The Legend of Friendship, the first book of the second installment of The Faerie Queene, opens by taking the perspective of a critic of the poet's work in what appears to be a self-criticism. Here “Kingdomes causes … affaires of state” and virtue itself are presented as antithetical to the false allurements of love that the poet takes as his subject. The minister of state authoritatively judges and rejects “vaine poemes weeds” which lead to folly frail youth “that better were in vertues discipled” (iv. Proem I). However, the second stanza of this book reveals the injustice of this allegation by rejecting the judgment of the critic; culpability now lies with the speaker of this false imputation rather than with his victim.

Love is the root of “of honor and all vertue,” and poetry, in taking it as its subject, promotes, rather than undermines, virtuous discipline. Spenser brilliantly aligns himself with the example of Elizabeth, the queen whose rhetoric often justified her rule by the love she bore her subjects and who managed the factions at her court by styling them as suitors for her affection, to ballast his defense of love poetry. The “rugged forhead” may have foresight regarding state concerns, but he is rejected as one of the “Stoicke censours” (IV. Proem 3.9) who misunderstands love's relation to virtue and hence cannot serve as a sufficient audience for the poem.

Ultimately, Jonson and Spenser undermine the power of their critique of the state's assessment of poetry because their projects assume stable categories of right and wrong, virtuous and slanderous speech. As I demonstrate in chapter I, slander is by nature unstable and draws its power from the inaccessibility of truth and the indeterminacy of language. Their projects collapse not because the state succeeds in censoring their complaints – the texts are still available for us to read – but because of the faulty logic of the representation of slander in state–poet relations. Ideally, both poets imagine an enlightened monarch who allows her-or himself to be guided and corrected by the superior wisdom and virtue of the poet. Both understand the threat of slander to a settled state and seek to protect the ruler from such attacks. But when they perceive themselves as under attack when their ultimately benighted rulers reject their advice and critique, they defend themselves by defining these attacks as slanders. Once they transform from advocates of to adversaries against the state, they open themselves up to the same charge of slander they themselves employ, and the match ends in a draw or worse, since they have insisted on the absolute evil of slander that they have now become guilty of speaking.

Shakespeare manages to escape from this conundrum by radically reconfiguring the terms of the debate. As demonstrated earlier, the government was anxious to control for its own aims the theatre's power to criticize and expose; independent attempts to deploy this medium were distinguished as slanders.

This book advances the argument that slander provides a model crucial for the analysis of power relations between poets and state in early modern England, and by extension that the concept of censorship, currently employed by critics of early modern English literature to discuss these relations, serves rather to limit and distort our understanding. In recent years, critical interest in power in the early modern period has taken up the question of the nature and extent of control the state was able to exercise over literary expression, as well as explored the capacity for resistance or challenge that literature could pose to political authority. These discussions have for the most part assumed or explicitly articulated a paradigm of censorship as the appropriate context for analyzing power relations between the poet and the state. However, the use of censorship, particularly of the drama, as an analytic focus poses a few problems. The term is often employed anachronistically in presupposing a hierarchical exercise of power only possible for a centralized state bureaucracy and thus inapplicable to early modern England. Typically, the narrow focus on regulatory mechanisms and topical content employed by scholars of censorship prevents our understanding how the control of literary production was shaped by, and shaped, larger socio-political concern in the period over the control of language in general. While discussions of censorship in the past decade made some valuable contributions to our understanding of early modern English texts, they virtually ignored the significance of defamation, a critical concern that fueled official attempts in England to control a whole range of discourses from the Reformation forward.

In the 1596 Faerie Queene, Spenser attempts to champion the social and political benefits of a virtuous state poetics in the face of perceived defamatory attacks against poets and other public servants. By the turn of the century, Ben Jonson takes up a similar cause for satire, an even unlikelier genre. If Spenser felt that his poetry was misunderstood and misrepresented as defamation, Jonson had to face the fact that satire was judged to be explicitly slanderous and seditious; it had been outlawed by the High Commission, which had oversight of all printed materials, in 1599. In the years leading up to the ban, satire had grown to be an extremely popular genre that increasingly registered criticism of the status quo. As Richard McCabe notes, “Such pointed and articulate criticism in so popular a form must have given the authorities cause for concern, for there can be little doubt that the satires were being received by their readership as commentaries upon contemporary events … Everyone knew that real individuals were being attacked in the literary squabbles: why not then in the social satires also?” (McCabe 1981: 191–2). As dissatisfaction with Elizabeth's long reign increased towards the end of the century, the High Commission acted decisively to prohibit the potentially seditious and disruptive genre.

Shortly after the Bishop's Ban, Jonson produced the first of three “comicall satires,” Every Man Out of His Humour, which succeeded in translating the outlawed genre into a popular and licit dramatic form.

To gain a sense of the scope and operation of early modern defamation, one might begin with the complexity and contradiction contained in the definition of the various terms used to denote it. I should explain at this point that I tend to privilege the use of “slander” as a general term, following general usage of common parlance and the central courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which employ various expressions for false imputations interchangeably. Because distinctions in the terms “libel” and “slander” were still unclear during this period, legal historians tend to use the term “defamation” to cover both safely. Although the Star Chamber tended to see written defamation as a more serious offense than spoken defamation, the common law courts did not consistently distinguish them as libel and slander respectively until 1660 (Baker 1990: 506). This ambiguity of terms is evident in the language of bills presented to the Star Chamber alleging defamatory attacks in poetry and drama, in legal treatises on the subject and even in state proclamations and statutes; take, for example, this 1581 statue making it a felony to “deuise, and write, print, or set foorth, anie maner of booke, rime, ballad, letter or writing conteining any false, seditious, and slanderous matter to the defamation of the queenes majestie” (23 Eliz.c.2). As F. G. Emmison notes: “Libel and slander, for our purposes, scarcely need to be distinguished, for the scandalous writing, if in ballad form, was also meant to be sung” (Emmison 1970: 66).

The point of this book has been not to replace the censorship paradigm with that of defamation, but rather to suggest that we situate the former within the latter and reconsider its significance in terms of a broader cultural context. I have been at pains to establish that defamation was a significant social concern in the early modern period, and by focusing on the works of three major contemporary authors I attempt to demonstrate the literary importance of defamation. What can we now conclude about the place of literature and literary representations of power relations between the poet and state once we locate them within a more complex understanding of responses to transgressive language in early modern England?

Let us return briefly to the literary representations of slander to begin an answer to this question. In their respective works, Spenser and Jonson both endeavor to preserve poetry from allegations of slander by establishing them as stable and diametrically opposed categories of good and evil in order to distinguish between the two. They also imagine a symbiotic relationship between the virtuous poet and the enlightened ruler which will provide a united front against slander. However, when they represent their works as meeting with official disapproval, both indirectly redefine this criticism as defamation in order to discredit it. On the one hand this is a rhetorically powerful move because it aims to legitimate their work in the face of “slanderous” attacks. On the other hand, however, the state can respond to such imputations by labeling this poetic criticism as libel, a charge that is difficult to shake, given the popular and legal associations of poetry with slander.