Stationers and Censors
THIS learned work, Some Aspects and Prob- lems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650, by Sir W. W. Greg (Clarendon Press, 21s.), is a reprint of the Lyell Lectures delivered in Oxford in the summer of 1955. It deals almost exclusively with the technicalities of the printing trade in the century before 1640—who printed and published books, and how they were licensed for publication.
What is of interest to the general reader is to recall the circumstances of rigid and largely ecclesiastical censorship against which the literature of the great Elizabethan age had to struggle. The licenser of Donne's Paradoxes was had, up before the Privy Council, though the Dean of St. Paul's might have seemed a safe enough author. Many other works which posterity could ill, have spared had to wait until after 1640 before they could get into print. In the years immediately preceding the civil war we can see two simultaneous pro- cesses—an increase in secret printing and illegal import of books printed abroad; and attempts by the Star Chamber to tighten up its control. This governmental and clerical censorship is often left out of account by literary historians trying to explain the decline in literary standards under Charles I; but it must in fact have been of the utmost importance. These lectures are apparently con- cerned with everything about books except what was written in them; but they throw a great deal of light on the limiting conditions and hazards through which authors had to pick their precarious way.
CHRISTOPHER HILL
Previous page
