cum privilegio, proclamation, libels, publishing, suppress, subversive literature, Francis Bacon
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51
privilege (cum privilegio).
91
The proclamation from July is concerned explicitly with silencing rather than rebuking libels; they should be brought before the authorities “immediately without showing or report or speech thereof to any person”.
92
By publishing the antecedent poem to provide a context for his answer, Knell is contributing towards the spread of prohibited literature. Bearing this in mind, it is worth noting that it was perhaps as difficult for the authorities to wield effective control over the poetics of response as it was for them to suppress libels in the first place. Even when subversive literature was responded to directly from a position of authority the poetics is highly susceptible to abuse and mismanagement over even its most fundamental points of protocol. Perhaps the most notable example of such botched statecraft in a proclamatory answer-poem is James I’s response to a libel complaining of his assumption of personal rule in the early 1620s.
On the 24th of December 1620 a proclamation drafted by Sir Francis Bacon was issued ‘against Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State’ warning against meddling in state affairs, and more specifically against criticising royal policy openly.
93
Such proclamations against, usually anonymous or pseudonymous, oppositional literature allowed disapproval to be registered while allowing those officials whom libellous comments touched upon to maintain dignified aloofness from the source of complaint. Similarly, poets might be given, or take upon themselves, the official capacity of deflecting slurs upon the reputation of king and country; such as in many of the flytings I examine in Chapter Two. The consequences of such distance not being upheld becomes apparent in the
91 A second augmented answer by Knell was perhaps included under the same license (see Cat. K 193b).
92 Hughes and Larkin eds (1961), II. p.342.
93 ‘A Proclamation against Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State’, in Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-83), I. (1973), pp.495-6.
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