Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 2, 1998: Joad Raymond

Harold Weber. 1996. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. x + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8131-1929-4. $39.95.

When Charles II was 'restored' to the thrones of Britain in 1660 his legitimacy was broadcast by the same, relatively new media that had assisted in the undermining of his father. The Stuarts – and successive regimes – were unable entirely to cut off the flow of printed materials that had begun a century or more previously, and had undergone a profound expansion in the early 1640s. Instead they learned to live with the press as best they could. Paranoid secretaries of state were obliged to participate in the market for propaganda and journalism, controlling the presses where they could, and offering alternative products on a regular basis. The Carolean regime was a harsh one – historians are increasingly seeing in it a world dominated by hit-squads, kangaroo courts and the long arm of Secretary Williamson – but it could never entirely silence opposition and discontent. The sphere of public opinion, of popular participation in public debate, grew in spite of press controls and proclamations against coffee-houses.
Harold Weber's Paper Bullets is a literary study of the relationship between the press and images of kingship, of what happens during a period of royal authority when representation of monarchy escapes central control. Weber offers five long essays on more or less discrete case studies, and, if I understand his purpose right, tries to build upon them a larger picture of the chaos and contradictions inherent in print culture under Charles II. The 'kingship' of the title is probably best understood as a metonym for authority and royal bodies, rather than a constitutional form; Weber's approach is more in line with New Historicist approaches than the Pocock or Skinner schools. He bases his account on a rich range of materials: pamphlets, ballads, newsbooks, as well as more familiar literary texts, and he treats them with equal respect. Methodologically Paper Bullets is dense, and its interpretations are interesting, but its thesis is a little elusive.
The first chapter discusses sympathetic representations, mostly from the Restoration, of Charles Stuart's disguised escape from the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Troubled commentators prevaricated over whether royalty really could be disguised, whether its inherent divinity should not shine through (similar doubts were raised in 1646, when Charles I fled the besieged Oxford). Escape narratives have a high providential content, and Weber suggests an analogue between the hidden truths of disguised kingship and providential patterns. Escape narratives were also emplotted like romances, and the point of this chapter seems to be that the propagandists who recounted the escape to a new, large audience, tried to deploy the old, restricted genres of panegyric. In this confrontation between 'high' and 'low' the old genres became partly dysfunctional.
The second chapter also presents a contradiction between high and low: a medical/scientific conflict fought out in the popular press over thaumaturgy. Whereas the press played a sponsoring role in the performance of the royal touch in the early seventeenth century, under Charles II the press lost its magic. Weber suggests two main influences: the advance of scientific rationalism and the accompanying secularisation of society; and the publicisation of the touch-healing of the Duke of Monmouth and Valentine Greatrakes. Thaumaturgy began to retreat into mysticism, the medical profession triumphed, and Charles had to try not to look like another quack. This narrative is perhaps unnecessarily (and unfashionably) dismissive of the popular strength of Jacobitism and the continuation of touching practices by Anne and the exiled Stuarts.
The third chapter takes as its theme the awkwardness of Charles's sexual identity, and the treatment of his promiscuity. Weber sees 'a coherent strategy for constructing a subversive public literature' (95) manifested in manuscript and printed satires. Charles's sexual conquests were contrasted with his military failure in the second Anglo-Dutch war, and with the absolutist discipline of Louis XIV of France. Through an extended – and politically nuanced – reading of Sodom, the obscene drama probably by the Earl of Rochester, Weber argues that Charles's polymorphously perverse sexuality was somehow subversive, and sparked male anxieties about sexually empowered women (127). Hence this chapter also finds a contradiction in a royal body. Sexual performance leads to political underperformance, which is equated with emasculation. Weber's moral is this: 'Charles [ . . . ] "spent" his erotic and political capital, his sexual extravagance degrading his masculine authority and making him [ . . . ] less than a woman, impotent, sterile, effeminate, homosexual' (125). Weber does not address the more tangible contradiction: that panegyric and satire used so many of the same topics; that decidedly ambivalent praise of the king's sexual practices (for example, in Absalom and Achitophel, with which this chapter begins) was not practically troubled by the correlative images produced in Whig propaganda. The fact is that it was as easy imaginatively to connect sexual promiscuity with martial strength as it was sexual promiscuity with martial failure; and the regime remained intact despite the ingenuity of satirists.
The two chapters in the second part of the book ('The Language of Censorship') address more generally the nascent print industry. Chapter four discusses the language of censorship as evidence for perceptions of public opinion, seeing in this language a rencounter between state and public. Weber offers an interestingly account of the history of censorship, tracing the shift in press control from proclamations to parliamentary acts. In this narrative authorial identity emerges not as offshoot of bourgeois subjectivity or the property rights of an emergent liberalism, but as the consequence of royal attempts to exert control over the press. Milton plays his usual role in this account, but he is juxtaposed with very different kinds of evidence: Richard Atkyns's Original and Growth of Printing (c.1660) and coffee houses and Tory claims of the parallels between 1641 and 1681. Weber's evidence suggests how sensitive some readers were to the nuances of print, to its extended history in Britain, to the price, format and genres of books. He depicts a Manichean conflict between the inherently controlling and repressive nature of early-modern governments and the inherently subversive tendencies of the press: 'Print technology, by its very nature, must threaten that power [ . . . ]' (143). In a revisionist account of the growth of political consciousness (which contrasts with a Whiggish view of press controls), Weber presents Carolean public opinion as a pawn in a struggle 'between competing factions of the traditional ruling elites' (167). Here, however, he is silent about the 1620s and the developments of 1640-42. The longer-term perspective suggests that we have to take seriously the term 'public' in the collocation 'public opinion', and the social and economic forces that made the public worth courting. For Weber the people are, like Louis XIV, fabricated: 'During the years 1678-1682 "the People" enter the theatre of national politics not primarily because of a principled decision to comprehend in the political process the excluded and disenfranchised, but because for both Whig and Tory it became expedient and finally necessary to do so' (169). This exaggerated, top-down view of events only tells half the story.
In the final chapter Weber discusses the case of Stephen College, the 'Protestant Joiner' executed in 1681 for his part in a plot against the king. During College's trial for treason a printed text played a pivotal role in the evidence presented by the prosecution (there was only one material witness), and this text was subjected to close-reading. For Weber the case reveals not only the concern of the authorities for the power of print but the legal pressures that came to define a modern construction of authorship. When College was proved to have written the ballad in question, his protestations that he had not published it became immaterial. The government publicised College's case as a dire warning, and turned around the subversive potential of print with crushing authority. I do wonder, however, how whether the government really had a 'canny appreciation of the dramatic effect of textual dramatisation', given that it decided to give extensive publicity to College's opinion that the Stuarts were a 'race of buggerers' (195). In doing so the government was either being plain dumb, or assumed that readers could be relied upon passively to believe what they were told.
Weber's picture confirms the Foucauldian account of authorship as a punitive category, though he insists, against Foucault, that transgression also has to be understood in its commercial context. He does not, however, address the very un-Foucauldian instance of John Twyn, the printer who was executed for printing a treasonable book, whose case hung on the fact that he had proof-read it, and was therefore deemed conscious of his actions. Twyn's punishment, however, was decidedly Foucauldian. A great deal of work remains to be done on literature and the law, and Weber's account suggests trial proceedings offer a rich resource for investigations into writing and the book trade. College's trial shows that the boundary between words and deeds was permeable; an inference Weber reinforces in his Conclusion with a discussion of Algernon Sidney. This point, though readily enough made, does have significant repercussions for our conception of the place of literature, and its relationship with pamphlets and print culture, in the seventeenth century. These implications are captured by a striking formulation in the Conclusion, which, regrettably, comes as a surprise: 'The very category of the literary is determined by the complex interaction between judicial traditions and political necessity, forged from the untidy confrontation between competing forces vying for power in elections, through the courts, and on the page' (210).

JOAD RAYMOND
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN