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Book Review
| Debora K. Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 352. $59.95 (ISBN 0-8122-3917-2).
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| In the book under review, Debora Shuger, professor of English at UCLA, offers a fresh interpretation of the early modern English regime's system of censorship and people's attitudes toward it. This is a worthwhile undertaking: as her introduction points out, the seeming inconsistency of Tudor Stuart censorship has puzzled scholars, although most have agreed that it embodied the attempt, sometimes clumsily carried out, to suppress ideas deemed threatening to the state. As Shuger shows, however, this theory fails to explain, for example, why the Privy Council expurgated from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles politically sensitive material, but left untouched the opening of his chapter on Parliament with its seemingly explosive claim that "Parliament held the most high and absolute power of the realm, for thereby kings ... have from time to time been deposed" (3). Shuger asserts that such inconsistencies only seem that way because we have been looking at them from the wrong angle. We best understand early modern state censorship, she suggests, not as the suppression of dangerous ideas but as an outgrowth of the Roman law of injuria, which regulated all kinds of assaults on the dignity of the self, whether verbal or physical. It's not news that Roman law influenced the common law, and Shuger's contribution thus far is illuminating. She overreaches, however, in claiming that this approach reflected "deeply consensual norms" in the society (6). |
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If there was agreement at all levels of society that personal attacks violated civility, why did such attacks abound, as Shuger amply documents? To the contrary, it seems more likely that the regime's suppression of defamatory attacks on its elite reflected a deeply divided polity. In a study that illuminates this issue, Joanne B. Freeman shows that the American Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized personal attacks on members of the government precisely because such attacks undermined a fragile government's shaky hold on loyalty and respect. In a culture that bestowed credibility based on personal honor and reputation, defamation of rulers amounted to political challenge. |
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The book has other flaws. Shuger's references to American case law are often inapt. She falls into anachronism, referring to Elizabethan tracts as containing "hate speech," a modern term of art for opprobrium directed at racial, ethnic, and other minorities, not a synonym for libel, or even for saying nasty things about people, as Shuger seems to use it. Overlooking the torts system, she erroneously claims that Roman injuria law has no analogue in American law today. Further, Shuger's reading of cases, such as New York Times v. Sullivan, is problematic. She claims that Sullivan "betrays a postmodern skepticism regarding the whole notion of truth and falsehood" (116). This interpretation is farfetched: Sullivan was written long before "postmodern skepticism" became fashionable. It stands rather for the proposition that open and robust civic debate is more important than personal reputation, and that even demonstrable falsehoods are preferable to suppression of that debate, especially when those defamed are public figures with access to the media and the political process with which to fight back. In tipping the scales in favor of a free press, the Warren court nowhere undermines the notion of an ultimately identifiable truth; rather, it expresses the view that the open exchange of ideas in a democracy is more important than preventing caustic attacks on public figures. |
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Signals of trouble appear at the outset, where Shuger misuses a quotation from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as her book's epigraph. In that book, Foucault claimed, "we must cease ... to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes,' it 'represses,' it 'censors'" (1). Given Shuger's thesis, that censorship in Tudor Stuart England, rather than silencing political opposition, merely enforced civility based on Roman law's concept of defamation as personal injury, she invokes Foucault's insight as support for her position that we should not see the regime's silencing of dissenting views as repressive but rather as seeking to enforce civility and protect people's reputations from irresponsible attack. But Shuger misunderstands Foucault's use of "negative" to mean "bad" and thus reads Foucault as supporting her thesis about the benevolent intentions of power. To the contrary, Foucault was famously not interested in describing power as "good or "bad"; he was interested in how power operates, the channels, so to speak, through which it flows. For Foucault, the term "negative" means that power does not work by opposing dissenting forces, but that it functions through the very forces it seems to repress. Ironically, then, Foucault's argument, correctly understood, undermines Shuger's basic premise, suggesting that ideas about civility were a medium precisely for the suppression of dissent. This book, then, illuminates, but ultimately, in overreaching, also obscures. |
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| Carla Spivak
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| Oklahoma City University |
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