The aim of the "Companion Library" is to provide students of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama with a fuller sense of its background and context. This book traces the development and the impact of dramatic censorship from its beginnings in the suppression of religious drama to the end of the Jacobean period. In fact it was not until 1968 that the practice of theatre censorship which became established in the reign of the first Elizabeth was finally abolished. Before judging what appears to be a play's structural imbalance, political equivocation or ambivalent ideology it is necessary to take into account the kinds of constraint applied by the state, whether through theatrical censor or otherwise. There is a tendency in studies in the politics of Renaissance drama either to dismiss censorship as lenient and posing no threat or to view it as consistently repressive and menacing. Neither view reflects the true nature of a system which under Elizabeth I and James I was dynamic and unstable. Fluctuations in the intensity of censorship and the issues deemed censorable occurred between and during the reigns of these monarchs. In such a public art as the theatre, dramatic censorship is inevitably linked with local circumstances at the time of performance. The approach of the book is historically specific and is based on the assumption that until we locate the text within a historical moment of production and reconstruct the precise preoccupations of the censor by way of the evidence from censored texts we cannot know how censorship impinged on the working playwright. The book details several isolated cases of censorship. The purpose of this study is primarily to re-situate and reappraise those plays which were victims of censorship because of their subject matter or ideology, boldness of language or iconography or which were censored because of a particular collusion of dramatic material and political event. The book also examines how the pressures of censorship shaped the artefacts and rhetorical strategies of plays in the repertoires of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres.
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About the Author
Janet Clare is Lecturer in the Department of English, University College Dublin.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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