Barbara J. Shapiro's Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558–1688 represents an ambitious synthesis, the work of a senior scholar bringing together diverse strands of scholarship and primary source research. While not a research monograph in the traditional sense, the book succeeds in introducing a broad range of concerns associated with the study of the media in early modern England.

Shapiro approaches the period through the organizing framework of “genre,” which she defines as “a recognizable form of expression typically following a set of known rhetorical features” (4). Each chapter is organized around a particular genre of political communication, ranging from printed and manuscript news books, “empirical political description” to historical and political thought, drama, poetry, the sermon, public ritual and ceremony, and the law. These communicative genres are not rigidly defined, and Shapiro acknowledges that the boundaries between them were frequently porous, allowing for significant crossover. For example, historical works such as Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives (1579) and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle (1587) are not only examples of different subgenres of historical writing, but they provided ample fodder for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Similarly in chapter 7 Shapiro draws a close connection between ideas of divine-right kingship and magistracy found in the treatise literature of the period, and the content of assize sermons preached mainly after 1610. By the 1680s, Shapiro argues, ideas of divine-right kingship had become a staple of royal and Tory polemicists both in speech and in print.

A broad, synthetic work like Shapiro's study depends heavily on mastery of the secondary literature, as well as primary source research. Shapiro demonstrates a strong command of the literature including both long-standing, seminal scholarship going back to the mid-twentieth century and more current scholarship, such as Noah Millstone's recent work on scribal publication and manuscript circulation under the Caroline regime (34). Shapiro notes at a number of junctures the important influence of Jürgen Habermas's theory of the bourgeois “public sphere” on the historiography of the early modern period since the appearance of his 1962 Habilitasionsshcrift in English in 1991; however, it does not play a central role in the analysis, which instead concentrates on the interrelation of rhetorical genres. Subsequent refinements to the Habermas argument, emphasizing the plurality, inclusiveness, and transitory nature of the early modern public sphere—or “spheres” as the case may be—do not figure prominently in the argument. While some readers may see this as a significant omission, others may find it a refreshing departure from current historiographical orthodoxy.

Given the ambitious scope of the work there are inevitably some issues that emerge. For example, in chapter 2, “News, Information, and Political Controversy,” it would have helped if Shapiro had addressed more directly Adrian Johns's argument that the regulation of the press was aimed as much at establishing the proprietary rights of stationers over their copies as at the censorship of politically and theologically suspect works. Regulation of the press not only served as a juridical mechanism for suppressing scandalous materials offensive to the crown and the established church but also offered a means by which stationers, and to a lesser extent authors, could invest their published works with authority and credit and protect themselves from the ever-present threat of piracy. The crown certainly did intervene when its interests were at stake, sometimes with exceptional brutality as the cases of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne demonstrate, but more mundane, market-driven considerations were also very important in the day-to-day regulation of the press.

In recent years academic publishers have been putting increasing pressure on authors to produce shorter books that are less expensive to manufacture. In the case of Shapiro's study, however, the reader sometimes wishes that the book had been significantly longer, allowing for a more detailed treatment of some subjects. This is particularly the case in the chapters on history and political thought and the chapter on drama, where the secondary literatures are especially extensive. In some parts of the book, most notably chapter 6, “Politics, Poetry, and Literature,” the treatment has a cursory feel, enumerating lists of genres and subgenres of political poetry rather than offering interpretation and analysis. Sometimes the discussion is enough to whet the appetite but not sufficient to satisfy it, leaving the reader running to the footnotes for further information.

This is an excellent book for undergraduate and graduate students new to the field of early modern British history and for younger scholars looking for a broad overview of the various modes of political communication at work in early modern English political life, whether, print, script, ritual, performance, or the spoken word. For those scholars already deeply involved in the study of English political life during the later Tudor and Stuart eras, the book constitutes a historiographical position paper summarizing a life's work to date.