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Jason Peacey, Randy Robertson. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division. (The Penn State Series in the History of the Book.) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pp. xv, 272. $75.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 887–888, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.887
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Extract
This work of literary scholarship surveys censorship from the early Stuarts to the early eighteenth century and represents an engagement with, and rejection of, three powerful historiographical strands. Randy Robertson rejects Whiggish ideas about the pervasive but doomed nature of Stuart censorship, challenges revisionist claims about the inefficiency of the Stuart state and the importance of consensus, and seeks to refute new historicist notions of the containment of dissonant voices. This is done through chronological case studies, beginning with William Prynne's trial for Histriomastix: The Player's Scourge, or Actor's Tragedy (1632) and proceeding through Richard Lovelace, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and on to Jonathan Swift. Along the way, Robertson makes bold claims about his topic and about other scholars, but the argument is ultimately unconvincing and at times highly problematic.
In Prynne's case, Robertson finds profound tension rather than consensus and a “continuous chain” between early Stuart censorship and the outbreak of civil war. Prynne recognized that the matter of early Stuart theater reflected profound issues of church and state, and his book was the first salvo in the civil war (p. 69). Prynne did anything but engage in self-censorship, and he faced a powerful and repressive response and became a cause célèbre who “preoccupied the national conscience” (p. 64). As such, Robertson rejects the arguments of both Annabel M. Patterson and Kevin Sharpe, and suggests that “if Siebert's account of Caroline censorship is overdrawn, Lambert's is inadequate” (p. 32). Turning to Milton, Robertson portrays the author of Areopagitica (1644) as someone who advocated a “public sphere” in a way that was entirely consistent with his role as a press licenser during the republic and who might even be regarded as having inspired the press legislation of 1649. In negotiating censorship during the late 1640s, Robertson suggests that Lovelace used studied moderation, “temperate rhetoric,” and “delicate artistry” in order to camouflage a royalist agenda (p. 71) in a way that is considered problematic for Patterson's idea of a “social contract” between authors and governments. Robertson also suggests that Lovelace recruited independent parliamentarians to provide prefatory epistles to his poems in order “to divide the opposition along cultural lines.” Lovelace thus “hoped to rescue the Independent literati from Presbyterian boors and hence to fracture the parliamentarian coalition” (pp. 86–87).
