MASTERING THE REVELS The Regulation and Censorship of English

Renaissance Drama

Also by Richard Dutton

AN INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY CRITICISM BEN JONSON: TO THE FIRST FOLIO MODERN TRAGICOMEDY AND THE BRITISH TRADITION *WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A LITERARY LIFE BEN JONSON: 'EPIGRAMS' AND 'THE FOREST' (editor) SELECTED WRITINGS OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (editor)

*Also published by Palgrave Macmillan

Mastering the Revels The Regulation and Censorship of

English Renaissance Drama

Richard Dutton Reader in English

Lancaster University

~ MACMILLAN

© Richard Dutton 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991

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civil claims for damages.

First published 1991

Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London

Companies and representatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dutton, Richard

Mastering the revels: the regulations and censorship of English Renaissance drama. 1. England. Theatre. Censorship, history I. Title 792

ISBN 978-1-349-09881-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09879-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09879-8

8765432 02 01 00 99 98 97

For Maura, Katie and Claire

Contents

List of Plates viii Preface and Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations and Citations xi

Introduction 1

1 Country and Court: A System of Control Emerges, 1549-79 17

2 Tilney, Patronage and Profit, 1579-89 41 3 Martin Marprelate, Sir Thomas More, Marlowe, c. 1589-93 74 4 Theatrical Authority in the Later 1590s 97 5 Essex and the Limits of Toleration, 1600-03 117 6 The Question of Authority I- From Tilney to Buc,

1603-10 142 7 The Question of Authority II- The Boy Companies,

1604-10 164 8 Sir George Buc, 1610-22 194 9 Pembroke, Astley, Herbert: 1622-26 218 ~otes 249 Bibliography 278 Index 289

vii

List of Plates

1 Frontispiece of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess. 2 Title page of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall History of the

Life and Death of Dr Faustus (1616). 3 Sir Henry Herbert. 4 Ben Jonson. 5 Philip Massinger. 6 Thomas Middleton. 7 Edmond Tilney's censorship of the insurrection scenes of Sir

Thomas More. 8 Sir George Buc's censorship of parallels between the United

Provinces and the Roman Republic in Sir John Van Olden Barna­velt.

9 Buc's censorship of the treatment of the Prince of Orange in Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt.

10 Buc's licence attached to The Second Maiden's Tragedy. 11 Sir Henry Herbert's licence for Believe As You List.

11. Sir Henry Herbert's licence for Believe As You List.

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Censorship is a form of repression. If, as I shall argue in this book, the censorship of English Renaissance drama was neither as totali­tarian nor draconian as it is often held to be, it was nevertheless an infringement of self-expression and one difficult to justify (as it may perhaps sometimes be justified in matters of violence, sexual exploitation and state secrecy) in terms of the greater good of the community as a whole. My purpose in studying it at this length is to examine how it actually operated, what the rationale behind it was, and how it related to the wider structures of the society that imposed it. No instance of official interference in the theatre of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is intelligible without recourse to all those questions. And only when we take all these matters into account can we make a realistic assessment of the relevance of the subject to our own condition, which is the proper, indeed unavoidable, duty of all scholarship.

My terminal dates, for reasons that will emerge as the book unfolds, are 1581 and 1626. In as much as I consider the period before that, it is to establish the status quo at the point when Edmond Tilney became the first Master of the Revels to be concerned with the regulation and censorship of the public theatres; references to later plays and incidents are mainly prompted by the unavoidable necessity of drawing on material from the papers of Sir Henry Herbert (de facto Master of the Revels from 1623 to 1642 and again at the Restoration), by far the most informative documents to have survived on this subject. Even within these limits I cannot pretend to have considered every play on which censorship has left a demonstrable mark, to have written a comprehensive history of the subject. In many ways, plays which have survived apparently unscathed, instances when the dog did not bark in the night, are just as illuminating about the mind-set which determined what was permissible and where the line was to be drawn as those which have clearly been mutilated. I have chosen therefore to concentrate on a representative range of texts, including many of the causes celebres of censorship and state intervention, but also cases like Marlowe where there is surprisingly little evidence of interference with his writings, rather than aim for comprehensive coverage. This

ix

X Preface and Acknowledgements

has given me room to tease out fundamental issues and practices, and to consider their implications.

This book would probably never have come to fruition without the generous grant of two terms' special study leave by the Humani­ties Research Committee of the University of Lancaster in 1985/86. Nor would it have come to anything like its final shape without the award of a Short-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., in the summer of 1987. I am grateful for both of those. A further term's sabbatical leave, for which my hard-pressed colleagues in the Department of English at Lancaster have had to cover, brought the book almost to its final state. My thanks to all of them. Various portions of this book, at different stages of its gestation, have been the basis for papers I have given at the Seventeenth-Century Studies Conference at the University of Durham in July 1987, a special session on the Herbert family at the MLA Convention in New Orleans in December 1988, and the Politics, Patronage and Literature Conference at the University of Reading in July 1989. Part of the book has been published, in rather different form, as 'Patronage, Politics and the Master of the Revels: The Case of Sir John Astley, Master of the Revels 1622-1640' in English Literary Renaissance. My thanks to the editor for permission to re-use the material. I am pleased to acknowledge the support, encouragement and constructive criticism I have received in all these contexts. I should particularly like to mention N. W. Bawcutt, Julia Briggs, Dick Burt, Joe Candido, Philip J. Finkel pearl, Tom Gravell, Andrew Gurr, Margot Heinemann, David Kay, James Knowles, Tina Malcolmson, Irvin Matus, Ronnie Mulryne, Brian Parker, Michael Shapiro, Sara Jayne Steen, Margaux Stocker, Richard Wilson and Laetitia Yeandle, who have variously offered help, advice or listened to my ramblings on the subject of censor­ship. More specific debts are mentioned in the notes to the book. The greatest debt, as ever, is to Maura, Katie and Claire.

Richard Dutton Halton.

July 1990 This book was already in proof when I received Janet Clare's 'Art made tongue-tied by authority': Elizabethan and Jacabean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester 1990). Despite some inevitable overlap, our approaches are very different, and the main difference between us is clearly apparent in the contrast between our respective closing paragraphs.

Abbreviations and Citations

Certain works are, of necessity, referred to so frequently in what follows that I have decided it will be less distracting to readers to offer brief references within the text than to keep referring them to the Notes at the back of the book. These are, with their shortened forms:

The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, edited by Joseph Quincy Adams (New Haven, 1917): Herbert.

G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941-68): JCS.

E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923): ES. Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Eliza­

bethan Drama (New York, 1908; reprinted 1961): GR. Mark Eccles, 'Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels' in Thomas Lodge

and Other Elizabethans, edited by C.]. Sisson (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 409-506: 'Buc'.

Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 A.D. (London, 1876; reprinted Gloucester, Mass., 1967): Arber.

Where other works are referred to with any frequency within the notes, I have indicated a short-citation form on their first occurrence there.

All references to the works of Shakespeare are to William Shakes­peare: The Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Compact Edition (Oxford, 1988). Similarly, all references to the works of Jonson (except for Eastward Ho) are to Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52); this includes his 'Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden' (vol. 1, pp. 128-78), hereafter referred to as 'Drummond', with line citations. In the case of all other plays, including Eastward Ho, references will be to the editions cited in the notes. These have been selected eclectically, according to their usefulness in relation to the subject of this study, and not with any view to consistency in matters of spelling. I have been consis­tent only in reproducing texts as I have found them in the works cited.

xi

OLIVIA There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail.

(Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Or What You Will (c. 1600), 1.5. 89-91)

ARETINUS (Caesar's Spy) You are they That search into the secrets of the time, And under feign' d names on the stage present Actions not to be touch' d at; and traduce Persons of rank, and quality, of both sexes, And with satirical, and bitter jests, Make even the senators ridiculous To the plebeians.

PARIS (The Tragedian) If I free not myself (And in myself the rest of my profession) From these false imputations, and prove That they make a libel which the poet Writ for a comedy, so acted too, It is but justice that we undergo The heaviest censure ...

. . . for traducing such That are above us, publishing to the world Their secret crimes, we are as innocent As such as are born dumb. When we present An heir, that does conspire against the life Of his dear parent, numb' ring every hour He lives as tedious to him, if there be Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him He is of the same mould, we cannot help it. Or bringing on the stage a loose adult'ress, That does maintain the riotous expense Of him that feeds her greedy lust, yet suffers The lawful pledges for a former bed To starve the while for hunger; if a matron, However great in fortune, birth or titles, Guilty of such a foul, unnatural sin, Cry out, "Tis writ by me', we cannot help it ...

xii

... If any of this reverend assembly, Nay, e'en yourself, my lord, that are the image Of absent Caesar, feel something in your bosom That puts you in remembrance of things past, Or things intended, 'tis not in us to help it. I have said, my lord; and now, as you find cause, Or censure us, or free us with applause.

(Massinger, The Roman Actor (1626), I. iii. 36--49; 106-22; 136--42)

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