The Elizabethan era is generally understood to coincide with the blossoming of English language
- it was the age of Shakespeare Sidney and Marlowe. Yet it is known also as a period of
brutality and repression: saying or writing anything against the state the queen or its
governors might result in hanging fines or the loss of limbs. Defaming neighbours could and
frequently did result in a day in court with slander emerging as a byword for unacceptable
speech and writing. Academic interest has long been divided into studies which focus on the
power relations underpinning literary production the ways in which authorities sought to
suppress and censor transgressive material or the role slander played in religious polemic.
This book will explore the legal backdrop which helped and hindered the production and
curtailment of slanderous and seditious material across multiple sites. In so doing it will
seek to uncover exactly how slander and sedition were defined regulated punished and
ultimately negotiated by those who grappled over control of discourse. Through examination of
the legal theatrical and religious conditions of the age of Elizabeth this study will
provide an explanation of the rise of the flagrantly slanderous political discourses of the
seventeenth century.
