Abstract
Andrew Hadfield’s excellent new study of lying in early modern England was published in 2017. As such, it shows either a striking lapse or impressive restraint in failing to use the phrase ‘fake news’. Hadfield quotes the anthropologist J. L. Barnes in 1994 making a claim that has not stood the test of time: ‘whether lies are in fact told more often nowadays than previously is anyone’s guess, but at least there is a greater awareness of the prevalence of lying’. Hadfield does not think Barnes has got this right, ‘if we consider the evidence from sixteenth-century England’, where there was no shortage of anxiety about the prevalence of falsehood (pp. 29–30). It is by no means clear that a greater awareness of lying translates into greater understanding – in fact, the opposite may be closer to the truth. Hadfield’s book culminates in a compelling reading of Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) as ‘a fable for a time of acute paranoia’, a work so ‘saturated in a culture of lying’, that its inhabitants can no longer distinguish reliably between truth and falsehood (pp. 292, 308). The fact that Hadfield feels compelled to mention President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but not President Trump, in itself illustrates his central premise that ‘the contexts in which lies are uttered and received change, which transforms our understanding of lying, even if the basic concept of the lie remains the same’ (p. 30).
What drove the fevered obsession with lying in early modern culture? Hadfield answers: the Reformation and its ‘increased emphasis on the individual cast adrift from an obvious institutional framework’ (p. 308). With this insight, astute attention is paid to the crucial role played by institutions in constructing our values of truth and falsehood, a power which the Reformation transferred from church to state. Othello’s fibs about his youthful travels fly because the Duke of Venice approves of and conspires in them; Thomas More went to the scaffold because his testimony fell afoul of the monarch’s ‘authority to distinguish between proper and improper words’ (p. 45). By taking two landmark oaths of allegiance as bookends for his study – the Oath of Supremacy (1535) and the Oath of Allegiance (1606) – Hadfield underlines how Reformation anxieties about the distinction between truth and falsehood proved integral to ‘the contract between sovereign power and subject’ (p. 67). In this sense, Hadfield’s work will make for important reading for scholars interested in the history of politics and political thought in the period – for instance in tracing the heritage of Hobbes’s contention that ‘the bonds of words are too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions, without the feare of some coerceive Power’. 1
The other obvious, and much-discussed, context which this book cannot afford to ignore is the rhetorical culture of humanism. A very interesting chapter traces several commentators’ anxieties about the enormous power to deceive wielded by well-trained orators. The central case study here is Montaigne, who epitomises a core principle of Hadfield’s method, that ‘an analysis of lying is most meaningful through a series of examples rather than precepts’ (p. 179). This insight yields a rich sense of Montaigne’s studied evasion of clear-cut conclusions: ‘separating truth and lies is easy enough in theory, but nearly impossible in practice’ (p. 180). Lying, Montaigne implies, is both inadvisable and yet inescapable. In the hands of another historian (say, Richard Tuck) we might have heard considerably more about later humanist authors like Montaigne and their increasing willingness, under the tutelary influence of Tacitus, to ponder the pragmatic uses of lying. 2 Though Machiavelli makes an obligatory appearance in this capacity, Hadfield takes an enjoyably contrarian line by throwing doubt on Machiavelli’s real significance. Even if Elizabethans were reading Machiavelli – it was hardly necessary for playwrights like Marlowe to conjure up his spectre in order to ‘instil paranoia in an audience unsure what they can trust’ – the Florentine never truly rivalled the reach of the more morally orthodox Cicero (pp. 232, 234). 3 Yet Machiavelli was by no means the only available authority who contemplated politically useful forms of lying. Though we do briefly encounter Bacon’s cautious analysis of dissimulation (pp. 15–17), we find barely any mention of Justus Lipsius’s thoroughly Tacitean treatment of what he called ‘prudentia mixta’. It may be that not all readers would join me in clamouring to hear more about Lipsius, and it may also be that this omission is a consequence of Hadfield’s periodisation: perhaps the Tacitean trend would appear more prominent in a study that extended further beyond 1606. I hope somebody will write a sequel.
Hadfield’s most impressive achievement lies not in his treatment of any single subject, but rather in his overall method, derived from Montaigne, of working through ‘examples rather than precepts’. Hadfield is ‘sceptical of how much a history of lying as a concept on its own will really tell us’. Rather, we need to reconstruct ‘how lies are produced, how they are imagined, analysed, and understood, and in which contexts they are articulated’ (pp. 29–30). What results is a fast-paced book, structured through a series of nimble and intriguing case studies. The most eye-catching chapter discusses the Renaissance’s troubled understanding of testimony, leading us through (among other things) an incisive close reading of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), prodigy pamphlets on the discovery of ‘Wondrous Herring’ and the political machinations that may have motivated this phenomenon. In the process Hadfield unfolds a rich array of modes through which deceit was experienced: as anxiety about the danger of false testimony; as the ‘guilty enjoyment’ of indulging one’s own gullibility; and as the satirical realisation that ‘the world is always mediated’ by ‘literary modes’ (pp. 248, 254). The latter insight, gleaned from Nashe, explains why the book progressively turns away from the cultural to the more narrowly literary. Echoing the critique levelled by Natalie Zemon Davis in Fiction in the Archives (1987), Hadfield defends – diplomatically but trenchantly – the importance of literary analysis in interpreting the raw information we find in the archives. His book compellingly demonstrates the extremely timely necessity of ‘uncovering a mentality that understood that lies were a part of everyday life … and that they structured reality’ (pp. 4–5).