Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- A note on texts and list of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: how the drama disappeared
- PART I 1642–1649: CASES IN POLITICS AND DRAMA
- 1 New news for a new world? Genre, politics and the news dialogues of the 1640s
- 2 ‘With the agreement of the people in their hands’: transformations of ‘radical’ drama in the 1640s
- 3 Royalist versus republican ethics and aesthetics: The Famous Tragedie of Charles I and The Tragedy of the Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Interchapter: ‘The life of action’: playing, action and discourse on performance in the 1640s
- PART II THE 1650S: PROTECTORATE, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Coda
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
1 - New news for a new world? Genre, politics and the news dialogues of the 1640s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- A note on texts and list of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: how the drama disappeared
- PART I 1642–1649: CASES IN POLITICS AND DRAMA
- 1 New news for a new world? Genre, politics and the news dialogues of the 1640s
- 2 ‘With the agreement of the people in their hands’: transformations of ‘radical’ drama in the 1640s
- 3 Royalist versus republican ethics and aesthetics: The Famous Tragedie of Charles I and The Tragedy of the Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Interchapter: ‘The life of action’: playing, action and discourse on performance in the 1640s
- PART II THE 1650S: PROTECTORATE, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Coda
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
What news in Fraunce?
None that I can tell, still warre, warre.
Is there no good news?
(1593)PAMPHLETS AND THE 1640S: POLITICS AND GENRE
In 1640 one reader wrote, ‘I hate these following railing rimes, yet keepe them for the president of the times.’ He recorded this in his news diary where he stored diverse items – verses, dialogues, the whole text of the arraignment of Strafford. In 1643 William Walwyn addressed his levelling tract, The Power of Love, ‘To Every Reader … for there is no respect of persons with God’. In 1648 the East Anglia royalist Thomas Knyvett wrote to Sir John Hobart, describing two pamphlets. On the first, ‘a declaration in the King's name’, he comments ‘sure a counterfeit would never have had the power over my passion that this had’. The authenticity of voice he attributes to the ‘royal’ pamphlet is contrasted with the bastardised parliamentarian product (as he sees it), published by the republican and father of illegitimate children, Henry Marten:
I have read it, and shall say no more but that I look upon it not only as the spurious issue of his brain, but as the sense of the saint-like house: yet brave Harry hath the better on't, to beget the bastard, and make the honourable state to father it; else, sure, it durst never have peeped abroad.
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- Drama and Politics in the English Civil War , pp. 19 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998