Abstract
The tangible effects of an emerging print culture in the seventeenth century on the availability of news can and have been dated to the 1620s. That decade witnessed the circulation of corantos, news-sheets deriving from the Continent and relating the progress of the European wars; it also saw the transition towards domestically printed newsbooks. Such happenings have been seen as liberating and potentially democratizing in their provision of news for a wider audience. David Norbrook has argued that, in the 1620s
There was a significant expansion in the political public sphere … an emergent civil society whose means of communication — reports of parliamentary debates, newsletters, satires, and so on — circulated horizontally, cutting across the vertical power structures emanating from the court.1
In their political and religious bias, however, these same literary productions in print have been viewed as examples of the suscep-tibility of news to contentious issues such as ‘censorship’ and ‘propaganda’. Terms such as these require more thoughtful definition in their application to the early modern period. Both are anachronistic invocations, linguistic projections back from later times.
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Notes
See David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Richard Burt and John Archer (eds), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3–33 (pp. 7–8).
I am indebted here to the work of Ian Atherton on manuscript news in this period and for our lively discussions on this theme. See also Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 60–90.
Karen Newmans ‘Engendering the News’ in A. L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee (eds), The Elizabethan Theater XIV (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1996), pp. 49–69, reached me too late to figure in my discussions here but provides an interesting counterpoint to my argument.
Leah S. Marcus, ‘Renaissance/Early Modern Studies’, in Greenblatt and Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries, pp. 41–63 (p. 50). The work of Elizabeth Eisenstein is seminal here. See, for example, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
See the introductory essay to Anthony Parr’s Revels edition of The Staple of News (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 22.
The issue is expertly weighed in Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Print and the People’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London: Duckworth, 1975).
I am indebted to Nigel Smith’s forthcoming work on the Levellers and print culture here. On the issue of illiteracy and print culture, see R.A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1988), and Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France.
He nevertheless concedes that Jonson is an interesting case for any consideration of the effects of censorship in the Stuart period. See Worden, ‘Literature and Political Censorship’, p. 45. For examples of texts which present the monolithic understandings of censorship which Worden attacks, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) and Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority. For an argument sympathetic to Worden
see S.L. Lambert, ‘The Printers and the Government, 1604–1640’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), pp. 1–29.
Joseph Loewenstein, ‘For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfé s Reformation’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), 389–412.
Martin Butler, in ‘“We Are One Man’s All”: Jonson’s The Gipsies Metamorphosed’, Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 253–73, suggests that one of the motives behind Jonson’s composition of the 1621 masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed may have been to seek the support and patronage of Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham (who commissioned the piece) in the waning years of James. The course of events, however, and subsequent references in Jonson’s plays imply that the bid was unsuccessful.
For an interesting discussion of this masque, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). She examines the way in which masques displaced the consumption of sweets and confectionery following a banquet — ‘consuming the void’ as it was known — and how the idea of that ritual — a withdrawal into privacy — was replaced by an act of exposure, the masque. The banqueting halls for the purpose accordingly grew in size. Fumerton discusses the masque and its ‘trivial’ themes in terms not of the Spanish match but an aristocratic ‘aestheticization’ of foreign trade, pp. 141–68.
See Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).
Sara Pearl, ‘“Sounding to Present Occasions”: Jonson’s Masques of 1620–25’, in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 60–77.
Richard Levin, ‘The Staple of News, the Society of Jeerers and Canters’ College’, Philological Quarterly, 44 (1965), 445–53.
Richard Brome would also exhibit an interest in the language of canting in A Jovial Crew (1641). McKenzie, ‘The Staple of News’ observes a link between emergent print culture and expanding academic institutions, comparing the Canters’ College with the universities of the 1620s at which a large number of new lectureships were being created, and in opposition to which both Charles I and Archbishop Laud would speak.
Food frequently provided a masque theme for Jonson. See in particular Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, with Cornus as God of the belly, the masque reappropriated in more strictly republican (and Protestant) terms by Milton in Cornus, A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle (1634). See also Leah Marcus, ‘The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’, Studies in English Literature, 19 (1979), 271–94.
See Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980).
John Milton, Areopagitica; For the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, To the Parlament of England (1644), ed. William Haller in The Works of John Milton IV, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 11. 16–22, p. 328. Spelling modernized.
See Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica’. See also George Orwell and Reginald Reynolds (eds), British Pamphleteers (London: Wingate, 1948), 1.
Devra Kifer, ‘Too Many Cookes: An Addition to the Printed Text of The Staple of News’, English Language Notes, 11. 4 (1973), 264–71.
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© 1998 Julie Sanders
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Sanders, J. (1998). The Commonwealth of Paper: Print, News and The Staple of News. In: Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_8
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