Abstract
This book is a response to the transformation of the study of early modern literature through a new focus on the material conditions of writing, printing and manuscript publication, and new accounts of reading. I will build on these important developments, but switch my attention to the way that, during the 1620s, an increasing range of literature encouraged what I will be calling ‘political’ reading. I will be paying due attention to the dissemination, circulation and performance of the texts under consideration, but with the aim of providing a clear account of the way that the political crises of the 1620s can be seen reflected in the literature, which in turn directed readers/audiences towards a particular kind of interpretation. I should also note at this point that I use the word ‘literature’ to encompass the full range of writing and performance from the period, including such genres as sermons, or libels, or popular pamphlets. Again this reflects the way that current criticism has come to acknowledge the fact that, in order to read historically, it is counterproductive to impose a modern distinction between, say, high and popular literature, or between imaginative and ‘factual’ writing. I will begin with a discussion of the 1620s as a decade that rewards the scrutiny I offer here, in part because of the social and political changes that engaged writers and readers, and in part because within literary history this remains a comparatively neglected period.
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Notes
Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
see also Russell’s incisive (though again contested) account in The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). The most helpful and balanced general counter-argument to Russell and revisionist historiography, is J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1999), esp. Conclusion.
Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Ibid., p. 23; see his more detailed account of the popular excitement at the prospect of a war for the Palatine in 1624, pp. 281–301; for a detailed account of pamphlets in the early modern period, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, new edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
For further work following Patterson’s lead see in particular Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000);
and in a much more wide-ranging study, Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006);
for a counter-argument (which I don’t find convincing for the 1620s, though it may be of more force for the later period on which it concentrates), see Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009). A clear and careful argument somewhere in the middle is taken up by Cyndia Clegg in both Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See in particular Norbrook’s edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s Elegies and the Situation of the Republican Woman Writer’, ELR 27 (1997), pp. 468–521; Norbrook is also general editor of the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of Hutchinson’s works.
A useful supplement to Norbrook may be found in Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005); while his focus is on republican ideas in Shakespeare, Hadfield offers a concise overview of the transmission of republican ideas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Part I.
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 48.
See, for example, David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton University Press, 2000).
Early Modern Culture Issue 8: Printing Publics, http://emc.eserver.org/1–8/issue8.html; Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2007).
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
The starting point for this is of course Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989);
the notion of a counterpublic or alternative public space is outlined in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), see p. xvii.
Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 32; the writers Gray considers are: Dorothy Leigh, Sarah Wight, Katherine Philips, Anne Bradstreet, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers.
See Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 90. My sampling of a single year underlined the scope and range of printed and manuscript works at this time; see Paul Salzman, Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
See, for example, Marcus Nevitt, ‘Ben Jonson and the Serial Publication of News’, in Joad Raymond, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 51–66.
See especially Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
and Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2002);
and the invaluable online edition ‘Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources’, ed. Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I (2005). http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/libels/.
While there are many summarizing histories of the period, as well as the more detailed accounts referenced above, a good general account, on which I have drawn here, is Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England 1603–1642, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1999).
See the authoritative study by Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
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Salzman, P. (2014). Introduction. In: Literature and Politics in the 1620s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305985_1
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