"Art made tongue-tied by authority": Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship by Janet Clare, and: Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama by Richard Dutton (review)

Reviews385 This carefully-edited work is flawed by but two typographical errors: "a interrelationship" (p. 201) and "occured" (p. 225, n. 8). Because this research represents a major advancement toward a more complete understanding of Calderón's court spectacles and of the interplay of political power in their composition, staging, and interpretation, it should be read by all those interested in those plays and in Spanish theatrical history, particularly that of the Golden Age. For those readers who do not know Spanish, complete comprehension of the book may be difficult, since there are numerous quotations which are not translated or, in some instances, even summarized. Most readers interested in Calderón may know Spanish; but notes with English translations of these and of the other, much less extensive Latin, French, and Italian quotations would broaden the potential readership and understanding of this very worthwhile research. GARY E. BIGELOW Western Michigan University Janet Clare. "Art made tongue-tied by authority": Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.Pp. xv + 224. $49.95. Richard Dutton. Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.Pp. xiii + 305. $32.95. The nearly simultaneous appearance of two volumes dealing with almost identical topics might at first seem an awkward event; certainly it attests to the very strong current interest in the ways power impinged on literature in early modern England. However, although these two books cover much the same ground and draw on much the same evidence, their emphases, structures, and ultimate conclusions all differ, sometimes significantly . Yet these differences, paradoxically, make the books highly complementary; the strengths of one volume supplement the virtues of the other. Thus instead of feeling any need to choose one work over its "competitor," most scholars will welcome access to both. Reading them together is not at all a monotonous or repetitive experience; it is more nearly stereophonic. One listens to Clare more intently after having heard Dutton on the same issues, and vice versa. Clare's volume is slightly earlier and slightly shorter, and should be marginally more useful to undergraduate students in particular. Her book is chiefly and valuably organized as a play-by-play account of the impact of Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship, and the virtues of this method are immediately obvious. It allows Clare to confront texts and contexts as these confronted the censor—one at a time—and it thus discourages facile or sweeping generalizations. Moreover, Clare's method allows her to marshall in brief compass the relevant evidence on discrete and particular cases so that her volume functions, as intended, as a very useful handbook or "companion" to the reading of individual dramas. Students wanting a quick overview of the impact of censorship on a particular play will find such information readily at hand in Clare's volume, and 386Comparative Drama it is greatly to her credit that she manages to deal with so many individual works. Although Clare does have a larger argument to make, and although that argument differs from Dutton's, she is usually careful to acknowledge alternative interpretations of the data she presents. She contends that there "is a tendency in studies of the politics of Renaissance drama either to dismiss censorship as lenient and posing no serious threat, or to view it as consistently repressive and menacing. Neither view," according to Clare, "reflects the true nature of a system which under Elizabeth I and James I was dynamic and unstable" (p. ix). Thus she asserts that "until we locate the text within the historical moment of production and reconstruct the precise preoccupations of the censor by way of evidence from censored texts we cannot know—other than in the broadest terms— how censorship impinged on the working playwright" (p. x) . She disputes Annabel Patterson's contention "that there was an implicit social code governing relationships between authors and authorities, intelligible to all parties at the time as being a conscious and collusive arrangement." Instead she suggests that the evidence "militates against" any notion of such a "shared perception" (p. xii). Clare believes that most contemporary playgoers would have been able to appreciate "only thinly...