' as À word meant to frighten or terrify; a word that causes dread. Usually in pl. Swaggering or threatening language'. It clearly derives from the old Welsh word `bug', which means a hobgoblin, bogy or scarecrow (often imaginary rather than real), a sense that survives today in `bugbear', which the OED renders as À sort of hobgoblin . . . supposed to devour naughty children; hence, generally, any imaginary being invoked by nurses to frighten children'. I rather fancy that there is some such ironic inflection of nurses frightening children in Chamberlain's use of `buggeswords' ± words that would turn an innocent-seeming dedication into a hobgoblin of treason; triggers that transform harmless discourse into subversive doctrine. (The anonymous author of The Troublesome Raigne of King John also uses the term rather archly, suggesting that dangerous words may forestall the reality of dangerous action). Chamberlain suggests not only that there are no dread-inducing words in the Hayward preface, but that the whole search for them is one inspired by nurse-like authorities trying to frighten potentially naughty children. The status of buggeswords in texts ± true hobgoblins or merely imaginary ones ± is the acid test of most censorship in the period, and depends on the capacity of readers to shift from one mode of reading to another on the smallest and most ambiguous of signals. In that sense Chamberlain's Ì can find no



xii Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

such buggeswords, but that everything is as it is taken' properly stands as an epigraph to this volume. In Mastering the Revels I mentioned two notable instances where the veil of discretion about how a text might be read was allowed to drop, when the matter was at a suitable remove. Fulke Greville's account of burning the manuscript of his Antonie and Cleopatra was probably not consigned to paper until a decade or so after the event, and was not published in his lifetime; the play was: sacrificed in the fire; the executioner, the author himself, not that he conceived it to be a contemptible younger brother to the rest, but lest, while he seemed to look over-much upward, he might stumble into the astronomer's pit: many members in that creature (by the opinion of those few eyes which saw it) having some childish wantonness in them apt enough to be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government . . . and again, in the practice of the world, seeing the like instance not poetically, but really fashioned in the Earl of Essex then falling . . . stirred up the author's second thoughts, to be careful, in his own case, of leaving fair weather behind him. (Greville, p. 93) The explicit suggestion that the play might be read as a reflection on Essex (even as Greville disavows the intention) is what is so unusual. This example, of course, can always be pigeon-holed as closet drama by a courtier, never intended for a wider audience, and so not evidence of popular practice. The same might have been said of Samuel Daniel's Philotas, had it not been for the fact that Daniel himself became licenser to the newly repatronised Children of the Queen's Revels in 1604 and imprudently allowed it to be staged. For this he was called to account by the Privy Council, and the surviving correspondence with it members ± Sir Robert Cecil (Essex's rival) and the Earl of Devonshire (Essex's former ally) ± makes it clear that this play had in actuality been read as shadowing Essex's career. It is one matter to admit as much in private correspondence, but Daniel also coolly alluded to the matter in the Àpology' appended to the subsequent printed text: And for any resemblance, that thorough the ignorance of the History may be applied to the late Earl of Essex. It can hold in no proportion but only in his weaknesses, which I would wish all that love his



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading xiii

memory not to revive. And for mine owne part having beene particularly beholding to his bounty, I would wish God his errors and disobedience to his Sovereigne, might be so deepe buried underneath the earth, and in so low a tombe from his other parts, that he might never be remembred among the examples of disloyalty in this Kingdome, or paraleld with Forreine Conspirators. (Daniel, p. 157) Of course, what Daniel does is to deny that any parallel could or should be drawn between Philotas and Essex ± even as he admits that one had been. This is totally disingenuous, since a systematic comparison between the play and its historical sources puts it virtually beyond dispute that Daniel had intended such an analogy. The disclaimer, like Jonson's lament over àpplication', is in fact an advertisement, an invitation to future readers to repeat the ìgnorance' of the Privy Council. Ours is not the first age to discover that censorship can be good for sales or self-promotion. For such reasons, authors are never entirely to be trusted as readers of their own works. Albert H. Tricomi's fine study of Philip Herbert's annotation of his copy of Chapman's Byron plays is thus particularly instructive (1986). Herbert, by the 1630s Earl of Pembroke, was not an òrdinary' reader, if such a creature exists, since as Lord Chamberlain he was ultimately responsible for theatrical activity in the country. But he had no particular stake in these plays, the notoriety of which was more than 20 years in the past when he made his notes. What Tricomi demonstrates is that Pembroke recognised significant analogies between the narratives of Chapman's plays and the careers of several notable English politicians, including Robert, Earl of Leicester, the second Earl of Essex, the Earl of Salisbury and the Duke of Buckingham. It is indisputable that, when the Tragedy was staged in 1608, it outraged the French Ambassador with its offensive portrayal of various French notables.2 My own further assessment is that, where Chapman deviated from the history of the actual Duc de Biron (as in scenes where the Queen slaps Madame de Verneuil, and Biron has to be restrained from drawing his pistol in the presence of the king) he was pointing English audiences towards parallels with Essex ± as Robert Cecil probably appreciated when de la Broderie complained to him (Dutton, 1991, pp. 184±5). But that was all long in the past when Herbert annotated the play, and it is striking that he took a longer view, involving figures both earlier and later. Buckingham, then only a child, could never have been a target when Chapman wrote. Herbert's reading is in no way circumscribed by a



xiv Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

sense of the author's intentions or immediate frame of reference. Since, moreover, even Buckingham (the latest named figure) was dead by the time these notes were drafted, it would be difficult to argue that Herbert was reading the play under the pressure of then current events: it is as if the text lies open to be over-read in the light of any number of actual histories. Whatever else we make of this practice, it must be the case that no censor could hope to regulate what an audience of such readers might infer from, or over-read upon, any given text at any given moment. It underlines the ways in which, for example, any of the Elizabethan history plays might be (in Jonson's terms) `subject to construction'. It should occasion no surprise that the play of Richard II was so subject on the eve of the Essex rebellion, nor that no one suffered for the fact in the aftermath (Barroll, 1988). Hans Werner's account of The Hector of Germanie is also relevant in this context (1996). This was a highly anomalous play performed by citizen amateurs in 1613. As Werner observes: Òne of the few known instances of an amateur production mounted in a public playhouse rented for the occasion, the play was ``made for Citizens, who acted it well'' and therefore the playwright ``deemde it fitte to be Patronizde by a Citizen'', here Sir John Swinnerton, Lord Mayor of London (1612±13) and ``principal ornament '' of ``the worthy Companie of the Marchantaylors'' (Dedication, p. 67)' (p. 117). In this context the play might well have escaped the licensing regime of the Master of the Revels and, like the Lord Mayors' Shows, have come under the authority of the sponsoring trade guild (Dutton, 1995, pp. 9, 73±4). Nevertheless, the play is in other respects a typical piece of Jacobean pseudo-history, set in the time of the Black Prince, with no ostensible reference to contemporary affairs. Yet Werner detects a clear encoding in the play: `(palsgrave = Black Prince) = (Black Prince = Prince Henry) = (palsgrave = Frederick V). Factoring out (palsgrave = Black Prince), the equation collapses into Frederick V = Prince Henry. That is the whole point of the play . . .' (p. 119). Thus, for Werner, the play equates King James's new son-in-law with his dead elder son, an equation with important potential implications for Anglo-German relations and what became the Thirty Years' War. It is an entirely plausible decoding, and for once not entirely uncorroborated. When Thomas Scott, author of the scandalous Vox Populi (1620), defended himself in Vox Regis (1624), he turned to the drama for precedents on the use of topical allegory: `why not Gondomar, as well as Hieronymo or Duke d'Alva? And why not Philip, as well as Peter, or Alfonso, or Caesar? Or why might I not make as bold with them, as they [playwrights] our blacke Prince, or Henry the eighth, or



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading xv

Edward the sixth, or Queene Elizabeth, or King James, or the King and Queene of Bohemia?' (Scott, p. 10). As Werner observes, `Since The Hector of Germanie is the only known English play of the period prominently featuring two of the characters mentioned here (King Peter, or Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile and the Black Prince), it would appear that Scott either saw the play or read the subsequent quarto' (p. 119). That, I suppose, remains debatable. But Scott clearly and helpfully suggests that it was the practice of dramatists to write about historic figures as shadows of their modern counterparts. And this corroborates the view that playwrights commonly (perhaps even normally) expected their plays to be read analogically. In this connection I should also like to thank Hans Werner for bringing to my attention material which significantly reinforces my own earlier suggestion that Fletcher and Massinger's Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt was intended to be read, at least in part, as a shadowing of the fate of Sir Walter Ralegh (Dutton, 1991, 208ff). Ralegh was executed in October 1618, the Dutch statesman Barnavelt in May 1619, and the King's Men performed the play (despite an official intervention from the Bishop of London) that August. The Bishop's unusual intervention may suggest that the play's discussion of Arminianism ± a style of Christianity at odds with the current orthodoxies of the Church of England ± caused some disquiet. But the play clearly also had other uncomfortable dimensions. And, as with Chapman's Byron plays, it seems entirely likely that the play's foreign topicality conveniently disguised its English application, an over-layering which would be doubly taxing for any censor. Despite obvious differences (Ralegh was not an Arminian, for example), the parallels between Barnavelt and Ralegh were strong: two patriots and leaders in their country's struggles with Spain lost royal favour and were eventually beheaded on dubious charges. The play seems to underscore these parallels by stressing Barnavelt's connections with France. Thomas Hariot's notes of Ralegh's last words on the scaffold make clear how important, and publicly known, was a French connection in Ralegh's demise.3 It was beyond dispute that Ralegh had engaged in negotiations with French diplomats before his last voyage to Guiana, apparently seeking a safe refuge if things should go wrong, and the French were prepared to offer this. The inference from Hariot's notes must be that these negotiations had been interpreted as disloyalty to the king, a charge perhaps compounded by supposed slanders against the king when Ralegh was arrested on his return from the voyage by his kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley. Stukeley was much reviled for his part in the arrest, and then re-arrest when Ralegh belatedly attempted to flee to France.



xvi Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

The speech on the scaffold was obviously intended to make public Ralegh's own perspective on all of these matters ± starting with the French connection. And this makes it the more likely that Barnavelt in the play, who negotiates with French ambassadors, would partly have been over-read as Ralegh. This conjecture, like the other instances I have cited, hinges on an audience's capacity for analogical reading. It does not depend on the play being a full-blown allegory, matching Barnavelt and Ralegh point-forpoint. One of the besetting sins of attempts to find topical meaning in early modern drama has been a determination to make the parallels too thorough and exact, explaining every detail.4 On the contrary, as Philip Herbert's reading of Chapman's Byron plays shows, and as I shall argue at length in Chapter 7 `Middleton: Censorships of A Game at Chess', the analogies were commonly incomplete, titillatingly so. Daniel's Philotas was not Essex in every detail, nor could Greville's Antony have been. What mattered were the suggestive correspondences, the innuendoes and inferences. This level of indeterminacy is what made it possible for licensers like the Masters of the Revels to àllow' such texts. This is an issue that will recur throughout this book. In Chapter 3 Òbscenity and Profanity' I look at Sir Henry Herbert's response to the players' revival of Fletcher's The Woman's Prize in the context of a topicality that could only derive from analogical reading. His prickliness on questions of obscenity and profanity was, I suggest, linked to ways in which they might prompt such readings. In Chapter 6 `Jonson: the Epistle to Volpone' I look at a document which is centrally concerned with delimiting the possibility of (and responsibility for) such readings, and defining the role of official censorship in these processes. Chapter 7 `Middleton: Censorships of A Game at Chess' reconsiders various aspects of the censorship and non-censorship of A Game at Chess, and investigates the suggestion that it can be read against the grain as a work critical of (in particular) the Duke of Buckingham, despite the prevailing tone of national unity and celebration: this is not implausible, given the pervasive practice of analogical reading. Chapter 8 `Buggeswords' analyses the case of John Hayward's Life of Henry IV as the best documented instance of the early modern authorities choosing to read a text analogically in an attempt to trap not only its author but more significantly its dedicatee, the Earl of Essex. The anxious refusal of both the author and the licenser to accept that topical meanings might have been intended is a reminder of how vulnerable anyone might be (as Sir Henry Herbert found in his dealings with Archbishop Laud) when the usual accommodations



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading xvii

surrounding censorship in the period broke down under extreme political pressure. The cumulative evidence suggests that analogical readings, over-reading texts in the light of contemporary persons or concerns, was very much the norm, not the exception. It further suggests that this was widely understood, not least by the Masters of the Revels and their counterparts, the clerical licensers for the press. Their role, therefore, inevitably became one, not of eradicating àpplications' (which was impossible) but of keeping them within bounds. The fact that Philip Herbert could read Chapman's Byron plays a generation after they were written in the light of the Duke of Buckingham demonstrates the range of difficulty and necessary accommodation involved. My reading of what happened over The Woman's Prize suggests a belated awakening to the risks inherent in allowing the unregulated revival of old plays. This evidence offers further proof that the `flash-points' of early modern censorship and regulation were not primarily products of intensive attempts to police political and religious ideology but rather moments of breakdown, when the usual accommodations failed to protect the privileged classes who expected to be shielded from demeaning public scrutiny. In normal circumstances those classes were sufficiently patrician not to notice (or pretend not to notice) a wide range of veiled commentary about them. Only at specific moments did they, or the licensers on their behalf, draw the line and demand either strict censorship or exemplary punishment. A large part of the difficulty of understanding such matters at this remove is identifying the precise provocations which caused the line to be drawn. As some of the examples discussed here suggest, neither authors themselves, nor their audiences, nor even their licensers are entirely reliable witnesses as to what caused, or might cause, offence. And modern perceptions of what might have been at issue (such as political ideology or obscenity) always need to be weighed in the balance of early modern cultural codes.

Most of the essays here, then, explore constructions of early modern writing and theatre in the light of the practices of licensing and censorship as I defined them in Mastering the Revels. But where the earlier volume outlined a theory of early modern dramatic censorship, this looks at the consequences of that theory for modern readings of the texts that were produced under that censorship, for readings of author-



xviii Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

ship as a phenomenon that (some might say paradoxically) flourished under its aegis, and also for our understanding of the place of the actors in these systems of control. The first two chapters in different ways define the contexts. Chapter 1 `Regulation and Censorship', originally commissioned by David Scott Kastan for A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, allows me to rehearse on a very much smaller canvas the central contentions of Mastering the Revels in a way that makes them accessible to readers of this book. But it is not simply a restatement of the arguments of the book. I have taken the opportunity to fine-tune certain details of the thesis in the light of further thought. In particular, Bill Ingram's work on the origins of the London theatres made me realise that the conflicts between court and city over the licensing of the actors (within which the role of the Master of the Revels evolved) were less black-and-white affairs than I, and many others, had supposed: money was, at times, as much an issue as political authority. I have also been increasingly convinced by a suggestion first put to me by Brian Parker: that the system of censorship I had outlined was perfectly consonant with the normal habits of rule of the English Establishment, which typically deflects intellectual or ideological threats to itself by refusing to take them too seriously, opting (at least in the first instance) for a patrician indifference over rigorous repression. The fate of Oscar Wilde, which required a degree of obstinate self-martyrdom, is a more recent measure of this proposition. The remit of this essay also required me to carry the story down to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Mastering the Revels had drawn a line at 1626, when William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke ceded the post of Lord Chamberlain to his brother Philip. Throughout my work, however, I had drawn for models on the records of Sir Henry Herbert (Master of the Revels from 1623±73, barely overlapping with my own focus), simply because those of his predecessors have all but disappeared. This essay forced me to look at Herbert's work in the context of his own time, and the result follows in Chapter 3 Òbscenity and Profanity'. This focuses on a very particular sequence of events, but one which (as I have suggested) has widespread implications for our understanding of analogical reading. It also shows the whole process of licensing and censorship under severe pressure, the accommodations which had normally characterised the system under Elizabeth and James ± that very patrician indifference ± all but breaking down under Charles I's Personal Rule and William Laud's officious attention. In it, we see Herbert himself reflecting on what he had inherited from his predecessors in a way that speaks to the whole era. The essay on `Licensed Fools' suggests ways in which the dramatists



Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading xix

themselves reflected in their works on the system of containment which these two chapters outline. If, then, I continue to refer to Mastering the Revels (Dutton, 1991) it is in the spirit of pointing to fuller documentation on particular points, not because Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England is unintelligible without it. The structure of this book makes it a self-contained work, complementing its predecessor but not dependant upon it. The opening chapters are the nub: all the others refer to them and depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on the reading of the processes of cultural control which they resume. Other chapters explore successive major dramatists ± Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton ± in the light of those processes of control, highlighting how earlier conceptions of those processes coloured and distorted our reading of their writing, and indeed our construction of them as àuthors'. There is also a chapter on the `licensed fool' character, as a spokesperson for the actors who originally translated the writings of these dramatists to the stage; this reflects on the ambivalent `freedom' of the theatre in the period, a privileged forum but one for which there were real if unwritten limits. The final chapter, on Hayward's Life of Henry IV, relates the world of the theatre to that of those who wrote and licensed printed books ± in this instance a lawyer and a priest who both saw how unforgiving early modern government could be when the gloves were off, yet lived and conspicuously flourished in later years, when conditions returned to something more like normal. The book has most commonly been studied in conjunction with Shakespeare's Richard II, the subject-matter of which it extensively parallels. In the case of Shakespeare's play we have the voices of neither the author nor his censors to explain why the text was treated as it was. For the Life of Henry IV, uniquely, we have both.



xx Preface: Buggeswords and Analogical Reading

The Regulation and Censorship of Early Modern Drama

King Have you heard the argument? is there no offense in't?

Hamlet No, no, they do but jest; poison in jest ± no offense i'th'world.

King What do you call the play?

Hamlet `The Mouse-trap.' Marry, how? tropically: this play is the image

of a murther done in Vienna; Gonzago is the duke's name, his wife, Baptista. You shall see anon. 'Tis a knavish piece of work, but what of that? Your Majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not. (Hamlet, 3.2.232±42)

Hamlet plays many roles, several of them quite explicitly theatrical, including that of Master of the Revels. He determines that the actors shall play The Murder of Gonzago at court, and when Claudius shrewdly suspects that it may contain òffense' (i.e. offensive material) he assures him that it contains `no offense i'the'world' (i.e. no crime of any sort) ± because the poisoning it depicts is only fictional, not the real thing. It is a sophisticated piece of quibbling, going to the heart of the role of the Master of the Revels, the key figure in the licensing and censorship of professional drama in the time of Shakespeare and down to the closing of the theatres in 1642. He was primarily an official in the Lord Chamberlain's office, charged with providing suitable entertainment at court. When Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream demands a `play / To ease the anguish of a torturing hour' (5.1.36±7), Philostrate is on hand as his ùsual manager of mirth' (35).1 Yet he can only outline a sorry list of options for the wedding night. As Theseus warms to Pyramus and Thisbe, Philostrate insists: Ìt is not for you. I have heard it over, / And it is nothing, nothing in the world' (77±8). That is, he has done his proper job as Master of the Revels ± he has seen a dress rehearsal of the production and knows it is 1



1

not fit for the court. In the real world, it would not even have been on a list of options, but in the freedom of comedy Theseus insists: `never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it' (82±3). If we strip away the fictional packaging, Shakespeare is obliquely addressing his own situation as a commoner in a troupe of `mechanicals', frequently called upon to play before royalty but at all times required to attest `simpleness and duty' (R. Wilson, 1993b).2 The structure of licensing and censorship that grew up around the Master of the Revels was precisely one that enabled professional actors to become adjuncts of the court and aristocracy, while also providing them with a relatively stable environment within which they could ply their trade for a more diffuse audience in the public theatres. In 1581 the Queen gave the serving Master, Edmond Tilney, a special commission, which authorised him: to warne commaunde and appointe in all places within this our Realme of England, aswell within francheses and liberties as without, all and every plaier or plaiers with their playmakers, either belonging to any noble man or otherwise, bearinge the name or names of using the facultie of playmakers or plaiers of Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes or whatever other showes soever, from tyme to tyme and at all tymes to appeare before him with all such plaies, Tragedies, Comedies or showes as they shall in readines or meane to sett forth, and them to recite before our said Servant or his sufficient deputie, whom we ordeyne appointe and aucthorise by these presentes of all suche showes, plaies, plaiers and playmakers, together with their playing places, to order and reforme, auctorise and put downe, as shalbe thought meete or unmeete unto himself or his said deputie in that behalf. (Chambers, 4, pp. 285±7) He was also given powers to enforce this authority. This commission was the basis of what became Tilney's role as licenser and censor of the professional theatre in the London region. Some scholars have seen it as a next step towards absolute state control of players and playing, in the wake of concerted efforts in the provinces to eradicate the mystery cycles and other religious drama closely associated with Roman Catholicism (Wickham, 1959±81, 2:1, p. 94). But W.R. Streitberger (1978) has shown that Tilney was given these powers specifically to aid him in his primary role as the provider of theatrical entertainment at court, and the social dynamics which governed the



2 Licensing, Censorship and Authorship

control of professional theatre in London were actually very different from those operating in other spheres of early modern life. Prior to his appointment (in 1579) the Office of the Revels had been in disarray: it was expensive to run, some of the shows it sponsored were not satisfactory, and there were problems with the aristocrats who patronised acting companies competing to have their own `servants' perform at court. The commission was aimed at dealing with the first two problems, by drawing on what was still a relatively recent resource ± a professional theatre industry semi-permanently resident in London, signalled by purposebuilt theatres like the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre and the Curtain (both 1576). Tilney's commission gave him the power to compel these troupes to rehearse their repertoire before him, with a view to the most satisfactory pieces being performed at court during the festive season. Until 1607 he had capacious quarters in the old palace of St John's where, as Thomas Heywood recalled in An Apology for Actors òur Court playes have been in late daies yearely rehersed, perfected, and corrected before they come to the publike view of the Prince and the Nobility'. The quality of drama at court duly improved, and it was provided more economically than hitherto. The problem of competition at court between influential patrons of the actors was largely resolved for a decade in 1583 by a decision to create a new royal troupe, the Queen's Men (McMillin and MacLean; Gurr, 1996, pp. 196ff). Tilney was instructed to create this eÂlite company, drawing on players from existing companies; it was clear that they were specifically subject to his authority, and they received the lion's share of performances at court over the next several years. Tilney, however, remained only one figure in a complex array of authorities. The key competing authorities in respect of the theatres were on one side the court itself, usually represented by the Privy Council: one member, the Lord Chamberlain, had a particular brief for acting matters, though Lord Admiral Howard (Tilney's patron) also took a particular interest in them; and on the other side the City of London, variously represented by its Lord Mayor, its Common Hall, Court of Common Council and Court of Aldermen. The received picture of this competition has it that the court staunchly supported the actors, while the Puritan-inclined City resented their presence and tried to put them out of business. But this is misleading. The court was only ever interested in supporting actors patronised by its own senior members, often regarding their commercial activities as in effect rehearsals for performance before the Queen; it readily followed Parliament in stigmatising unlicensed actors as rogues and vagabonds. In the City there were



Regulation and Censorship 3

legitimate concerns about the maintenance of order and the threat of disease (which the Privy Council sometimes shared), as well as the promotion of crime and lewd behaviour; but there was also a shrewd sense that these enterprises could be licensed and so taxed to support the hospitals for the poor and diseased (Ingram, 1992, pp. 119±49; see below, Chapter 4 `Marlowe: Censorship and Construction', pp. 73±7).3 At times negotiations between the parties also boiled down to a contestation over their respective prerogatives, in which the theatres were almost an incidental issue. As a result of such tensions ± financial as much as ideological ± all the early purpose-built theatres were constructed outside the jurisdiction of the City authorities, in the liberties to the north and south, where they came under the authority of the magistrates for Middlesex and Surrey.4 But until around 1596 ± and perhaps even after that ± there was also regular playing at inns within the City's jurisdiction, notably the Bell, the Bull, the Cross Keys and the Bel Savage (Ingram, 1978, pp. 140±1). The role of the Master of the Revels evolved in the midst of these conflicting authorities and agendas, and not without competition. As early as 1574 the Common Council of London sought to establish that playing places in the City should be licensed, and that plays performed there should be `first perused and allowed', by persons appointed by the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen. This was partly to rebut the Lord Chamberlain's proposal that òne Mr Holmes' should undertake such a role. They wanted to preserve the City's own authority and to control profits from the licensing, rather than promote `the benefit of any private person' (Ingram, 1992, pp. 127, 142). There is no evidence, however, that such persons ever were appointed. In 1589, the Privy Council instructed Tilney to act in consort with nominees of both the Lord Mayor and the Archbishop of Canterbury in a Commission for the censoring of all plays to be performed ìn and about the City of London'; but the articles setting it up are all we ever hear of this Commission. By 1592 Tilney's importance was such that the City authorities saw his office as an impediment to the kinds of restraint they wanted to exert themselves and they sought (though without success) to buy him out. By then, he was certainly receiving regular fees from Philip Henslowe. Aspects of Henslowe's accountancy remain inscrutable, but it seems Tilney was receiving separate fees for licensing the theatres, the acting companies and each play ± which he would `peruse' (that is, read rather than see in rehearsal ) and then àllow' when he was satisfied with it, appending his signature at the end of what became the only àllowed copy' for performance purposes. Tilney kept records of licences in his




office-book, but the office-books of both Tilney and his successor, Sir George Buc, have been lost. Only from the time of Sir John Astley (1622), who quickly sold his office to Sir Henry Herbert (1623), do we have information from their shared office-book ± but even that is patchy and second-hand, since the original long since disappeared (Herbert, pp. 13±26). We often have to infer from this what may have been earlier practice. The precise nature and rate of fees changed a good deal over the period as a whole, but a significant economic symbiosis between the Master of the Revels and those whose livelihood he licensed remained throughout (Dutton, 1991, pp. 52, 116; Herbert, pp. 38±40). Precisely which companies Tilney licensed in the 1580s and early 1590s we do not know, apart from the Queen's Men: probably only those who actually performed at court, notably Leicester's, Strange's, the Admiral's and the boy companies (Chapel Royal/Oxford's and Paul's) closely associated with the court, though their licences as adjuncts of choir schools were different from those of the adult players. As early as 1574 Leicester's Men had received a patent which gave them the right to perform anywhere in the country, providing that their plays had been `sene and allowed' by the Master of the Revels (Chambers, 2, pp. 87±8; Gurr, 1996, pp. 187±8). This was probably sought by the company as defence against civic authorities (including London) who tried to prevent them from playing; the Master's licence certified that their plays were fit for court, and ought not to be challenged elsewhere. This reinforced the status they asserted as servants of a patron like Leicester, whose livery they wore. In practice, patronage by an influential aristocrat was an important adjunct to commercial viability for any company, and a form of control in as much as loss of patronage could have important consequences. Earlier in Elizabeth's reign members of the gentry had patronised the actors, but from 1572 this privilege was restricted to the aristocracy (barons and those of higher degree), though companies could locally get permission to perform from two justices of the peace. Those without patronage or permission were subject to the harsh laws against rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars (Chambers, 4, p. 270).5 In such a context we can see why some (including the City authorities) might see the Master of the Revels as the protector of the most successful actors, as much as their regulator. And we may suppose that the actors appreciated this themselves; his licence gave them protection against unwelcoming authorities, an opportunity of lucrative performances at court and the sole right to perform plays àllowed' to them ± a version of performing copyright. As a censor it seems that each of the Masters was scrupulous, could on occasion be strict but on the whole applied




relatively broad criteria of what was permissible, determined largely by their position within the court. In the years before Elizabeth's reign a number of edicts specifically restricted plays in English, but tacitly permitted those in Latin in privileged contexts, such as the universities, Inns of Court and noble households. At the start of her reign Elizabeth issued a proclamation (16 May 1559) which instructed royal officers everywhere on what was not acceptable in plays performed within their jurisdictions: And for instruction to every one of the sayde officers, her majestie doth likewise charge every one of them, as they will aunswere: that they permyt none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the governaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no meete matters to be wrytten or treated upon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisedome, nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreete persons. (Chambers, 4, pp. 263±4) Here too there is an assumption that such matters might be put on stage (even in English) in privileged contexts, an implicit court standard of what was acceptable. This explains how a play like Gorboduc, which clearly if mythologically treats of matters òf the governaunce of the estate of the common weale' (the need for the Queen to marry, beget heirs or otherwise provide for the succession), could be performed in the Inns of Court. But the play passed into the professional repertoire after it was published, circumventing notional restrictions. Similarly Masters of the Revels, who were supposed to be reviewing plays for possible performance before the monarch, implicitly applied a court standard in their licences. One of the clearest demonstrations of this comes in Herbert's office-book (January 1631): Ì did refuse to allow of a play of Messinger's, because itt did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal by Philip the <Second,> and ther being a peace sworen twixte the kings of England and Spayne' (Herbert, pp. 171±2). So he refused to licence a play he deemed overtly hostile to the king's current foreign policy. Yet five months later he licensed a play called Believe As You List which is transparently a re-working of the play he had turned down, merely transposed to classical antiquity. It could be an oversight, but this is unlikely. All the Masters were literate and sophisticated men ± Tilney a diplomatic genealogist, Buc a highly respected historian and Herbert the brother of the poets, Edward and George Herbert. I suspect rather that Herbert was well aware that this was




the same play, re-worked ± but judged that it was no longer an overt affront to the royal prerogative or to a friendly foreign power. In that context, it was acceptable. It was not for him to second guess either Massinger's intentions or what audiences might infer from material that was not openly provocative. There is something very patrician about all this ± Herbert, as representative of the privileged classes, not deigning to notice what did not strictly require to be noticed. As Annabel Patterson puts it: `there were conventions that both sides accepted as to how far a writer could go in explicit address to the contentious issues of his day, how he could encode his opinions so that nobody would be required to make an example of him' (1984, p. 11). To return for a moment to Hamlet: The Murder of Gonzago was an entirely innocent piece of work, doubtless duly licensed (in the fictional world) by Tilney's counterpart in Elsinore. Hamlet's appreciation of its aptness for a particular audience was provocative but not strictly an òffense' ± just as the aptness of the Richard II performed on the eve of the Essex rebellion was suspicious but not in itself punishable (Barroll, 1988).6 But his insertion of a passage not cleared by the licenser was an òffense' in itself.7 While we do not strictly know what was in that passage, it seems almost certain to have been something that ± for one critical member of the audience ± breaches the art-life boundary. Claudius is unmoved by the sight of his own crimes in the dumb show, but reacts intemperately to hearing that the poisoner (`nephew to the king') will woo the dead king's widow. The king/nephew/widow triangle revolves, and in that moment all the fictional veils are down: a tacit accusation of guilt has become a pointed promise of revenge. It was normally the Masters' function precisely to ensure that the fictional veiling was adequate, so that serious offence might not be offered to members of the court or friendly foreign dignitaries. They also needed to be alert to immediately contentious issues, with possible public order implications; but in other respects they could take quite a relaxed approach to their remit. The only extant manuscript of a play that shows Tilney's attentions is Sir Thomas More, about a man seen by many as a Catholic martyr to Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII; the play depicts More going to his death for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy ± though it tactfully does not go into detail about this extremely delicate subject. We might have supposed that Tilney would ban the play outright, but his markings suggest he was careful about its main theme, though not overly-disturbed. On the other hand the opening scenes, depicting riots against aliens in London, brought this strict warning: `Leave out the insurrection wholy & the Cause ther off & begin with




Sr Tho: Moore att the mayors sessions with a reportt afterwardes off his good service don being Shrive [Sheriff] of London uppon a mutiny Agaynst the Lumbardes only by A Shortt reporte & nott otherwise at your perilles. E. Tyllney' (Dutton, 1991, Plate 7). His concern is almost certainly regarding similar anti-alien riots in London at the time the play was first drafted (Long). Feelings against French immigrants were running particularly high, so references to the Lombards might be less inflammatory; but the main thrust is to replace graphic scenes of rioting with a short report of More's actions. In short, Tilney seems much more concerned by the immediate public order resonances of the play than by its broader ideological implications. We may see something analogous in the censorship of the 1597 quarto of Richard II. We do not know if the abdication scene was cut by Tilney (either when it was first licensed or later) or by the press censor (Dutton, 1991, pp. 124±7). But we have the apparent anomaly of censorship which allows the murder of a king to be shown openly, while cutting the very stylised and non-inflammatory abdication. The most compelling explanation of this is that the scene specifically shows Richard's abdication being sanctioned by Parliament, suggesting that Parliamentary authority might outweigh that of the monarch (Clegg, 1997b). In the context of 1597, with no agreed successor to Elizabeth and no agreed mechanism for finding one, this was highly contentious. Again, the censor's attention seems to be on immediately provocative matters rather than on potentially subversive sub-texts in the play as a whole. The fraught situation as the reign neared its uncertain end did play its part in a sequence of Privy Council initiatives concerning the theatres, which finally installed the Master of the Revels centre-stage. (These are all considered in more detail in the next chapter). In July 1597 they issued an extraordinary order, which has never been fully explained, that the theatres should be `plucked down' (Wickham, 1969; Ingram, 1971±2). But it was never enforced. Instead they restricted the number of companies authorised to play in the London area to two (February 1598), both licensed by Tilney and patronised by two of their own number, the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral, both cousins of the Queen.8 At the same time Parliament removed the right of justices of the peace to authorise playing: patronage was restricted exclusively to the peerage, while the penalties against masterless men were made even more draconian. In June 1600 the two companies were restricted to playing (in the London area) to their ùsual houses' ± for the Chamberlain's the new Globe, for the Admirals (after a short delay) the new Fortune. And the number of performances they could give was strictly




limited. The intention was clear: to restrict London playing to two select companies, both patronised by Privy Councillors, in fixed locations and at known times, conditions which Tilney could easily police. The reality was a little different: first the Children of the Chapel, then Paul's Boys, both defunct for a decade or more, were revived under their different licensing arrangements. Then Derby's Men started playing at the Boar's Head, and even performed at court. When they failed to achieve a permanent place among the àllowed' companies they were replaced by Worcester's Men. Worcester, as Master of the Horse and a Privy Councillor, secured them a place among the àllowed' companies ± making three adults and two boys. This was as many companies as the Master of the Revels was ever directly responsible for, usually four and sometimes five, as companies and patronage possibilities fluctuated. Tilney and his successors sought to expand their authority (and revenue) by licensing firstly non-theatrical shows and latterly actors travelling in the provinces (Dutton, 1991, pp. 116, 235±6). But their central concern was always those London-based companies, who in the nature of things were the most successful of their time and bequeathed the overwhelming majority of plays which have survived to posterity. When James I finally succeeded Elizabeth he took four of the five London companies into royal patronage: the Chamberlain's became the King's Men, the Admiral's Prince Henry's, and Worcester's Queen Anne's. The Children of the Chapel became the Children of the Queen's Revels.9 This has commonly been seen as a decisive act of royal absolutism, pulling the theatres away from their popular roots and redirecting their repertoires towards courtly tastes and political perspectives. In fact it was only a logical development of the policy of the Elizabethan Privy Council, taking into account the fact of multiple royal households which had not been an issue before, and it very probably only reinforced the economic instincts of the companies affected. The adult companies remained answerable to Tilney, but the Queen's Revels Boys were given their own licenser, Samuel Daniel, and for the next few years this company (under a variety of titles but until 1608 always at the Blackfriars theatre) was responsible for some of the most notable theatrical scandals of the era. Firstly, Daniel's own play, Philotas (1604), was seen as commenting on the Essex rebellion and he was questioned by the Privy Council. In 1605 Eastward Ho landed Jonson and Chapman in prison and under threat of mutilation; their provocative satire of mercenary Scots courtiers proved to be compounded by failure to have the play licensed at all ± a serious omission when much could be overlooked within the circle of licensed authority, but the flouting of that authority




might be unforgivable. It seems that only representations to some of the most powerful people at court effected their release. Day's Isle of Gulls (1606), also unlicensed, also caused offence to the Scots, and reheated the old scandal over The Isle of Dogs (see note 8). We presume Daniel lost his post as licenser. Andrew Gurr states: `By the end of 1606, like all the other companies, the Blackfriars company was under the orders of the Master of the Revels' (Gurr, 1996, p. 352). This is plausible, but more than we know, and the company continued to cause scandal, with Chapman's Byron plays (1607±8) and other works. The fact is that the company had fostered a repertoire of politically-charged satirical drama from the time they were resuscitated; this may well have found encouragement under Queen Anne's patronage, and they continued to be controversial whoever was licensing them, at least until they lost the use of the Blackfriars (Lewalski, p. 24). There is evidence that other parts of the profession resented the threat to their collective livelihood; Heywood in his An Apology for Actors, urges them `to curbe and limit this presumed liberty', while the `little eyases' additions to the folio Hamlet have been convincingly linked to this period (Knutson, 1995). The lines of authority in the Revels Office seem further confused by the fact that in 1606 Sir George Buc took over the licensing of plays for the press; these powers were formerly held by clerics of the Court of High Commission, who licensed all other printed books. Buc had held the office of Master in reversion since 1603, but we do not know how he acquired this new authority. It has been supposed that he acted as the ageing Tilney's deputy but there is no evidence of this, and Tilney continued to collect his allowance for attendance at court until his death. Only then in 1610 can we be confident that one man, Buc, was licensing all the London companies, as well as playtexts for the press. He inherited from Tilney a system of licensing and control that did not change in essence until the closing of the theatres. From 1606 this included the need to attend to the provisions of Parliament's Àcte to restrain the Abuses of Players', which sought to put an end to blasphemous language on the stage. Most though not all texts licensed or relicensed after this are more careful (see, for example, the differences between the quarto and folio Volpone and Othello); the manuscript of The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611), which bears Buc's licence, shows that he was alert to the issue, marking a number of places where such changes were necessary, perhaps expecting the actors to change the others (Dutton, 1991, pp. 194±209). Herbert later felt his predecessors had not been as scrupulous on these matters as he was, but his changes to Davenant's




The Wits caused problems. Davenant had influence at court, and so Herbert reviewed it with King Charles himself: `The king is pleasd to take faith, death, slight, for asseverations, and no oaths, to which I doe humbly submit as my masters judgment; but under favour conceive them to be oaths, and enter them here, to declare my opinion and submission' (Herbert, p. 186). Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1618) is another manuscript where Buc's hand is visible; we see a careful method of lightly pencilled markings, some of which are later reinforced in heavy ink, with warning crosses in margins where he perhaps intended to consult the actors (Howard-Hill, 1988). Where he finds objectionable material he tries to find acceptable alternatives, and seems only to cross it out altogether as a last resort. He is particularly alert to depictions of the Prince of Orange, whom he had encountered in his earlier career as a diplomat; he loses patience in an initialled note: Ì like not this: neithr do I think that the prince was thus disgracefully used. besides he is too much presented' (Dutton, 1991, pp. 208±17, and Plate 9). We learn during the Game at Chess controversy, that at some point `there was a commaundment and restraint given against the representinge of anie moderne Christian kings in those Stage-playes' (Howard-Hill, 1993, p. 200; Dutton, 1991, p. 242). On the whole, however, Buc seems patient and constructive, only drawing a line when faced with outright provocation, as in a strongly anti-monarchist passage which contains the loaded suggestion (ostensibly meant for those on stage, but equally likely to be picked up by an audience) `you can apply this' (Dutton, 1991, pp. 214±15). Buc tinkered, redrafted, but finally crossed out the whole passage. In all probability the play (rather like Chapman's Byron plays) was doubly problematic since it depicts recent Dutch history, and so might be diplomatically sensitive; but it was probably read as a commentary on the death of Walter Ralegh who, like Barnavelt, was a `patriot' who had fallen from royal favour and been executed.10 Buc finally went mad, probably from the pressures of trying to run an office in a court that was all but bankrupt. This perhaps explains how some actors managed to circumvent the Revels Office, and obtained licences by other routes ± a situation which Lord Chamberlain Pembroke tried to rectify with a special warrant of November 1622, confirming the exclusive authority of the Revels Office in such matters throughout the country (Dutton, 1991, pp. 225±6). Perhaps because of such problems, Buc's successor, Sir John Astley, quickly sold the post to Sir Henry Herbert (Dutton, 1990; Bawcutt, 1992). The outcome was a situation in which Herbert was the client and kinsman of his Lord Chamberlain, the




powerful third Earl of Pembroke; even when Pembroke vacated his office in 1626, in favour of his brother, the Earl of Montgomery (later fourth Earl of Pembroke), the essential ties of patronage and kinship remained. This perhaps helped to maintain a continuity of emphasis and practice in the Revels Office (in particular helping to extend a recognition of his authority into the provinces), at a time when the supremacy of Buckingham and later the personal government of Charles I made for a very different political atmosphere from that in which the largely consensual role of the Master of the Revels had evolved. Herbert had been in office only a year when the most resonant theatrical scandal of the era occurred. Middleton's A Game at Chess was performed to packed houses for an unprecedented nine days in a row, before the protests of the Spanish Ambassador had it stopped. The play (the subject of Chapter 7 `Middleton: Censorships of A Game at Chess') is a lively satire on Jesuit wiles and the machinations of the previous Spanish Ambassador, Gondomar, contriving to review recent AngloSpanish relations in unusually close detail. Gondomar and the Archbishop of Spalato were impersonated in some detail, and while other characters were shrouded in the allegory of chess pieces it was evident that they represented, among others, the Kings of Spain and England, Prince Charles and Buckingham. We know that Herbert gave the play a licence in the usual way, but commentators then and some scholars since have supposed that the play may have been specially sponsored at the highest level. This is unprovable, and probably not a necessary conjecture. England and Spain were on the brink of war, a context in which Herbert would have felt no need to protect Spanish sensitivities (as he did over Believe As You List) and may have felt that the depiction of the English court was acceptably patriotic. Perhaps the lengths to which the actors went to impersonate Gondomar (acquiring a cast suit of clothes and a `chair of ease' for his anal fistula) created more of a stir than he anticipated, and breached the fictional veiling on which he normally insisted (Believe As You List is again instructive). In 1632 he recorded: Ìn the play of The Ball, written by Shirley, and acted by the Queens players, ther were divers personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the court, that I took it ill' (Herbert, p. 177). The chess allegory may have looked adequate veiling on paper, but as with The Ball performance was a different matter.11 Middleton may have spent some time in prison over A Game at Chess, but the King's Men suffered no more than a brief suspension of playing (see below, pp. 145±6). The business clearly did not over-awe them, since in December 1624 they staged The Spanish Viceroy (now lost, but




clearly exploiting the same anti-Spanish sentiments) without Herbert's licence. He was so incensed ± and so sensitive to the implications for his own standing ± that he got all the patented members of the company to subscribe to a letter (transcribed in his office-book), acknowledging their fault, promising not to repeat it and submitting to his authority (Herbert, p. 183). Yet again, however, no one actually suffered the harsh penalties which potentially lay in store either for libeling someone important on stage or for flouting the licensing regulations. Although dramatists and actors spent relatively brief periods in prison, no one involved in the theatre in the period suffered the grim mutilations of John Stubbes or William Prynne, or the prolonged imprisonment of John Hayward, for their transgressions in print (Finkelpearl; Kaplan). Which is a testament of sorts to the effectiveness of the Revels Office as an instrument of regulation, but also to the general good-will of the court towards the actors it patronised. In October 1633 something about a revival of Fletcher's The Woman's Prize (or The Tamer Tamed, c. 1611) caused Herbert's particular indignation and severely strained his relations with the actors (Herbert, pp. 182±3). Normally where the actors still had the àllowed copy' and were performing it unaltered, they did not require it to be re-licensed. Yet Herbert stopped a performance of this play at short notice, which `raysed some discourse in the players, though no disobedience'. His recorded objections were to òaths, prophaness and ribaldrye', which he certainly did take seriously. But I argue in Chapter 3 Òbscenity and Profanity' that something more specific and serious probably caused him to react as he did. The fact that the King's Men and Herbert were already in dispute over Jonson's The Magnetic Lady, which had been referred to Archbishop Laud himself in the Court of High Commission, is almost certainly relevant. Herbert now insisted that old plays should be relicensed `since they may be full of offensive things against church and state, ye rather that in former time the poetts tooke greater liberty than is allowed them by me'. The actors concerned later apologised for their ìll manners'; they knew how things stood. One effect of the growing identification of the leading companies with the court, which clearly affected Astley and Herbert's terms of office, was the emergence of gentlemen or courtier playwrights, who were in a position to challenge the authority of the Master of the Revels.12 Davenant's challenge over The Wits is an example of this. Astley had problems with a play by Lodowick Carlell, a courtier with connections. His officebook records: `6 Sep. 1622, for perusing and allowing of a new play called Osmond the Great Turk, which Mr Hemmings and Mr Rice affirmed to me




that Lord Chamberlain gave order to allow of it because I refused to allow it

Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Women and Property: In Early Modern England

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England

Press Censorship in Caroline England

Press censorship caroline england

Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

The Family in Early Modern England

Women In Early Modern England, 1500-1700

The Family in Early Modern England

Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England

Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Plague Writing in Early Modern England

Devil and Demonism early modern england

Queens and power in medieval and early modern England

Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England

Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Women and Property: In Early Modern England

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England

Press Censorship in Caroline England

Press censorship caroline england

Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

The Family in Early Modern England

Women In Early Modern England, 1500-1700

The Family in Early Modern England

Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England

Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Plague Writing in Early Modern England

Devil and Demonism early modern england

Queens and power in medieval and early modern England

Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England

Recommend Documents