Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity

208 Pages·2009·2.579 MB·English

by  Keith M. Botelho (auth.)

Renaissance Earwitnesses
Renaissance Earwitnesses
Rumor and Early Modern
Masculinity
Keith M. Botelho
RENAISSANCE EARWITNESSES
Copyright © Keith M. Botelho, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61941-8
Cover image: Georgette de Montenay, Emblematum Christianorum
centuria (Lyon, 1571). Glasgow University Library, Department of Special
Collections.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38219-4 ISBN 978-0-230-10207-1 (eBook)
DOI.10.1057/9780230102071
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Botelho, Keith M.
Renaissance earwitnesses : rumor and early modern
masculinity / Keith M. Botelho.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-349-38219-4 (alk. paper)
1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—
History and criticism. 2. Rumor in literature. 3. Masculinity in literature.
I. Title.
PR658.R86B67 2010
822(cid:2).3093521—dc22 2009017019
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2009
For Denise, Ethan, and Julia,
and
In memory of my Father,
Frank A. Botelho (1935–2007)
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations ix
Preface: Listening in an Age of Truthnapping xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction Buzz, Buzz: Rumor in Early
Modern England 1
One Table Talk: Marlowe’s Mouthy Men 27
Two Bruits and Britons: Rumor,
Counsel, and the Henriad 49
Three “I heard a bustling rumour”: Shakespeare’s
Aural Insurgents 75
Four “Nothing but the truth”: Ben Jonson’s Comedy
of Rumors 95
Conclusion “Contrary to truth”: Elizabeth Cary’s
Tragedy of Rumor 127
Notes 133
Bibliography 175
Index 189
I L L U S T R A T I O N S
I.1 Woodcut of Fama, from Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of
Emblemes, and Other Devises (Leyden, 1586). This item
is reproduced by permission of The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. 4
2.1 Greate Brittaines Noble and worthy Councell of Warre
(London, 1624). The Society of Antiquaries of London. 50
3.1 Woodcut from Clement Marot, Sensuiuent les blazons
anatomiques du corps (Paris: Charles Langelier, 1543).
Special Collections, University of Virginia. 81
4.1 Tittle-Tattle; Or, the several Branches of Gossipping
(London, c. 1600). The Trustees of the British Museum. 96
4.2 The frontispiece from Sir Walter Ralegh’s The History of
the World (Printed by William Stansby for Walter Burre,
London, 1614). This item is reproduced by permission
of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 106
P R E F A C E
Listening in an Age of Truthnapping
Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot
get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual
information.
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth
In the same year when the word truthiness, coined by one of Comedy
Central’s resident satirists Stephen Colbert, was voted the Word of
the Year, the Sago Mine Tragedy in the early days of January 2006
highlighted the often slipperiness of report, the contested notion of
truth, and the devastating effects of rumor.1 Merriam-Webster, the dic-
tionary publisher that conducted the survey for the word of the year,
defines truthiness as “truth that comes from the gut, not books” or “the
quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than
concepts or facts known to be true.”2 The concept of truthiness provides
a useful lens to examine how the hopes and fears of the victims’ fam-
ilies and the community at large overshadowed the truth of the situa-
tion at the West Virginia mine. Reflecting on the events of the mine
tragedy in his blog, Brian Williams, anchor of NBC Nightly News,
implicated the news media for proliferating a rumor based on garbled
communications (radio frequencies, speaker systems, cell phones) that
mistakenly repeated that the miners were alive. Williams writes, “The
church exploded, the church bells rang, the usual systems of confirm-
ing a news story broke down, celebrations broke out. And then hours
later, hearts were broken.”3 Testimony to how the media is suscepti-
ble to reporting and printing unauthorized information, newspapers
across the country, from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times to the
Washington Post, printed headlines based on rumor the following day.
xii Preface
Similarly, cable news networks and Internet sources initially reported
these rumors as fact, for as Coal Group Chief Executive Office Ben
Hatfield remarked, false information “spread like wildfire.”4 All of these
media outlets soon issued retractions and apologies, but ultimately these
events revealed the fallout of reporting rumors to the masses and how
unverified information can, under certain circumstances, be portrayed
as truth in a headline society.5 As Ralph Rosnow and Gary Fine have
remarked in their landmark book on rumor, “It becomes problematical
whether one can trust one’s eyes and ears, and of course one’s surrogate
eyes and ears—the mass media.”6 Even though these media outlets’
credibility was momentarily sullied, the public returned to these same
sources for the unvarnished truth in the days after the incident.
Certainly, the news media’s thirst for story perpetuated a rumor, a
form of unverified information with large-scale importance that is,
as I detail in the introduction, distinct from gossip. As James C. Scott
writes, rumor thrives “in situations in which events of vital importance
to people’s interests are occurring and in which no reliable informa-
tion—or only ambiguous information—is available. Under such cir-
cumstances one would expect people to keep their ears close to the
ground and to repeat avidly whatever news there was.”7 More to the
point, as Taylor Clark argues, “Fear breeds rumor. The more collective
anxiety a group has, the more inclined it will be to start up the rumor
mill.”8 All too often news reports are taken at their word without dis-
cernment. Keeping one’s ear to the ground implies being well-informed
but also being on sensory alert, keeping one’s ear open to the possibility
that rumors, with their inherent ambiguity, could be at work.
For better or for worse, our society is hungry for information. In
fact, such a gustatory metaphor is apt in many ways both today and in
the early modern period, as the act of eating was often aligned with
sharing and hearing news.9 But this problem of leaving undigested the
news that comes to our ears has its roots in past societies, particularly in
the Renaissance, as the burgeoning news business, initiated by inven-
tions of moveable type and the printing press, opened up information
en masse to the masses. Any democratic society prides itself on the free
flow of information, readily available to fall upon the feasting ears of
the populace. Yet in every society, information falls prey to the work-
ing of rumor. As former vice president Al Gore has recently written,
individuals must hearken back to a time in the past when they used
their “reasoning capacity to sort through the available evidence rele-
vant to decisions that affected their lives”; in other words, to combat an
assault on reason, people must listen to and reject “the cynical use of
Preface xiii
pseudostudies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally cloud-
ing the public’s ability to discern the truth.”10 It becomes necessary to
establish a line of defense at the ear in order to preserve truth, to hear
through the rumor.11
Today, with so many available sources of information about the
world—from podcasts to tweets to blogs to Web sites to newspapers
to talk radio programs to nightly news broadcasts—it is imperative,
more than ever, that individuals establish defensive mechanisms at
the ear.12 With so many talking heads and typing fingers, the public
must become attuned to listening closely to a multitude of voices.
However, I do not think that myriad news outlets are necessarily
detrimental to a pursuit of truth, if, that is, we engage with them in
a discerning manner. Too many individuals choose to get their infor-
mation from one and one source only, and as a result, truth often
becomes kidnapped. What I would coin as truthnapping has become
a commonplace in our modern world, where individuals or institu-
tions abduct truth by fraud, holding it hostage. It is often necessary
to broaden one’s sources, to listen to a variety of outlets with vari-
ous levels of credibility, to hear all despite the possibility of hearing
rumor. The example of rumor is instructive because rumor contains
the seeds of both truth and falsity, and the listener must discern the
truth content of the information that comes to his or her ears. By
casting our auditory nets widely, we hear many sounds, which affords
us the possibility to come closer to truth after having digested more
than just one story, more than just one side.
What we commonly call spin in speaking about the news media fur-
ther solidifies the imperative to listen closely. Spin, in fact, aligns more
with entertainment than news. Many news outlets have in the past
decade relied on spin to fill air time, often “spinning their wheels,”
failing to be productive or move toward an examination of the truth.
Spin revolves around immediate commentary, reactive journalism, so
to speak, where sound judgment and discernment are often absent.
Furthermore, spin often reveals a failure to closely listen, either to
the other commentators or to the actual news that has been reported.
Nevertheless, spin shapes stories. Individuals engaged in spin should
thus work toward drawing out the meaning or truth of information;
as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, to spin can be defined as “to
evolve, produce, contrive, or devise” (4c) or “to evolve or devise by
mental effort: to express at length” (6c). Spin, of course, has the poten-
tial to make us dizzy, but we must approach spin with open ears that
seek to determine truth. One reason to be wary of spin can be found