Obscenity and Profanity: Sir Henry Herbert’s Problems with the Players and Archbishop Laud, 1632–34

Abstract

What remains of Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book is one of the indispensable points of departure for anyone interested in the dramatic censorship of the whole early modern period: for the simple reason that virtually nothing has survived from the office-books of his principal predecessors as Master of the Revels, Edmond Tilney and Sir George Buc.¹ Yet the gravitational pull of Shakespeare and his immediate contemporaries remains so strong in the study of the period’s drama that Herbert is almost always called upon as a bit player rather than a major character. So it is that both Janet Clare’s ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’ (1990) and my own Mastering the Revels (1991) frequently invoke Herbert’s example, even though we both confine our studies to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, ending virtually as his term of office was beginning. For the most part (and despite Herbert’s own stated view ‘that in former time the poetts tooke greater liberty than is allowed them by mee’, which I shall consider shortly), we both followed general precedent in assuming that Herbert’s standards and practices were broadly comparable with those of his predecessors. In all this the occasion never arose to take an overview of Herbert’s own career, or to consider how some of the entries in his office-book might have reflected very specific or local circumstances. This essay aims partly to rectify that omission.