This chapter examines how reading – and sharing and discussing and debating – libels brought early modern people together as publics. Following the conjoined careers of libels and talk about libels, it sketches the interpretive practices that characterized their circulation across manuscript, print, and performance. The chapter begins with a small but representative slice of the scribal archive to illustrate how libels spread and were read. Its sources include Francis Bacon’s government white papers, a poem by King James, and two libels bearing annotations – the first in the hand of Robert Cecil, the second by an anonymous copyist – that have received virtually no attention. The remainder of the chapter turns to a different kind of evidence: fictional representations of reading. It successively considers Leicester’s Commonwealth – an anonymous Catholic prose tract printed in 1584 – and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Both the pamphlet and the play self-reflexively train their audiences in the art of interpreting libels. Taken together, this chapter’s eclectic archive maps the networks of physical and discursive spaces that made up the early modern public sphere.

explores the origins and implications of the political marriage metaphor deployed by King James to buttress his growing prerogative and by godly ministers to articulate their principled resistance. Because women served as ideal surrogates for political subjects who merited “reasonable liberty” while accepting monarchical rule, domestic conduct guides such as William Whately’s offered coded discussions of political rights and duties, including a woman’s obligation to obey her conscience. In addition, oppositional uses of the passionate and militant female voice in the Song of Songs championed Christ’s independent jurisdiction over the faithful to the exclusion of earthly kings. Echoing the voice of the wife as political subject in marriage sermons, the desiring voice of the spouse as Church united male and female subjects seeking to be joined with an attentive Head committed to mutuality and recognition of her needs.