Speaking News in Pamphlets of the English Civil Wars

With the beginning of the first English civil war, the pamphlet play emerged as a new genre which tapped into both news and drama. Highly topical, deeply political, and bitingly satirical, pamphlet plays are located in the spheres of both the written and the spoken word as they draw on printed newsbooks as well as on the verbal exchanges typical of drama. In my paper, I use the pamphlet play /The Levellers Levell’d/ (publ. 8 Dec. 1647) in order to discuss how pamphlet plays lift news items from newsbooks and frame them as dramatized versions of English civil-war politics. In the first part of my discussion of /The Levellers Levell’d/, I focus on the political dimension of the pamphlet play’s plot, which shapes topical events that dominate newsbooks in late 1647 into polemical royalist propaganda. In a second step, I analyse the cultural function of the pamphlet play’s dramatized version of news. As I argue, /The Levellers Levell’d/ aims at containing royalist anxieties about Charles I’s personal safety and the future of the monarchy. Bringing together the sphere of news (i.e. the written word) and that of drama (i.e. the spoken word), the pamphlet play provides a means of understanding English civil-war politics as a royalist tragicomedy. Thus, the pamphlet play projects a hopeful future for its royalist readers at a time when, for a few weeks in late 1647, a settlement between the king and parliament seemed to be on the political horizon.