On 1 June 1599, John Whitgift (the Archbishop of Canterbury) and Richard Bancroft (the Bishop of London) signed their names on an order to ban a selection of literary works. This act of censorship has become known among scholars as the "Bishops' Ban" and is one of four such acts during the reign of Elizabeth I. Debora Shuger has called the order "the most sweeping and stringent instance of early modern censorship."
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Censored books
This "Bishops' Ban" has been documented in the surviving records of the Stationers' Company and can be observed in Edward Arber's transcription. It ordered the censorship of satires and epigrams, histories and dramatic works published without the approval of the Privy Council, and all the works by Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey. Additionally, nine specific books were singled out for censorship:
The last work may be a translation from a French original, and is probably lost (although we know it was probably printed by Adam Islip, who was fined for printing the book on 5 February 1599). All the other books survive. Three days later, on 4 June, seven of the above titles were burned in Stationers' Hall. The two books that were "stai[e]d" (i.e. not burned) were Hall's Vergidemiarum and Caltha Poetarum.
The following year, poet John Weever published Faunus and Melliflora, which contains references to Joseph Hall, John Marston, and the Bishops' Ban. Weever is also the probable author of an anonymous pamphlet in 1601 entitled The Whippinge of the Satyre, which vindicates the decision of the bishops and attacks Edward Guilpin, John Marston, and Ben Jonson.
Theories about the Ban
It is not entirely clear what reason or reasons prompted the ban and the subsequent book burning. Nevertheless, there are three general theories that attempt to explain the controversy.
The first of these supposes that the ban was simply a response to satirical writing that was getting out of hand. Richard McCabe refers to the ban as an effort to target social critique that was "too close to the truth for comfort." More recently, William Jones contends that the bishops' primary concern was the satirists' harsh, Juvenalian approach to social commentary. This interpretation draws its force in part from the Bishops' sentence "That noe Satyres or Epigrams be printed hereafter." However, though many of the books in question fit the generic category of "satire," the Bishops' Ban problematically also limits the printing of some "English histories" and "playes", which may themselves be satiric.
An alternative theory on the event supposes that Archbishop Whitgift engineered the ban specifically to protect his friend, the Earl of Essex, from political satire. This nuanced, political interpretation points out that Essex's failure during a military campaign in Ireland had recently captured the attention of the English public, and figures that the banned books seize upon this controversy. Because Robert Tofte's Of Mariage and Wiving and the anonymous xv ioyes of marriage are literary translations that do not directly relate to England's contemporary political climate, some scholars suppose that the anti-marriage rhetoric of these two books was perceived as sedition against Elizabeth I.
A third explanation for the ban reasons that the bishops were reacting specifically to the malicious and pornographic content in the books, as opposed to their generic or political implications. Charles Gillett argues that the seven books were burned "because of their offence against morality." Lynda Boose has claimed further that the bishops "attempted to cut off the hostile, malcontented political aggressions of the violently sexualized discourse they heard in these new hybrid literary constructions."