Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Cyndia Susan Clegg has written a knowledgeable, detailed, and shrewd study of censorship during the reign of James I. Although she focuses primarily on the twenty-three years of James's kingship, her book has important implications for the ways in which both literary scholars and historians conceive of censorship and describe its effects.

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Central to Clegg's arguments concerning the nature and effectiveness of censorship is her insistence that as a Jacobean political and cultural practice it must be understood as multivocal rather than univocal, local rather than cohesive, strategic as opposed to unified: "recognizing that multiple agencies sought and employed censorship in Jacobean England means recognizing that censorship operated at different times, in different ways, and for different reasons" (p. 17). This conviction shapes the book's structure, which begins in chapter one by delineating the variety of agencies, institutions, and instruments that the state could employ to regulate printing. Here, by surveying precisely what James inherited from Elizabeth, Clegg asserts that while "the outlines for hegemony" (p. 67) certainly existed in the diversity of means available to discipline the press, in fact the proliferation of institutionalized tools and controls actually diminished central authority. Although the crown, Stationers' Company, Court of High Commission, and Privy Council could work conjointly, more often they describe competing interests in an elaborate and convoluted political contest in which both individuals and institutions sought to protect and extend their power.

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