Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England (review)

Treason by Words by Rebecca Lemon combines a broad definition of treason with close textual readings. Lemon argues that John Hayward's The First Part of the Life of Henry IV, Shakespeare's Richard II and Macbeth, Donne's Pseudo-Martyr, and Ben Jonson's Cataline opposed, with moderation, the monarchical use of treason laws to assert sovereign power. She chose to work with these texts because they "resonate," she argues, with various responses (pamphlets, for example) to two attempts by the crown to regulate words: Elizabeth's inquiries into writings associated with Essex's rebellion in 1601, and the promulgation by King James of an oath of allegiance following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The larger claim of this book is that these debates produced a textual community whose defining characteristic is the rational struggle to interpret, through debate about government, often irrational activities such as treason. All this occurred "precisely at the time when the state expanded its treason laws to include words as well as acts" (20).

Lemon is particularly deft at identifying and exploiting paradoxical behavior. The chapter on Hayward takes its cue from Bacon's comment to the Queen—rather oddly delayed in the text—that John Hayward was innocent of seditious intent when he wrote about the deposition of Richard II: his only crime was stealing passages from Tacitus when, like a civil lawyer, he presented the case against the king. By accusing Hayward, the crown turned his readers into rebels, particularly Essex, the unsuspecting dedicatee of the book, who—Lemon argues (following Wallace MacCaffrey)—was driven mad and into his final act of desperation by the queen's suspicions.

The paradox she identifies in Shakespeare's Richard II ("strongly resonant" with the language of contemporary attacks on Elizabeth orchestrated by the Jesuit Robert Persons) is that by ignoring the law, Richard becomes a traitor to himself and thus vulnerable to Bolingbroke, whose mercantile language Richard adopts on his way down. Despite his rebellion, Bolingbroke represents the rule of law, in contrast to "the supremacy of royal prerogative" in which Richard wraps himself (56).

Among the many voices circulating on the issues of treason and sovereignty were speeches of loyalty uttered by those about to be executed. This vocal hallucinarium gives us a purchase on Malcolm's account of the dying words of the Thane of Cawdor at the beginning of Macbeth. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler argues that the victims of Stalin's show trials made their confessions so outlandish that, they hoped, they could not be believed. Something similar occurs to Macbeth, whose rebellion against King Duncan receives a salutary motivation in her reading, explaining in part our attraction to this man and his blood-minded wife.

The final two chapters conclude that Donne and Jonson are more nuanced than the "sensationalist polemics" of the propagandists (158). Pseudo-Martyr moves the argument raised by James's loyalty oath away from treason, recasting the issue as a personal struggle of conscience to rationalize a subject's divided loyalties to the king and the pope. The solution is loyalty to England, not Anglicanism, and devotion to the Church, not a papal decree. Jonson's Cataline also turns on individual conscience, but here the issues of treason and sovereignty are broadened to include the play's themes about the dangers and necessities of extralegal powers assumed by the state in times of crisis. Cicero, who is naturally the hero of his own account of the Catalinarian conspiracy, suddenly realizes that if he accuses Cataline, he as a magistrate will be blamed (150). Treason, as defined by Cataline in Jonson, who follows Sallust, is freedom from state-imposed submission. This is also the theme of the book's afterward, which castigates the Bush administration's attempts to expand the definition of treason to cover speech.

This book engages current scholarship in Renaissance studies and then uses selected literary works to argue that...