PRESS CENSORSHIP.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 393, 27 March 1937, Page 3

PRESS CENSORSHIP.

GALLOWS BECKONED. Raleigh’s “Too Saucy” History. Press censorship of an intensity unequalled anywhere in the world today flourished in Great Britain early iit the sixteenth century, says a London message. Not only were offending volumes summarily banned, but the authors were liable to serve penalties. To displease a monarch or queen might bring the writer to the gallows or the torture chamber. His works would be publicly burned. The days when writers needed to watch their quill points to save their heads are vividly recalled in an exhibition of “banned” books held at the Bodleian, London.

It was in the reign of Henry VIII. that the first regular censorship, which was to develop into a normal instrument of statecraft, was established. In 1538 William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament was banned, because it was considered an “unequalled fount of heresy.” The censorship was tightened by the star chamber in 1586. For three centuries censorship of great intensity was a normal function of statecraft in Britain.

The author of one of the earliest books exhibited, “Historic of Italie”, (1549), was hanged and quartered. His remarks about the Italian clergy had given offence to Queen Mary.

Her sister. Queen Elizabeth, was more severe. There is exhibited a proclamation against John Stubbs, author of “Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf” (1579). The book itself, a copy of which also was on exhibition, contains a bitter attack on the proposed marriage between the Queen and the Duke of Anjou. When Stubbs had his right hand cut off as punishment it is reported that he “immediately, with memorable courtesy, raised his hat with his left hand and cried, ‘God save the Queen’.” When the ostensible reason for objection was some offence to morals or taste, there generally was some fear of subtle sedition or ridicule. Thus Sir John Harrington’s “A New Discourse on a State Subject” (1596), in which he introduced in a rare Rabelaisian setting his invention of the water closet, is believed to have been suppressed, riot so much for its grossness as for a suspicion that in

some way it ridiculed the then Lord of Leicester. Sir Walter Raleigh’s ambitious “History of the World” was called in on the ground it was “too saucy ?n censuring princes.” The same charge was brought against Leighton’s “Sion’s Plea Against the Prelacie” (1628), for which the author was branded on the face, lost both ears, and had his nostrils slit.