Andrew McRae. Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ix + 250 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-81495-9.
Paul Raffield. Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ix + 289 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82739-3.
Reviewed by Jason Peacey (History of Parliament Trust, London)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2005)
The Rise of Texts in Early Modern England; Or, Why All Roads Lead toWilliam Prynne
These two fascinating books seek to explore the political culture of the early modern period.
Andrew McRae approaches the early seventeenth century from the standpoint of literary scholarship, and explores satires and libels before the civil wars. His texts range from little known satires against figures such as the Duke of Buckingham, through more well known works such as the "Parliament fart," and on to infamous works by Thomas Scott and Thomas Middleton. Although such material has become increasingly familiar in recent years, thanks to the scholarship of Alasdair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, amongst others,[1] McRae adds both literary analysis as well as a challenging claim for the wide-ranging impact of such texts upon the early modern state. He seeks to demonstrate how satire changed under the early Stuarts, away from formal verse moralizing and towards more accessible forms. Nevertheless, he argues that this is not the same as a shift from elite to popular libeling. McRae rejects the notion that libels were merely the product of "pot poets," in order to demonstrate how often they emerged from informal political clubs and associations, involving figures such as Serjeant John Hoskyns. Having undertaken thorough archival research, McRae is also able to demonstrate that such works proved popular with those members of the elite who compiled verse miscellanies and commonplace books. Early Stuart libels cannot merely be dismissed, in other words, as representing products of, or for, a remote and insignificant "underground."
Avowedly "post-revisionist" in intent, McRae stresses that such material represented and fostered a "discourse of division" (p. 6). Libels provide a means, in other words, of recognizing the nature and growth of political contestation, but he also connects his work to a broader historiography of news culture, in order to suggest that the period witnessed the emergence of a "new model of citizenship" (p. 14), in which public discussion of politics was central, not least in terms of a new focus on individual political actors. Libels "reinforced demands among the populace for information about, and ultimately a sense of involvement in, political processes" (p. 82). Early Stuart satire, he suggests, demonstrates how individual political actors has lost the ability to control their popular representation, and provided a means by which contemporaries could analyze the mechanics of power and the workings of the political system. This involved skeptical assessments of individual motivations and of the intention behind particular policies, even to the point of offering veiled comments on the monarch. McRae concludes, for example, that libels made the assassination of Buckingham "conceivable and laudable" (p. 82), and fostered what might even be called a "democratic" or "republican" form of engagement. Rightly concerned not to overplay such claims, however, McRae suggests that the effect of early Stuart libels is that "we might glimpse a model of politics in which citizens vigorously debate the government of the state" (p. 113).
That McRae's analysis avoids the obvious pitfalls of post-revisionist discourse is evident in two further ways. Firstly, he is well aware that libels and anti-libels were written by more than merely those disaffected opponents of the early Stuarts. He thus devotes attention to writers such as Richard Corbet, who defended courtiers and government policies. Nevertheless, McRae suggests that the work of such writers reinforced the divisive impact of libels. He argues that the satire of loyalists shifted both in terms of patronage poems and assaults on political and religious opponents. The discourse of praise became "openly sycophantic and unashamedly political, identifying with a patron in direct opposition to that person's acknowledged opponents" (p. 163). Attacks on the political threat posed by "Puritans," meanwhile, merely joined them in operating outside norms of authorized political discourse, and reinforced political conflict rather than consensus.
The second area of subtlety in McRae's analysis centers on his treatment of Jrgen Habermas. While inevitably forced to confront the issue of the emergence of the "public sphere," McRae's argument is subtle and intriguing. He recognizes the important constraints placed upon debate by the state, in terms of both censorship and proclamations against licentious discourse. He suggests also that satirists did not consider themselves to be generating rational and open debate, but rather to be concerned with stretching the bounds of commentary and reflection. He claims, nevertheless, that the efforts of early Stuart satirists helped to challenge such constraints, and that the manuscript circulation of their works helped to foster a public sphere, even if this was something "by necessity plural, contingent, ephemeral and tactical" (p. 113).
In many ways, Paul Raffield's exploration of the political culture of the Inns of Court in early modern England complements McRae's work. Like McRae, Raffield approaches a field thick with important historiography (Sir John Baker, Wilfrid Prest), but from a cultural rather than a straightforwardly political (or legal) angle, and like McRae he seeks to explore large issues of early modern history. Covering a longer time frame (1558-1660), Raffield revisits a relatively familiar thesis regarding the rise and fall of a powerful and independent common law community, but does so through an exploration of the "aesthetics of law" (p. 2). Although not stated at the outset, the foundation of much of Raffield's work is the idea that renaissance symbolism was pervasive and taken extremely seriously, and that visual signs reveal much about the self-image of the legal community. This was, he suggests, particularly important in the absence of legal and constitutional codification.
Raffield seeks to demonstrate that from the mid-sixteenth century the culture of the Inns revealed that they perceived themselves as an "ideal commonwealth" (p. 5); integral to, yet independent of, the civil government. This thesis is developed through a number of thematic chapters. Raffield analyzes patterns of life at the Inns, in terms of dining and learning, which revealed these societies' religious origins and hierarchical model, as well as their exclusivity. Learning, moreover, was conceived more broadly than merely legal knowledge, and incorporated the development of rhetoric and oratory through drama. Raffield then turns his attention to the architecture of the Inns, another means by which the legal community conveyed its image in the absence of a written constitution. Through architecture, Raffield argues, the Inns demonstrated their independence, not least with high walls and gates, which reinforced the sense that these societies were miniature city states. Part of the semiotics of legal architecture was the deployment of heraldic devices, which Raffield again argues symbolize independence and honor. He goes further, indeed, by suggesting that architectural developments in the sixteenth century were inspired by the ideas of Sir John Fortescue, and by drawing a somewhat far-fetched analogy between the topography of legal buildings and renaissance understanding of the human body. Another chapter explores the role of sumptuary laws as another means of expressing independence from the state, and of controlling the image of the legal community, in order to project an image of a utopian society, and in order to express the propriety, authority, and indivisibility of divine and common law. Sumptuary laws provide a means of exploring, therefore, the idea of common lawyers as a secular priesthood.
Three other chapters explore similar themes through the dramatic concerns of the Inns, in terms of revels and masques, enabling Raffield to explore more thoroughly the role of the legal community within the dynamic of early Stuart history. It was through such events, with their expression of ideas of the ideal commonwealth, that the Inns developed the constitutional theories of Fortescue and St. Germans, and notions that legitimacy sprang from the community rather than the monarch, and that civil magistrates were accountable to parliament and the courts. As such, Raffield argues, the Inns were fundamentally at odds with a post-Henrician theory of imperial kingship. Raffield argues that from the late sixteenth century the Inns used such revels in order to challenge royal infringement of ancient liberties, and encroachment upon legal independence; to meddle, in other words, with the arcana regni. Likewise, Raffield suggests, masques such as Gorboduc reflected the ascendancy of the common law, and asserted the importance of legal independence to a well governed state, as well as concerns about uncertainty of succession and disdain for the unlawful use of the royal prerogative. They also explored the likely result: murder, rebellion, and civil war.
It is this concern with masques and with political developments under the early Stuarts which brings Raffield to his discussion of the seventeenth-century controversialist, William Prynne, just as McRae's analysis of developments in satire under Charles I prompt him to a discussion of the arch-Puritan martyr. For McRae, the response within the legal community to Prynne's attack upon stage plays--in the form of the masque The Triumph of Peace--symbolized the "supine acceptance" of Caroline rule, and of the compromised autonomy of the Inns. This independence, he argues, was not regained by 1660, because of ongoing political interference during the civil wars, the co-option of leading lawyers during the Interregnum, and the diminished appeal of the old world of the Inns to radical critics of the legal profession and royalists alike.
McRae, meanwhile, explores the late 1630s writings of Prynne (as well as his associates Burton and Bastwick) in order to demonstrate the extent to which satiric strategies and religious dissent had been turned into political opposition. Aware, he argues, that language constructed meaning, they sought to redefine orthodoxy and to stigmatize Arminianism by associating it with more profound religious and political threats. For McRae, therefore, Prynne symbolizes the extent to which debate had become confrontational by the 1630s, and to which old rules about communication had been broken by the use of unauthorized discourse. Agreeing with Kevin Sharpe about the impact of the 1637 trial of the three Puritans, McRae suggests that it was at this point that the government and its critics obviously raised the political stakes by deploying strategies of subversion and confrontation, and at which the Caroline regime lost the battle of mutual stigmatization.
Both of these books are welcome for shedding new light upon familiar arguments about the political "crisis" of early Stuart Britain, and for bringing into play relatively new historiographical methods and sources. Independently, they suggest important new avenues for scholarship. For example, both appear to be working towards ideas of the individualization of early modern political culture, in an age increasingly dominated by texts, whether printed or otherwise. Although Raffield prioritizes the impact of political interference, he adds to this a longer process by which "texts" triumphed over "signs" within the legal community. Indeed, part of his aim is to trace a gradual demise of the institutional coherence of the Inns, and the fragmentation of the legal community. The emergence of individualism among common lawyers, and of lawyer-authors, indicated the disintegration of a unified legal establishment, which was made evident by the response to Caroline interference and the trial of Prynne, and which prevented the revival of the Inns' fortunes thereafter. McRae likewise detects the emergence of a culture in which individual political actors became the subject of analysis and criticism, and their performance the subject of scrutiny.
Both authors also stress how the fortunes of Parliament, and particularly the House of Commons, affected wider political culture. Raffield suggests that the rise of Parliament in the 1640s, within which common lawyers predominated, ensured that they no longer placed such value on the status and voice provided by their own societies. McRae, who likewise perceives that the political influence of the Inns was usurped by Parliament and public discourse, draws a parallel between the more aggressive satirical strategies of the 1620s and the growing assertiveness, and institutional confidence, of the Commons, not least by reviving the strategy of impeachments--a means of stigmatizing individuals--and by departing from traditional notions of counsel.
The weakness of McRae's book partly consists of a failure to develop these fascinating areas of inquiry, and to concentrate instead upon a single major argument--the promotion of a new model of citizenship--with which some readers may feel overly familiar by the later chapters. Furthermore, it might be argued that the central argument regarding the changing nature of satire is harder to sustain in the absence of comparative material from the pre-Jacobean era. Archival evidence certainly exists, indeed, with which to suggest that Elizabethan satire was already targeting specific political figures and members of Parliament.
Raffield's book probably suffers from much more serious drawbacks. Such a wide-ranging work almost inevitably has moments of historical weakness, such as the rather garbled analysis of Prynne's relations with Parliament in 1648-49. More unsettling are methodological and historiographical issues in a book which occasionally sounds rather whiggish. Methodological comments regarding the idea that the early modern era was one of "heightened political artifice, in which the medieval interpretation of symbolism as reality still prevailed" (p. 264), properly belong in the opening rather than the closing pages. In the absence of a more rigorous analysis of methodology, readers may sometimes feel that Raffield oversimplifies certain themes, and idealizes the early modern Inns in such a way as to downplay historical contingency. On the architecture of the Inns, for example, Raffield emphasizes conscious design over historical accident, despite the fact that the legal community was not the original occupant of their buildings. At best, we might argue, the architecture of the Inns was an agglomeration. Raffield might have avoided the pitfalls of idealizing the Inns by introducing a more comparative approach, which examined university colleges and Inns of Chancery, not least in order to establish those things which were particular to the common law community rather than common to all such societies.
More serious is the use of sources. In addition to employing the records of the Inns, and contemporary commentators on legal culture, such as William Dugdale, Gerard Legh, John Fortescue, and even William Shakespeare, Raffield also introduces Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. At times it is unclear whose view of the aims, intentions, and ideas of the legal community--contemporary or modern--we are being offered. This has practical implications, for in the absence of the views of particular contemporary lawyers, there is a danger of overplaying the cohesiveness of the Inns in the early part of the narrative. It is likely that the dissenting voices which Raffield acknowledges in the 1630s may also have existed much earlier. Likewise, Raffield's ideas regarding the growing importance of the "subjective" understanding of judges may have found few contemporary supporters. Raffield's picture of the legal culture of the early modern period may not, therefore, have been one which men like Sir Edward Coke would have recognized.
Such reservations aside, both books offer extremely valuable new insights, and are important contributions to an ongoing enrichment of our understanding of early modern political culture, not least because they are pregnant with possibilities for further analysis and exploration.
Note
[1]. See, for example, David Underdown, "Review of Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660," H-Albion, H-Net Reviews, May, 2002, URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=265621024068269; Alastair Bellany, "Review of Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell," H-Albion, H-Net Reviews, August, 2003, URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=37701065819671.
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Citation:
Jason Peacey. Review of McRae, Andrew, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State and
Raffield, Paul, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10595
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