| In the seventeenth century, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a King, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define "liberty and property." This contest entailed a battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, for the control of language and representation. My dissertation offers a portrait of the "censorship contest" joined in seventeenth-century England, and, more particularly, of the art that emerged from this affray. The portrait spans several panels; the subjects include figures whose concerns and commitments were equally political and aesthetic: William Prynne, Richard Lovelace, John Milton, Samuel Pepys, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift. I argue that the object of the "art" writers employed in grappling with censorship was not so much to compromise and negotiate as to delight and deceive.; Censorship told profoundly on the literature of early modern England. In her groundbreaking work on the subject, Annabel Patterson argues that the licensing system was regulated by a tacit "social contract" or "cultural bargain" between writers and the government: in her view, the "artfulness" and indirection to which authors resorted in criticizing rulers was a form of diplomacy, of "playing by the rules." The censor discerns the critical nature of the writer's remarks but allows them because they are tactfully oblique; the benefit of adhering to such a contract---for both parties---was a purer harmony in the state. But the contractual model implies---erroneously---that political parties always strove for consensus and that monarchs endorsed the notion of a "contract" with their subjects. To the contrary, the idea of a "social contract" was very much at issue in early modern England, and political factions often aimed to promote discord rather than harmony, employing a subtle divide and conquer strategy against their opponents. I argue that "discursive contest" better describes some aspects of licensing in early modern England than does the idea of a social contract: in certain battles, words were foot soldiers, and censors (including the King himself) were the field marshals governing them. In other struggles, where artists sought to outflank or outwit the licensers, the "artifice" that they deployed was not simply tactful, it was tactical; in fine, the aim of art was not always concord (or even "concordia discors"), but victory. |
