Every now and then I post something old, in this case an academic (shudder) paper I submitted in 1990. I know that a great part of this inclination is sheer laziness, but if it was good then, it's probably good now.
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You can speak as you openly like against... tyrants, as long as you can be understood differently, because you are not trying to avoid giving offense, only its dangerous repercussions. If danger can be avoided by some ambiguity of expression, everyone will admire its cunning.
--Quintilian, Institutes
Perhaps owing to our twentieth-century legacy of "new critical" assumptions, Elizabethan literary criticism has rarely come to grips with the impact of official censorship upon writers and their works. Yet it is hard to escape the fact that few other historical periods have matched the repression inaugurated by the Tudors, who within fifty years of the introduction of print into England began to devise a censorship apparatus which required two hundred years and two revolutions to dismantle. Such repressive machinery was bound to affect not only the authors and readers o9f printed texts, but the institutions of public address-- sermons, parliamentary speeches, theater-- and private correspondence and conversation as well.
The institution of modern censorship properly began with the response of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the pamphlets and broadsides of Martin Luther and his supporters in Germany. The emperor's Edict of Worms promulgated in 1521 contained a "Law of Printing," which prohibited the printing, sale, possession, reading, or copying of Luther's works or other material deemed contrary to the Catholic religion or directed against the pope, prelates of the church, princes, or university faculties. Any libelous material already in. existence was to be confiscated and publicly burned. Charles appointed professors of theology as censors and empowered local. municipal councils within the empire to administer censorship. Printers were forced to take an oath of compliance with the strictures of pre-publication censorship, with penalties ranging from heavy fines to exclusion from their profession. In 1530 the existing censorship mechanisms, having proved ineffective in stopping the spread of Lutheran ideas, was supplemented by the Edict of the Diet of Augsburg, which required the printer's imprimatur and identification of the city of publication, and by the Edict of Speyer in 1570, which legally confined the press to free imperial cities or towns that had a princely court or university.
In 1564 the papacy itself undertook the business of censorship in decisive fashion by publishing its first Index librorum prohibitorum (known as the Tridentine Index, because it had been authorized by the Council of Trent). The Index included a long list of authors whose entire output was prohibited, an additional list of banned individual titles, and rules for the expurgation of books whose "chief matter" was deemed good, though they contained isolated offenses. The promulgation of the Index provided the last of sixteenth-century European censorship's essential components, along with a process of pre-publication screening to halt the printing of offensive works and the establishment of international and local interdiction of contraband publications. In spite of such formidable weaponry, however, neither church nor state was able to stem the tide of Reformation literature on the continent.
To England, then, belongs the dubious distinction of inventing the first truly effective model of state repression in modern history. Consisting of the same basic components as the apparatus taking shape on the continent, the main difference in the English system was that the state took the leading role in censorship. Taking censorship ougt of the hands of conscience-stricken, lax, or corrupt ecclesiastical officials, the English crown now defined heresy, issued censorship regulations, and relied on civil agencies to enforce its decrees. The Tudor repression was relatively uniform and compliance by English publishers and readers relatively general, at least until the appearance of widespread Puritan dissention late in the. sixteenth century.
Printing was at first not deemed a social or political threat, and there was no attempt in England to control it forr nearly half a century after the introduction of Caxton's press. The impetus for the rise of censorship in England, as in the rest of Europe, was the spread of Lutheran ideas. Luther's works were burned by order of the church of Cambridge in 1520 and in London the following year. Then in 1529, anticipating the papal index by 35 years, Henry VIII promulgated his own list of 85 prohibited book titles, including 22 by Luther, eleven by Zwingli, nine by Oecolapadius, and two by Wycliffe. Without a reliable machinery of enforcement, however, censorship did little to stop the production, importation, or sale of these books. Henry responded in 1530 by proclamation of a licensing system, at first applied only to religious publications, which for the first time put censorship firmly under secular control. Well aware of the power of the printed word in all aspects of policy, Henry would henceforth follow a strategy not only of eliminating undesirable texts, but also of stimulating the circulation of printed matter that supported his cause.
The early 1530s witnessed further book-burnings, along with the execution by burning of those convicted of circulating Reformation literature. The turning point of Tudor history, and the point of no return for English censorship, came in Henry's Act of Supremacy in 1534 and the ensuing Proclamation of 1538, in which the "Great Bible" united king, church, and censor into one absolute ruler whose powers now extended to all kinds of printed texts. Henry's Privy Council now replaced the inefficient hierarchy of ecclesiastical examiners and re-aimed its weapons against the adherents of Rome with a wave of executions, most notably of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher.
Censorship under the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Mary, probably the most lenient in Tudor history, proceeded under the desire to reconcile the sharp divergences in matters of polity and religion. Soon after the accession of Mary, however, it became apparent that a policy of national consensus was doomed, and the stringent censorship of Henry was resumed by Mary's 1555 prohibition of 26 named authors, as well as any book in a foreign language "containing false doctrine contrary and against the catholic faith, and the doctrine of the catholic church" (Gillett 28, citing John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1563). Mary's other refinement upon the machinery of censorship was the establishment in 1557 of the Stationers Company, a trade organization of printers under royal charter, which functioned as the official publishing monopoly.
Queen Elizabeth undertook the manifold strengthening and sophistication of the represssive system already in place. Her injunctions of 1559 brought into the business of censorship, alongside those put in place by her predecessors, the Anglican Church hierarchy. Later her Star Chamber decree of 1586, giving the Stationers Company express authority to conduct inspections of print shops for contraband throughout the realm, became the capstone of a legal edifice which stood more than a century.
Book burnings under Elizabeth continued the by now customary persecution of religious nonconformists (including, among others, books by Thomas Cartwright, Walter Travers, Henry Nicholas, Robert Brown, Robert Harrison, Henry Barrow, John Greenway, Francis Johnson, John Udall, and the Martin Marprelates tracts), but significantly they began to include works by such advocates of popular liberty as George Buchanan (De jure regni, 1579) and Hubert Languet (Vindiciae contra tyrannis, 1579). The intense controversy of 1579-1581 over the question of royal succession was quelled by the wrath of Elizabeth against those who dared to express their opinions in print, particularly the gruesome punishment meted out to John Stubbs. The final years of Elizabeth's reign were marked by yet another wave of bannings and burnings, this time mainly directed against satires which "offended against morality," leading to an outright decree by the bishops against offensive histories and printed plays, along with satires.
Few critical studies of recent years have undertaken to assess the impact of censorship as a factor in shaping either the form or content of Renaissance English literature, probably because the majority of critics retain the notion of literature as somehow immune from the vicissitudes of politics. One significant exception has been the study, published posthumously in 1987, by William Empson of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Empson's investigation compares versions of the Faust legend in German and English with the extant versions of Marlowe's play and concludes that the institutions of Elizabethan censorship were responsible for the wholesale mutilation of the play.
In the background of Empson's discussion are the ghastly contemporary events on the European continent, as a French traveller reported in 1590: "Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for witches. Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villagers on their account. Travellers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound (49). Small wonder that the German Faust-book of 1587 was one of the first international best-sellers. Faust seized the popular imagination as a particularly evil witch, but at the same time magicians, well-received by many rulers including Elizabeth, claimed to work via the Middle Spirits, neither of Heaven nor of Hell. The drastic mangling of Marlowe's text, amounting to one quarter of the play's original length, is traced by Empson to its probable entanglement with the Star Chamber on the volatile issue of magic and the propensities of the English public toward the kind of witch phobia gripping thee continent.
Of still more interest to scholars than such an explanation of the impact of censorship upon an individual text is the question of its general effects upon Elizabethan literature and literary careers, and especially the problems of interpretation that arise from the critic's recognition of these effects. Annabel Patterson's Censorship and Interpretation is perhaps to only recent study to address these concerns. In her examination of a wide range of political pamphlets, royal proclamations, published speeches and other records of parliamentary proceedings, sermons, plays, histories, editions and translation of classics, familiar letters, pastoral romances, and neo-Pindaric odes, Patterson explores the conventions of "oblique discourse" characteristic of the English Renaissance and sets forth her own theory of "functional ambiguity," in which "the indeterminacy inveterate to language was fully and knowingly exploited by authors and readers alike" (18). It is to censorship, she insists, "that we in part owe our very concept of 'literature,' as a kind of discourse with rules of its own," and further, that acceptance of her thesis "might require a review of that other set of unexamined assumptions, about the freedom of the literary, or the critical, or the textual, from historical concerns" (4).
The starting point of Patterson's argument is the banishment in 1535 of the French poet Clement Marot by King Francis I and his subsequent complaint against the government agents who had seized the manuscripts from hnis private study in Blois. In Marot's remonstrance to Francis, Patterson finds a "symbolic paradigm of a profoundly mistaken relationship between culture and authority" (5), the idea that both the artist's creative "space," sanctified by the poet's historical privilege, and the reader's right to interpretation are inviolable. "Central to [the Marot incident and its textual consequences] is the equivocal and fragile relationship... between writers in the early modern period and the holders of power, a relationship whose maintenance was crucial to all writers who aspired (as who did not?) to have some influence, either on the shape of the national culture or more directly on the course of events" (7). On the one hand, this relationship is expressed as a "cultural bargain between writers and political leaders"; on the other, Patterson perceives "another binary relationship," that between writing and interpretation, or between author and reader" and asserts that "censorship united writers and readers in a common interest as to how interpretation in fact worked" (7).
In the body of Renaissance literature, Patterson finds "a highly sophisticated system of oblique communication, of unwritten rules whereby writers could communicate with readers or audiences... without producing a direct confrontation," a ubiquitous "system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence" (45). Whatever the efficacy of direct application of the draconian censorship laws, she asserts, "there is a whole range of publishing in England that can be better accounted for by assuming some degree of cooperation and understanding on the part of the authorities themselves...: there were conventions that both sides accepted as to how far a writer could go in explicit address to the contentious issues of his day, how he could encode his opinions so that nobody would be required to make an example of him [by punishment]" (11).
The bulk of Patterson's book is devoted to a careful reconstruction, by analysis of a broad range of selected texts, of this cultural code in England of the late sixteenth century. In her discussion of ambiguities and conflicting interpretations over time of Sidney's Arcadia, she quotes a telling remark from Fulke Greville's Life of Sidney to explain the tendency of Renaissance authors to conceal their "serious" intentions: "that hypocriticall figure ironia, wherein men commonly (to keep avove their workes) seeme to make toies of the utmost they can doe" (cited 43). Another device widely employed by Renaissance authors to accommodate their works to the demands of the censor, one that has perplexed literary critics ever since, was the use of inexact analogies as a deliberate strategy to allow the author an "escape route" from accusations of libel. In certain authors she marks the tendency to hide behind the opinions of classical authorities, and she cites the use of such introductory materials as dedicatory epistles, epigraphs, and emblematic title pages to "alert the reader to his special responsibilities." The central predicament of censorship, says Patterson, became a search for (in the words of one bemused commentator) blatantly offensive "buggeswordes." Hence the indeterminacy of language so characteristic of English writing in the sixteenth century becomes essential to the hermeneutics of censorship; hence the question of authorial intention, hidden beneath the give-and-take of political life, begins to acquire a problematique of its own.
Among the texts Patterson analyzes are plays by Ben Jonson and Phillip Massinger, Shakespeare's King Lear, a court masque by Thomas Carew, John Donne's sermons, the seventeenth-century roman a clef, and the new genre, under the Stuarts, of the publication of private letters. In the English Renaissance she finds the "one period in European history before our own in which there was only one kind [of censorship] that really counted; in which political censorship was so pervasive that it rose to the forefront, as least among intellectuals and to some degree all literate people, as the central problem of consciousness and communication." In the more recent critical methods of Marxism and Freudianism and their twentieth-century offshoots, Patterson posits the possibility among the "subtle intersections of state censorship with self-censorship, as fear shades into caution, caution into prudence, and prudence into more self-serving emotions and motives" (17).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Empson, William. Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus". Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Gillett, Charles Ripley. Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat P, 1964.
Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: U of WI P, 1984.
Siebert, Fredrick Seaton. Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776. Urbana: U of IL P, 1965.
IN ROTATION:
Hampton Hawes, Three Classic Albums Plus (Contemporary/ Avid Jazz, 1955, 1956)
Hawes's sheer velocity is a challenge to the rest of the quartet in the three-volumeAll Night Session series, especially to guitarist Jim Hall. Bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Bruz Freeman complete the rhythm section for a studio session lasting an entire November night in 1956.
The Plus in the compilation's title refers to the first of three Hampton Hawes Trio outings the previous year, minus one track.
Miles Davis, The Columbia Years, 1955-1985 (Columbia 5-LP compilation, released 1987?)
In the late 1980s, this was the largest Miles Davis compilation one could purchase, though its size has been surpassed many times since. Still, I like this collection; there are the usual advantages of the LP over the CD, not least that the enclosed booklet, containing an extensive appreciation by Nat Hentoff, is legible and beautiful to look at.
The arrangement of the set is interesting: instead of ordering the selections chronologically or according to genre, each disc is representative of a single aspect of Davis's playing. Thus the first LP is devoted to blues, followed by those representing standards, Davis originals, moods, and latter-day electric performances. One of the reasons I've kept the set for so many years is that fifth disc, covering music that is not as appealing to me without having to listen to entire albums. Nevertheless, I first found here "Honky Tonk" from Get Up With It, a collection from the early and mid-1970s, and enjoyed it enough to buy the album many years later.
Though Davis has been derided for "selling out" for this sort of music played in big arenas, one must also understand that he was looking for a new audience, beyond the largely white club-goers who were aging. He especially wanted to attract a young, black audience by getting into the styles with which they were already familiar.
Other highlights of the Box set include "So What" in the version recorded live at Carnegie Hall with the Gil Evans Orchestra in 1961. The first disc gave me my first opportunity to hear two of the themes from the soundtrack ofAscenseur Pour L'échafaud from 1957. This time through I enjoyed the "moods" disc most.
Ralph Sutton and Jay McShann, Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players (Chiaroscuro, 1989)
Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Verve, 1996)
The Very Best of Sheryl Crow (A&M compilation, 2003)
Sheryl: Music Featured in the Documentary (A&M 2-CD set, 2022)The entire Sheryl Crow phenomenon from the 1980s on took place largely without my notice. It was my kids' musical era, along with Alanis Morriset, The White Stripes, and Prince.
I finally have taken a chance on her music, and I like what I heard, a real rock 'n' roll woman, a singer-songwriter cut from the same fabric as Bonnie Raitt, whom I have also come to appreciate in recent years.
