Fake News and News Anxiety in Early Modern England Richard David Macey [email protected]
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2018 Fake News and News Anxiety in Early Modern England Richard David Macey [email protected] Recommended Citation Macey, Richard David, "Fake News and News Anxiety in Early Modern England" (2018). Dissertations. 2973. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2973 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2018 Richard David Macey LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO FAKE NEWS AND NEWS ANXIETY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY RICHARD DAVID MACEY CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2018 Copyright by Richard David Macey, 2018 All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: STAGING UNCERTAIN NEWS 1 CHAPTER ONE: NEWS ANXIETY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND 13 CHAPTER TWO: THE CASE OF THE HEADLESS BEARS: HOW A FAKE NEWS PAMPHLET SOLVES A CRUX IN SHAKESPEARE 56 CHAPTER THREE: WAITING FOR THE TRUTH: THE PROBLEM OF VERIFICATION IN THE WINTER’S TALE 102 CHAPTER FOUR: NECCESSITY COMMANDS ME NAME MYSELF: RUMOR, REPORT, FAME, AND THE THREAT OF THE “MULTITUDINOUS TONGUE” 145 WORKS CITED 178 VITA 192 iii INTRODUCTION STAGING UNCERTAIN NEWS The Folger Library’s copy of a news pamphlet titled A true Relation of a barbarous and most cruell Murther, [com]mitted by one Enoch ap Evan. who cut off his owne naturall Mothers Head, and his Brothers (1633) includes the following manuscript annotations on the verso of its title page: “It is upon good groundes suspected that this peice was penned rather attonding to the authors fancy, then the truth of the matri: e fatri: cides [the matri- et fatricide’s] behaviour in the prison,” to which a different contemporary hand has added “though the thing in it selfe was too abominable.” The pamphlet account includes a poem ascribed to Enoch ap Evan himself. This confessional poem blames “Non-Conformists” for inspiring his violent murders: You Non-Conformists, unto you I call, Take heed in Pulpits how you raile and baule; Draw not poore Lay-men quite beyond true sense, Which caused me to doe this foule offense. Because my Mother and my brother both, To stand at the Communion were loath, But kneel’d with reverence at that holy Act I through your treachery did this wicked fact. (B1) At the conclusion of this poem, the anonymous pamphlet writer comments, “Thus you heare the poore wretched mans repentance; The hainousnesse of the fact, and his sorry for the same; You here moreover how lamentably hee complayneth how visiously hee hath bin misled by these reproaching Sectists, who as well in their doctrine publikely, as in their perswasions privately, oppose our Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction” (B2). The first marginalia writer, however, deemed this confessional-poem-cum-non-conformist-polemic as the murderer’s “behaviour in prison” that 1 2 likely “was penned rather attonding to the [pamphlet] authors fancy, then the truth,” and the second marginalia writer seemed to have agreed. The “abominable” crime was real; the confessional poem was not. Printed confessions of the condemned, as these two annotators recognized, could be outright inventions—in other words, fake news. The clergyman Henry Goodcole complained in one of his own news pamphlets that “most base and false Ballets…were sung at the time of our returning from the Witches execution” (A3v). One wonders if such “false Ballets” magically included penitent remarks from the scaffold, for the “ballad-monger,” as the satirist Richard Braithwait joked, “ha’s a singular gift of imagination, for hee can descant on a mans execution long before his confession” (B3/9). The “fabulous relations” of the “corranto-coiner” were no better: “You shall many times finde in his Gazetta’s, Pasquils, & Corranto’s miserable distractions; here a City taken by force, long before it bee besieged; there a Countrey laid waste before ever the enemie entered” (Braithwait B9/21). Shakespeare’s News This work is the first to study William Shakespeare’s anxious preoccupation with news, especially with what we today call fake news. As chapter one details, early modern contemporaries both lament and laugh over the prevalence of what they termed false news, false report, and false intelligence: news that was not merely incorrect, but, in their parlance, forged, coined, cogged, feigned, counterfeited, made, and invented. By the time Shakespeare satirized newsprint in The Winter’s Tale (c.1610), early modern England faced a news crisis. The amount of newsprint swelled in the 1590s, and contemporaries complained that news was overabundant, confusing, trifling, and distracting. More seriously, such news was unreliable—unreliable because even well-intentioned, good-faith actors in the nascent news industry found it difficult to 3 produce reports that were both timely and verified, and unreliable because false reports proliferated. Newswriters invented false reports to sell copy, governments invented false reports to gain a political or militaristic advantage, and companies invented false reports to game a global economy. Broadly speaking, this work investigates how and to what ends news transmission is dramatized on the early modern English stage, and in Shakespeare’s plays particularly. This study focuses more narrowly, however, on the negative elements of these news dramatizations. The dramatic portrayal of news anxieties, a term I define in the following chapter, thus forms the principle subject of this work. Shakespeare carefully stages news and the anxieties news incites. As a cursory search of the Open Source Shakespeare Concordance shows, news is a mainstay of Shakespeare’s work. The word news occurs 317 times across 38 works; report, 150 times across 37 works; tidings, 55 times across 23 works. This is to say nothing of Shakespeare’s use of other newsy terms, such as messenger, post, intelligence, process, etc. The Shakespearean stage is noisy with news, crowded with messengers and missives. Shakespeare stages news to provide exposition, to narrate events that he prefers not to stage, and to push along his plots. Frequently then, the staging of news is showy: a nameless Messenger, a ghost, a principle character strides out on stage and delivers a report. But news is a frequent background hum as well, for characters are constantly judging and being judged on the basis of prior reports. Consider for example the layers of verbal transmission of which report plays the key role in the following passage from Macbeth. Lady Macbeth reads tidings from her husband of his encounter with the prophetic weird sisters, whose pronouncements were confirmed as “the perfect’st report” by “missives from the king”: 4 Lady Macbeth [reading]: “They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by the perfect’st report, they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who all-hailed me ‘Thane of Cawdor,’ by which title, before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king that shalt be!' This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.” (1.5.12) Everything becomes deeply mediated by report in the openings scenes of this great play. Macbeth is first introduced through the reports of Ross and the wounded Captain. The weird sisters give their “strange intelligence” directly to Macbeth and Banquo (1.3.74). Ross and Angus, whom Macbeth calls “missives” in his letter, report to Macbeth that glowing reports to the king have resulted in his new title as Thane of Cawdor: “The King hath happily received, Macbeth, / The news of thy success…As thick as hail / Came post with post, and every one did bear / Thy praises in his kingdom’s great defense, / And poured them down before him” (1.3.87- 98). So, numerous reports to the king result in a report from the king that seemingly confirms the witches’ report. All of this Macbeth “thought good to deliver” in a report to his wife. Shakespeare thus constructs the beginning of this play on a substrate of intertwined reports. Macbeth’s letter “transport[s]” Lady Macbeth into a dark reverie (1.5.54): Lady Macbeth: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way […] Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; And chastise with the valour of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crown'd withal. Enter [a Servant] What is your tidings? 5 Servant: The King comes here tonight. Lady Macbeth: Thou’rt mad to say it. Is not thy master with him, who, were’t so, Would have informed for preparation? Servant: So please you, it is true. Our thane is coming, One of my fellows had the speed of him, Who, almost dead for breath, had scarcely more Than would make up his message. Lady Macbeth: Give him tending; He brings great news. (1.5.13-36) Her reverie on Macbeth’s news is interrupted by the servant’s news that King Duncan is on his way.