You can’t prove I meant X
Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020
Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019,978 0 19 874449 8 Show More
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019,
“... Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ... ”