Historicism and the Question of Censorship in the Renaissance

Author(s): JANET CLARE

Source: English Literary Renaissance , SPRING 1997, Vol. 27, No. 2 (SPRING 1997), pp.
155-176
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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 JANET CLARE

Historicism and the Question of Censorship

in the Renaissance

Renaissance literary studies may appear a belated endeavor. For

A Renaissance more discussion thana adecade
more than of decade literarycriticial
now much the legitimacy now studies much may and criticial appear the nature writing a belated of on historicism endeavor. Renaissance For in
writing on Renaissance
culture has claimed to be historically inflected, and with varying degrees
of sympathy and hostility the methodologies and historical conceptual-
izations of practitioners have been debated in scholarly journals and at
conferences. Cultural materialism, new historicism, material feminism
and, less centrally, revisionism, have become referents for the work of
criticis who lay claim to an historical mode of inquiry into the literary
text.1 Most recently, Jean E. Howard has argued at length that the Re-
naissance theater, far from being a distinct realm apart from the political
life of its culture, participated in ideological production and served a
variety of class and gender interests.2 Ideological and culturally engaged
work on the English Renaissance stage has allowed controlling access to
theatrical activity as a significant political issue. But the concept of
censorship assumed by such critics remains fundamentally idealist, un-
touched by complex and changing material conditions. In reconsider-
ing the cultural practice of censorship and in focusing on its deployment
in current historicism, the overall aims of this essay are broad. I am
concerned not only with the location of censorship within Renaissance
studies, specifically drama, but also with certain limitations of current
historical method and the suggestion of a more inclusive historicist
approach to the literary Renaissance.
From the start questions have been asked about how truly historical

i . A useful anthology of new historicist and cultural materialist materials has been edited by
Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (London, 1992).
2. Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London, 1994).

155

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 156 English Literary Renaissance

some of the cultural work on the Renaissance can claim to be.3 As some
of these questions impinge on the representation of censorship in the
early modern period, they need to be rehearsed here. Briefly, there must
be some reservation about the comparative neglect of the material his-
tory of archival research in favor of the examination of more anecdotal
material.4 The yoking together of the literary text and the non-literary
artifact suppresses differences between circumstances of production, and
thus tends to ignore respective rhetorical situations. In the choice of
both "canonical" and "non-canonical" works which are then fitted into
a common episteme, there is often a worrying arbitrariness of connec-
tion which must unsettle claims to serious historical investigations.5 In
the effort to remap the Renaissance, the cultural text has often been
chosen not because it is part of a series with the literary text, but because
it illustrates those paradigms which historicists have wanted to see as
socially active. Further, it has been persuasively argued that despite the
repeated rejection of formalist approaches to traditional literary texts by
Stephen Greenblatt and others, such an examination is residual in the
treatment of non-literary texts which serve as interpretative models for
the literary.6

3. Critiques of new historicism are now numerous. See especially Jean Howard, "The New
Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 13-20; Edward
Pechter, "The New Historicism and its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," PMLA,
102 (1987), 292-303; Howard Horwitz, " 'I Can't Remember': Skepticism, Synthetic Histo-
ries, Critical Action," South Atlantic Quarterly, 87 (1988), 787-820; James Holstun, "Ranting at
the New Historicism," English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 189-22$; Brook Thomas, The
New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, 199 1); Brian Vickers, Appropriating
Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven, 1993), pp. 214-72; and two articles
by Carolyn Porter, "Are we Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly, 87 (1988), 743-86
and "History and Literature: After the New Historicism," New Literary History, 21 (1990),
253-72.
4. For Stephen Greenblatt s defense of the anecdote, see Learning to Curse: Essays in Ea
Modern Culture (London, 1990). Greenblatt comments: "The historical anecdote function
as explanatory illustration than as disturbance, that which requires explanation, contextua
tion, interpretation" (p. 5). He claims to have rejected historical evidence conventionall
voked because "it was the enemy of wonder: it was brought in to lay contingency an
turbance to rest." But this does not really satisfy the reservation about cultural poetics, t
practitioners privilege the socially marginal texts at the expense of more mainstream and i
diate, hence influential, literary discourse.
5. See Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare" in Shakespeare Reproduced
Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion O'Connor (New York and Lo
1987), p. 34.
6. See Alan Liu, The Power of Formalism: the New Historicism, ELH, 56 (1989), 721
and Thomas, The New Historicism, pp. 43-45.

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 Janet Clare 157

Cultural materialists are often impre

icists as practicing a similarly motiva
can be misleading. Whereas new histo
tioners as a reaction against formalis
sance studies drew its strength from
literary history commonly associat
idealist Elizabethan world picture wh
of this cultural vision had already be
not claim to be of the new historicis
until the preeminence of the ideolo
became more generally apparent how
tioning of texts against a stable cultu
icism could be. In contrast, cultura
getic, if somewhat overdetermined
registering the ideological encount
method must be met with reservations. In the construction of Renais-
sance texts as sites of challenge to and transgression of dominant ide-
ologies, cultural materialists have come perilously close to creating a
new orthodoxy which can become as inflexible as the older cultural
history they so vigorously reject.
As even a short summary allows, there are considerable reservations
about allegedly historical approaches to and analysis of the text in the
prevailing climate of literary and cultural studies. When we turn to
censorship and the position it occupies in such writings, the reservations
deepen. Neither new historicism nor cultural materialism has developed
any formulations to deal with the presence and impact of censorship in
the early modern period. In view of the historicist insistence that litera-
ture cannot transcend the shifting pressures and particularity of material
conditions, this oversight is curious. Moreover, in new historicist think-
ing, negotiation is a key concept, the means by which the social world

7. Jonathan Dollimore s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shake-
speare and his Contemporaries (Brighton, 1984) remains the classic example of such readings of
Renaissance drama. See Paul Werstine's review, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 522-24, for a
qualified acceptance of Dollimore s terms. More recently, Alan Sinfield has stated that "pa-
tronage and censorship persuaded artists to incorporate secular and religious symbolism that
ratified the prevailing power arrangements and projected them onto a supernatural dimension."
See Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), p. 182. The
lack of any clear formulation about censorship is evident, however, in Sinfield s unquestioning
acceptance later in the book of Annabel Patterson s idea of a cultural bargain between writers
and authority determining literary output.

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 158 English Literary Renaissance

and the world of the theater interact.8 Here again, one would
there to be greater reference to censorship as a vehicle of me
between representation and reality, problematic as those terms are
after all, the existence and implementation of censorship which d
the objects, means, and extent of dramatic representation.

II

Any analysis of the production of drama has to be extended to in

history, in a more than factual sense, of the institutions which m
operational. Forsaking such investigations, the new historicists di
a preoccupation with an abstracted notion of power circulating in
modern society. Such power is not specifically manifested in the g
ment, wealth, the military, or employment; but it is symbolic
display and resonates in social exchange and negotiation. As a mea
social and artistic control, the focus is not the institution of cen
but power in general. Power not only represses, it creates a "
which serves as its own legitimation. Such power, new historicist
argued, interacts with the cultural artefact which serves to repli
For new historicists and, less markedly, cultural materialists, pow
seen as a vital ingredient both in social and in textual formation.
institutionalized if crude form of power over literary output and
form, censorship also represents a more insidious means of co
cultural boundaries. But it has been given no real place in the
equation by critics with new historicist predilections and, in the
cultural materialists, it has been regarded unproblematically as rep
and draconian.9
Stephen Greenblatt has raised a number of thought-provok
disparate, points about censorship in the early modern period
early essay he made a legitimate observation that it is not the tex
over which the censor had control, but the "full story" of a play s
mance.10 But, while elaborating the "story" of production, in thi
of Richard II, Greenblatt did not attempt to accommodate cen
within the story. In the Introduction to Shakespearean Negotiation
is a further allusion to censorship as a set of regulations governin
8. For a critique of new historicist understanding of the concept, see Theodore B. L
"Negotiation and New Historicism," PMLA, 105 (1990), 477-90.
9. See Radical Tragedy, pp. 22-25.
10. Introduction, "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms," Genre, Special
(1982), 3.

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 Janet Clare 159

was or was not permissible on the stage

to give way to the more abstract insis
predetermined and enclosed.11 It is
which informed Greenblatt s analysis o
Such a conviction, however, bears lit
about the actual processes of censorshi
of a dynamic form of censorship wh
pressure on the writers of the period
essentialized and disembodied power, a
Renaissance society.
Here, the debt to cultural history as
immediate. While acknowledging the
cault focused not on the modes of ex
which has become ubiquitous, on "d
power is dispersed throughout a cultur
sin in medieval allegory, subtle and all
thing but repressive, if it never did any
think one would be brought to obey it
what makes it accepted, is simply the f
as a force that says no, but that it trave
pleasure, forms knowledge, produces
ered as a productive network which ru
much more than as a negative instance
For Foucault, power is abstracted and o
and political discourse. Moreover, all
sorbed into an increasingly wider syste
power are not made comprehensible by
the state or legislative process.13 Inste
prism of the technologies of power wh
in discourse, a term favored by some h
than "literature" or "history." In Fou
improbable places: in prisons, doctors'
This concept of power proved amenab

ii. See "Invisible Bullets" in Shakespearean Negotia

Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 37, 53, 65.
12. Michel Foucault, Power / Knowledge, ed. Colin
13. For an assessment of Foucault s contributio
"Michel Foucault s History of Culture," The New
1989), pp. 25-46.

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 1 60 English Literary Renaissance

of their chosen texts, although, significantly, in the process the ope

of Foucault 's "productive network" has been simplified to what seem
be a donnée of the new historicism and- central to new historicist
analysis- the powerful containment of subversive impulses in texts. In
Renaissance Self- Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt described the formation
of literary and social identities through a specific form of power. Power
is seen as localized in the church, the court, colonial administration, and
the patriarchal family, but, more significantly, is "diffused in ideological
structures of meaning, characteristic modes of expression, recurrent nar-
rative patterns."14 The identification of power in recurrent narrative
patterns has again been intuited in Shakespearean Negotiations, where
Greenblatt has claimed that the drama absorbed and exploited funda-
mental energies of political authority. In replicating the essence of that
authority, plays produce both subversion and the powerful containment
ofthat subversion. In such a way theatrical production served to confirm
the structure of human experience as proclaimed by those in authority.
Here Greenblatt drew on the nexus of power and pleasure, implicit in
Foucault, in his claim that the audience are urged in their pleasurable
appreciation to reconfirm social structures and hierarchies. Because of
the theatricality of royal power and the power of theatricality, spectators
on and offstage become acquiescent and malleable in the interests of the
state. In this way there is no chance of subversion taking hold. Subver-
sion may be manufactured and orchestrated, but it is always /already
contained.
There are a number of objections to this central new historicist prem-
ise. The commonsensical one is the question of agency. As Annabel
Patterson has said, the theory of containment implies that Shakespeare's
histories, unbeknown to himself, were serving the Elizabethan state
apparatus.15 There must also be further doubt about a totalizing view of
"top-down" containment. The work of social historians has shown that
the administration of civil and criminal justice was not merely a man-
ifestation of sovereign powers and that there could be a fairly broad
participatory base in local legal procedures.16 Conflicts might be re-
solved by arbitration and the law could be absorbed into local custom to
provide a structure for the regulation of disputes. Likewise, restrictions

14. Renaissance Self- Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1984), p. 8.
15. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1988), p. 25.
16. See Introduction, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A. J. Fletcher and
J. Stevenson (Cambridge, Eng., 1985) and Leinwand, "Negotiation and New Historicism."

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 Janet Clare i6i

on dramatic activity might spring

injury to his reputation. For exam
Milward, brought a libel case in the S
he and his wife, Agnes Howe, had
Chapman, The Old Joiner of Aldgate.
proven, the theater personnel were
suspended. Here we have a case of t
some success to control defamatory t
The conviction upon which Greenbla
cept of institutional collusion betwee
on a trans-historical notion of the
"The Renaissance had theories, as we
and psychological grounds for the pr
these were supplemented by explici
watching a play, Nashe suggested, wo
Greenblatt gives no further refere
nouncement, but presumably he is
Pennilesse in which Nashe puts forw
fense of plays, pitched in a character
prentice had not the opportunity to
"melancholie in his Chamber, devi
howe he may best exalt himselfe by
hatcher of plots against the state is a
mold of Jack Cade of 2 Henry VI.
Earlier, in his defense of current p
Nashe offers another oblique pers
fathers valiant acts . . . what can be a
effeminate dayes of ours?" (p. 212). T
ing the audience to make comparis
plays can unmask adverse cultural
edged: drama mirrors past heroisms,
tions. Theater can serve as both an
society. Nashe s argument thus can
carrying more subversive undertones

17. Details of the case and the relevant documents

found in C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare's
18. Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 18.
19. "Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Dive
McKerrow, 2nd ed., rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxf

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1 62 English Literary Renaissance

for theater as an antidote to rebellion is to abandon the sophist

reading techniques Greenblatt has applied elsewhere to literary and
literary texts. Such an analysis of discourse must apply equally
texts, historical documents, and historical materials. The one u
biguous point of contact between current historicisms and deconst
tion is the understanding that there is no surface or ideologically
cent reading of discourse.
The implication of the Introduction to Shakespearean Negotiation
that the enactment of subversion and containment has broad appli
to the Renaissance stage. But it is too easy and too simplistic to con
all plays which were produced on the Renaissance stage and to see t
as representative. In its overdetermined analyses, new historicist c
icism has by and large considered too few texts. New historicists h
chosen to work with texts which can be appropriated to expose the
of power and as illustrations of the familiar subversion /contai
trope. One such text is 2 Henry IV, discussed at length in Greenbla
celebrated essay "Invisible Bullets." The play is of particular in
here, because its moment of production coincided with a time of c
surveillance over the publication and performance of historical
rials. Indeed, its textual history is indicative of a play which encoun
opposition from the authorities: specifically, discrepancies between
Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 suggest that passages reportin
rebellion were removed from the play.20
Greenblatt s purpose to reveal the power politics of the drama b
rather differently with Thomas Harriot s A Brief and True Report
New Found Land of Virginia (1588), from which he constructs an i
pretative model for 2 Henry IV Harriots colonialist tract disclo
willingness on the part of the settlers to manipulate religious practi
order to maintain the subordination of the Algonquian Indians
voices of the Algonquians are recorded and it is revealed how Chris
rituals were presented to them to induce awe and acquiescenc
manner typical of new historicist practice, a ligature is formed
Shakespeare s second tetralogy, which exemplifies the consolidation
Lancastrian power by the same artful manipulation. The plays o
trate their own subversion by recording and testing alien voice
there are significant moments of exposition or explanation wh

20. See Janet Clare, " Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority": Elizabethan and Jacobean D
Censorship (Manchester, 1990), pp. 68-70.

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 Janet Clare 163

becomes apparent that subversion is co

sion. Alien voices, such as those of Falst
the drawer Francis are thus recorded,
tions for his collaborations with soc
audience.
Greenblatt s imaginative analysis of textual detail rested, however, on
fundamental premises which are far from secure. The first is the formu-
lation already mentioned, that plays produce their own subversion, only
to rein in such impulses in the interests of royal power. Yet in applying
the episteme Greenblatt is highly selective. The contestatory, uncon-
tainable moments such as the insurrection in 2 Henry IVy which almost
certainly provoked some kind of censorship, have been virtually ig-
nored. If the play itself suppresses or negates subversive impulses, how
does one explain the absence in the Quarto of 1600 of a number of pas-
sages in which the rebels state their case? It is notable, for example, that
in the Gaultree Forest episode, where the rebels surrender in good faith
to John of Lancaster, the Archbishop s measured reply to Westmorland is
missing. The Archbishop is eloquent and persuasive:
Here me more plainly.
I have in equal balance justly weighed
What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer,
And find our griefs heavier than our offences.
We see which way the stream of time doth run
And are enforced from our most quiet there
By the rough torrent of occasion,
And have the summary of all our griefs,
When time shall serve, to show in articles,
Which long ere this we offered to the King,
And might by no suit gain our audience. 4. 1 .66-76

These lines, as with others spoken by the rebels and omitted from the
text of 1600, work to sway the reader or the audience toward a sympa-
thetic understanding of the rebellion; for this reason they may well have
been suppressed by the censor.
Any theory of containment of contestatory impulses within texts
must take account of the full range of subversive voices and how these
disruptive presences are brought under control. In his analysis of 2 Henry
IV, Greenblatt s alien voices are, with the exception of Falstaff, deter-
mined on a class basis. It is the commoners who are perceived as a threat
to society. In a teleologica! view of history Falstaff s recruits are de-

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1 64 English Literary Renaissance

scribed as the masterless men who would enlist in the new model a
But as has been argued, the truly subversive voices in the plays are
of the social elite, Henry Percy in 1 Henry IV and the Archbish
York in 2 Henry IV Such expressions of opposition to the body
do not fit into Greenblatt s demonstration in the play of recor
testing, and explaining, and despite their centrality they are alloted
little attention. "The rebels" he allows, "are deftly, if ingloriously,
patched by the false promises of Hal s younger brother, the priml
tuous John of Lancaster." This is commonplace and cursory. If the
do indeed exemplify the orchestration and containment of subvers
the insurgency of 2 Henry IV cannot be appropriated for Greenbla
thesis. A formal analysis of the play provides no indication that th
could be any royal complicity in the rebellion; indeed, it is a real t
and perceived as such. Far from aggrandizing royal power and harne
the consequent pleasure of audience collusion, the defeat of th
bellion in 2 Henry IV presents an alienating display of political dup
and ruthlessness.
The relative conditions of the two substantive texts of 2 Hen
suggest the censor s interference. Yet Greenblatt argues that the s
"watchful for signs of sedition on the stage, was not prodded to in
vene." This misapprehension follows from a common new histo
neglect of textual history, but also from a particular understandin
what constituted sedition. For Elizabethans, the overriding mea
attendant on the word itself were those of concerting or incitin
bellion against established authority. Sedition was usually credited
agency. The Privy Council described in 1 597 the lost play by Nash
Jonson, The Isle of Dogs , as "sedytious matter."21 In Sejanus, Jonson
the historian Cordus accused on a trumped-up charge of being "a so
of sedition in the state," and in a reprisal typical of Tiberius' tyrann
works are suppressed and burned. But Greenblatt s appropriation o
term is more subtle than this; sedition is an exposure of the strategi
darker purposes of power, such as we witness in action against the r
at Gaultree Forest. On such an intepretation not only Machiavel
Bacon, who in several of his Essays exposed the wiles and indirectio
authority, should be considered seditious writers. It would seem
from the evidence we have, however, that the traces of sedition id
fied by Greenblatt were not the preoccupation of the Master o

21. See Acts of the Privy Council, 1597, XXVII, 338.

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 Janet Clare 165

Revels. From cumulative evidence in

of plays first produced in the last year
censor was much more concerned with
resentations of rebellion. A useful cross-reference can be made with a
well-known case of non-dramatic censorship. In 1600 the historian John
Hayward was brought to trial for his allegedly seditious work, The First
Part of the Life and Raigne of King Hernie IIIIê The history was judged
seditious because, according to the interrogation by Lord Chief Jus-
tice Popham, the historian had omitted "every principal point that
made against the traitor or rebels." Hayward was further asked why he
had maintained "that it might be lawful for the subject to depose the
King."22 Haywards crime had been to describe and present a rebel-
lion with legitimate cause against, and the deposition of, the sovereign.
This, rather than an exposure of political duplicity, was the source
of state anxiety.

Ill

The analysis of 2 Henry IV might have taken a different direction if

bibliographical details had been taken into consideration. But part of the
cost of current historicist extension of literary boundaries is a compara-
tive neglect of more traditional bibliographical and philological skills.
Work during the last decade on Renaissance texts - again, notably the
Shakespearean canon - has, however, made plain that since texts are far
from stable, scholarly exegesis has to proceed from a sure knowledge of
the text s production and whether it is constituted as a performance-
based, revised, or "literary" text. Arguments about meanings of plays
available to contemporaries can simply fall apart if certain material is
known to have been excluded from the text.
The textual history of 2 Henry IV suggests that the play was consid-
ered more intractable than the application of the subversion /contain-
ment thesis allows. The same might be argued of Greenblatt s analysis of
Henry V For Greenblatt, this play most of all exemplifies the process of
"explaining," the third and last stage of the strategy he sees in operation
in the second tetralogy. In the last Elizabethan history play the audience
is made aware of the motives for the French war and it colludes because
the self-interest of the monarch and the interests of the nation are one.
But in Greenblatt s analysis we witness an anticipatory subversion of
22. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1398-1601, CCLXXIV, 404.

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1 66 English Literary Renaissance

each of the plays central claims. The first such moment is the
where the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely agree to su
the French war, with the express purpose of deflecting the King f
stripping the Church of its assets. Again, an awareness of the t
history of the play seriously weakens the point. This scene was cut
the Elizabethan text. Several reasons suggest themselves for the sce
removal, but censorship, official or unofficial, is the most obv
Whatever the cause, Greenblatt s argument no longer holds. The sc
was considered either dramatically superfluous or politically subver
in its revelation of episcopal opportunism (the latter suggesting an
of sedition which, incidentally, does appear close to that used by G
blatt elsewhere). Either way, its omission from the stage version and
available text until 1623 does tend to contradict the notion of a
dience colluding with a morally corrupt state machine. The h
image of the King is perpetuated by the rhetoric of the Chorus, w
as Greenblatt says, helps to close the gap between the real and the
But the Chorus also appears to have been omitted in Elizabethan pe
mance, since it is absent in the Quarto. This exuberant and pop
celebration of nationhood in 1599 may have been cut because it
simply inappropriate in the context of current colonialist vent
The lines could be applied to any popular military hero, but in
the analogy, as conveyed in Chorus 1, was with the Earl of Essex and
Irish campaign. This was an inglorious venture. When reports o
waste of men and resources, of irresolution and of an apparently dis
orable truce with the Earl of Tyrone became widespread, the an
would have become subversive of actual events. The Chorus was
sumably excised because it, above all, promoted a dangerous topicali
The condition of the text suggests that the play was operating, or
perceived as operating, at more than the one level of Greenblatt s
ysis. The idea of the strategic containment of subversive designs in
V thus needs to be revised in the context of the play s probable ce
ship in 1599.
The monolithic conception of power which underpins the in
pretation of sovereign power in Shakespeare s histories has likewise
transposed to sanction concepts of theatrical power. In one contrib
to the debate about historicism and the Renaissance, "Renaissanc
erary Studies and the Subject of History," Louis Montrose state
poetic power helps to create and sustain the political power to which

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 Janet Clare 167

subservient.23 The Introduction to Sha

point that theatricality is not set over a
essential modes. In "Invisible Bullets,"
understand Prince Hal, "we need in
power, and this in turn will prove inse
poetics of the theater." But again, the r
cal power as homologous is not altog
details of the Queen s progresses, the
occasions so well documented by cult
royal power was indeed conceived in
simply to transfer the image and to cl
representations imbibe power from wh
suppose mimesis, a stage of total natur
ther bears any resemblance to what
styles of Elizabethan acting and the im
production.
Greenblatt has claimed that the English form of absolutist theatri-
cality draws the audience toward an acceptance of power, and that this
acquiescence allowed the drama, in spite of state censorship, to be re-
lentlessly subversive. But the representation of royal power on the stage,
far from being augmented by the real thing, was seen as having the effect
of dismantling and diminishing the carefully maintained aura of monar-
chical power by rendering it reproducible. Here censorship may have
been more psychological than political in motivation, that is against the
subversive effect of mimesis , of play-acting in a world-picture where each
was supposed to know his or her own place. Theater can disfigure what
it represents. How else do we understand the tacit inhibition of the stage
representation of the reigning monarch? The censorship of Jonson s
Every Man out of His Humour is a good case in point. Jonson s original
epilogue had Macilente, the envious, impoverished scholar-courtier,
kneeling before Elizabeth, purged of his envious humour by her pres-
ence. But as Jonson was at pains to record in the appendix to the printed
text, the scene was censored following the first Globe performance
because there was a reaction against the non-ritualistic, mimetic repre-
sentation of the monarch. In his defense Jonson claimed that his imagi-

23. Louis Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," English
Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 5-12.

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 1 6 8 English Literary Renaissance

nation "could not have met with a more Proper, Eminent, or wo

Figure, than that of her Maiesties: which his Election (though bo
but respectively) used to a Morali and Mysterious end."24 In a se
Jonson is deploying an argument not dissimilar to the new histor
position. The discontented scholar s transformation through his disp
of loyalty to the Queen serves to contain the play s social critiq
Jonson attempts, but fails, to conflate the theatricality of the mon
which the mystique of royalty so artfully projected, with the monar
representation on the stage. For contemporaries, there was clear
difference. The aesthetic was distinct from the imperialistic, as wou
seem apparent from Henry Wotton s well-known comment on de
of staging in the 1613 production of Henry VIII, which he consid
"sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, i
ridiculous."25 Wotton s response suggests that, far from colluding w
and ultimately ratifying state power, the theatrical reproduction of
embodiments of power might rather undermine and demystify the p
lic image. Jonson was allowed to present the Queen on the stage at t
court performance, where her presence in the audience or on the st
occluded the acting of the part, but not on the stage of the Globe, wh
representation would split and deform image and identity.

IV

One of the weaknesses endemic in much historicist criticism of Renais-

sance drama is the way theater, like power itself, is deployed in an
abstracted and denatured way. There is no attempt to synthesize any of
the more empirical work on theater structures, dramatic records, the
composition of the audience, and theater repertoires, together with the
larger sociopolitical claims of some current historicisms. Indeed, claims
rest upon old assumptions about the interrelationships between the the-
ater companies, the court, and the city. Stephen Greenblatt has posited
an unquestioning notion about the crucial relationship between the
theater and the sovereign: "The Queen enjoyed and protected the the-
atre; against moralists who charged that it was a corrupting and seditious
force, she evidently sided with those who replied that it released social

24. Every Man out of his Humour, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn
Simpson, II vols. (Oxford, 1925-1952), III, 602.
25. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. L. Pearsall Smith, 2 vols. (London, 1907),
II, 32.

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 Janet Clare 169

tensions, inculcated valuable moral less

diversion those who might otherwis
thority."26 Underlying this commonly
of the view that the City was invariab
turn gained its prestige and protection
the Guildhall seem to suggest, the Ci
the social disruptions it caused. But at
London s population, the Privy Counc
sive about the potential for protest a
gathered at the public theaters. The m
rehearsing to illustrate the point that
ater and the sovereign, as articulated
munications of the Privy Council, w
the Council was investigating breaches
days after the disorders at the Theatre
ordered the Justices of the Peace of M
until Michaelmas, ostensibly because
crease any infection."27 This seems too
there was some connection between the social disorders and the closure
of the playhouse. The crisis of threatened indefinite suppression came in
1597, when the theaters were in fact closed for three months following
Privy Council investigations into the allegedly seditious Isle of Dogs ,
performed at the Swan. This well-known episode once more points to
government anxiety about the output of the public theaters. The con-
clusion to be extracted- that the players could never depend upon royal
or Privy Council support- endorses Jean Howards claim that the public
theater of early modern England was subjected to complex conditions of
constraint.28 The new historicist corrective to traditional literary history,
that there is no stable cultural referent to which the literary text can be
bound, has to apply to all boundaries and referents for the period. When
the theaters were closed in 1597, when a third theatrical company was
ordered to disband in 1600, and when the Children of the Queen's
Revels disappeared from view in 1606, the state was clearly invoking its
prerogatives to control the theatrical profession in the most repressive
manner.

Current historicist criticism of Renaissance drama has for some time

26. Greenblatt, "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms," p. 3.

27. 1 570-80, Al, 449.
28. Howard, p. 153.

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 1 70 English Literary Renaissance

been dominated by two epistemes, neither of which seems ent

convincing when confronted with what we know about the oper
of censorship during the period. The first has already been tou
upon, namely, that the theater was complicit with the circulati
power; the corollary of this is the rather self-defeating belief that
lose their critical potential. The second is that drama and theater w
confined to a marginalized realm of recreation and from this posit
exercised a degree of license in their activity. The first position fin
chief advocate in Stephen Greenblatt and has come to inform the cr
reasoning of more recent work, notably on Shakespeare s histories
ical of the latter is Christopher Pye s The Regal Phantasm: Shakespea
the Politics of Spectacle , and in particular his chapter on Richard II
Betrayal of the Gaze." With acknowledgement to Foucault and
Greenblatt, Pye fixes upon the irreducible relationship between
atricality and absolutism during the English Renaissance. Rather
viewing the theater in instrumental terms, he argues that we should
rather at its constitutive terms. For Pye, this is the performative asp
sovereignty shaped by the rise of absolutism: "The remarkable ideo
cal charge theater assumes during the age of absolutism should be u
derstood in terms of this element of active, performative theatric
at the core of the body politic."29 We are back to the old presup
tion about the theatricality of power and the power of theatricalit
endorse state legitimacy or, in Pye s words, to shore up feudal
structures.

When Richard II is approached, Greenblatt s trope of subversion

containment is taken to its limits. The ultimate act of subversion, t
deposition, is contained by the sovereign s control over its represe
tion. Richard s betrayal becomes self-betrayal; theater has the pow
fend off the very usurpation it threatens. To his question whether,
moment his defeat becomes apparent, the reduction of the King s
presence to "something ghostly and unlocatable" makes the play su
sive, Pye gives a tentative answer: the benign potency of theater m
make sovereignty's ideological hold "most complete at the mom
becomes nothing more than a stagy ghost" (p. 101). In fundamental
are not far from the traditional view that Richard possesses the my
and ceremonial of kingship, which he exploits effectively and affect

29. Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (L
1991), P- 4-

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 Janet Clare 171

to upstage Bolingbroke. However, in

as Richards various enactings of "t
transgression," there is no discussion
his discussion of stage spectacle Py
sovereign power. But if this response
sponses surely defy standardization, i
scene of Richard s deposition was cut
almost certainly in performance befo
interventions reveals the flaw in the overdetermined view of theatrical
power as an extension of state power, orchestrated by the sovereign. In
Richard s actual surrender of the crown to Bolingbroke, in the image of
the empty throne and in the sight of Richards conveyance by his erst-
while subjects to the Tower, the doctrine of passive obedience is sub-
verted. The stage censor located the play s most subversive moment in
his suppression of the deposition scene, and did so in spite of the distrac-
tion afforded by Richards plangent lyricism and appropriation of power
over his own dethronement.
The same evidence must qualify the contrary view that Renaissance
theater was basically self-regulating, socially marginal, and powerless. In
his study of Renaissance theater Stephen Mullaney has deployed the
familiar new historicist terms of license, play, and power, but his argu-
ment is ultimately a modification ofthat offered by Greenblatt. Power is
still central and Foucault is invoked. But instead of directly harnessing
alien and subversive impulses for its own purposes, "power" marginal-
izes potential threats. Hence the topography of the Renaissance theaters
outside the City, at a distance "from the historical conditions that make
them possible," enables dramatic license, that is, "a new capacity for
commentary."31 But to read the theaters' topography in this metaphori-
cal way, attractive as it seems, is to misrepresent the social mobility of the
theater as an institution in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. The same
plays were presented and the same actors performed at court, in public
playhouses, and in private theaters. Moreover, bibliographical details
of Jonson s Cynthia's Revels and Marstons The Malcontent , for exam-
ple, suggest that plays were adapted with particular venues in mind.
The production and subsequent reception of a play are complex phe-

30. See Clare, "The Censorship of the Deposition Scene in Richard //," Review of English
Studies, 41 (1990), 89-94.
3 1 . Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License , Play ; and Power in Renaissance England
(Chicago, 1988), p. 59.

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1 72 English Literary Renaissance

nomena, dependent on many factors besides the physical locati

performance.
In his argument for a socially peripheral, powerless theater,
Yachnin has represented the theaters marginality in more abso
terms: "The dramatic companies won from the government pre
what the government was most likely to give: a privileged, prof
and powerless marginality."32 The theater was rendered powerless,
gues Yachnin, through the twin operations of commercialism and c
sorship. Commercialism demanded that the players pleased the
diences, instead of, as in earlier Tudor drama, playing to patron
factional interests. On the other hand, the practice of censorsh
couraged the development of indeterminacy. The meanings of
drama became the responsibility of the audience. Yachnin s is an in
esting counter-argument to those who conceive of theater issu
sustained ideological challenge to Tudor and Stuart hegemony. B
two prongs of his argument need to be more closely examined.
commercially viable, Yachnin argues, the theater must provide plea
Here the pleasure of the audience is not exclusively bound up with
power of theatricality. Instead, commercialism enables the dra
address a variety of topics "in an objective spirit." "Objective s
suggests a careful neutrality. But as we know, playwrights did inter
in current affairs, and in so doing did overstep the permissible bo
aries. The Prologue to John Days Isle of Gulls (1606) is particu
illuminating here, in its adumbation of a conflict of interest. In res
to the auditors' questions about the nature of the play, the Prologu
mock exasperation, disingenuously replies: "Alas, Gentlemen, ho
possible to content you? you will have rayling and invectives, whic
Author neither dares nor affects . . . yet all these we must have, and
one play, or tis alreadie condemnd to the hell of eternali disgra
Pleasing the audience in the various theatrical venues was not quite
simple task which Yachnin appears to presuppose. Audiences evid
wanted plays which were satirically and politically audacious, a

32. Paul Yachnin, "The Powerless Theater," English Literary Renaissance, 1991,
Yachnin 's view of censorship during the period is influenced by Philip Finkelpearl, who
Comedians' Liberty: Censorship of the Jacobean stage Reconsidered," English Literary R
sance, 16 (1986), 123-38, argued for a lenient view of censorship. But this depends at wha
in the reign of James I the evidence is read. The early years of James' reign were a per
which comparative leniency was shown toward topics which later in the reign were not
the same freedom of expression.
33. John Day, The He of Gulls, (London, 1936).

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 Janet Clare 173

short-lived but phenomenal success

demand for, and hence commercial su
nerves explains the spate of topical pl
teenth century and also the social cut
Yachnin s representation of censor
the permissible" needs some qualifica
censorship over a period of time do
contrary to the perception of thes
would argue that as with current libe
position made it difficult for playwr
take their critiques. Instead of depoli
extent stimulated the invention an
became more readily decodable, whi
induced playwrights to risk the prov
The paradigm of the powerless thea
ship developed by Annabel Patterson,
currency.34 Patterson contends th
between writers and the state which,
served, permitted writers (and Patt
tween the genres of literature and dr
quently, texts written under conditio
functional ambiguity. There are sever
Patterson s argument, illuminating a
tive, transhistorical texts to support t
sion to the complex and changing
court poets, and public playwrights o
the individuals who directed, operate
tus of literary and theatrical censors
nore generic differences. Genre must
of communication and evasion. In t
can employ allegory and fantasy to
work of relationships. Even so, such
Mary Wroth was forced to withdra
cause of alleged slander of the family

34. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretat

Early Modern England (Madison, 1984).
35. See Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women
p. 211, and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing W
1993), PP- 249-50.

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1 74 English Literary Renaissance

writing of a play, playwrights have recourse to nonverbal strategi

oblique communication: mimicry, mimesis, costume and locut
speech. Moreover, the assumption of a cultural bargain struck betw
the professional playwright and those in power simply has to be r
in view of what we know about a body of drama which fell f
censorship.
Taking Jonson as his model, Richard Burt has recently argued th
their focus on the opposition between government and theater,
modern concepts of censorship tend to relegate other significant e
modern censoring agencies and are thus ahistorical.36 Jonson
claims, used an emergent literary criticism, particularly critical th
of imitation, as a mode of critical /censorial regulation, albeit one
was severely limited by the non-institutional nature of such critic
Legitimate criticism functions to distinguish between good and
imitation, between poets and poetasters, and between the judgm
of independently-minded spectators and those who merely ex
second-hand opinion. Employing this paradigm, hierarchies of
ment are established and the roles of critic and censor are perceive
rather more complicit than opposed. Indeed, self-censorship, an elu
practice to uncover, was as playwrights' own testimonies confir
imperative in early modern dramatic production and one which
been recognized as such in analyses of Elizabethan and Jacobean cen
ship. Burt is right to move away from a monolithic idea of censor
and to identify the putative receptions of the play, at court and com
cially, as part of the licensing process. In seeking to deconstruct ce
ship with its antitheses, however, there are problems. It could be ar
for instance, that in the Elizabethan "comical satires," Jonson s poet
imitation, his edgy recall of classical antecedents, is rather more str
than self-regulatory. Moreover, the apparent contradictions in Jon
experiences of court and market censorship must also rest with the
dynamics of censorship during his working life, together with his u
ble relationships with sovereign and court over three reigns.
From an analysis of just one cultural practice, and its interaction
the literary text, it is evident that we cannot begin to understand
Renaissance and its theater in historical terms by imposing infl
notions of "power," "theatricality," "play," and "license." In pra

36. Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship
1993)-

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 Janet Clare 175

such economies are fluid and compl

contingencies. Totalizing theories o
break down when posited against a
concept of power underpinning do
idea of censorship lacks complexity,
cultural paradigm which enmeshes lit
tainment. Indeed, the limitations of
of censorship in literary-cultural s
point to deficiencies of prevailing his
cluded, "considered across the full
lic theater of early modern Englan
consistent" (p. 153). But the reading o
paradigm and a common episteme dim
challenge and disables the critic in res
ity. Paradoxically, a comprehensive u
period should reinvigorate our approa
in terms of social engagement. As an
power, censorship did mediate betwee
and the dominant ideology. But as is
sion of plays, and the imprisonmen
merely replicate their culture s orth
literary output to the interests of th
approach to censorship can bring u
production and reception, and thus h
functioned in its worlds. Plays coul
while contestatory and subversive e
Renaissance, to quote the schoolmaste
stock y "the carriage of a thing is all
critical remarks about Richard II a
covered them rarely." The textual ind
the decipherable and indecipherabl
ments of texts written under conditio
In her review of Art Made Tongue-tied
for "a radical rethinking and restruct
censorship in the wake of the new hi
nate 1980s."37 How we observe and

37. "Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobea

(1991), 394-

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1 76 English Literary Renaissance

naissance is bound up with our committed responses to historical s

The historicisms of the 1980s have reinvigorated literary histor
brought texts into new and stimulating perspectives. But these
nant historicisms have been cavalier about the traditional strength
skills of historical investigation, which should be complementar
attention to narrative, chronology, the localization of specific cont
semantic shifts, and bibliography. History may not be easily know
objective, and transparent, but that should not disable investigatio
research. As with any social practice, to understand censorship
Renaissance, we need to map its terrain, note its serial changes, ex
the language through which it was articulated by the officials
served it and the writers who chafed against its strictures. We nee
consider the specificity of individual works which encountered cen
ship and register the character of the cultural practices which sou
determine them. Thus the disciplines of literature and history can f
tate both a keener apprehension of the text's historical production
the availability of meanings at the points of reception.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

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