Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Alison Shell

Janet Clare. 1999 [1990]. 'Art made tongue-tied by authority': Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 242 pp. ISBN 0-7190-5695-0. £15.99 pb.

This is a welcome reappearance of a classic study. First published in 1990, a time when poetry-and-politics were fashionable as never before in Renaissance studies, Janet Clare's book surveyed a number of causes célèbres in the field of drama and censorship: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, The Isle of Dogs and A Game at Chess, among others. But her conclusions extended over the whole field of Elizabethan and Jacobean English drama: as she puts it, 'all the plays of our period were written in the shadow of the censor and […] no dramatist could unchain his thoughts from the agent of that most arbitrary and punitive instrument of state control'. Clare's work conducted a dialogue with Annabel Patterson's provocative and influential Censorship and Interpretation (1984), which argued for an element of game-playing in the behaviour of both authors and censors, with censorship only undertaken when one side hit a ball out of court. One of the most important differences between the two is Clare's emphasis on an unpredictable government who could waive or disregard previous convention at any time, according to prevailing external circumstances.
Subsequent scholars have wanted, in turn, to supplement and modify the picture presented by Clare. Richard Dutton's book Mastering the Revels (1991) stressed the mediating role of the Master of the Revels; acting as arbitrator between the players and the government, his job was not to suppress debate entirely, but to help both parties to arrive at a mutually acceptable version of a play. Though his stress on consensus poses an interesting counterbalance to Clare, Dutton's conclusion that problems tended to occur when 'conditions for reciprocity were temporarily missing' is, in fact, assimilable to Clare's belief that censorship was often rendered less than effective by pervasive inefficiency, and the dynamism of the political environment within which it operated. In Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (1997), Cyndia Clegg has engaged more directly with Clare's argument, contending that governmental censorship should be regarded as an unsystematic, almost panicky reaction to specific incidents, rather than any kind of grand plan.
However, Clare's model has proved resilient. The recent collection of essays edited by Andrew Hadfield, Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (2001) shows the extent to which her work, and responses to it, continues to dictate the parameters within which the debate is conducted. Its strength is that it combines a keen recognition of the powers of an authoritarian state, potential and actual, with an acknowledgement that one needs, in every case of censorship, to recover the circumstances specific to the times. Rightly suspicious of too great a tendency towards theoretical abstraction, her work is never other than bibliographically and historically well grounded, and will not look dated for a long time. In this second edition, Clare has added an introductory chapter, 'Historicism and the question of censorship', issuing a salvo against the tendency of new historicism and cultural materialism to be cavalier about the traditional strengths and skills of historical investigation; and this is an admonishment which she has every right to deliver.

ALISON SHELL
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM