The prevalence and literary impact of censorship has been a contested question, and Randy Robertson’s book makes a bold and stimulating case that it was both pervasive and necessarily shaped what was written. The book has a provocative introduction in which Robertson makes a general argument for the importance of censorship; the chapters that follow are case studies which illustrate it.

He has found 2,600 titles and editions of books, excluding serials and periodicals, that were censored (to be placed online as The British Index at http://www.psupress.org/). Assuming a loss rate of 25 percent, he argues that “the total number of suspect titles comes to … 2.87%” of the total, seven times as many as estimated by Donald McKenzie (8). Moreover, these were titles investigated or suspect to the authorities; the prepublication licensing system itself curtailed what could be said and, Robertson suggests, was reasonably effectively enforced. The examples made of those who breached the law also added a “chilling effect” that was nevertheless productive: “censorship led to self-censorship—the internalization of the censor—which in turn produces art” (20).

Robertson concludes that censorship was “more rigorous than is sometimes allowed” (5) and that “systems of licensing nursed a poetics of opacity and indirection” (12). Robertson thus supports Annabel Patterson’s contention, in Censorship and Interpretation (1984), that censorship pervaded early modern consciousness, especially in the 1640s, and fostered “artistic indirection,” codes and allusions that allowed authors to evade prosecution. Censorship “told profoundly upon the writing of early modern England, but resourceful writers and publishers found ways around the licensing regulations” by exploiting its inefficiencies or by art (19). While seeing Patterson’s book, with which his own has so much in common, as “seminal,” Robertson nevertheless criticizes her suggestion that writers struck a “cultural bargain” with the government that set out the bounds of criticism. Robertson instead argues that the bargain “was struck not between writers and the state, but between the state and the Stationers’ Company” (15) and that it is better to think of a “discursive contest” rather than some form of contract (21). He identifies a series of writers who “engaged in the subtle art of division—the artful insinuation of divisive polemic into a discourse ruled by the rhetoric of consensus” (28).

Robertson’s general argument is not without its problems, and there are tensions in it. Censorship is depicted as efficient but also as containing inefficiencies that could be exploited by authors. In an interesting chapter on Prynne, Robertson appears to endorse Anthony Milton’s suggestion that licensers often massaged the writings of authors to whom they were sympathetic (33); but Milton is critical of the type of case for censorship that Robertson makes in his introduction. Robertson’s talk of a “discourse ruled by the rhetoric of consensus” sits uneasily with his concluding remarks that “consensus, when it was attained, proved transient” (207). For all his problems with the “cultural bargain” element of Patterson’s thesis there is a good deal in common between his argument and hers. Moreover, Robertson blurs the boundaries between formal suppression and informal self-censorship and censure.

Nevertheless, Robertson’s case studies offer some real jewels, the chief of which is the chapter on the poet Richard Lovelace. Robertson’s argument that Lovelace wrote in an obscure style as a deliberate means of evading censorship seems convincing. Robertson carefully sets the publication of Lovelace’s Lucasta in its context of 1648–49 and the poet’s imprisonment in October 1648. The poetry’s love theme, it is suggested, becomes a shrewd and effective way of discussing royalist allegiance. Love was never simply love but was entangled in politics; and as the context changed, “meanings accrued to the volume over the long life of its composition, publication, circulation and reception” (91). Lovelace’s obscure style was artful, “an aesthetic code decipherable by the initiated” (98).

The chapter on Milton argues that, while some writers enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom, “they did not inhabit a full-bloodied public sphere” (102). Robertson thus challenges those who seek an earlier date for the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere, for that required “freedom of speech de jure and not merely de facto” (105). Robertson locates Milton among the skeptics, uncertain of what might be true; whereas the licenser defined truth, Milton’s religious quest for truth meant that the concept of a licenser was absurd and popish. Robertson might have pushed this insight further to examine more fully the relationship across the seventeenth century between calls for freedom of the press and freedom of conscience.

Two interesting chapters on anonymity suggest that it could be wielded “as a weapon” (135). The centerpiece of the chapter on the restoration is an analysis of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which is situated in a culture of anonymous attacks on the court and which, though published anonymously (juries were packed by the Whigs, making explicit authorship dangerous), deliberately invited readers in its preface to identify its author. Moreover, owning one’s issue, Robertson suggests, was precisely the problem faced by Charles, whose natural son, the duke of Monmouth, was being touted as a possible successor in order to avoid the popish duke of York. Dryden, in this reading, is suggesting that “the fruit of both the Whig press and the English monarch are misbegotten, spurious” (161).

The final chapter also considers anonymity, this time in relation to Swift, who used it as a protective cloak and playful ruse for the Tale of a Tub. Behind this cover Swift used his work to try to silence “the mob of scribblers” who had emerged after the lapse of the licensing act in 1695. Swift censored Grub Street; but he also self-censored, littering “the piece with dashes, ellipses, and asterisks where text should be” (181), even though he wanted the reader to decode them.

Robertson is an able and sensitive literary critic, teasing meaning out of texts in a fresh and interesting way. He has useful and interesting things to say about the relationship between authorship and authority, a relationship which goes much further than prepublication censorship. He is perhaps less convincing in his argument about the prevalence and efficiency of censorship, and one wonders whether he really needed such a framework for his literary criticism to gain purchase: it is perfectly possible to argue that sporadic and inconsistent censorship still required authors to be as inventive, artful, and self-censoring as Robertson nicely shows them to have been.