Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends. Building on her two previous studies on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Cyndia Clegg scrutinizes all aspects of Caroline print culture: book production in London, the universities, and on the Continent; licensing and authorization practices in both the Stationers' Company and among the ecclesiastical licensers; cases before the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and the Stationers' Company's Court of Assistants; and trade
Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends. Building on her two previous studies on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Cyndia Clegg scrutinizes all aspects of Caroline print culture: book production in London, the universities, and on the Continent; licensing and authorization practices in both the Stationers' Company and among the ecclesiastical licensers; cases before the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and the Stationers' Company's Court of Assistants; and trade
This 2001 book examines the ways in which books were produced, read and received during the reign of King James I. It challenges prevailing attitudes that press censorship in Jacobean England differed little from either the 'whole machinery of control' enacted by the Court of Star Chamber under Elizabeth or the draconian campaign implemented by Archbishop Laud, during the reign of Charles I. Cyndia Clegg, building on her earlier study Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, contends that although the principal mechanisms for controlling the press altered little between 1558 and 1603, the actual practice of censorship under King James I varied significantly from Elizabethan practice. The book combines historical analysis of documents with literary reading of censored texts and exposes the kinds of tensions that really mattered in Jacobean culture. It will be an invaluable resource for literary scholars and historians alike.
This study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. Shakespeare's Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare's plays and poems, whether printed or performed. Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II's reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English
Holinshed's Chronicles, best known as one of Shakespeare's major sources, contains one of the few accounts of Elizabeth's reign written during her lifetime. A contemporary history, it was subjected to
