Broadening the notion of censorship, this volume explores the transformative role played by early modern censors in the fashioning of a distinct English literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sophie Chiari is Professor of early modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France. She is the author of Shakespeare's Representations of Climate, Weather and Environment: The Early Modern 'Fated Sky' (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); As You Like It: Shakespeare's Comedy of Liberty (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2016); Love's Labour's Lost: Shakespeare's Anatomy of Wit (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2014). She has also edited or co-edited several collections of essays such as Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare, Edinburgh University Press, 2017 (with Mickaël Popelard); and The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature, Ashgate, 2015. She is currently co-editing with John Mucciolo a volume on early modern court performances.

Acknowledgements

Table of illustrations

Textual Note

Notes on Contributors

General Introduction:'"To be seen and allowed": Early Modern Regulation Practices'

1. 'An Incident in the History of English Book Burning'

2. 'Satire, Immoderation and the Bishops' Ban of 1599'

3. '"I like not this": Censorship, Self-Censorship and Collaboration in Early Modern Dramatic Manuscripts'

4. 'The Limits of a Censor's Authority: The Case of the Masters of the Revels'

5. 'Revisiting an Old Controversy: Censorship in Doctor Faustus'

6. '"An you talk in blank verse": the Poetics of Liberty in As You Like It'

7. 'The Malcontent's Fool, Censorship, and the Construction of the Subject'

8. '"Let him speak no more": Trust, Censorship, and Early Modern Anti-Confession'

9. 'What Florio did not Translate: the Return of the Repressed in the English Rendering of Montaigne's Essays'

10. 'Spenser's Strategies of Indirect Representation in The Faerie Queene (1590)'

11. '(Self-)Censorship in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621-1630)'

12. '"No cloudy stuff to puzzle the brain": 'Fair Editing' and Censorship in John Benson's Edition of Shakespeare's Poems (1640)'

Coda:'Early Modern English Censorship in European Context'

General Bibliography

Index