Etudes Epistémè (May 2021)
Is the Pen Really Mightier than the Sword? Poetic Fragments and Politics in Civil War Ephemeral Newspapers
Abstract
The significance and dissemination of print culture during the British Civil Wars is now well documented, and the role played by newsbooks not only as purveyors of news but also as contributors to the circulation of ideas has been ascertained by a fair amount of scholarly work. Until recently, Civil War weeklies tended to be studied and valued for their historical potential as witnesses of a troubled age when war was also fought in pamphlets, but their literary dimension was often neglected. This unfortunate oversight is being redressed and newsbooks are increasingly investigated as literary artefacts/objects/products in their own right in terms of the way they recycled literary genres and conventions, now following literary traditions, now challenging norms and twisting codes. This paper reconciles the two approaches by concentrating on poetic fragments in Civil War newsbooks while looking at the way these publications engaged with the pressing political issues of their time. It is centred on the ephemeral newspapers of the year 1648 – the year when royalist risings in the provinces developed into an all-out civil war; the word “ephemeral” here is to be understood as referring to weeklies that did not last for more than a few weeks, but whose significance and political impact historians and literary scholars have not yet quite appraised. This paper looks at the way both royalist and parliamentarian “mercuries” used canonical forms and genres – in particular, the epigram, parody and satire – to convey their political meanings as well as carry polemic further afield in an effort to generate support for the cause they fought for.
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