Literature and Politics in the 1620s: ‘Whisper’d Counsells’ by Paul Salzman (review)

In his latest work, Paul Salzman examines the ways in which political events of the 1620s manifested within high and popular literature across a range of genres. The author builds his study on a wide range of writing and performance, including pamphlets, sermons, and libels, to trace the social and political changes that engaged writers and readers of the period. The dissemination, circulation, and performance of literature are also emphasised, illuminating the ways in which readers and audiences were drawn into a network of political reflection and commentary.

Part I, ‘Imaginings’, investigates the conventional genres of drama, poetry, and narrative in relation to politics. The author posits that Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton became more topical writers during this period, satisfying the public’s growing appetite for news and examining the struggle over its regulation in such works as Jonson’s Staple of News and Middleton’s A Game at Chess. For Salzman, the publication of William Shakespeare’s first folio in 1623 also highlights the political character established by the plays and masques published and performed around it, representing a challenge to, and circumvention of, political interpretations of the period.

Moreover, poetry in the form of libels, satires, epigraphs, and occasional poems, along with establishment poetry by Donne, Herrick, Herbert, and Jonson is testament to the complex nature of interaction between different forms of literature and politics in the 1620s. Salzman studies the circulation and recirculation of these texts under different circumstances, giving colour to the way in which poetry of the 1620s demands to be read politically. In his discussion of narrative, the author pairs the genre of romance with politics to demonstrate the ways in which Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, among others, shifted from being a form of entertainment to a form of political allegory.

Part II, ‘Religion’, examines sermons, popular religious pamphlets, and religious controversy. Salzman places the sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes in the context of a great range of sermons that spoke to all facets of society, covering an enormous variety of religious and political positions. They were part of the growing obsession in the 1620s with reading for political intent, not only in a specific place and time, but through subsequent manuscript or print publication. The pamphlets and ballads discussed in Part II centre on the notion of religiosity, from homilies and pious works read by people of both low and privileged statuses, to more radical and controversial works. In combination with the author’s discussion of doctrines, this section widens the genre of religion and further advances the perception of literature in the 1620s as embodying ever-changing counter-publics through a politicised approach to reading and analysis.

In Part III, ‘News’, Salzman remains focused on the nature of shifting counter-publics through the most naturally political texts written in the period: burgeoning ‘newspapers’, printed news-books, manuscript newsletters, and pamphlets. Salzman argues convincingly that news was a commodity in the 1620s, and further, a desire for political information drove reading practice and delineated the relationship between private information and public knowledge. Particularly fascinating is his discussion of the printed pamphlet, a genre which appealed to a wide readership and transcended class boundaries. However, this genre also represented a means of undermining any attempt to control the subject of news. Some pamphlets were political, others only partially so, but they encompassed subjects as diverse as parliamentary events, celebrity scandals, international politics, and international relations. Salzman also studies diaries of the period to gather information on proceedings in Parliament from a private perspective, noting shifts in foreign policy and changes in status. He finds that politics, in its promulgation and reception, moved between public and private spaces across a range of experimental genres.

In Literature and Politics in the 1620s, Salzman studies the various relationships between literature and politics, publics and counter-publics, and civic and private...