Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England

Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. Commentators are divided on a number of questions. Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo? Or did authorities only intervene in periods of acute crisis? Did they actually read the material referred to them? This is the first collection that brings together the key figures in the field and includes essays by Richard Burt, Janet Clare, Cyndia Clegg, Richard Dutton, Richard McCabe and Annabel Patterson.

Preface List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Chronology Introduction: The Politics of Early Modern Censorship; A. Hadfield PART ONE: THEATRICAL CENSORSHIP Theatrical Censorship and Negotiation; J. Clare Puritan Tribulation and the Protestant History Play; S. Longstaffe Elizabethan Protest, Disorder, and 'Precautionary' Playing Restraints: Social Control Masquerading as Plague Control; B. Freedman The Censorship of A Gate at Chess ; R. Dutton PART TWO: RELIGIOUS CENSORSHIP Right Puissance and Terrible Priests: The Role of the Anglican Church in Elizabethan State Censorship; R. McCabe What is a Catholic Poem? : Explicitness and Censorship in Tudor and Stuart Religious Verse; A. Shell John Foxe and the Godly Commonwealth, 1563-1641; D. Loades Archbishop Laud and the Licensing of Books for the Press; A. Hunt PART THREE: POLITICAL CENSORSHIP Censoring Ireland in Early Modern England; A. Hadfield Burning Books as Propaganda in Jacobean England; C. Clegg The Censorship of Andrew Marvell; A. Patterson AFTERWORD Doing the Queen: Gender, Sexuality, and the Censorship of Elizabeth's I's Royal Image from Renaissance Portraiture to Twentieth-Century Mass Media; R. Burt Index