N.D. versus O.E.: anonymity's moral ambiguity in Elizabethan Catholic controversy

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Marcy L. North

Southwell's secrecy helped him to evade the Elizabethan government's prohibitions against Catholic publication and unauthorized printing, but this instance of success does not bespeak an exact correlation between government crackdowns on Catholic activity and the popularity of anonymity in Catholic polemic.

Anonymity did not always mirror repression closely as a countermeasure, perhaps because, as Cyndia Clegg has recently argued, Elizabethan censorship was "less a product of prescriptive (and proscriptive) Tudor policy than a pragmatic situational response to an extraordinary variety of particular events."(8) Toleration, persecution, freedom of the press, and book suppression were by no means consistent conditions in Elizabeth's reign. Catholic polemicists experienced periods of relative freedom, such as the first decade of the reign, and periods of harsh repression, such as the early 1570s and several years in the 1580s when the Jesuit Mission and impending war with Spain occupied Elizabeth's mind.(9) One would like to say that anonymity was most common during the harshest years of repression, but no exact formula emerges from the information available.(10) In the first decade of Elizabeth's reign when restrictions against Catholic publication were relatively lax, few authors published anonymously. The crisis years that followed reveal a variety of responses to repression. Catholic authors employed anonymity most frequently in the early 1580s, in 1592 and 1593, and again in the last three years of Elizabeth's reign. When the Elizabethan government took action against the Mission priests in the early 1580s, many of the Catholic apologists did indeed publish anonymously. The years surrounding the Armada threat (1588-91), however, resulted in a dearth of English Catholic publications; only one of the few books published was anonymous. The end of Elizabeth's reign was marked by a sharp increase in Catholic publication and a new employment of initials as a convention that could enact both anonymity and naming.(11) The Appellant and Archpriest Controversies, to which many of these late Elizabethan texts belonged, took place between Catholics with differing views about the government of the underground English Catholic church and the appropriateness of an appeal to Elizabeth for greater toleration.(12) Although the Elizabethan anti-Catholic statutes were still in place, Elizabeth seems to have encouraged this controversy discreetly.(13) The anonymity of its authors, therefore, was not specifically in reaction to a new government crackdown and probably had more to do with the growing conventionality of anonymity in ecclesiastical debate.(14) Throughout Elizabeth's reign, one finds anonymity integrated into the flurry of particular debates rather than serving solely as an enabler of free speech in periods of great repression. Anonymity allowed authors to take advantage of relatively lax enforcement of book regulations. It also served as a protective device for those using provocation to effect change and begin debates. Most often, however, anonymity reflected the character of particular debates and the choices and circumstances of individual authors and book producers.