The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (review)

Reviews 257 are dead ones and that experimentation, diversity and change should be a cause for celebration rather than concern (p. 365). The bibliography is comprehensive, though in view of the fact that the work is intended for second and third year tertiary students it is unfortunate that primary sources are listed under the name of their translator or editor. References, as on p. 178, to Filelfo's letter of 1451 (1478 edition, p. 183), are not helpful for the general reader, and the two maps are not listed in the table of contents. However, these are minor idiosyncrasies and the work as a whole is extremely impressive and a very valuable handbook for students in a wide variety of disciplines. Lynda Garland School of Classics, History and Religion University ofNew England Kaplan, M. Lindsay, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern Engla Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xii, 148; R.R.P. $80.00 According to the Elizabethan poetic theorist George Puttenham, poets are 'in deede the trumpetters of all praise and also of slaunder'. In a parenthetical comment, however, he immediately revises this position; a true poet, he states, will trumpet 'not slaunder, but well deserved reproch'. A s M . Lindsay Kaplan argues, such a tenuous distinction highlights the inevitable contestation surrounding categories of defamation and legitimate criticism. Kaplan, whose book is concerned with defamation in both written and spoken forms, focuses on 'the paradox of slander'. Defamatory language is not only impossible to distinguish clearly from 'well deserved reproch', it is also inherently unstable in its 258 Reviews reversibility. A s evidenced by legal records from the time, libel was often confused amidst labyrinths of charges and counter-charges: any accusation of an offence, after all, might equally be a defamatory statement. A n examination of this textual and discursive field, Kaplan claims at the outset of her book, offers a n e w way of considering relations between poets and the state in Early Modern England. She contrasts this approach to the model of censorship, which she declares to be the paradigm 'currently employed by critics of early modern English literature' (p. 1). She contends that censorship, as defined by critics such as Annabel Patterson, Janet Clare and Richard Dutton, assumes state repression and authorial acquiesence; slander instead 'offers of model of contestation...which demonstrates the material consequences linguistic instability has for the social order' (p. 9). While this is a promising beginning, Kaplan relies rather too heavily on the questionable assumption that contemporary critics are fixated upon monolithic models of power, and some of the scholars she targets might find her analysis overly selective and schematic. Moreover, Kaplan's curiously slight book fails to fulfil on its promise, largely due to the unrealistic parameters of the investigation. After a brief introduction, in which she reviews major approaches to censorship, she has a twenty-page chapter concerned broadly with 'the scope and operation of early modern defamation' (p. 12), then three chapters devoted to individual canonical texts. As an exercise in cultural analysis it is disappointing, at once overly reliant on certain secondary sources, and vague in its relation of texts to 'culture'. This book is thus less a study of 'the culture of slander' than of the w a y in which a few canonical texts negotiate a position for an author in relation to the power of the state. Kaplan begins her series of text-based chapters with a study of Spenser's 'allegories of defamation in The Faerie Queene Books IV- Reviews 259 VT (Chapter Two). In these books Spenser appears increasingly sceptical about the assumptions of the role and efficacy of poetry on which he founds his epic. In Kaplan's assessment, the books 'present the problem of h o w to negotiate and invalidate criticisms of poetry made by the state, that is, to render them mere slanders, without implicating the queen whose approval Spenser seeks to create and secure' (p. 35). Far from aligning himself with the court, in the latter books Spenser is detached and critical, a shift Kaplan suggests is a response to perceived attacks on loyal servants, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Arthur, Lord Grey, and...