Annabel M. Patterson

This is an interesting study of official reaction to political writing, both overt and covert, from the late 16th century through the 17th century. It examines how writers used poetical convention, historical allusion and other forms of literary sleight-of-hand to criticise monarchs and governments at a time when not merely saying the wrong thing, but being thought to have said the wrong thing could land you in prison, or cost you your ears - or your life.The issue, as Patterson shows, is not the text, but the interpretation of the text, which was finally, sometimes fatally, in the eye of the beholder. As John Chamberlain wrote in a puzzled way in 1599, after Sir John Haywood was jailed for his book, The Life Of Henry IV, "I have got you a transcript of yt that you may picke out the offence if you can; for my part I can finde no such buggeswordes, but that every thing is as yt is taken."

Patterson breaks her study up into times and genres, examining the dangerous game of political criticism from the reign of Elizabeth through to the arrival of William of Orange. She examines straightforward (or as straightforward as anyone dared) pamphleteering; the work of poets including Donne, Jonson, Milton and Dryden; and plays both produced and banned. One of the most interesting sections of this book analyses what Shakespeare might have been up to when he wrote King Lear - and what James I might have thought when it was staged for him. The chapter on romances travels from Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney's response to his banishment from the court of Elizabeth for giving an unwelcome piece of advice, to works such as The Princess Cloria and Panthalia, which from the vantage point of the Restoration look back across the times of Charles I and Cromwell, and demonstrates how this allegorical form was used as a vehicle for political protest.

The final part of the book deals with letters as a genre, showing through a series of quotations from hesitant, muted, incomplete communications how a culture of suspicion and censorship impacts even upon the most private of human interactions. Disturbingly, it is evident that - writing in 1984, appropriately enough - Annabel Patterson felt her own book to be a form of protest against increased censorship and a climate of decreased freedom of speech. The book as a whole is clearly intended as a warning against "forgetting history".… (more)