Press Censorship in Jacobean England (review)

This learned and sophisticated study is a valuable contribution to our understanding of print censorship and to the interdisciplinary analysis of political culture in Jacobean England. Clegg challenges the prevailing historiographical and critical models of early Stuart press censorship, rejecting both the standard Whig-Marxist depiction of a coherent state mechanism efficiently repressing opposition and dissent, and the revisionist model of a lax and essentially apolitical system operating in a consenus-driven political culture. Clegg systematically breaks down Ja-cobean press censorship into its constituent parts, exploring the diverse ways in which censorship could be exercised, the different institutions that administered it, and the people whose individual biases and beliefs shaped its application. She also painstakingly reconstructs the "confluence of immediate contemporary economic, religious, and political events that inform multiple local acts of censorship" (224). Paying attention to "local acts of censorship," Clegg argues, reveals that it is fundamentally misleading to talk of a coherent and systematic state censorship of the press: "Censorship in Jacobean England was a tool that could be employed by multiple agencies to achieve diverse ends" (224).

Clegg frames this argument with a number of explicitly interdisciplinary gestures. Drawing inspiration from Sharpe's recent manifesto for a postmodernist rethinking of Renaissance political culture, Clegg urges a re-reading of the sources on censorship as "rhetorical productions with multivalent meanings," and offers an analysis of the operations of power that rejects many of the historiography's stale binaries, replacing them with a greater appreciation for multiplicity, polyvalence, and complexity (6)¹ . Each of her case studies ultimately depends as much on rigorously contextualized archival evidence as on these theoretical assumptions.

After lucidly describing Jacobean press censorship as it existed in principle, Clegg analyzes its diverse functionings in practice. One chapter explores James I's use of public book burnings as rituals of royal self-fashioning, symbolic presentations of the king as the implacable enemy of certain heretical or seditious ideas. Another chapter analyzes cases of private, extra-judicial suppression, which Clegg categorizes as "personal" censorship designed to protect individual or familial honour rather than to repress politically dangerous ideas—a problematic distinction, given Jacobean perceptions of the inextricable connections between the personal and the political. A third chapter explores the use of censorship by institutions—Parliament, Church, rival law courts—as a means of "bolstering institutional authority and salvaging reputations" (125). The last two chapters focus on the 1620s, when a new and more dangerous religiopolitical dynamic evolved, as James I attempted to suppress critical discussion of foreign policy and as rival factions in the church, in alliance with different political groupings, attempted to censor opponents' controversial writings.

Most of these case studies are impressively well researched and historiographically astute. Historians and critics will learn much from them. Clegg's argument about the general ineffectiveness of print censorship is not totally convincing, however. To assess the impact of press controls properly, we must pay attention to the circulation and policing of other forms of media. Clegg virtually ignores the scribal forms of political communication—libels and separates—that were often vehicles for dangerous opinions on church and state. Arguably, the proliferation of these political media is evidence that print censorship, however haphazardly applied, was effective enough as a deterrent to force certain strains of critical political expression underground.