Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820

• Published in: Seventeenth-century news Vol. 78; no. 3/4; pp. 137 - 142
• Main Author: Allsopp, Niall
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: College Station Seventeenth-Century News 01.10.2020
• Subjects: 17th century; 18th century; Anxiety; Authorship; Censorship; Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); Determiners; Dryden, John (1631-1700); English literature; Licenses; Marvell, Andrew (1621-1678); Poetics; Poetry; Romantic period

Keymer's central claim is that indirect censorship via the threat of post-publication retribution proved "a crucial determinant of eighteenth-century authorship" (21). The climate of anxiety and uncertainty created by this regime, Keymer contends, provided an "enabling discipline" (22) which spurred writers to brilliant heights of technical skill in developing strategies of "irony, indirection, and encoding," or as Jonathan Swift put it, writing "with Caution and double Meaning, to prevent Prosecution" (24). [...]Keymer highlights the continuing attempts to reassert punitive press controls successfully in cases like the Succession to the Crown Act of 1707 or the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, and through the expansion in post-publication prosecution for seditious libel. Because seditious libel resided in common law rather than statute, the new regime could be considered tougher than the old Licensing Act, offering greater latitude to censors, and hence greater hazard to authors. If the regime was keen to avoid reliving the Prynne affair, the event still played out repeatedly in literary memory It resurfaces famously in Pope's Dun-ciad, applied to an even more slippery literary troublemaker: "Earless on high, stood un-abashd Defoe."