Lovelace and the "barbed Censurers": Lucasta and Civil War Censorship

Abstract

T HE middle of the seventeenth century saw England rent asunder by civil war; beleaguered, the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace sought with his exquisite lyrics to brace the tottering royalist cause. His work has a quietly polemical thrust-its smooth surface is deceptive, a product of the censorship that fell athwart royalist writers of the period. In this article, I will canvass the ways in which Lovelace's curved style in Lucasta (1649), as well as his strategic alliance with select parliamentarians, allowed him to circumvent the Puritan censorship that stood in his way. The text and context of Lucasta illustrate the methods that early modern writers used to negotiate censorship and to forge political consensus in times of crisis.1

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