Literature and Politics in Seventeenth Century London Transcript

Literature and Politics in Seventeenth Century London Transcript Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2011 - 6:00PM Location: Museum of London 12 October 2011 In Association with the Fulbright Commission Literature and Politics in Seventeenth Century London Dr Anna Beer, Distinguished Fulbright Scholar, Kellogg College Oxford The History of the World, written by Sir Walter Ralegh, was published in 1614, here in London. Paradise Lost, written by John Milton, was published in 1667, also in London. Both publications were remarkable achievements that can tell us much about literature and politics in the seventeenth-century, and possibly now – and I am not talking about the content of the works (although I could do so). No, I am talking about their very publication. In my lecture this evening, I hope to explain that claim, and in doing so, I hope to show the ways in which writers, and in particular writers who had contentious political messages to convey, responded to, and exploited, what we would call new media in the seventeenth century – here, in the City of London. At the heart of my research lies the desire to understand, and to foreground, the world in which writers operate. When I read what Ben Jonson said of William Shakespeare, that 'He was not of an age, but for all time!' I say, 'yes, but Shakespeare worked within a particular culture of drama’. He worked in a particular place (not far from here – although the City authorities did what they could to suppress the dangerous South Bank theatre world); he worked within particular norms of performance and publication - a play would run for just a night or two, and play texts were generally ephemeral, shoddily produced things, often pirate editions half-remembered by an actor looking for a bit of extra cash from an unscrupulous publisher; and he worked at a particular historical moment, when the content of plays was controlled and policed by the state. One sign of his success was that Shakespeare was one of the few dramatists who didn't spend time in prison. So, although I agree with Jonson – Shakespeare is for all time – he is also of his age. In fact, Jonson was pursuing his own agenda when he wrote those lines. They come from a commendatory poem he wrote for the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare's plays (To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us.) Jonson’s edition of Shakespeare sought to transform the status of stage plays through presenting them in a ground-breaking format – the folio, usually reserved for weighty works of theology, law, or history – as if the tweets of Liz Hurley were to be published as an OUP monograph. The Folio reveals Jonson's agenda: he wants plays to be taken seriously (he even published his own plays with footnotes). Shakespeare himself didn't bother to circulate or preserve his plays in print. To look at the world in which writers function, and to consider how their work came to be read, can give us valuable insights in particular into those factors that enable or disable a writer from being heard. The issues are at their most stark when one considers the lives and works of women: following Virginia Woolf's lead (and who can resist the elegant arguments of her essays?), I always wonder about Shakespeare's sister – Woolf imagines an equally talented sister for William. If you are denied education, or educated only to fulfil certain proscribed roles; if you cannot access pen and paper (or a laptop); if you have no privacy or time for your own writing; if you are prohibited, whether by law or custom from publishing your work (whether in print or over the internet); if you are barred from public or professional life; and if to publish or perform your own work would make you tantamount to a prostitute – and all these were true for women in the time of which I speak, and remain true today for some women, then it is hardly surprising that no female Shakespeare or Milton appeared. But these questions are not only questions for women – and my concern this evening is to demonstrate the obstacles that both Ralegh and Milton had to overcome in order to write their most monumental works, and, even more importantly, what was necessary to bring those works to the eyes of readers. In exploring this second issue, I will be talking about an emergent, and rapidly changing, print culture in the seventeenth century that has something in common with what has been described as our own digital revolution. So, first, to Sir Walter Ralegh. Why do I say it was remarkable that, in 1614, his History of the World was published? One answer is that the book’s author, Ralegh, was, in legal terms at least, a dead man: his King, James I, controlled his lands, goods and person, because in 1603, Ralegh had been condemned for treason. Although reprieved from execution by James, he was nevertheless imprisoned in the Tower of London, and he was certainly not pardoned. I have written elsewhere about the early years of that imprisonment, both from the perspective of Ralegh and from that of his wife, Bess Throckmorton, and I will not discuss them here: suffice to say, they can be characterised by the words desperate and hopeless (with a new low reached in 1609, with the loss of the Sherborne estate in Dorset, held in trust up until then by Lady Ralegh). But probably some time around 1610 or 1611, Ralegh seemed to gain a new focus. On one level, he had hopes from the court: King James' son, Prince Henry, was rumoured to be a supporter of his cause, and Ralegh wrote various position papers, about naval or political matters, either for him, or in the hope that he would be interested. These were tentatively circulated in manuscript. It is quite possible that Ralegh's interest in history was prompted by the desire to serve the young Prince, but soon the project became all-consuming: he was absorbed in the writing of a History of the World, from the Creation to the present day. With maps. So far, so scholarly and therefore harmless. Except that it was a history. The ability of history to comment on the present, under the guise of talking about the past, was feared by the state: already effectively banned from writing about contemporary matters unless under royal authority, authors had had to deal with Privy Council censorship of histories, since 1599. But as the project grew, so did Ralegh's ambition. Ralegh decided that he wanted to reach beyond the Tower walls and past even the Court. He would publish (after all, he was already damned...). I will ask 'how' first, then 'why'? How to get a work, which was well over a thousand pages of folio (and it only gets up to the second Macedonian war, not even reaching the birth of Christ) printed – and past the censors? Two answers first off: what we now call networking – and anonymous publication. A key player is Ben Jonson (we've already seen how he was responsible for establishing Shakespeare's status with the Folio of 1623). Jonson, it seems, got his publisher and his bookseller on board. (The bookseller was Walter Burre, the publisher William Stansby: Jonson had been a Stansby author through the 1610s). (Jonson was then hired by Sir Walter to tutor Wat, his son, and through 1612 and 1613 he did something approximating that – Ben and Wat went on an extended, alcohol-fuelled trip round northern Europe – a sort of mini-grand tour meets gap year meets extended stag party.) The Stansby deal was done in 1611, and printing went on for three years, Ralegh continuing to produce material during this time. His commitment to the project only intensified with the early death of young Prince Henry in 1612 and thus the loss of his potential royal reader and supporter – it was now even more important to reach beyond the Tower walls. Ralegh wrote the book back to front, in fact: the long Preface was completed only in 1614, just before publication. And this answers the second part of my 'how' question: how did this work get past the censors? It got past because they didn't see the whole thing. If you pick up the work now and turned to Book One, you would find chapters entitled 'Of the meaning of the words Heaven and Earth' or 'Of the intellectual mind of man, in which there is much of the image of God: and that this image is much deformed by sin' or, possibly a bit more exciting, but not much: 'Why it should be needful to entreat diligently of the place of Paradise' (which is not, as some commentators suggest 'as high as the moon' or 'under the equinoctial' but, a nice uncontroversial choice, in Mesopotamia). This is undoubtedly what the censors saw, and passed, in 1611 – with the stipulation that the work appeared anonymously. That explains how, but the more interesting question, to me, is 'why'? Ralegh is operating at a cusp in communication methods. Print had been around for over 150 years at the time I am talking about, but it was not as widely used as one would think. Yes, Books of Homilies were provided by the Church to ensure that the right words were spoken in every church and we should not forget, in its quatercentenary year, the Authorized Version of the Bible, but this is state-sponsored publication, designed not to create debate, but to establish conformity.

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