Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (review)

Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England. Edited by Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. vii, 322 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-8142-5049-1.

Does technology generate culture, or does culture generate technology? Eschewing the "technological determinism" of some earlier histories of the book that often celebrate the emancipatory side of print technology, on the one hand, and a nostalgia for the cultural losses entailed by the rise of printing, on the other, this new collection takes up that conundrum, offering dynamic analyses of early modern media in England. Though many critical perspectives are represented within these eleven essays, Foucault's theories of knowledge, power, and corporeality figure prominently throughout and serve to unify the ensemble. The authors of these essays explore the complex circulation of power through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing, manuscripts, and plays. They investigate the attempted control of these media by various authorities (e.g., the monarch and/or state, religious groups, village elders) as well as numerous modes of resistance to censorship or repression. And they provide an archaeology of a wide cross-section of early modern media, from canonical texts, best-sellers, and theatrical hits to more ephemeral and/or less well-known modes of communication.

In "From Oral Delivery to Print in the Speeches of Queen Elizabeth," Leah Marcus provides an intriguing analysis of the monarch's oratorical practices. Elizabeth tended to extemporize from speeches she had loosely prepared via the classical art of memory. Published versions were later spun, either by Elizabeth or by her advisors, into "acceptable Tudor bureaucratese." Historicizing Derrida's notion of the "metaphysics of presence," Marcus shows the extent to which the early modern English were invested in the oral prototypa of Elizabeth's speeches and of printing in general, a realm of authentic communication imagined in quasi-sacramental terms.

In "Staging the News," F. J. Levy analyzes the power struggle in Jacobean England between throne and theater for control of the news. Royal proclamations proscribed "Licentious Speech of matters of State," and censors sought to enforce certain news blackouts by effacing the informative as well as the provocative elements of some plays. Yet state control of the news proved difficult, for early-seventeenth-century playwrights eluded or sometimes colluded with their censors, while newsletters, corantos, and other precursors of the newspaper disseminated information to a public hungry for a scoop.

Douglas Bruster explores the growing taste not only for news but for other more titillating genres of expression. "The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England" analyzes the intimate, often transgressive impulse that motivated inquiring minds (readers as well as writers) to probe other people's bodies and identities in print. Bruster meticulously details the rise of the author as celebrity and of the early modern best-seller, which capitalized on these tastes.

By the seventeenth century, the status of print authors had improved significantly, as Joseph Loewenstein demonstrates in the case of George Wither, a successful defender of "poets' rights." Wither managed to obtain from King James a lucrative and unprecedented patent for his Hymns and Songs of the Church. In doing so, he helped give rise to the modern notion of intellectual property. Yet not all celebrity writers managed to corner their markets, as Alexandra Halasz demonstrates in her Marxian reading of the beleaguered pamphleteer John Taylor. And for women the conditions of publication remained relatively more difficult, as Margaret Ezell explains in her study of Ann Halkett. Though she wrote copiously, Halkett did not publish her manuscripts. Nevertheless, she seems to have prepared her work for posthumous publication.

The form of media often influenced the content of the work, as Harold Love explains in his analysis of the story of Lucina, whose rape was recounted in various fashions for the edification of print, manuscript, and theatrical audiences. Randall Louis...