Chapter Twenty-six - The Press in Literature and Drama

Summary

Shakespeare died some five years before the first ‘newspapers’ appeared in London as English translations from the Dutch. In what would later be known as Germany and the Netherlands, newspapers had appeared earlier, as had newsletters – avvisi, coranti – and gazzetta in Italy, a favoured setting for Shakespeare's plays. The latter frequently mentioned letters, messages and messengers, and made fun with a character's ability to read and write (for example, Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). Aspersions on messengers echoed the ‘killing the messenger’ theme from ancient Greek drama. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many authors – a term used in its widest sense – enriched their prose and verse with classical allusions. Likewise, while they praised writing, reading and the book as furthering enlightenment and diversity, if not freedom, of expression, they disparaged ‘journalists’ and hacks. Invective, satire and polemics abounded. When Ben Jonson (1572–1637) decided to publish his plays (1616), a critic noted ‘Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mistery lurke / what others call a play, you call a worke’ (Wits Recreations, 1640, G3v). With other matter, plays were considered ephemera, unworthy of conservation: Thomas Bodley, founder of Oxford's Bodleian Library, saw no point in keeping ‘suche bookes as almanackes, plaies & an infinit number, that are daily printed of very unvorthy masters’ (Wheeler 1926: 219–20). Jonson's satire of ‘news-mongering’, The Staple of News (1626), merely added to the disrepute of what was a craft, a trade, not a profession.

Words that would gain currency among journalists – including the very terms ‘journalist’ and ‘newspaper’ – emerged during the period. Many were pejorative – ‘hack’ was a poor scribbler; many lived in ‘Grub Street’ – grub referring probably to refuse. The word ‘novel’ (nova: new things from the Italian novella for ‘new’, ‘news’, or ‘short story of something new’) still had something of ‘new news’ when it began to describe a literary genre; in the eighteenth century ‘novelist’ could mean a ‘newsmonger’. In the early seventeenth century ‘newsbooks’ and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘intelligence’ were appropriate terms. Terminology was often multifaceted.