Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (review)

Reviews 127 forces of darkness: uses of light and dark cinematography in Robin Hood films'. Mills confidently demonstrates how filmmakers have mediated our view of the Middle Ages literally by the light they cast on the subject. Less successful is Helen Hickey's 'Doubting Thomas: Hoccleve's wilde infirmile and the social construction of identity'. I can't understand why Hickey would want to reduce Hoccleve's rending account of his nervous breakdown to a fiction intended to 'disguise textuality' (p. 57). While citing many theorists and scholars, Hickey overlooks her debt on one key point—that Hoccleve enacts his recovery through his successful creation of the Series—to John Burrow's 'Hoccleve's Series: Experience and Books', an article she does mention in other contexts. A number of the essays betray their origins in postgraduate research by an over-deference to secondary sources. Elizabeth Freeman labours creditably, in 'Aelred of Rievaulx's De Bello Standardii and medieval and modern textual controls', to lay some new insights along the trail of her many citations. Meagan Street, in 'Translation anxiety: tradition and revision in a Middle English romance', does not so much argue her o w n case as guide a collection of scholarly statements on or relevant to Arthour and Merlin towards a fashionable conclusion. Several of the articles would have benefited from stronger editing. Cassidy'stitlequote should not have appeared only in a footnote. Helen Hickey's contribution could have been tigtened up, and Dianne Hall's article needed a rewrite to remove some confusions of grammar and exposition. Still, Cassidy, Hickey, and Street are to be commended for assembling this anthology, and for the zeal they show to rescue medieval studies from the decline affecting many of the humanities. I don't know if the best method is to gird ourselves with the theories of the 'new hegemony'—which themselves are attracting increasing attack (and derision)—or to emphasise our discipline's traditionalrigour,which seems to be coming back into fashion in somefieldsof education. N o field can be dying that can still attract young scholars of the talent displayed in this anthology. Joyce Coleman Department of English University of North Dakota Clegg, Cyndia Susan, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xv, 296; R.R.P. AUS$95.00. The activities of press censorship in Elizabethan England fell considera short of the government's often lofty rhetoric. Take, for instance, the case of Sir John Hayward's Henry IV (1599), which was initially approved by a government authoriser but subsequently suppressed by the Archbishop of 128 Reviews Canterbury. According to the authoriser, a friend of Hayward's had personally presented the book for inspection. O n the recommendation of this gentleman, the authoriser 'sett to his hand sodeinlie as mooved by his friend never reading (upon his salutation) more then one page of the hedlesse pamphlett' (p. 63). The case of an arguably seditious text passing the censors without an examination of 'more then one page' emerges from Cyndia Susan Clegg's impressive study as utterly characteristic of the Elizabethan censorship system. As Clegg argues throughout, censorship was a messy business: 'less a part of the routine machinery of an authoritarian state than an ad hoc response—albeit authoritarian—to particular texts that the state perceived to endanger the exercise of its legitimate and necessary authority' (p. 222). This position sets her work in opposition to many existing appreciations of the field, such as Frederick Siebert's vision of a stringent Elizabethan regime in his Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776 (1952). Like the recent work of other scholars, such as Sheila Lambert and Richard Burt, Clegg's book contributes to a freshly complex view of censorship, which stresses specific acts over general doctrine. Moreover, Clegg challenges prevailing new historicist representations of the operation of power in Early Modern England. In reference to the Elizabethan High Commission's attempts to control radical religious writing, for example, she notes that, 'like so many other sixteenth-century institutions, what looks like hegemony in conception, in practice emerges riddled with contradictions shaped by competing interests' (p. 54). This prompts her to confront Annabel...