Abstract
By the time he wrote this passage, George Wither already had a reputation as a prison poet. Wither had spent over five months in the Marshalsea in 1614 over his satire Abuses Stript, and Whipt (1613), and when Wither’s Motto itself fell victim to ‘these guilty Times’, he once again found himself in prison. In fact, throughout his lengthy and prolific literary career, which began in 1612 and ended with his death in 1667, Wither was arrested six times and imprisoned on at least four occasions for his writings.1 Given this extensive experience and his reputation as an oppositional poet, Wither is an ideal candidate for a study of early Stuart censorship, and not surprisingly he has a prominent place in Cyndia Susan Clegg’s recent study Press Censorship in Jacobean England. Clegg takes to task a Whig model of censorship for its over-simplifying account of a repressive state determined to silence all dissent. Instead, she draws attention to the varied, and sometimes competing, interests informing censorship practices to argue that instances of press censorship were isolated events determined by local interests rather than a wider ideology. Clegg bases her conclusions about a culture of censorship primarily on evidence of press control.2
For now, these guilty Times so captious be That such, as loue in speaking to be free; May for their freedome, to their cost be shent, How harmlesse er’e they be, in their intent: And such as of their future peace haue care, Vnto the Times a little seruile are.
(George Wither, Wither’s Motto, 1621, A6r)
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Notes
J. Milton French, ‘George Wither in Prison’, PMLA 45 (1930), 959–66.
C.S. Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Interestingly, in this case Wither was arrested but probably not imprisoned; instead it was the printer, George Wood, who bore the brunt of the prosecution. In the case of Wither’s Motto, the authorities did question those involved about the regularity of its licensing, and printers and booksellers were duly fined, but at Wither’s examination they tried to discover if he had written it in contravention of the 1620 proclamation, and, in particular, if he was guilty of a libel. See Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Clarendon Press, 2000), 185.
A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Clarendon Press, 2000), 299–405.
S. Lambert, ‘The Printers and the Government, 1604–1637’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Aspects ofPrinting from 1600 (Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), 1–29.
W. Hudson, ‘A Treatise of the Court of Star Chamber’, in Francis Hargrave (ed.), Collectanea Juridica: Consisting of Tracts Relative to the Law and Constitution ofEngland, 2 vols (1792), vol. 1, 103
Ibid., vol. 1, 101.
Case de libellis famosis (1605), 5 Co. Rep. 125. See also Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, Stanford Law Review 37 (1985), 691–705.
J. Hawarde, Les Reports del Cases in Camera Stellata, ed. W.P. Bailden (1894), 230.
Ibid., 223.
P. Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion, and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1991), 68–9.
L.L. Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Unwin Hyman, 1990), 203, 207–8.
Hudson, ‘A Treatise’, 104; Roger B. Manning, ‘The Origins of the Doctrine of Sedition’, Albion 12 (1980), 116–20.
Quoted in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early Modem Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 1, 306.
J. Knott, Discourses ofMartyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18–20.
G. Wither, The Shepheards Hunting (1615), D6°.
T. Starkie, A Treatise on the Law of Slander and Libel, and Incidentally of Malicious Prosecutions (1830), 176.
L.L. Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (Allen & Unwin, 1982), 207–8. It may have been Northampton’s illness that prevented him from prosecuting Wither before the Star Chamber and opting instead for the Privy Council.
Clegg’s argument that ‘Wither offers the satirist’s conventional defense that his satire is general, but while most satirists used this ruse to protect themselves from accusations of libel, Wither’s satire actually is general’ (Press Censorship in Jacobean England, 113) concurs with that of Allan Pritchard in ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt and Wither’s Imprisonment’, Review of English Studies 14 (1963), 338.
John Marston, The Scovrge ofVillanie (1598), in The Poems ofJohn Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool University Press, 1961), 176.
See, for example, Michael Drayton’s The Owle (1604), and Richard Niccols’s The Begger’s Ape, first published in 1627 but probably composed in the first decade of James’s reign.
D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 10; Pritchard, ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt’, 345
Records of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640, ed. William A. Jackson (Bibliographical Society, 1957), 73; William A. Jackson, ‘Counterfeit Printing in Jacobean Times’, The Library 15 (1934–35), 364–6.
E. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 5 vols (1876), vol. 3, 232a, 233b.
Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: the English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Clarendon Press, 1990), 127–36.
26 Nov. 1612, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N.E. McClure, 2 vols (American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, 394; Peck, Northampton, 81–2.
A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B. Howell, 21 vols (Hansard, 1816), vol. 2, 861–3; McClure (ed.), Letters of Chamberlain, vol. 2, 394.
A Free and offenceless justification of a lately publisht and most maliciously mis-interpreted Poeme: Entitvled Andromeda liberata, in The Poems of Ceorge Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (Oxford University Press, 1941), 330.
The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 2 vols (Clarendon Press, 1907), vol. 2, 22–3.
L.L. Peck, ‘The Mentality of a Jacobean Grandee’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 149–51, 156–7, 163–64; J.P. Sommerville, ‘English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism’, Journal ofBritish Studies 35 (1996), 175–89.
J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd edition (Butterworths, 1990), 538; Peck, Northampton, 83.
I am grateful to Lorna Hutson for pointing out this connection. Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, (Macmillan, 1994), 78–9.
M. Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630’, in ibid., 25–7; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), 351–2.
A. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Cornell University Press, 1995), 94.
R.H. Helmholz and Thomas A. Green, Juries, Libels, and Justice: the Role of English Juries in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Trials for Libel and Slander (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1984), 11–16.
J. Hedley, Power inVerse:Metaphor andMetonymy in theRenaissanceLyric (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 4–10, 19.
For a discussion of Wither’s literary style in terms of its insistence ‘on the authority of individual experience and perception’, see Thomas O. Calhoun, ‘George Wither: Origins and Consequences of a Loose Poetics’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 16 (1974), 263–79.
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O’Callaghan, M. (2005). Taking Liberties: George Wither’s A Satyre, Libel and the Law. In: Sheen, E., Hutson, L. (eds) Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597662_7
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