Chapter 1 - How to Read a Libel in Early Modern England

Summary

This chapter examines how reading – and sharing and discussing and debating – libels brought early modern people together as publics. Following the conjoined careers of libels and talk about libels, it sketches the interpretive practices that characterized their circulation across manuscript, print, and performance. The chapter begins with a small but representative slice of the scribal archive to illustrate how libels spread and were read. Its sources include Francis Bacon’s government white papers, a poem by King James, and two libels bearing annotations – the first in the hand of Robert Cecil, the second by an anonymous copyist – that have received virtually no attention. The remainder of the chapter turns to a different kind of evidence: fictional representations of reading. It successively considers Leicester’s Commonwealth – an anonymous Catholic prose tract printed in 1584 – and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Both the pamphlet and the play self-reflexively train their audiences in the art of interpreting libels. Taken together, this chapter’s eclectic archive maps the networks of physical and discursive spaces that made up the early modern public sphere.