Dorothy Auchter. Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. ix + 403 pp. $91.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-313-31114-7.

Reviewed by Cyndia Susan Clegg (Humanities Division, Pepperdine University)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2002)

A B C's of Tudor-Stuart Censorship

A B C's of Tudor-Stuart Censorship

As Professor Auchter rightly observes, "few reference materials have been devoted to detailed exploration of Renaissance censorship," and this book intends to fill that void. Actually, two important and useful reference books do exist: W.H. Hart's 1872 Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus (reprinted in 1969), which provides a chronological descriptive catalog of the principal books printed in England and suppressed, and Charles Ripley Gillett's Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature (1932), which offers a chronological and categorical analysis of censored books, burned or not. I mention these two reference works because close reading of Auchter's entries reveals a dependence upon these earlier books. Indeed the spirit of Auchter's book, which, she says, "tells the story of men and women who risked their lives and fortunes in an attempt to make their voices heard" (p. i), remarkably resembles Gillet's conviction that "dead men do not argue, though the argument of their lives may continue and even grow in force for the very reason that by death they have given incontestable proof of the strength of their convictions" (p. i). Auchter's ninety-two entries are carefully selected to tell a story of Tudor-Stuart censorship which subscribes to Whig historiography's teleological view that English people under Tudor and Stuart monarchs suffered such egregious repression of speech and writing that they were "no longer willing to tolerate a government that attempted to prescribe religious and political opinions for its citizens" by the end of the Stuart era (p. xxiii).

To this end, the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship goes beyond Hart's objective listing of censored texts and reprinting of related documents to providing for each title a discussion of the historical context in which the work was written and received, a synopsis of the work, and an explanation of the censorship that includes "formal charges of censorship, the fates of the author, and the lasting impact of the particular work" (p. viii). A thumbnail "Author," "Date of Issue," "Date of Censorship," "Type of Work," and "Offending Issue" begins each entry, and suggestions for further reading follow. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order. While the author intends that the ninety-two entries should be representative and "highlight the major issues that could provoke the wrath of a censor" (p. viii), the act of selection severely skews the representation of censorship. Admittedly, by its abrupt end in 1691 with entry 294, Hart's Index Expurgatorious defies any periodicized historicity, but even so, a comparison between his comprehensive effort and Auchter's selective strategy suggests how short this dictionary falls. Of the 294 works Hart identified as having been censored, Auchter considers only eighty-five--or twenty-nine percent. (The percentage is actually lower since Auchter adds six works Hart does not include--one of which, Milton's Areopagitica was not actually censored.)

Admittedly, given the intended scope of the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship's entries--context, synopsis, and censorship--to have treated all the works censored to the end of the Stuart monarchs would have been a daunting task. On the other hand, to include Areopagitica, which was certainly not censored, and several works for which evidence of censorship is very slim (Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, John Taylor's Laugh and Be Fat, Robert Tailor's The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, and George Gascoigne's A Hundred Sundrie Flowers), or where censorship had little effect on the actual text (e.g., the change of Oldcastle to Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 1), and not to include the writings for which there is considerable evidence for censorship (William Tyndale's pamphlets, Holinshed's Chronicles, the seven satires burned in 1599 by the Bishop of London, Edwin Sandy's A Relation of the State of Religion, the writings of Conrad Vorst and David Pareus burned under James I, to mention only a few) is to seriously distort not only the image of Tudor-Stuart censorship but also the representation of England under Tudor and Stuart monarchs.

Even though the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship offers an incomplete picture of Tudor and Stuart censorship, it does provide substantive information about the individual instances of censorship it includes. At its best, as its author maintains, this book serves as "a starting point" (p. viii). As a primer (an "ABC" in Tudor-Stuart terms), it is useful for its effort to place the censorship of individual works in their local historical contexts and to make suggestions for further reading. Although the entries are not documented, their suggestions for further reading reveal their sources--and the entries' constraints. While this seemingly seamless synthesis of sources provides the kind of cohesion that a reference tool requires, it eclipses the contested nature of the scholarship on censorship, in some cases distorting the information. One place where this is especially true is with regards to dramatic censorship. Two scholars are consistently cited in entries on dramatic censorship prior to the English Revolution--Janet Clare and Richard Dutton. While the dictionary refers the reader to the work of both of them, the entries themselves subscribe almost entirely to Janet Clare's interpretation of dramatic censorship. Dutton's scholarship repeatedly challenges Clare's interpretation with solid factual evidence that much of Clare's work lacks. The net effect of reading all the dictionary's entries on drama, however, is the same as rereading Clare's book--without the benefit of being able to weigh Clare's arguments and evidence (or lack of it). Thus, Clare's view that dramatic censors prevented any representation of insurrection--even though this has been disproved--dominates the dictionary.

Had the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship confined itself to the local and particular, it would have been a much better resource. As it is, that so many of its sweeping statements are either distortions or outright errors seriously detracts from its value. It errs in several directions. First, it relies on certain bibliographical assumptions that are mistaken. For example, even though it is now well understood that a dearth of extant copies of early printed books is as likely to indicate the widespread dissemination and popularity of a text as it is its suppression, the dictionary repeatedly assumes effective censorship to be the cause of limited extant textual witness. Similarly, it misunderstands title-page's ascriptions of authorship in the early modern period and equates the lack of authorial identity with a fear of censorship. Second, it misunderstands many Tudor and Stuart institutions and political strictures, often perpetuating outdated historical misunderstandings. Contrary to the dictionary's assertions, the Star Chamber was not the site of most trials for the production of dangerous literature; the "civil law" was not the opposite of ecclesiastical law (civil lawyers appeared in the church courts); and the Master of the Revels was not first appointed by Queen Elizabeth "to read a script of all plays prior to public performance" (p. xxi). Furthermore, the dictionary fails to understand the role important institutions like the Court of High Commission and the Stationers' Company did play in press control. (The dictionary does not, for example, distinguish between ecclesiastical licensing, which was in the hands of the first Court of High Commission, and the license issued by the Stationers' Company that served as a kind of copyright.) Finally, it sometimes oversimplifies the historiography upon which it depends in the sections on "Historical Context." For example, the dictionary consistently depends on the Whig view of an escalating Puritan (with a capital "P") opposition beginning during the reign of Elizabeth and culminating in the English Revolution. This ignores both important recent historical scholarship on English Protestantism as well as revisionist and post-revisionist interpretations of the English Revolution. While this does not make the entries inherently wrong, it does produce misleading statements like the one about the mid-1620s that "Calvinism was making inroads in England" (p. 30) when, indeed, it had dominated the English church from the 1590s.

Besides grounding its master narrative in historical imprecision, some of the entries in the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship contain information that is simply wrong. George Gascoigne was not "charged with obscenity and scandalmongering" (p. 164). The Jesuit, Edmund Campion, did not become the "most wanted man in England" for writing Decum Rationes (pp. 75-6). George Buchanan's De Jure Regni Apud Scotus was not denounced by the English parliament in 1584 and "all owners of copies of the book" were not "ordered to surrender them within forty days" (p. 80). John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV was not censored in both 1599 and 1600 (p. 118). Its author was not tried before the Star Chamber in 1600. And it certainly was not "burned and the author imprisoned" after "Essex did indeed launch an abortive attempt to dethrone the Queen" (p. 298)--which was in 1601 not 1599 when the book was suppressed. The Marprelate Controversy did not begin in 1558 (as an unfortunate typo indicates). Sir John Harington's Metamorphosis of Ajax was not denied a license for "offensive and scatological subject matter" (p. 237). Finally, since all "available copies" of Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft were not "called in and burned," the book cannot serve as "a textbook example of the vagaries that befell writers depending on the attitude of the person currently in power" (p. 95), as the dictionary would have it.

If my calculations are correct, outright errors emerged in eight of the dictionary's twenty-four entries (material on Hayward appeared in two entries) for works issued between 1558 and 1603; that is to say one out of every three entries for the Elizabethan period contains errors of fact (not of interpretation). And there may be more such errors that my lack of expertise on later Stuart censorship does not recognize.

Greenwood Press, which envisions the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England as a "reference book" for "students and scholars," needs to be held accountable for the weaknesses of this book. A publisher of reference works surely should have an editorial policy that requires vetting a book among experts in the field--something that has apparently not been done here--and it should employ in-house editors who not only catch typographical errors in entry headings and conflicts between entries but who encourage the kind of objectivity in both language and perspective appropriate to reference works. If scholars and students using this dictionary attend to the author's vested interests outlined in the preface and pursue their topic into all the suggestions for further reading, the Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship can serve as a partial guide to the study of works censored in Tudor and Stuart England.

Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

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Citation: Cyndia Susan Clegg. Review of Auchter, Dorothy, Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. May, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6328

Copyright © 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.