Another victim was William Prynne, a firebrand Puritan. Prynne was a pompous prude with a poisonous pen, among whose literary output was a broadside against men wearing long hair, entitled The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628). In 1634, his Histriomastix launched an extended tirade against the theatre world, containing an attack on women who acted in plays (index entry: ‘Woman actors, notorious whores’). This was taken as, and indeed probably was, another slingshot aimed at the queen, so Prynne won little sympathy as Star Chamber tossed him in prison and snipped off the top of his ears. It was said that Attorney General William Noy laughed so hard at the punishment that he bled from his penis.
This book, covering the Seventeenth Century in England – the Civil War, the apparent end of monarchy, the Interregnum and the republics, the Restoration and all – is huge, fascinating, and a lot more entertaining than you might expect.
Healey is extremely good at the earthy details – even the godly King James is recorded as saying ‘A turd for your argument!’ to an actual bishop. It livens up the narrative considerably, although Healey handles the extensive cast of players and the timeline very well.
It’s a broad book, by design a whistlestop tour of a mad century, all folk tradition and politics, having to cover a period that went from mobs to standing professional armies, but it all remains coherent and gets into the real technological and cultural shifts:
Perhaps most revolutionary of all was the new type of publication that appeared on the bookstalls of London in 1620. Published in Amsterdam by a Dutchman, it was a folio broadsheet, untitled, bearing news – in English – from the Continent. This was the first of the English ‘corantoes’: news serials.
It’s easy to think of this as a mannered and prudish era, given the Puritans and the strong religious structure of the times. Healy reminds us that it really wasn’t – and also that it was powerfully populist. A brilliant read.
THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+)