Tudor Literary Censorship

But where as you say a poet may faine what he list: In deede my thynke it should bee so, and ought to be well taken of the hearers: but it hath not at al times been so allowed.

--William Baldwin (1563, p. Xiii), A Mirror for Magistrates¹

What have I to do with you, ye books, ill-starred object of my toil,—I, ruined and wretched through my own talent?

--Ovid (1924, pp. 56–57), Tristia

Poets’ laments for their labors lost to authority’s arbitrary exercise have been central to the historical reconstruction of censorship practices, especially in Tudor England. The law court’s condemnation of the poet Bonfont in Book 5 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene grounds Jonathan Goldberg’s (1983) argument that “what comes from the poet’s mouth belongs to the queen” (p. 2)—that is, the poet’s liberty is entirely circumscribed by the monarch’s authority. Annabel Patterson (1984) relied on the Mirror for Magistrates’ “Howe Collingbourne was cruelly executed for making a foolish rime,” as the touchstone for her idea that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, in “an era of censorship” (p. 7) adopted the practice of “functional ambiguity” as a means of “airing … contentious issues” while deferring to political authority (pp. 11–14). The prefatory letter addressed “To the reuerende Diuines” in George Gascoigne’s (1575)  Poesies envisions a system of preprint censorship in which the ecclesiastical censor “vnder Seale of Seueritie” issues a “definitiue sentence,” which “shall then passe publikely” to uphold the moral state. Critics of Tudor literature have taken for granted that literary authors were subject to those “conditions of writing” that strictly regulated literary endeavor through threats of suppression. Considering more closely the literary texts where censorship is thematized, as well as revisiting Tudor literary censorship, raises questions about literature’s reliability as witness to historical practice and about censorship’s literary intentions.

Discerning the particular relationship between literature and censorship in Tudor England requires understanding the broader mechanisms of control, which from the Middle Ages derived from the Church’s spiritual authority, the temporal authority of crown and parliament, and some intersections of the two. The regulation of language—both spoken and written (and, later, printed)—focused on three principal areas: heresy, sedition, and treason. Sedition and treason received definition though the temporal authority of parliament. Seditious language, defined as scandalum magnatum, was proscribed in the first statute of Westminister (3 Edw. I, 1, ca. 34, 1275), which commanded the people to refrain from telling or publishing “any false News or Tales” that would breed discord between the king and his people or between the king and his nobility (Statutes of the Realm, 1810; hereafter cited by regnal year, statute number, and chapter). Treason received statutory definition in 1352 (25 Edw. III, 5, ca. 2) as compassing or imagining the death of the king, queen, and the heir apparent, levying war against the king, or giving aid to the king’s enemies.( It also included violating the king’s eldest daughter if she was unmarried or the wife of the king’s eldest son and heir, counterfeiting the Great Seal, the Privy Seal, or the coinage, and killing the Lord Chanceller, Lord Treasurer, or the justices.) In pre-Reformation England, the Church’s control of religious language resided in its authority from ancient times to control doctrine and root out heresy but with deference to English law, which reserved to crown and parliament the power to deny life, limb, or property. How this operated may be seen in the fourteenth-century experience of John Wyclif, the Oxford theologian with connections to the royal court, who challenged papal authority and Eucharistic doctrine both in his writings and sermons. In response to Pope Gregory XI’s bulls condemning Wyclif, English ecclesiastical authorities forbade him to preach or teach until he renounced his heretical views. Royal proclamations censured his writing, statutory law instigated searches for his books, and university officials drove him from Oxford, and although he was publicly condemned by both Church and state, he was not prosecuted (Hudson & Kenny, 2004). In 1401, seventeen years after Wyclif’s death, shaken by the persistent popularity of his teachings, parliament passed the first statute against heresy, De Haeretico Comburendo (2 Hen. IV, ca. 5, 1401). This provided that once the Church had tried and condemned a heretic, he would be consigned to “lay” officials to be burned. In 1409, in an effort to eradicate the influence of Lollard views, the Church adopted Arundel’s “Constitutions,” which established strict limits on preaching, on religious teaching in the schools and universities (and presumably writing), and on the possession and use of vernacular scripture and other heretical writings (Watson, 1995; see also Kerby-Fulton, 2006; Simpson, 1990). These provisions established by Church and state for controlling language remained unaltered until the Reformation. (For a succinct analysis of the connections between medieval censorship and Tudor censorship and their impact on literature, see Simpson, 2002, pp. 333–343).

The Reformation brought changes to language regulation in England, most obviously because the introduction of printing coincided with the Reformation but also because religious changes forced Tudor monarchs to renegotiate principles of heresy, treason, and sedition. Even before Luther, the Church understood printing’s potential for disseminating heresy. In 1501 Pope Alexander VI issued the bull, Inter Multiplice, which required archbishops to prohibit books contrary to the orthodox faith by requiring an imprimatur (the preprint allowance of a book; Maclean, 2012, p. 156). The imprimatur proved useful to the Church when Luther employed printing to widely disseminate his teachings. Across Europe various laws, from city ordinances to royal edicts, required authors and printers to obtain official permission to print books. European press censorship thus developed from the Church’s interest in suppressing heresy, especially Lutheran doctrine. This was also the impetus for English press control during the reign of Henry VIII.

In the course of Henry VIII’s reign, restraint of religious writing devolved from Church to temporal control. In 1520 Lutheran books began appearing in England, and in 1521 Cardinal Wolsey issued a commission to bishops to be read in churches warning against Lutheran error and ordering, under pain of heresy laws, that erroneous writings be turned over to church authorities. (Luther had posted his 95 Theses, challenging the Church to a disputation, on the Wittenburg Cathedral door in 1517; Loades, 1991, pp. 110–111.) In 1524 the bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, required printers and booksellers to obtain ecclesiastical permission to print and import books, and for the next five years he vigorously campaigned to suppress the influx of Continental reformers’ books. In 1529, when Church politics brought Tunstall into disfavor, the government assumed responsibility for suppressing heretical books (Loades, 1991, p. 112). Two royal proclamations (1529 and 1530) outlawed the possession and importation of nineteen heretical English-language books printed on the Continent and prohibited printing domestically any book concerning Holy Scripture without ecclesiastical examination and approval (imprimatur). The 1529 proclamation gave bishops the responsibility for arresting and imprisoning offenders until they recanted, but the 1530 proclamation placed implementation in the civil authorities’ hands (Hughes & Larkin, 1969, pp. 181–186, 193–197). This allowed the Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, to try heretical offenders in the secular court of Star Chamber instead of the ecclesiastical courts. Henry’s divorce and the Henrician Act of Supremacy created an environment only slightly less hostile to Reformed writing. The 1531 statute that made Henry the supreme head of the Church and gave him authority to reform and redress errors and heresies reinforced Henry’s control of religious discourse (26 Hen. VIII, ca. 1). In 1533–1534 parliament passed an act for the punishment of heresy. This allowed both Church and state to inquire after heretical views, required trial in open court, and upheld traditional Catholic doctrine, although it exempted speech against the Bishop of Rome from heresy (25 Hen. VIII, ca. XIV). In the next few years, religious unrest abroad led to fears of anarchy, and Henry intensified efforts to suppress reformed writing. A 1538 royal proclamation instituted a formal system of preprint authorization, suppressed any debate on the sacraments, exiled Anabaptists, and deprived married clergy. The 1542–1543 Parliament enacted a statute for the “advancement of true religion,” which gave ecclesiastical authorities the right to confiscate offensive texts. The 1542–1543 act abolished books contrary to the Henrician Six Articles, which denied papal authority but upheld traditional Catholic doctrine. Although the act strictly controlled religious printing, it allowed unrestricted possession of certain books printed before 1540 (proclamations and law books, chronicles, biographies, and books by Chaucer and Gower) and permitted plays, songs, and interludes that “meddle not with interpretations of Scripture, contrarye to the doctrine set forth” (34, 35 Henry VIII, ca. 1; see also Clegg, 1997, pp. 25–27).

When Edward VI ascended the throne, restraints on Protestant writing were lifted. Some Catholic writing circulated, but that which advanced the cause of Rome was suppressed. During Edward VI’s reign printers flourished, even though the regime instituted preprint licensing to prevent writing that criticized the government (Loades, 1991, pp. 115–116). During Mary’s rule, the number of printers diminished by half. Many fled to the Continent where they worked in Protestant printing houses. Some remained in England but lost their livelihood. Others, like John Day, went underground and continued to print Protestant controversy (Evenden, 2004). In response to the continuing presence of Protestant books, Mary’s regime imposed an even more draconian censorship than her predecessors. On 18 August 1553, she issued a proclamation extending “freedom of conscience” but forbidding printing without the Queen’s express written license. Two years later, on 13 June 1555, Mary prohibited and ordered burned any work by protestants. Edward Hall’s “Chronicle” , which provided the basis for Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates, was specifically named. The book Mary consigned to fire was a recent edition of Hall’s The union of two noble and illustrate families of Lancaster and York, first printed in 1548.

Secular books fared better than those by Protestant clerics whose writings became evidence of heresy in the brutal Marian Protestant executions. In 1557 in what became her final effort to control Protestant writing, Mary’s government reached an agreement with the London print trade, which had long sought incorporation as a guild (Blayney, 2003). Mary granted them a charter to form the London Company of Stationers. While this granted company members a monopoly on printing—a clear triumph for the Stationers—it also required them to suppress “detestable heresies against the faith and sound catholic doctrine of Holy Mother Church.” (The original 1557 charter conferred to the Stationers’ Company is lost, probably to fire. A copy of the charter appears in Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1555-1557[1938]. In 1667, the company made a certified copy of the patent roll copy; this still survives at Stationers’ Hall.)

Although the Stationers’ Company was a creature of Marian government, Queen Elizabeth approved its charter in 1559, and Protestant printers returned to the Company. The Stationers’ role in press controls has been misunderstood as an extension of state authority, and though Mary may have intended this, what emerged under Elizabeth was quite different. The Company was principally interested in assuring, first, that only Company members practiced the “mystery” of printing; second, that taking apprentices and advancing into liveried positions was orderly; and third, that a guild member’s right to copy was protected. To achieve these ends, the Stationers could search printing establishments and bookshops and bring violators before their court of Assistants, which imposed fines and seized illegal presses and illegally printed books. (Illegality here meant violating Company regulations, not English law.) To keep track of copy ownership, the Company recorded titles and ownership in its register book. The Company’s permission to print a given title, granted by a Company officer (master or warden), constituted a “license” to print. The Company’s license differed from an ecclesiastical or government imprimatur. Like her Tudor predecessors, Elizabeth called for preprint ecclesiastical approbation in her 1559 Injunctions, which instructed clergy on implementing her religious settlement. The Injunctions’ final item (51) required preprint authorization by the queen, six privy counselors, the ecclesiastical commissioners, the archbishop of Canterbury or York, the bishop of London, or the university chancellors. The Injunctions’ language indicates that preprint authorization intended the examination of religious texts and, since in Elizabeth’s person governance of Church and state were conjoined, of political books.

The elaborate preprint censorship the Injunctions envisioned was loosely implemented. Between 1559 and 1586, the master and wardens made the Company’s license contingent on ecclesiastical authorization as they saw fit. If this was required, Company members turned to clergy residing near Paul’s churchyard, the principal locale of book trade. Only a small percentage of Register entries before 1586 indicate ecclesiastical authorization; those that did were usually for political or religious books, or for English translations of foreign texts. Full print oversight did not come until 1586 when, after a decade of challenges to the Stationers’ monopoly, the court of Star Chamber issued decrees for order in printing that gave the Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiastical (led by either the archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of London) jurisdiction to resolve printing conflicts. Following the decrees, the archbishop of Canterbury licensed presses, and he and the bishop of London oversaw ecclesiastical authorization. Even in the years immediately following the decrees, however, only half the printed books were authorized, and these were still religious and political books or translations (see Clegg, 1997, ch. 2).

Besides religion, the Tudors were troubled by treasonable and scandalous writing. During Henry VIII’s reign “writing” and “imprinting” were added to the medieval formula of “compassing” or “imagining” the monarch’s death, and actions against the king’s successive wives and heirs were included (and excluded) in multiple statutes. A 1531 statute expanded treason’s definition to include wishing or attempting bodily harm against the king or royal family, seeking to deprive him of rule, or slandering the king as a heretic or usurper (26 Hen. VIII, ca. 2). Edward VI simplified treason law by eliminating the Henrician sequence of revisions and restoring Edward III’s formula—with writing and printing added. Under Mary, treason protection was extended to Philip and expanded to include slandering the queen or praying for her death (1 Phil. and Mar., ca. 3). Elizabeth’s government retained Marian treason law but added upholding papal authority by writing or printing as treasonous (5 Eliz., ca. 1). A subsequent statute made it treason to “publish, declare, holde, opinion, affirme or saye” that the Queen “is not or ought not to be Queene” or name her as “Heretyke, Schesmatyke, Tyraunt, Infidell, or Usurper” (13 Eliz, ca. 1) and prohibited writing about the succession.

The 1275 statute defining slander and libel had not criminalized scandalum magnatum, although interpretations in the Common Law courts did. A statute passed in Philip and Mary’s first Parliament extended the principle of scandal from the nobility to the monarch and added writing, printing, and publishing to false rumor. Further it imposed public shaming and losing an ear as the penalty for a first offense of spoken slander and shaming and losing the right hand for written slander (1, 2 Phil. and Mar., ca. 3). Elizabeth’s 1580–1581 Parliament increased the penalties for seditious words and rumors but specified that they must be spoken or written “advisedlye and with malicious Intent” (23 Eliz., ca. 2).

Punishments under Tudor treason and sedition laws have left indelible impressions of Tudor tyranny. During the reign of Henry VIII, a nun named Elizabeth Barton claimed the gift of prophecy after recovering from an illness. Her prophecies attracted widespread attention, especially among conservative clerics. In 1528 she began prophesying dire outcomes for the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and his religious governance. Several texts circulated about the prophetess, and a large compilation of her prophecies (The Nun’s Book) was printed in 1533. The government seized all copies and tried Barton and her followers for treason for “slander against the Kings Highnes and the Queene” (15 Henry VIII, ca. 12). They were executed at Tyburn (Devereux, 1996). The most notorious Elizabethan prosecution for seditious writing was for an outspoken pamphlet against the proposed French marriage, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579). The author, John Stubbs, was tried and convicted under the Marian statute against seditious libel, and for this, according to the statute’s provision for punishment, Stubbs lost his right hand. (Elizabeth’s first Parliament passed a statute [1, ca. 5] that judged that the Marian statute was “demed in all things to extende to the Quenes Highnes that nowe ys.”)

John King describes these Tudor years of weather-cock religion as “a time when monarchical government attempted to control public discourse” (King, 2009, p. 105), but this description’s accuracy depends on what “public discourse” means. In the highly volatile religious climate of the English Reformation—along with Mary’s effort to undo it—most public discourse was centered on religion, and at any given moment the monarchy, the driving the force of religious change, was highly invested in that discourse. According to King, Thomas More and William Tyndale, on opposite ends of the religious spectrum, both demonstrated how Tudor governments directed the discourse by employing propagandists. This kind of control continued in print throughout the reign of Elizabeth, with religious controversialists quoting and answering their opponents’ arguments. Prohibiting, seizing, and burning books (and sometimes authors) was another kind of control. One effort at control involves reasoned discourse and the other tyrannical rule. Since an accusation of tyranny was a common propagandistic strategy for both Catholics and Protestants, distinguishing among various kinds of monarchial control of public discourse and between these and control over the kingdom of letters can be difficult. Henry VIII and Edward VI, both supporters of humanist learning, appear to have had little interest in suppressing poetic discourse. Indeed, this may be said for Marian government, except that regardless of a text’s subject, if its author was Protestant, the writing was proscribed. The 1559 religious settlement sought (unsuccessfully) to end religious dissent. After the 1570 papal bull, which declared Elizabeth a heretic and released her Catholic subjects from fealty to her, some Catholic writing reached beyond theological debates to attack the Queen’s government and her rule’s legitimacy. On the other side, Protestant radicals launched printed opposition that escalated from theological debate about vestments and attacks on the Book of Common Prayer (the Admonition Controversy) to libeling the bishops (the Marprelate Controversy). Elizabethan government deemed such public discourse a threat, and when propaganda failed, it resorted to prosecution. Even so, control was tyrannical only to the degree that law was tyrannical. In the most notorious cases—the Admonition and Marprelate pamphlets—writers escaped discovery and printers got off with fines that were later mitigated. Catholics fared less well, since the statutes against denying Elizabeth’s right to rule or upholding papal authority dictated treason’s harsh penalties.

If, as I have indicated, Tudor censorship was primarily religious and political, why would “literary” writers like Baldwin, Gascoigne, and Spenser so readily thematize censorship in their literary works? Scholars commonly assume that all writers were subject to the same repressive conditions of writing, thus Baldwin, Gascoigne, and Spenser were thus mirroring their world. Other scholars have suggested that because these individuals felt the censor’s sting, they were willing to risk writing about repression, perhaps as a cautionary lesson to fellow poets. I would suggest, instead, that Baldwin, Gascoigne, and Spenser, self-conscious of the humanist tradition in which they were writing, invoked classical rhetorical devices—one of which concerned poetic freedom and poetic license—to advance and defend a distinctively English poetic tradition.

The classical discourse on censorship and poetic freedom permeated the English school curriculum, from Ovid’s lament on his exile, Tristia (usually read in the fourth or fifth form), to the historian Tacitus, to Rhetorica ad Herennium, the introductory school text on Latin oratory that taught truth and freedom’s place in the literature of counsel (Baldwin, 1944, chs. 5–6; Colclough, 2005, ch. 1). Roman history, of course, shaped the Latin literature read in English grammar schools. Beginning in the Augustan Golden Age, writers chafed under the emperor’s growing literary scrutiny. According to Frederick Cramer (1945), when Augustus came into power his policy regarding freedom of speech and writing was fairly liberal, but the antimonarchic nobility’s continuing criticism led Augustus to obtain a legal interpretation allowing him to punish writers for violating “majesty” (p. 177). In the rhetorical schools literary repression became an important concern, which, in turn, led Latin writers to invoke the idea of censorship according to a common pattern. This included nostalgia for earlier freedom, a condemnation of the persecution of talent, and a sense of justice in repression’s ultimate ineffectiveness. Cramer uses Tacitus’ Annals (IV) to illustrate this, beginning with a speech by the censored historian, Creminius Cordus, who, longing for the Golden Age, says, “I will not cite the example of the Greeks, with whom not only liberty, but even license remained unpunished” (Cramer, 1945, p. 193) Of Cordus’ condemnation, Tacitus concludes,

Laughable indeed, are the delusions of those who fancy that by the exercise of their ephemeral power, posterity can be defrauded of information. On the contrary, through persecution, the reputation of the persecuted talent grows strong. (Cramer, 1945, p. 196)

This convention juxtaposes the author and authority in a manner similar to the rhetoric manuals.

The Ad Herennium, one of antiquity’s most popular rhetorical texts, introduced English schoolboys to free speech, licentia, as a central figure of thought. It identifies licentia as “Frankness of Speech when, talking before those to whom we owe reverence or fear, we yet exercise our right to speak out, because we seem justified in reprehending them, or persons dear to them, for some fault” (Colclough, 2005, pp. 27–28). David Colclough observes that in Cicero’s De Oratore, as in the Ad Herennium, “freedom is first mentioned, and excused, in the exordium, as part of his construction of an ethos and with a simultaneous criticism of current political conditions” (p. 31). Essential to the Latin oratorical figure of licentia, then, is the necessity of both frank speech as a means of moral correction and an apology for its use. Indeed, the Ad Herennium links frankness and praise, suggesting that “either frankness or ‘praise’ alone could be unhelpful, one causing ‘wrath and annoyance’ and the other ‘error’; but when combined they prevent either” (p. 28). Implicit in the rhetorical figure is the idea that free speech is inherently dangerous because, without circumspect use, it can provoke wrath—the speaker (author) is potentially vulnerable to authority. Free speech required “decorum.”: “Consideration of the time at which, the place in which, and the persons to whom one was speaking all played a large part in the way in which claims to the right or obligation to speak out were framed” (p. 5).

Referring to “free speech” in Tudor England requires caution, for, as Colclough (2005) reminds us, free speech was not then a universal right as the post-Enlightenment world understands it. Instead, licentia belonged to the sphere of counsel, the literature of which was humanist in nature and addressed to either princes or would-be counselors. According to Colclough, “Liberty of speech is considered to be essential in virtually all early modern treatments of counsel: if the prince does not actively encourage frankness then his or her counsel will be worthless, and he or she will become the object of flattery framed as counsel, rather than constructive advice” (p. 63).

Two of the three pieces of Tudor literature that thematize censorship belong to the tradition of counsel literature: Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Gascoigne’s Poesies, which addresses his audience as young gallants and categorizes its poems as “Floures to comfort, Herbes to cure, and Weedes to be auoided,” describes itself as counseling moral education for its young gentlemen readers. All three poetic works participate in the humanistist revival of classical literature, but Baldwin’s Mirror offers the most sustained interest in licentia and counsel.

The critical reception of Baldwin’s Mirror is complex, in part because this popular work was reprinted and reorganized so often during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that editions differ markedly from each other—a problem nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions failed to resolve (Geller, 2007, p. 44). The only editions for which Baldwin was responsible (1559 and 1563) are collections of poems, ostensibly about the “misconduct of public officials” (King, 2004), which are linked by a prose “conversation” among Baldwin and other “authors” who are meeting together to listen to, choose, and organize the poems that would become A Mirror for Magistrates—a device Sherri Geller (2007) calls “a poets-at-work frame” (p. 48). The collection’s modus operandi is for each poem to speak in the spectral first person of someone who has died as a victim of fate, fortune, or just punishment. Although the ultimate model for the spectral visitation is Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, translated by Lydgate as Fall of Princes, Geller explains that Baldwin differs from Boccaccio because the “poets-at-work” frame makes the poets, rather than the ghosts, the composers and speakers of the laments. In the 1559 edition, according to Geller, the frame tells how Baldwin and his fellow poets proceeded at the commissioning printer’s behest:

Baldwin and his companions read lengthy segments from Edward Hall’s and Robert Fabian’s hefty chronicles; upon finding a historical figure deemed an appropriate subject for a complaint, a poet composes and recites a complaint for his companions, a first-person composition told from the historical figure’s point of view. The poets perform nineteen complaints and read substantial portions in the course of one day in the Mirror’s fictive reality, discussing as well many issues, including aesthetics, censorship, misinterpretation (intentional and unintentional), reader response, disparities in the chronicles’ accounts, suggestions for future versions of the Mirror and prequels, and the appropriate behavior of subjects and magistrates toward their ruler and its reciprocity by rulers. (pp. 51–52)

In the 1563 edition eight more poems are added, and the frame continues in the same conversational vein. The poets have gathered for another fictive editorial/composition meeting, purportedly one week after the meeting that had ended at the 1559 frame’s conclusion.

Geller’s (2007) work on the frame’s interrelationship with the complaints finds a much more thematically coherent Mirror than other critics. Conversations in the frame raise the issue of conflicting accounts in the chronicles, which resonated in some of the complaints, where historical figures “might lie to make themselves look good or might have a better opinion of themselves then their contemporaries” (p. 54). This multivocality interests Geller because it creates a skeptical reading of the Mirror’s use of history. While this may be true, I also see the multivocality as central to Baldwin’s artistic strategy, which employs it to establish the decorum appropriate to counsel literature.

In some respects, by employing this multivocality Baldwin’s work resembles one of the sixteenth-century’s best-known counsel books, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano), which uses the frame of dinner conversations. In Castiglione the distinctive personae of the principal speakers emerge and their biases and prejudices direct the discussion. This allows the expression of radically different viewpoints that may be censured by other speakers and that may (or may not) be modified in the conversation. The book’s purpose is to fashion the perfect councillor, but in doing so it establishes the nature of good government. Similarly, Baldwin’s dedication to the nobility in the Mirror addresses as the book’s intended audience, the king’s “officers”—the “magistrates”—who “have in your charge any ministracion of Justice.” He asks them to accept his book: “For here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the sooner amendment “(1559, ₡iii). Taking this dedication too literally has led to considerable critical bewilderment since the complaints do not appear to conform to an identifiable pattern of justice, nor are the personages depicted always properly magistrates. What should be done, for example, with Jane Shore, Edward IV’s mistress? (For a description of critical reception, see Lucas, 2009, pp. 2–12). The interplay of frame and complaint, like Castiglione’s interplay of personalities and arguments, uses multivocality to allow the expression of any viewpoint, however frank it might be, to be simultaneously spoken and undercut. This strategy, which dominates both parts of Baldwin’s work (1559 and 1563), is epitomized in Collingbourne’s complaint—but in that complaint only as it participates in the multivocality of the frame and other complaints.

Collingbourne’s complaint appears in the second part of the Mirror, first published in 1563. The first part of the Mirror (1559 and 1563) contains complaints of historical persons from the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry VI. Part I’s complaints participate in a “conversation” about good rule and “right” rule, that is, about the nature of good kingship, ----represented negatively in Gloucester’s, Mowbray’s, and Richard II’s complaints and positively in the “good princes” Henries IV and V-- versus the inherited right to rule. (They are identified as such in King Jamy’s complaint; Mirror [1559], Kiii^v.). This juxtaposes Lancastrian virtue with York claims to legal legitimacy. According to Hall’s Chronicle, the York claim to the throne came through Edward III’s eldest surviving son, Lionel Duke of Clarence, but was transmitted through his daughter (who married a Mortimer) to his grandson Roger Mortimer (subject of the Mirror’s second complaint) and then to Roger’s son, Edmund Mortimer. Glendower, Northumberland, and Cambridge, whose complaints follow Richard II’s, all died, advancing Edmund Mortimer’s claim, which is the subject of their complaints.² In the next generation, the York claim passed to Richard, Cambridge’s son, who died in the Wars of the Rose’s first battle, advancing his claim. (Richard appears headless to Baldwin in the Mirror’s only dream vision.) The rest of the Mirror’s first book contains complaints of those who invent or fall victim to political treachery on both the Lancastrian and York sides. Noticeably absent from the first part is the tale of Edmund, Duke of Somerset. The frame talks about the suitability of including it, and Ferrers says he will go about “deuising thereon” (1559, Nii). This is taking so long that Baldwin falls asleep and dreams of the headless Richard Plantagenet. The frame after the dream makes no further mention of Ferrers’ progress on Somerset’s poem, which ultimately appears in the second part (1563, Aa ii), precisely where Ferrer in the 1563 introductory frame told Baldwin to place it, and where I believe Baldwin intended it to be. Somerset’s complaint denies the York claim because it came “From the heyre female” and advances the Lancastrian “from the heyre male,” three of whom “in order dyd succeed, / By just discent” (1563, Aav^v). Had the 1559 edition included this, it would have nullified the first part’s conversation about princely virtue. As the 1559 edition stands, the reader must judge whether an effort to advance a presumed hereditary right justifies actions that would otherwise be treason.

While the first part of the Mirror addresses the nature of right kingship, the second part subordinates a conversation about “right” to one about tyranny, personified in Richard III. The second part’s complaints, however, do not merely vilify Richard; they wrestle with his councilors’ complicity, with subjects’ responses to tyranny, and with providence’s role in advancing and curtailing a tyrant’s actions. In the 1559 Mirror’s first complaint, Tresilian admitted that as Chief Justice he and the other justices erred by interpreting the law to serve the king’s lusts and desires: “And words that wer most plaine whan thei by us wer skande / We turned by construction, lyke a welchmans nose / Whereby many one both lyfe and landes dyd lose” (1559, A4). The first part repeatedly asks whether punishments followed due process of law, but outside of Tresilian, it does not mention legal manipulation. In the second part’s first complaint, Lord Rivers introduces the second part’s association of legal manipulation with tyranny. After observing that “wrestyng laws, and false conspyracyes” destroy kings, he says,

The seconde Richard is a proofe of thys

Whom crafty Lawyers by their lawes deposed.

An other paterne good kyng Henry is

Whose ryght by them hath dyversly been glosed,

Good whyle he grew, bad whan he was vnrosed. (1563, Lviii)

Of the current king, Edward IV, Rivers’ brother in law, Rivers says,

Whyle he prevailed they said he owed the crown

All Lawes and ryghtes agreed with the same:

But whan by dryftes he seemed to be downe,

All lawes and ryght extremely dyd him blame

Nought saue vsurping traytor was hys name.

So constantly the Judges construe lawes,

That all agree styll with the stronger cause. (1563, Lviii)

This emphasizes that legal manipulation can turn actions once deemed right into treason. Throughout Part 2 Richard’s tyranny relies on the lawyer Catesby’s manipulations. And it is about this that the poet Collingbourne complains.

Collingbourne’s lament follows Sackville’s “Induction” and the Duke of Buckingham’s complaint, which is set in hell, the duke damned for all the crimes he committed at Richard III’s behest but especially for murdering the two child princes. The journey to the underworld here follows classical models (“allowed Poetes”), even though one of the frame’s poets expresses concern that this might be unfavorably construed by readers as a too-Catholic depiction of purgatory. Another answers that “it is Poesie and no divinitye, and it is lawfull for poetes to fayne what they list” (1563, Xiii), to which Baldwin replies, “thynke it should bee so, and ought to be well taken of the hearers: but it hath not at al times been so allowed” (1563, Xiii), as Collingbourne will demonstrate. This frame introduces two aspects of the classical censorship trope: an idealized time of poetic license and a more recent time of repression. It also links censorship to Tudor times by mentioning divinity (regularly censored) and poetry which is “allowed” (Xiii).

Collingbourne’s lament is structured like most other complaints in both parts of the Mirror. It begins with an obvious moral that connects to the exemplum which the frame anticipated. For Collingbourne, the initial moral is that poets must “beware” the rehearsal of tyranny because they no longer have freedom: “The Muses freedoome, graunted them of elde, / is barde [barred], slye reasons treasons hye [high] are held” (1563, Xiii). After the initial moral, the complaints recount the historical figure’s particular experience in the first-person, even though the experience may not align with the initial moral. Collingbourne begins his narration with, “They murdred me, / for metryng things amys” (1563, Xv). Not exactly “mismetering,” he wrote the rhyme, “The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel or Dog, / Do rule al England, under a Hog” (1563, Xv), whose meaning, he says, “was so playne and true, / That every foole perceived it at furst” (1563, Xv). Not only did everyone understand his rhyme’s intent, but they muttered about it and cursed the king and his minions’ (“faultors”; 1563, Xv). The next two stanzas name names and recount the same crimes decried in Part 2’s other complaints—Richard’s murder of the princes, his usurpation of the crown, and his ruin of the realme through “laweles dealynges” (1563, Xv^v). The complaint itself reenacts far franker criticism of monarchy than the allegorical animal rhyme, whose meaning had been “so playne and true.” Collingbourne then claims that he thought “the freedome of the auncient tymes / Stoode styll in force” (1563, Xv^v), which looks remarkably self-serving, especially when he follows his defense with a quotation from Horace’s first satire: “Ridentem dicere verum / Quis vetat?” (1563, Xv^v: What forbids a man to speak the truth laughingly?). What are we to think about Collingbourne who has expressed the “truth” more in scorn than in laughter? The next stanza amplifies on the purported freedom of ancient time with the qualification that “Poetes freely blamed vice,” though they “named no man” and mixed “theyr gall with spyce” (1563, Xv^v). He then claims that he did not name names either, although he previously said that everyone knew his rhyme’s meaning, and his own poetic lament had just named names. This produces a dissonance between Collilngbourne’s claims about events and the events themselves.

Collingbourne’s lament is not unique in creating such dissonance; Baldwin employs this strategy throughout both parts of the Mirror. Here, as in other complaints, the speaker now digresses into an exposition that negotiates—or tries to negotiate—the dissonance. (Some complaints include this as an introduction to the historical figure’s experience.) Collingborne concluded two things from his life experience: it taught him “how cankard Tyrantes malice is” (Xvi), and it warns “all subiectes to take heade / They meddle not with Magistrates affayres” (1563, Xvi^v). His related exposition, however, digresses on how poetry indeed can meddle if it is properly written. The poet must follow Horace’s advice and “myxe theyr shrpe rebukes with myrth / That they maye pearce, not causing any peyne” (1563, Xvi^v). The poet must exercise a decorum consistent with the rhetoricians’ teachings on licentia: “A poet must be pleasaunt, not to playne, / No flatterer, no bolsterer of vyce, / But sound and swete, in all thinges ware and wyse” (1563, Xvi^v). Collingbourne devotes six stanzas to amplifying the Greek personification of the “Poetes office” in Pegasus, who is chaste, pure, devoted to truth, with courage enough not to “feare to register the ryght” (1563, Xvii). (Poets should also sense when they are in danger and flee.) Collingbourne then returns, as other complaints do, to reassessing his experience within the context of his digression. Collingbourne’s dilemma is that poets should give honest counsel, but when a corrupt justice system is in place, doing so will place them in peril. Catesby, the lawyer, has seen to this.

Yes (quoth the Cat) thy rayling words be treason

And treason is far worse than heresye.

Then must it followe by this foolyshe reason,

That kynges be more than God in Maiestie,

And soules be lesse than bodyes in degree.

For Heretikes both soules and God offend,

Traytours but seeke to bryng mans lyfe to ende. (1563, Xviii)

In the next few stanzas, Collingbourne obliquely admits his real mistake; he recognizes his was a “foolyshe ryme” which, “though rude,” was “sound in sence” (1563, Xviii). “Rude” here is the important word: he violated decorum. Within the counsel literature tradition, decorum is essential to escape the prince’s ire, and in the Mirror it becomes a relevant topic for discussion in the frames for Richard III’s and the blacksmith’s complaints. (Richard’s poetry is too good for the evils he committed, but the blacksmith’s crude verse is deemed appropriate for a smith and a rebel.)

This attention to decorum allows the final stanza to offer a moral that accommodates the complaint’s earlier dissonance:

And therfore Baldwyn boldly to the good

Rebuke thou vice, so shalt thou purchase thankes

As for the bad thou shalt but move his mood,

Though plesantly thou touch his sinful prankes:

Warne poetes therfore not to passe the bankes

Of Hellicon, but kepe them in the streames,

So shall their freedome save them from extreames. (1563, Yi)

In good and decorous poetry, the poet may both counsel the king and exercise his freedom. Thematizing censorship through classical precedents in and surrounding Collingbourne provides the paradigm within which the entire Mirror operates: poets may (indeed, should) “meddle” with “Magistrates affayers,” providing their counsel takes the form of good poetry.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), a poem participating in the same counsel tradition as Baldwin’s Mirror, follows Baldwin’s poetic rules. In his letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser identifies his work with counsel literature tradition: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (Spenser, 1977, p. 737). He will accomplish this (as Baldwin did) through history, but more particularly as “a poet historical.” His poem, “a continued allegory, or darke conceit” takes as its subject the “historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time” (p. 737). Spenser here alludes to the classical censorship trope’s perilous present, from which the poetic device of allegory can protect him. Students of the Faerie Queene know that Spenser did not avoid the danger, envy, and suspicion of “present time”; he simply employed poetic decorum in writing about contemporary matters.

Spenser’s treatment of his own time, which appears throughout the poem, is concentrated in Book V, in which Arthur and the knight of justice, Arthegall, learn about justice’s different aspects, including the harsh retributive justice necessary against England’s enemies and the clemency attributed to Queen Elizabeth. Interestingly, the event in which censorship becomes thematized occurs in Book 5, canto 9. The ninth canto’s subject is the execution of justice in England, and its analytical method offers three instances of “justice justlie administred.” In the first Arthegall and Arthur pursue and finally capture the shape-shifting Malengin (guile), an allegorical representation of the Jesuit mission to England. In this episode Talus (just force) upholds the letter of the laws exiling or punishing missionary priests and Jesuits. In the second, the poet, Bon Font/Malfont, receives punishment under the seditious libel law, which is seen as a necessary and just law. In the third, Duessa’s treason trial by jury is depicted as the ultimate manifestation of English law, where the monarch, within the constraints of the legal system, dispenses just punishment (for support for this argument, see Clegg, 1998).

Censorship in the Bon Font/Malfont episode appears only very briefly in relation to all of Book V. Having successfully defeated Malengin, Arthur and Arthegall enter Mercilla’s palace, where “iust judgements, that mote not be broken / For any brybes, or threates, of any to be wroken” (5.8.24.8–9). At the entrance to the palace’s great hall, both testimony to the justice within and a reminder of the deceit and guile without, stands the poet, Bon Font, now renamed Malfont, “whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle / Nayld to a post” (5.9.25,2–3). Spenser emphasizes that Bon Font/Malfont’s punishment was “adjudged so by law” (5.9.25.3). The offense for which he was tried and convicted was falsely accusing the queen of “forged guile” (planned treachery or conscious deceit) in speech and writing (5.9.25.5). (Two early Elizabethan statutes, Eliz. 1, ca. 5 and ca.6, prohibited libeling the queen.) The law and the courts upholding it, not a tyrannical queen, condemned Bon Font /Malfont. Spenser adds to this a critic’s condemnation: this was no poet but the author of “rayling rymes” who “on himself had ta’en” “the bold title of a Poet” (5.9.25.8–9). Characterizing “Poet” as a “bold title” alludes to the convention of poetic counsel explored by Baldwin. Poets must be bold and speak the truth, but the truth must appear decorously in poetry, not “rude” and “rayling rymes.” Just as Collingbourne’s claim that he had done nothing to deserve the king’s ire cannot be removed from the contexts of the entire complaint and its frames, Bon Font/Malfont should not be removed from the entire discourse of Book 5, whose context is the high political clash between international militant Protestantism and Spain’s Catholic imperialism and whose intention is to counsel Queen Elizabeth on domestic and foreign policy. Elizabeth must be vigilant in defeating her Catholic enemies both at home and abroad—at home through “just” laws against Catholic sedition and abroad though an aggressive military policy. That Spenser’s poetry so artfully can advance such a radical agenda (distasteful as it may be to later readers) testifies to the licentia poet’s exercised in Elizabethan England.

Licentia in counsel literature places the poet in a subservient position to his prince. In the third literary instance thematizing censorship, George Gascoigne’s Poesies, the poet assumes a position of authority, and the book’s introductory paratextual material invokes the classical censorship trope differently; it assesses the role of poetic license in furthering a young man’s moral education. In this Gascoigne is influenced more by Ovid than the ad Herennium, although the Poesies still reflects humanist education. The Poesies (1575) is a second and fully reconfigured edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573). The Poesies contains three separate prefatory letters: first to the “Lerned Divines” entrusted with censorship authority, next to “al yong gentlemen,” and finally “To the Readers generally.” In the first the author maintains that he returned from abroad to discover that his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres had both offended in their language and been “doubtfully construed, and (therefore) scandalous” (2¶i^r). In particular, “busie conjectures have presumed” that “The Adventures of Master F. J.” was “written to the scandalizing of some worthie personage, whom they would seeme therby to know” (2¶i^r). Gascoigne assures the divines that in this new book he has “gelded” his poems of anything that might offend. This prefatory letter has been taken as evidence that his Flowres was suppressed, though I think it unlikely. The 1573 edition departed from the order Gascoigne intended, something a new edition could remedy (Weiss, 1992). Furthermore, the Poesies’ letter to “al yong gentlemen” says that “the first Copie of these my Posies hath been verie much inquired for by the yonger sort” (2¶3^r-v), implying wide circulation. The Flowres, however, may have provoked censure, since whomever “Master F. J.” touched too closely may have been in a position to thwart Gascoigne’s ambitions. Even so, the prefatory letters are really all in the Poesies’ that seek to ameliorate the problem. The poems in Poesies, with the exception of “Master F. J,” are unchanged, and the changes to Master F. J. are minor. Its setting moves from England to Italy, where its characters acquire Italian names. The most significant change, the regrouping of the poems as “Floures, Hearbes, and Weedes,” allows Gascoigne to claim to the divines that the poems offer moral instruction (see Clegg, 1995, ch. 5).

Syrithe Pugh (2009) finds that Gascoigne’s experience of censorship “echoes Ovid’s.” The emperor Augustus banished Ovid for his amatory poem, Ars Amatoria; Gascoigne’s censored poems are also amatory (p. 573). Pugh notes as well that in the first prefatory letter Gascoigne mentions Ovid as “an example of a penitent love poet” (p. 575). Gascoigne, however, is not simply echoing Ovid, he is appropriating some of his strategies. In Tristia Ovid claimed that the Ars Amatoria, written long ago, was “the amusement of my youth” (Ovid, 1924, p. 35). Later he objected to Caeser’s charge that it taught adultery, and he made the defense that if verse be read “with upright mind, it will be established that it can injure nobody” (pp. 71, 75). He then claimed that he alone was denied the liberty other poets enjoyed in writing about love. Any “lerned divine” (indeed anyone with a humanist education) would have known Ovid’s fate, his complaints about his freedom denied, and his defense against charges of teaching immorality. Gascoigne (1575) protested his moral intentions to the Divines in this vein in the first letter, where he claimed the liberty of poetry: “For it seemeth vntoo mee that in all ages Poetrie hath beene not onely permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good and excellent qualitie” (¶iii). In the second letter he repeats Ovid’s claim that reading his poetry with an upright mind cannot lead to injury. Gascoigne warns the young gentlemen that “it is your using … or misusing of these Posies that may make me praysed or dispraised for publishing the same” (2¶3^r-v). Given the first two letters, the third letter, “To the Readers generally,” has an unusual shift in focus. Gascoigne turns from an Ovidian defense of his Poesies to his defense of poesie:

Thus much to the ende that myne intent may appeare in publishing of these Posies. Wherein as there are many things moral, so are there also some verses more sauced with wantonnesse than with wisedome. And as there are some ditties which may please and delight the godly and graver sort, so are there some which may allure the yonger sort unto fond attempts. But what for that? Hath Terence been forbidden to be read, because his Comedies are rehearsals of many madde prankes played by wanton youths? No surely. (¶¶¶)

The reference to Terence together with “wanton youths” alludes to the school curriculum. Just before this in the third letter, he had referred to his schoolmaster “which taught me Grammer” who “woulde always say that some schollers be wonne to studies by strypes, some other by fayre meanes, some by promises, some by praises, some by vainglorie, and some by shame” (¶¶¶). Gascoigne suggests that studying poetry in school could be a “fayre means” to win “Some schollers,” a matter of considerable debate.

Gascoigne’s schoolmaster in “To the Readers generally” refers to Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s tutor between 1548 and 1550. In defending English poetry, Gascoigne is in dialogue with Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), which condemned both rhyme and the introduction of foreign words (inkhorns) into English poetry (O’Day, 2004). Gascoigne’s first prefatory letter tells the divine, that although “constreyned for the cadence of rime, or per licentium Poeticum, to use an Ynkehorne terme, or a strange word,” he has sought “to make our native language commendable in it selfe” (¶iiii). Gascoigne’s reference to Terence also speaks to Ascham, who objected to teaching Terence in the schools because he was like a “meane painter … making the worst part of the picture” (Ascham, 1570, Riii). Only slightly above this scorn for Terence was Ascham’s dislike of all poesy, including epic and lyric, in schools:

But, because, in this little book, I purpose to teach a yong scholer to goe, not to danse; to speake; not to sing, (when Poetes in deed, namelie Epic and Lyric, as these be, are the dancers: and rime singers) but Oratores and Historia, be those cumlie goers, and faire and wise speakers, of whom I wish my scholer to wayte upon the first. (1570, Siii)

Ascham’s position on the place of poetry in the schools speaks to de tradendis Disciplinis (1531), by Juan Luís Vives, whose educational methods Ascham adapted, and whose views on poetry Gascoigne seems to have known (Watson, 1913, pp. xxxv–xli).

Vives compared studying the classics to “wandering amongst thorns, poisons, aconite, and most threatening pestilence that he is to take from them only what is useful, and to throw aside all the rest” (Watson, 1913, p. 125). Although Vives admires poetry because it “corresponds to the melody of the human soul,” it can be dangerous because of its bad lessons. Even so, he anticipates a skeptical audience:

Someone will ask, “How then ought we to read? How are we to gather healthy plants from amongst so many poisonous weeds. What are to be our precautions in stepping amongst the thorns? Or should we rather despise and reject them all?” (p. 127)

Vives answers by turning to Plutarch of Chaeronea, who advises “that the maxims of the moral poets should be opposed to the immoral teachings of the others” so that “the one sort will nullify the other sort” (Watson, 1913, p. 127). Gascoigne’s grouping of his poems as “Weeds, Herbes, and Floures” not only takes Plutarch’s advice but incorporates the plant imagery Vives used in warning against the dangers of poetry.

Gascoigne’s mention of censorship in the first letter also reflects Vives. According to Vives, if, as Plutarch suggested, no moral poets may be found to counter the immoral ones, the poems should be expurgated: “The diseased limb should not be cut off, but should be cured by treatment with medicine. Obscene passages should be wholly cut out from the text” (Watson, 1913, p. 128). Is it wrong, Vives asks, “to exclude those verses from Ovid, which would make a young man worse than he is?” Or would it be a crime if “the Ars Amandi of Ovid perished?” Whoever would do this would be performing a service “to poetry and to poets”: “This would be, as in a garden: a gardener only leaves the healthy herbs, and weeds out all the poisonous plants” (p. 128). Gascoigne cleverly appropriated this in telling the “lerned Divines” (“learned” here is significant) that he has “gelded” his verse of all filthiness (as Vives would have it done). Gascoigne, then, is not really commenting on Tudor censorship. Instead he is addressing concerns about poetry’s proper place. Nor is he making a case about the school curriculum. Instead he uses the curriculum to make the wider claim that “gelded” of inappropriate (indecorous) language, poetry on a wide range of topics, including love, has value, including value for moral education.

Baldwin, Gascoigne, and Spenser were all writing during a time when English poetry was self-consciously seeking to establish its own identity and integrity. Their concern about poetic license and the poet’s place in society participates in a critical conversation that includes Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie (ca. 1579 in manuscript) and George Puttenham’s The arte of English Poesie (1588). Why, then, one may ask, has literary history preferred to see the thematization of censorship in these Tudor writers (Baldwin, Gascoigne, and Spenser) as reflecting contemporary “conditions of writing” rather than very cleverly appropriating classical and humanist conventions to advance English poetry? The most obvious answer is that these writers each encountered suppression—although their experiences were quite different from those they wrote about. The prefaces to both the 1559 and 1563 editions of the Mirror for Magistrates say that in the course of the book’s printing Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor, suppressed the book. Scholars have sought parallels between contemporary events during Mary’s reign and Baldwin’s complaints as Gardiner’s motive, but it is not necessary to go beyond Gardiner himself. Although not initially opposed to England’s rejection of papal authority, Gardiner was an outspoken Catholic controversialist during Edward VI’s Protestant rule, and his views on Edward’s religious settlement landed him in the Tower. Mary released him when she ascended the throne, and he zealously led the Marian effort to restore the Catholic Church. As a Catholic controversialist, Gardiner would have known Baldwin’s Protestant controversial writing well. The queen’s anxieties about Protestant writers afforded Gardiner sufficient motive for staying the Mirror’s printing. Baldwin, unlike Collingbourne, was not accused of treason (or heresy), nor did he die for his verse. Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, though it may have been censured, was probably not censored, but the Poesies was called in. A 13 August 1576 entry in the Stationers’ Company Register indicates that fifty copies of the Poesies were seized in compliance with an order “by appointment of the Q. M. Commissioners” without any reason given. It may have been for immorality; the book may not have had the proper license. Perhaps Gascoigne had not complied with expectations for preprint authorization. We will never really know why—only that the book was censored a year after publication, and only a few copies were left unsold. As for the Faerie Queene, James VI asked his cousin, Queen Elizabeth, to suppress the work for representing his mother, Mary Queen of Scots(Duessa’s trial in Book V, canto 9), but Lord Burghley conciliated James through diplomatic means, and the book continued to be sold in England (Clegg, 2001, pp. 92–93).

While his Faerie Queene went uncensored, Spenser did find himself in trouble for another literary work, and this experience offers a better paradigm for understanding Tudor literary censorship than others that have been advanced. At the end of the Faerie Queene, Spenser refers to another of his writings that was not well received: “With which some wicked tongues did it backbite, / And bring into a mighty Peres displeasure (6,12,41). Critics generally agree that he here refers to “Mother Hubberd’s Tale,” included in the Complaints (1591). Critics disagree on whether this verse satire aroused official ire in the 1570s, when it may have been circulating in manuscript or in 1591 when it was printed. The “Peres” who were displeased were William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son, Robert Cecil. “Mother Hubberd’s Tale,” a beast tale about an ape who usurps the crown and a fox who does the ape’s bidding, portrays the fox as a corrupt courtier who “loaded” his cubs “with lordship and with might” (Qi). Although the Complaints is said to have been called in, the evidence is conjectural at best. Harold Stein (1934) probably comes closest to understanding what may have happened: “the authorities used semi-official pressure and had Ponsonby [the printer] impound the unsold copies” (p. 85) “Mother Hubberd’s Tale” was excluded from the first edition of Spenser’s complete works. Robert Cecil died in 1612, and subsequent editions of Spenser’s works contained the tale. Whether or not Spenser intended to satirize Cecil, father and son, in the fox and his cubs, the Cecils were displeased and used their power to suppress the work.

In explaining the censure of An Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, Gascoigne said that “busie conjectures have presumed” that “the Adventures of Master F. J” was “written to the scandalizing of some worthie personage whom they would seeme therby to know” (2¶i^r). This certainly describes the problem with “Mother Hubberd’s Tale.” It also applies to nearly every other example I can find of Tudor literary censorship—or censure. William Brooke, Lord Cobham, took offense that the riotous old knight in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I bore the name of one of his ancestors, and someone, presumably Shakespeare, changed “Cobham” to “Falstaff” (Shapiro, 2005, p. 17). Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth’s godson, was threatened with Star Chamber suits for gossiping about and satirizing prominent persons, especially the earl of Leicester, in his New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596; Warren, 2004). At the Lord Mayor’s behest, Thomas Nashe went to prison, “maliced for writing against Londoners” in Christs Tearss over Jerusalem (1593; Hutson, 1987, p. 199). And in 1599 ten works of satire, most printed a year or two earlier, were called in; eight of them were burned three days later. The order (“Bishops Ban”) also called in and prohibited the further printing of books by Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, who had been engaged in an acrimonious literary rivalry. Many of the satires named in the Bishops’ Ban can be read as attacks on courtiers, especially Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex, Lord Martial of England, who at the time of the bishop of London’s order was engaged in a military campaign to suppress a rebellion in Ireland (Clegg, 1997, ch. 9).

In Censorship & Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England,  Deborah Shuger (2006) argues that Tudor-Stuart England had a system of formal and informal controls which enforced culturally accepted norms of truth, charity, and respect. The system’s end, Shuger tells us, should be seen “as suppressing hate speech” (p.275). These few occasions when Tudor literature met with censure and censorship lend some weight to Shuger’s argument, except that the formal system of controls, licensing, and authorization did not detect violations of the norms. All the books—Spenser, Harington, all the satires—were licensed; objections arose after their publication from aristocratic readers who were extremely sensitive about their honor. Collingbourne maintained that “The authours meaning should ryght be heard, / He knoweth best to what ende he endyteth,” but despite this, he admits, “Wordes sometime bear mor than the hart behiteth” (1563, Xvii^v). The conditions of writing for literary authors in Tudor England were complicated. Except for touching a living person’s honor, poets enjoyed the licentia they coveted. What more their words might “sometime bear” to their powerful readers, however, could pose a problem.