Culture of Slander in Early Modern England: (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Series: Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. M. Lindsay Kaplan reveals it to be an effective, if unstable, means of repudiating one's opposition, and shows how it was deployed by rulers and poets including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare. Her study challenges recent claims that the state controlled poets' criticisms by means of censorship, arguing inste