You Can’t Write, Print or Read That: Censorship and Book Burning in Tudor England

“Remember

                        First to possess his books; for without them

                        He is but a sot, as I am; nor hath not

                        One spirit to command: they all do hate him

                        As rootedly, as I.  Burn but his books.” 

The Tempest, III, ii

Movable type lent itself easily to seditious arrangements.

Government censorship and burning books was neither new, nor systematically and consistently exercised in Elizabethan England. It was a game of whack-a-mole, reactive slapping down of each newly printed heresy, treason, sedition or revelation of embarrassing royal secrets, as it occurred. The Privy Council, the Bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Stationers’ Company, and the Master of the Revels each exercised censorship over different types of texts, pursuing and prosecuting offenses and offenders wildly inconsistently. 

For example, the unfortunately named John Stubbs, a lawyer and first cousin by marriage to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, had his right hand cut off in 1579 as punishment for his anonymous “seditious writing”. The government determined that Stubbs had published a pamphlet entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereunto England is like to be swallowed by another French Marriage.  In it, Stubbs opined that 46-year-old Queen Elizabeth had passed her child-bearing years and thus had no need to marry the 24-year-old French Duke of Alencon, with whom she was flirting mercilessly in public, including kissing him on the lips in church.

Stubbs described the proposed marriage as “an immoral union, an uneven yoking of the clean ox to the unclean ass.”  Casting the queen as the “clean ox” (thank heavens!) and Alencon the “unclean ass” may have preserved Stubbs’ left hand, but his pamphlets were publicly destroyed.

Yet, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first published in 1600, a playwright named William Shakespeare received no punishment when he metamorphosed Alencon, first into the self-aggrandizing attention-hog, Bottom the Weaver, and then into an actual ass, who lays his head in the thinly disguised fairy queen’s lap while she strokes his fair, large . . . ears. Why the vastly different treatment of writer and work for the same unseemly political message? Did the queen personally protect the Bard, or did she just find being a “fairy queen” preferable to being a “clean ox”?

For those who could read and afford them, books could be ordered from abroad (still subject to the censors' whims).

Limited access to books in Elizabethan England was one hurdle the government did not erect. Public libraries did not exist.  University libraries were restricted to scholars; private libraries to those able to afford them. Whether printed domestically or abroad, books were expensive and available only at limited locations, like the book stalls in Paternoster Row in St. Paul’s churchyard in London.  Pamphlets, an ancestor of newspapers, were much cheaper and easily distributed.

 All written material ran through the presses of the printers.

The Stationers’ Company was formed in 1557 to control all professional printers and book makers in England, who worked largely in London, Oxford and Cambridge. While it “encouraged” readers to voluntarily turn in offending materials, the Stationers had the right to seize and destroy any publications contrary to proclamation or statute. In 1586, the Star Chamber restricted the number of English master printers to more easily monitor, ban and burn offensive materials. But it was far harder to control books printed abroad, especially if a foreign printer merely changed the title page to say the book was printed in England, when it was not.

One way around the English censors was to buy books abroad in person. Plantin-Moretus, the largest printing house in Antwerp, published books in English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew and several continental languages.

For those who could afford and read them, books in English, Latin, ancient Greek, French, Italian, and Dutch could be ordered and shipped, subject to the censors, from the large continental printing centers in Antwerp, Venice and Paris, or found surreptitiously though book smugglers or personal purchase abroad.  Some illicit English-language books were printed abroad.  Leicester’s Commonwealth, into which we will take deep dives in later blogs, was printed in France, by an anonymous English author with the means to pay for publication there and circulation of copies across the Channel. Revealing secret transgressions of the powerful Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and accusing him of graft, rapes and murders was not a job any sane English printer would undertake.

As you might expect, the government’s censorship resulted in some readers going to great lengths to obtain banned material and rogue printers to print them.  During the so-called ecclesiastical Pamphlet Wars of 1588 to 1589 between the puritan Marprelates and the Church of England’s defenders, exhausted government agents rode back and forth across the country in hot pursuit of the illicit Marprelate printing press, only to find that their quarry had been loaded onto a cart and trundled to another location overnight to print a new salvo.

Talk about whack-a-mole!