The Uses of Libel
What began as subversive poetry 400 years ago is now bringing historians and literary critics together
By JENNIFER HOWARD
If today's politicians feel that they are too often the targets of the slings and arrows of constituents, they should be glad they didn't hold office in early-17th-century England. In that era, members of Parliament, courtiers, and even the king himself came in for abuse at the hands of anonymous commentators who expressed their sentiments in pointed, frequently rude poems known as libels.
"Never was bestowed such an art/Upon the tuning of a Fart," run the opening lines of "The Censure of the Parliament Fart," one of more than 350 Stuart-era libels now available online in Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry From Manuscript Sources (http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/index.html). Occasioned by an episode that took place in Parliament on March 4, 1607, when Sir John Croke, speaker of the House of Commons, attempted to read a message from the House of Lords, and Henry Ludlow passed gas loudly enough to be heard throughout the chamber, the poem goes on to describe the various reactions of notable politicians to the unfortunate emission.
"The Censure of the Parliament Fart" circulated well into the late 17th century, with successive libelers adding verses as the years passed -- a kind of running gag on the gassiness of politicians. "What we would see as analogies have almost a literal power" for Stuart-era readers and writers, says Alastair Bellany, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who edited Early Stuart Libels with Andrew McRae, a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Exeter, in England. Libelers used descriptions of bodily functions, corporeal decay, and sexual deviance to comment on corruptions in the body politic.
"A mixture of outrage and laughter" is how Mr. Bellany describes the libelers' collective attitude. Whether punning on Sir Francis Bacon's name or engaging in graphic speculation on the Duke of Buckingham's sexual proclivities, the writers used this "dodgy genre," as Mr. Bellany puts it, as a way to comment on events and public figures who, because of censorship laws, were otherwise off limits.
Bloody Penalties
The authorities in early-17th-century England kept a tight rein on what could be expressed, particularly in print. The term "libel" derives from the law but "came to define a range of unauthorized and controversial texts, on individuals or topical issues," according to the introduction to Early Stuart Libels. "A remark didn't have to be untrue to be a libel," Mr. Bellany says -- and libelers, if caught, faced penalties that ranged from being pilloried to having their noses slit and their ears cut off.
Hence the anonymity preserved by the poems' authors. Libels served as an underground safe zone in which one could let fly with political commentary, find an appreciative audience, and still keep one's ears. The poems circulated hand to hand, at dinner parties, in letters and diaries, and in the miscellanies and "newsbooks" assembled by contemporaries. Some miscellanies of the period are almost entirely made up of libels.
Cathartic as they probably were for those who wrote and read them, libels also played a role in the run-up to the constitutional crises of 1640-42 and the English Civil War that followed -- and have changed historians' understanding of that turbulent time.
In the introduction to Early Stuart Libels, the editors write that libels "help make opposition conceivable: and speakable."
In the 1970s and 80s, many historians subscribed to the idea that Stuart-era Englishmen didn't much care about politics, and that national debate focused on a few familiar points: the royal coffers, foreign policy, the union between England and Scotland. Libels preserve a depth and range of grass-roots political feeling that goes well beyond parliamentary debates. The libels offer "a completely different version of the political narrative of the early 17th century," says Mr. Bellany.
For instance, the death, in 1612, of Robert Cecil, King James I's most powerful minister and adviser, let loose a flood of scandal-mongering epitaphs that harped on his affairs with other courtiers' wives and the syphilitic condition of his genitalia: "Rotten with ruttinge like sores in September/ hee died as hee lived with a faulte in one member."
The mudslinging suggests a greater fear that the country was going to hell in a handbasket: "A cruell monster sent by fate,/ To devoure both cuntrye, king, and state,/ I care not, nor I cannott tell,/ Whether his soule be in heaven or Hell,/ Butt sure I am they have earthed the foxe,/ That stunke alive, and dyde of the poxe."As the court went, the libelers suggested, so went the kingdom.
A 'Sense of Fixity'
Early Stuart Libels is the product of 15 years of archival research and transcribing. Newsbooks and miscellanies that contain libels "survive in all kinds of places," Mr. Bellany says. The British Library, Oxford's Bodleian and the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, have been gold mines, as have local record offices in Britain. Many libraries maintain indexes of first lines; the scholars were also given leads by people who heard about their interest in the genre.
The scholarly work, which was financed largely by Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents an effort to make these manuscript sources more widely available. Many have never before been published. There are no plans for a print version, nor will the current edition be subject to augmentation or additions; the editors hope that there will be a "sense of fixity" about it, and that it will be referenced by scholars just as a traditional book would be.
In that, it may be on the leading edge of a new, electronic approach to studying and disseminating source material. "This edition seeks in many ways to be a pathbreaking endeavor," the editors note in their introduction. "The electronic medium ... provides a superb opportunity to offer scholarly editions of works otherwise largely inaccessible or unknown to both the academic community and the layperson alike."
There is no charge to access Early Stuart Libels, which can be either browsed online or downloaded. Users can search for poems by first line, by proper name cited, or by manuscript source, or they can browse through sections devoted to specific incidents or episodes, such as Cecil's death and the so-called Addled Parliament of June 1614. Annotations accompany each poem to help the nonspecialist navigate period references.
Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, says the online work may help expand the definition of what counts as a scholarly publication. For one thing, he says, it is more fully annotated than many publishers can afford to make print editions. Those notes help make Early Stuart Libels "a very useful set of texts," he says. "These were things that were not all that accessible."
The collection also reflects a growing sympathy over the past two decades between historians and literary critics. In the wake of work by Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists, who argued that literary works are better understood in their historical context, the two disciplines have been paying closer attention to one other.
Historians used to dismiss some literary studies of the 16th and 17th centuries as lacking in historical rigor even while they themselves "often had very narrow definitions of what made a good source," says Mr. Bellany. They wondered how "a rude poem about the Duke of Buckingham could teach you anything."
Those attitudes have given way to an appreciation of literary sources -- from court masques and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia on down to libels -- on the part of historians, and, for literature scholars, an appreciation of historical sources and methodology.
"Literature and history are colliding in surprising ways," says Mr. Grafton, particularly among scholars interested in the history of publishing and reading. "How do you do interdisciplinary work if you're not going to collapse the disciplines? This sort of project seems ideal."
As for the libelers themselves, they hardly limited their targets to those in public life. Seventeenth-century undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, were fond of sending up tutors and school officials, and many samples of their ruder comments survive in the miscellanies. Will you find any of those verses in Early Stuart Libels? "No," says Mr. Bellany with a laugh. "We suppress them."
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 44, Page A14
What began as subversive poetry 400 years ago is now bringing historians and literary critics together
By JENNIFER HOWARD
If today's politicians feel that they are too often the targets of the slings and arrows of constituents, they should be glad they didn't hold office in early-17th-century England. In that era, members of Parliament, courtiers, and even the king himself came in for abuse at the hands of anonymous commentators who expressed their sentiments in pointed, frequently rude poems known as libels.
"Never was bestowed such an art/Upon the tuning of a Fart," run the opening lines of "The Censure of the Parliament Fart," one of more than 350 Stuart-era libels now available online in Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry From Manuscript Sources (http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/index.html). Occasioned by an episode that took place in Parliament on March 4, 1607, when Sir John Croke, speaker of the House of Commons, attempted to read a message from the House of Lords, and Henry Ludlow passed gas loudly enough to be heard throughout the chamber, the poem goes on to describe the various reactions of notable politicians to the unfortunate emission.
"The Censure of the Parliament Fart" circulated well into the late 17th century, with successive libelers adding verses as the years passed -- a kind of running gag on the gassiness of politicians. "What we would see as analogies have almost a literal power" for Stuart-era readers and writers, says Alastair Bellany, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who edited Early Stuart Libels with Andrew McRae, a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Exeter, in England. Libelers used descriptions of bodily functions, corporeal decay, and sexual deviance to comment on corruptions in the body politic.
"A mixture of outrage and laughter" is how Mr. Bellany describes the libelers' collective attitude. Whether punning on Sir Francis Bacon's name or engaging in graphic speculation on the Duke of Buckingham's sexual proclivities, the writers used this "dodgy genre," as Mr. Bellany puts it, as a way to comment on events and public figures who, because of censorship laws, were otherwise off limits.
Bloody Penalties
The authorities in early-17th-century England kept a tight rein on what could be expressed, particularly in print. The term "libel" derives from the law but "came to define a range of unauthorized and controversial texts, on individuals or topical issues," according to the introduction to Early Stuart Libels. "A remark didn't have to be untrue to be a libel," Mr. Bellany says -- and libelers, if caught, faced penalties that ranged from being pilloried to having their noses slit and their ears cut off.
Hence the anonymity preserved by the poems' authors. Libels served as an underground safe zone in which one could let fly with political commentary, find an appreciative audience, and still keep one's ears. The poems circulated hand to hand, at dinner parties, in letters and diaries, and in the miscellanies and "newsbooks" assembled by contemporaries. Some miscellanies of the period are almost entirely made up of libels.
Cathartic as they probably were for those who wrote and read them, libels also played a role in the run-up to the constitutional crises of 1640-42 and the English Civil War that followed -- and have changed historians' understanding of that turbulent time.
In the introduction to Early Stuart Libels, the editors write that libels "help make opposition conceivable: and speakable."
In the 1970s and 80s, many historians subscribed to the idea that Stuart-era Englishmen didn't much care about politics, and that national debate focused on a few familiar points: the royal coffers, foreign policy, the union between England and Scotland. Libels preserve a depth and range of grass-roots political feeling that goes well beyond parliamentary debates. The libels offer "a completely different version of the political narrative of the early 17th century," says Mr. Bellany.
For instance, the death, in 1612, of Robert Cecil, King James I's most powerful minister and adviser, let loose a flood of scandal-mongering epitaphs that harped on his affairs with other courtiers' wives and the syphilitic condition of his genitalia: "Rotten with ruttinge like sores in September/ hee died as hee lived with a faulte in one member."
The mudslinging suggests a greater fear that the country was going to hell in a handbasket: "A cruell monster sent by fate,/ To devoure both cuntrye, king, and state,/ I care not, nor I cannott tell,/ Whether his soule be in heaven or Hell,/ Butt sure I am they have earthed the foxe,/ That stunke alive, and dyde of the poxe."As the court went, the libelers suggested, so went the kingdom.
A 'Sense of Fixity'
Early Stuart Libels is the product of 15 years of archival research and transcribing. Newsbooks and miscellanies that contain libels "survive in all kinds of places," Mr. Bellany says. The British Library, Oxford's Bodleian and the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, have been gold mines, as have local record offices in Britain. Many libraries maintain indexes of first lines; the scholars were also given leads by people who heard about their interest in the genre.
The scholarly work, which was financed largely by Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents an effort to make these manuscript sources more widely available. Many have never before been published. There are no plans for a print version, nor will the current edition be subject to augmentation or additions; the editors hope that there will be a "sense of fixity" about it, and that it will be referenced by scholars just as a traditional book would be.
In that, it may be on the leading edge of a new, electronic approach to studying and disseminating source material. "This edition seeks in many ways to be a pathbreaking endeavor," the editors note in their introduction. "The electronic medium ... provides a superb opportunity to offer scholarly editions of works otherwise largely inaccessible or unknown to both the academic community and the layperson alike."
There is no charge to access Early Stuart Libels, which can be either browsed online or downloaded. Users can search for poems by first line, by proper name cited, or by manuscript source, or they can browse through sections devoted to specific incidents or episodes, such as Cecil's death and the so-called Addled Parliament of June 1614. Annotations accompany each poem to help the nonspecialist navigate period references.
Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, says the online work may help expand the definition of what counts as a scholarly publication. For one thing, he says, it is more fully annotated than many publishers can afford to make print editions. Those notes help make Early Stuart Libels "a very useful set of texts," he says. "These were things that were not all that accessible."
The collection also reflects a growing sympathy over the past two decades between historians and literary critics. In the wake of work by Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists, who argued that literary works are better understood in their historical context, the two disciplines have been paying closer attention to one other.
Historians used to dismiss some literary studies of the 16th and 17th centuries as lacking in historical rigor even while they themselves "often had very narrow definitions of what made a good source," says Mr. Bellany. They wondered how "a rude poem about the Duke of Buckingham could teach you anything."
Those attitudes have given way to an appreciation of literary sources -- from court masques and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia on down to libels -- on the part of historians, and, for literature scholars, an appreciation of historical sources and methodology.
"Literature and history are colliding in surprising ways," says Mr. Grafton, particularly among scholars interested in the history of publishing and reading. "How do you do interdisciplinary work if you're not going to collapse the disciplines? This sort of project seems ideal."
As for the libelers themselves, they hardly limited their targets to those in public life. Seventeenth-century undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, were fond of sending up tutors and school officials, and many samples of their ruder comments survive in the miscellanies. Will you find any of those verses in Early Stuart Libels? "No," says Mr. Bellany with a laugh. "We suppress them."
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 44, Page A14
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