A Study of Censorship and Sociopolitical Oppression in 17th-Centuy England and Their Influence on Metaphorical Representations

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The aim of this study is to see how the censorship and sociopolitical oppression on the royalists in the English Civil War and the Commonwealth influenced their poetic creations. As parliamentary control of the press tightens its hold with successive legislation culminating in the Printing Act of 1649, publication of broadside-poems such as songs, ballads and litanies decreases with 1647 as its peak, while their style becomes more and more cryptic insinuating. That is,while the restrictions on the press formed a considerable hindrance to their literary activity in general, they helped add such qualities as irony and euphemism to their poetic creations. As for the poems circulated in manuscripts or published in books, the situation is a little different. They had a much more limited readership and their genres were more aristocratic : such as amatory verses, odes, pastorals and meditative poetry. An interesting thing is that in spite of their expected indifference to public propaganda, they are full of political allusions couched in seemingly casual remarks and descriptions and that the way they camouflage their political purport is far more elaborate than in those popular genres. This leads us to think that the secrecy in these poems, though partly resulting from the oppression of the press, is more intrinsically motivated by the secrecy-oriented mentality of the royalists. That is,the hierarchical orders they hoped to maintain (monarchy and episcopacy) were the ontological power/knowledge system in which the ultimate substance or truth should be constantly "deferred" or substituted for by other signs, making secrecy a common trait of their discourses. My conclusion is that the censorship did not necessarily hinder their poetic creation but rather prompted it affording them a condition of writing much suited for their sociopolitically motivated liking for secrecy.