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RIDICULE, CENSORSHIP, AND THE REGULATION OF PUBLIC SPEECH: THE CASE OF SHAFTESBURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2016
Abstract
The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710 Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author against the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.
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References
1 Many of these complaints are to be found in How, John, Some Thoughts on the Present State of Printing and Bookselling (London, 1709)Google Scholar.
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45 Lord Wharton, cited in ibid., 97.
46 “Never was there in our nation a time known when folly and extravagance of every kind were more sharply inspected or more wittily ridiculed.” For “[t]here can be no impartial or free censure of manners,” he continued, “where any particular custom or national opinion is set apart” or “exempted from criticism.” Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 7.
47 On Shaftesbury's ambivalence towards the “Whig politicos” see Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 307.
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52 Collections of passages referr'd to by Dr. Henry Sacheverell in his answer to the articles of his impeachment (London, 1710). The passages from Shaftesbury's Letter are cited at 23–4, 28.
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54 Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, 26 May 1710, in The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, 420. Connell finds it “very probable” that Shaftesbury is referring here to the condemnation of the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. Connell, Secular Chains, 170.
55 Cropley was Shaftesbury's “closest friend” from a young age. Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 18.
56 Sir John Cropley to James Stanhope, 17 June 1710, Kent History and Library Centre, U1590/C9/31. Cropley draws Stanhope's attention to a particular attack on the Sacheverellites contained on page 181 of the Soliloquy in which Stanhope himself supposedly makes “a pretty good figure.” There can be no doubt about the edition referred to, and yet the page in question (which mostly deals with authors of travel memoirs) contains no reference to Stanhope that I can identify. On the Tory attacks on Stanhope see A. A. Hanham, “Stanhope, James,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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62 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 3.
63 Ibid., 2.
64 Ibid., 14.
65 Ibid., 7
66 Ibid., 8
67 Ibid., 7
68 Defoe, Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 8.
69 Locke, “Liberty of the Press,” 331.
70 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 10.
71 Ibid., 8.
72 Ibid., 13
73 Ibid.,14.
74 Shaftesbury, “Askêmata,” 294. The italicized part is a rough translation from Epictetus, Discourses 2, 18, 24: “Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are, and what you represent. Let me test you.”
75 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 35.
76 Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 Oct. 1706, in The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, 359.
77 Sophia Rosenfeld similarly argues that the likes of Addison and Shaftesbury sought to encourage “a kind of self-censoring” among emerging elites. Rosenfeld, Sophia, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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79 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 104.
80 If the “audience” now “makes the Poet,” he complained, it is the “Bookseller” that makes the author. Ibid.,108.
81 Ibid., 146–7. The term Shaftesbury uses is “amanuensis,” usually a literary assistant or scribe. He clarifies in Miscellany I that he means by this word a “bookseller or printer.” Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 345.
82 In Miscellany I Shaftesbury presents a mock dialogue between author and bookseller in which the latter urges the former to reply to his critics and so generate a literary tumult that would encourage sales. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 345.
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88 Ibid., 146.
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91 Ibid., 40. Gerrard would deny during the trial that he had commanded Sacheverell to publish the sermon.
92 Ibid., 358.
93 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 170.
94 Ibid., 41.
95 State Trials, 376
96 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 40.
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98 The existence of such a law has long been the subject of controversy. Stephen Halliwell maintains that, far from being tightly regulated by law, comedy enjoyed an exceptional degree of cultural freedom in Athens. Halliwell, Stephen, “Comic Satire and Freedom of Speech in Classical Athens,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies, 111 (1991), 48–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Robert Wallace suggests that the Athenians may have introduced legal restrictions on ridicule in 440 BCE in response to the war with Sparta but that they likely lifted them three years later. Wallace, Robert, “Law, Attic Comedy, and the Regulation of Comic Speech,” in Gagarin, Michael and Cohen, David, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge, 2005), 357–73, at 364CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shaftesbury's own sources for the law are Horace's epistle on The Art of Poetry and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations 11.6.
99 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 93.
100 Ibid., 95.
101 Ibid., 93–4.
102 Ibid., 96.
103 Shaftesbury's source here is Horace, Epist. 1 lib. 2.
104 As Klein rightly puts it, on Shaftesbury's interpretation these legal curtailments “expressed not the limiting of freedom” but rather a “new and more sophisticated grasp of it.” Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 206.
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107 Ibid., 18.
108 Ibid., 74.
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110 Connell, Secular Chains, 169–70.
111 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, 191.
112 Ibid., 195
113 Ibid., 193.
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