This chapter focuses on Haiti’s twentieth-century periodicals, and more specifically on the literary magazine. By bringing to light the complex stories of literary revue culture during key historical moments I show how these specific forms of publications, which played a major role in Caribbean countries, have influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. At its core, this chapter addresses the tension between the aesthetics and politics of several literary revues by highlighting, first, literary and/or socially engaged magazines predominantly concerned with the development of Haiti’s literature and culture, and, second, those with a clear political agenda, some of which were infused with an explicit objective: the forging of a Haitian national voice.

Sanja Perovic’s chapter treats one of the most significant events in French history and an unprecedented period in theatre history. While the Revolution is often overlooked as a ‘dead period’ in French theatre, Perovic describes the scale and ambition of this extraordinary period. Never before had so many newcomers been able to forge successful careers as writers, actors and directors. Artistic innovation peaked, as revolutionary performance was more akin to what today is termed performance art, than to the kind of repertory theatre that preceded or followed it. Covering some of the major events, influential figures and key texts of this extremely fertile period, Perovic shows how theatre addressed the questions key to revolutionary culture: who is the audience? Where is it located? Who speaks on its behalf, and in what (theatrical, artistic) language? She concludes by contrasting two utopian works – Louis Beffroy de Reigny’s Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (Nicodème Goes to the Moon, or the Peaceful Revolution, 1790) and Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings, 1793) – with Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792), an altogether more sombre assessment of the effects of revolution.

Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

Chapter 1 chronicles how the distractibility of a king, the agency of objects, the desires that cloud judgment, and the memories that haunt the present shape events perhaps even more than ideology. Prior to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Duke of Newcastle proposed returning to a Caroline-style theatrical marketplace, but he was outmaneuvered by courtier-playwrights long accustomed to deploying networks of access. Contingency also determined outcomes. The particular circumstances of Charles II’s upbringing certainly benefited William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, the two successful patentees. Unlike his royal predecessors, the new monarch regarded the commercial theatre as a gift to be bestowed upon persistent clients who would enjoy monopolistic control going forward. No one foresaw, of course, the economic repercussions of that gift, namely, how the transformation of the theatre from a purely commercial to a hybrid enterprise would require substantial support beyond the box office. Additionally, the duopoly so sought by Killigrew and Davenant exerted its own unexpected agencies. As the following chapters explore, its resulting economic and cultural logic galvanized a host of decisions about repertories and performance practices that would prove both innovative and ruinous.

This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

This chapter offers a broad account of two key governmental themes in post-war British theatre: policy and censorship. The chapter’s discussion of these themes is informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which embraces both the activities of the state and the broader discursive regimes that constitute groups and individuals, including self-governing. The chapter examines a range of values that have featured in post-war cultural discourse in terms of continuities, ruptures, and changes between the post-war period and earlier moments in capitalist modernity, and within the period itself. The chapter surveys the expansionist arts policies implemented in the decades following the war, before turning to the effects of neoliberal governmental politics from the 1970s onward, which saw the value of the arts become subject to increasing scrutiny and justification. Next, the chapter addresses censorship and the contours of its post-war cultural politics. It notes overlapping shifts in focus from sexuality and gender to racial and religious identities – shifts which speak to the governmental ‘management of populations’. Finally, it analyses David Hare’s I’m Not Running (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2018) – a work that responded to contemporaneous governmental crisis.

The discovery of a consignment of books of Protestant propaganda in Seville in the autumn of 1557 convinced the Spanish inquisitors of the existence of clandestine circles that promoted doctrines that contradicted Catholic orthodoxy as redefined between 1547 and 1552 during the first sessions of the Council of Trent. The discovery of a second community of religious dissidents in Valladolid a few weeks later, followed by the arrest on suspicion of Lutheranism of Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda, archbishop of Toledo, on 22 August 1559 created the impression in the royal court of Philip II that Spain had escaped an odious heretical conspiracy hatched by foreigners and supported by members of its own nobility and senior clergy. Some of the outstanding figures among the Seville and Valladolid dissidents cannot, contrary to what historiography has long maintained, be characterised simply as Erasmists; many of them subscribed to the doctrinal core of Protestantism. There were several networks of Lutherans in Spain, as well as among the communities of exiled Spaniards throughout Europe. The Reformation made a greater impression in Iberia than has long been assumed.

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

Chapter 25 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s brief turn as Hollywood screenwriters. At the suggestion of the director Lewis Milestone (born Leib Milstein in the Russian empire), the pair spent nine days before Christmas 1935 holed up in their hotel writing a treatment of The Twelve Chairs – a story they did not tell in their travelogue. Still, the published work suggested bridges across the vast cultural divide. Extravagantly criticizing Hollywood films as mindless, Ilf and Petrov noted that they found many movie people who shared their perspective. Their unpublished accounts and evidence from the American side bring the central paradox of Ilf and Petrov’s Hollywood venture into sharper focus: Their brief and publicly unacknowledged work in Hollywood solidified both their disdain and their respect for the American dream factory.

Chapter 2 pursues a novel approach by combining the study of the local printing production and book imports to examine the different forms of market supply. It argues that the book trade was a rising though risky business. Mapping the workshops in Lima, it shows that print production was continuous and the output growing. However, even more reading material was imported into Peru, as proven by the quantitative evaluation of the number of boxes containing books, including the works of several representatives of the Catholic Enlightenment. Although most books had a licence, this chapter focuses on the illicit trade, in the form of titles in ships’ freight that were prohibited by the Inquisition and products from secret presses in Lima. The chapter lays bare the characteristics of a colonial book market fed by two totally differently structured supply sources that were both growing in late colonial times.

Diversity in resources, materials, and thought have been proven to be beneficial in numerous ways. This case study takes readers into the complicated world of book bans and censorship around “unnormal” topics.

The introduction sets out the aims and methodology for this study of ‘Wartime Shakespeare’. It proposes that wartime theatre is mediated by networks of production and reception that control meaning and impact. It outlines in detail theatre’s production agents, reception agents, and structures of control that collectively constitute the methodological framework for this study. The introduction argues that a recognition of these networks necessitates a reappraisal of wartime theatre and the critical terminology used to discuss it, including the relevance of binary labelling, such as pro-war/anti-war or conservative/radical. Wartime performances of Shakespeare, rather than offering ‘fixed’ or clear-cut applications to conflict, are malleable and can accommodate a range of different uses and interpretations. This book’s approach is relevant not just for Shakespearean theatre, but for wartime theatre more broadly and, with some adjustment, to theatre during peacetime. The prologue also considers the ‘origins’ of wartime Shakespeare by offering a short account of what is probably the first documented occasion during which one of Shakespeare’s plays was used in direct application to a wartime crisis: the performance of the ‘deposyng and kyllyng of Kyng Rychard the Second’ on 7 February 1601 at the Globe Theatre during the Nine Years’ War (1593–1603) with Ireland.

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

Ben Jonson never tired of railing against those who would apply his supposedly innocent satire to particular persons and “make a libel which he made a play.” Yet the central irony of Poetaster (1601) – and, indeed, of Jonson’s playwriting career – is that he undeniably did lampoon specific individuals, not to mention the host of more ambiguous topical analogies that appear in his plays. In Poetaster – set in an Augustan Rome that clearly stands for England – Jonson sharply satirizes the late Elizabethan surveillance state through the clash between Horace, the virtuous satirist and authorial stand-in, and Lupus, the corrupt and ignorant tribune. From the Bishops’ Ban in 1599 to the aftermath of the Essex Rising in 1601, the regime cracked down on verse satires and seditious libels with unusual severity; the line between satire and libel threatened to vanish altogether. Yet Jonson remained undaunted. In Poetaster, he counts on his audiences to draw precisely those topical applications that he stridently denies. If they make his play a libel, it is because he has turned playgoers into libel-makers.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

This chapter emphasises the key role that comic revues and music hall acts played in ensuring the British army had a continuous stream of recruits throughout the First World War. Through examining the songs, sketches and characters through which this was achieved, the chapter demonstrates the varied strategies used and the ways they drew on earlier modes of performance such as nineteenth-century melodrama. Particular emphasis is placed on the gendered ideology that was implicit in the performances examined, for example in looking at the dramatization of atrocity stories which were circulating in the press and the treatment of women in these plays and wider narratives. The chapter also focusses on music hall songs and performances by male impersonators such as Marie Lloyd. It encourages us to question the simple alignment of propaganda and popular entertainment and offers a more nuanced understanding of these performances through the lens of satire. By doing so, it demonstrates how satirising and parodying wartime experiences provided a release from anxiety. Stage satire and comedy, it concludes, offer a unique perspective on how modern total war saturated public life.