Dissertation
“Censorship
in the Plays of John Fletcher”
by
Meg Powers Livingston
A.
R. Braunmuller, Director
Abstract
of the Dissertation
My dissertation, “Censorship in the Plays of John Fletcher,” unites three modes of inquiry—critical, textual, and historical—in order to discuss the possibility of censorship in plays without surviving documentation of interference. The methods used by scholars who write on censorship issues clearly demonstrate that our knowledge regarding censored plays relies heavily on surviving manuscripts. With no surviving manuscript, censorship can only be conjectured, often by using traditional critical approaches that project twentieth-century perceptions of what might have been politically subversive onto seventeenth-century plays. My first chapter sets up this problem and then proposes a possible solution, one part of which is to rely on textual work that allows me to identify the “debris” left behind in a printed text when its copy-text has been censored.
Textual scholarship alone, however, does not solve the problems posed by Fletcher’s plays. Traditional textual scholars are often limited by their desire to locate definitive authorial documents; they are interested primarily in literary texts, not in play scripts “corrupted” by staging processes that reflect a particular moment in a play’s performance history. They ask “how” when faced with a textual anomaly or variant, in order to identify and erase textual corruption. I ask “why,” in order to explore the nature and concerns of theatrical processes, including censorship. To answer this question, critical interpretation and textual analysis must work in conjunction with theater history, especially an understanding of the intensely collaborative nature of early modern drama and the important role of the Master of the Revels. Combining these approaches fosters a deep engagement with both the textual artifact and the culture that produced it, allowing me to examine issues relevant to literary interpretations of these plays as well as to cultural studies. For example, the textual and historical work underlying my article “Henry Herbert’s Censorship of Female Power in Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize” (forthcoming in vol. 13 of Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England) allows me to move from a detailed textual examination of the play to much broader investigations of censorship as a cultural phenomenon in the 1630s and of the impact censorship had on representations of gender relations in the world of the play and at the court of Charles I.
The first three chapters of my study analyze three of Fletcher’s plays with both surviving manuscripts and documented histories of censorship, allowing me to focus attention on how censorship operated under two Masters of the Revels over a twenty-year period.
Chapter two describes the censorship
imposed by George Buc on Sir John van
Olden Barnavelt and how George Buc worked with Fletcher and
Massinger in a kind of give and take relationship. This chapter also uses new evidence on the playwrights’ source
materials to argue that their grasp of Dutch politics was more thorough than
previously thought and that their initial representation of the title character
might have been very different from what survives in the censored
manuscript.
Chapter three reveals how The Woman’s Prize was censored by Buc in
1611 and then again by Henry Herbert in 1633, demonstrating the ongoing scrutiny
visited even on old plays and establishing that Herbert was sensitive to and
concerned about subtle political subtext.
My discussion of The Honest Man’s Fortune in chapter four highlights the key
role played by scribes and bookkeepers in the censorship process and raises
questions regarding the fine line between censorship and theatrical adaptation
for revival, especially as old “public” theater plays were revived for the
“private” theaters.
All three plays demonstrate specific kinds of textual problems caused by outside interference, and these traits better enable me to explore whether censorship might have occurred in three plays that do not have surviving manuscripts or documented histories of interference.
Chapter five discusses Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and A
Wife for a Month, focusing on how textual difficulties in these plays are
very similar to the traits exhibited by the first group and seem to be
connected to representations of absolute authority. The chapter concludes that censorship almost certainly occurred
in two of these plays and cannot be ruled out in the third.
Working with these and with other censored plays has led me to several conclusions and many questions. My research produced strong evidence that censorship—even if defined very strictly as direct interference in a text by a state official attempting to impose certain ideological/political standards—certainly occurred more frequently in the early modern period than the scarcity of surviving evidence might suggest. If that definition is broadened to include indirect interference, typically made in the playhouse in anticipation of outside interference, then censorship occurred in an even greater number of plays. But my study raises larger questions regarding the place of censorship within the continually evolving theatrical subculture of Jacobean and Caroline London, as well as within the broader socio-political culture of early to mid-seventeenth-century England. My work indicates that censorship in this era was an established part of the collaborative production of drama, much more so than is usually recognized by scholars, and that the traditional understanding of censorship as inherently dichotomous needs to be adjusted. My dissertation demonstrates that censorship must be viewed as part of a spectrum of possible responses to a play among a group of potential agents, rather than as a simple author/Master, company/Crown, revision/censorship, either/or proposition.