Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Melissa Mowry

By Harold M. Weber. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Pp. 302. $39.95.

Anticipating Michael McKeon's recent call to "historicize patriarchy," Harold Weber's Paper Bullets addresses two abiding disciplinary interests among scholars of the "long" eighteenth century: the emergence of print culture and the gendering of political authority. Only with the combined pressure of new historicism and cultural studies, though, has the field come to see these two interests as intimately imbricated. And it is to this newly recognized intersection that Paper Bullets seeks to speak. Weber contends, here, that "The transformation of the English monarchy during the seventeenth century was not simply played out against a backdrop of changes in the production, marketing, and consumption of printed matter, but was itself part of these changes" (5). In support of his contention, Weber offers his readers a commanding array of archival evidence including proclamations, statutes, pamphlets and trial transcripts, which compellingly document the crown's active manipulation of the Restoration press as vehicle for its own power. And for scholars of the period wishing to deepen their understanding of this particular aspect of Restoration political culture Paper Bullets holds much of interest.

Weber's project proceeds through five chapters conceptually organized around the book's two themes: "Representations of the King" and "The Language of Censorship," with the later section offering some of the most interesting evidence of Weber's central argument, particularly in terms of the crown's creation of authorship as a legal fiction through which it could more effectively control seditious print. But Paper Bullets also labors under conceptual inconsistencies and a kind of historical inattention that often makes its central argument dubious and the final two chapters' incisive payoff too long in coming.

Paper Bullets begins by meticulously and promisingly laying the groundwork for its investigation, deftly noting that "The implementation of the Restoration settlement inevitably revealed the unresolved tensions that had divided the nation during its mid-century upheavals, and created new conflicts as well" (14). Sadly, it does not fulfill its promise to give readers a more subtle and attentive account of Restoration political culture's internal tensions, nor does it clearly articulate the conceptual relationship between Stuart patriarchalism and emergent capitalism.

Paper Bullets' first section amplifies the disciplinary commonplace that Charles II's Restoration carried with it the full reinstatement of Stuart patriarchalism by adding to the familiar catalogue of high cultural representations an extensive repertoire of popular culture representations. But to a large degree this ground has already been covered by Tim Harris' meticulous work on London crowd culture. Moreover, Weber's approach to this particular facet of Restoration life lacks Harris' deft attention to complicating matters of party and class. Regrettably, Weber drops his analysis of the crown's relationship to the populace, which was for this reader one of the most enticing promises Paper Bullets makes in its introduction, in favor of heavily formalist analyses of escape narratives. For despite the often meticulous readings of this popular subgenre and his salient recognition that these tales of Charles II's delivery were clearly deployed as Royalist propaganda, Weber's formalist hermeneutic leads him to collapse important historical distinctions. Thus, for instance, we find no distinction made between A Chronicle of the Kings of England published in 1670 after the London fire and two Dutch wars, when public sentiment was beginning to be disgruntled with crown military and economic policy and had become more cohesive in its anti-Catholicism, and earlier versions of the escape narratives published during the Restoration's first blush. Although there may have been little formal difference between these narratives, they were almost certainly deployed to different effect.

Readers will find the second and third chapters vexed by similar conceptual inconsistencies. Focusing on the monarch's sacred and profane bodies, Paper Bullets' topic seems to slip away from Weber here in two chapters that should be pivotal to his argument and that take up material both relevant to the period and provocatively indicative of the way Restoration culture conceptualized monarchical power. In the first of these chapters Weber discusses the crown's strategic employment of the royal touch to heal scrofula and argues that almost as soon as printing gained currency it instrumentally expanded the public theater in which these rituals took place by codifying and disseminating representations of the crown's miraculous and divine power. The problem is that this ritual, though used by Charles II, was on the wane and, according to Weber, by the early eighteenth-century was regularly subjected to medical skepticism. Weber's central contention, here, that print "contributed to [royal healing's] assumption of a standard, durable, and invariable shape" (56), falls apart and looks like an anachronistic characterization since if permanence is an irreducible conceptual characteristic of print culture, we should expect those public rituals in whose permanence print was instrumental to be on the ascendancy in the same way that print culture itself was during this period. Clearly, the King's body did not undergo such a transformation.