Negotiating the public sphere: Critical responses to the role of private citizens in public debate, 1620--1650

This study argues that the role of private citizens in public affairs itself became a matter for public debate in the period 1620--1650. By examining a range of contemporary responses to the idea of private people participating in public debates, I attempt to articulate the ways in which different constituencies in early seventeenth-century London understood the intellectual and practical bases for public discourse and public policy formation and control. I take as my departure point Jurgen Habermas's theory of the transformation of the public sphere, and I argue that literary critics have, in their eagerness to locate Habermas's transformation in the early-modern period, missed an opportunity to think about what might have been happening in the crucial period before the transformation that he describes.;Chapter 1 examines several sermons of John Donne with particular attention to the ways in which Donne negotiates the relationship between the hearers in his congregations and traditional power interests in Church and State governments. Donne vacillates between wanting to limit public critiques of Church and State government and wanting to participate in those critiques: his ambivalence about public discourse, I argue, is connected to his belief that both preachers and congregations must connect their spiritual lives with their lives as citizens.;Chapter 2 analyzes the rhetoric of humiliation in a collection of dramatic pamphlets from 1641--42. These pamphlets, part of the developing popular press, concerned themselves with a range of political, religious, and social problems and issued from every side of the civil conflict. They model for readers the kinds of conversation that were possible and suggest, often explicitly, that particular ways of speaking could affect national events. As a genre, these pamphlets equivocate: they both participate in the humiliation of leaders and lawmakers and reflect critically on their own tactics.;Chapter 3 discusses the interventions of Charles I in public discourse from the beginning of his reign in the 1620s to the civil war period in the mid-1640s. The King's writings help illuminate our understanding of the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century, and they begin to correct the critical commonplace that Charles was either inept in his dealings with the public or uninterested in public opinion.;Chapter 4 evaluates the dialogism of John Milton's early polemical work, as he attempts to influence governors in the Church and in Parliament. I begin by connecting the argument and the form of his antiprelatical tract Animadversions to show how he rejects the dead recitation that passes for dialogism in the church and replaces it with true, if scabrous, dialogism. I then argue that Milton's exuberant support of dialogism starts to wane in Areopagitica, his 1644 tract opposing the reintroduction of licensing legislation. Ironically, Areopagitica, the polemic in which Milton tries most strenuously to create common ground with his audience, contains the embryonic urges to control and direct its Parliamentary addressees. Both in the licensing legislation and in Milton's tract against it, we see the idealism of Protestant radicalism in conflict with the exigencies of statecraft.