Performing Libel in the Provinces: Community Conflict in Early Modern England

Performing Libel in the Provinces provides the first book-length study of the dramatic traditions and literary features of private libel occurring in the provinces of Jacobean England. The early modern phenomenon of private libel saw communal scandals creatively couched in verses, symbols, or mock-ceremonies and read, sung, posted, and published in prominent local places and spaces across the English provinces. By the early modern period, libelling a private individual had been criminalized and was being tried at the court of Star Chamber, alongside cases relating to the slander of monarchy and government. This remarkable conflation and criminalization of private libel brought the ruination of individual reputations in the provinces into the same realms as the circulation of false news of national concern. Performing Libel reads libelling in the provinces as a unique form of communal drama—a novel multimedia practice manipulating personal identities within provincial social networks.

Adopting a regional approach, this volume focuses predominantly on private libel cases from the southwest counties of Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Cornwall, which it puts into dialogue with drama and theatrical libel from across the English provinces. It considers previously unpublished Star Chamber libel records alongside material published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes, expanding the boundaries of what has typically been considered as performance. The book reveals sophisticated uses of performance, which depended on audiences of informed spectators, in early modern communal conflicts from all levels of society during a period of wider cultural, social, and political change. Divided into three parts, the book first considers the legal and communal contexts for early modern private libel, identifying a spectrum of performance for the various manners of libelling. Part two examines the oral and literate aspects of libelling culture, connecting libel performance to medieval and early modern dramatic traditions and considering the literary features of verse libels as multimedia expressions drawing on existing social rhetorics. Part three traces the impact of viewing libel as performance on our understanding of early modern provincial formulations of space, place, and gender, in particular reading the physical dimensions of conceptions of public and private, and offering a new perspective on the accepted connection between women and slander.