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It was the business of early modern literature to ask these questions. The idea that social convention was established on a natural order of things was no longer accepted. As Shakespeare's bastard Edmund declares, rejecting the customary inferiority of a person who is born out of wedlock, "Why bastard, Wherefore base? / When my dimensions are as well compact...As honest madam's issue." Writers were certainly supposed to educate their readers in virtuous ways. Spenser intended that his epic would "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." And Sidney believed that poetry, at its finest, could "take naughtiness away and plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls." But literature also questioned matters of being and identity because writers themselves were in the forefront of a class that was in the process of changing its way of life and its means of support. During the early modern period an educated man who sought employment as a writer was the object of patronage by the gentry or nobility, often functioning as a tutor or secretary in a prosperous household. The poet John Skelton taught the future Henry VIII; John Donne accompanied his patron Sir William Drury on his European journeys and dedicated his Anniversaries to Drury's deceased daughter Elizabeth; and Andrew Marvell educated Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary. Men who were employed in other ways—in diplomacy, law, or some aspect of commerce—might be rewarded for their writing by stipends from the rich. Elizabeth I gave Spenser, one of her administrators in Ireland, a single grant of fifty pounds for The Faerie Queene; and Ben Jonson, thanks to the generosity of James I, was able to make a successful career for himself as a poet. As a young man, Milton was patronized by the noble Egerton family, for whom he wrote a masque called Comus. But as the seventeeth century progressed, writers discovered that they could be supported by a broader public; after the Restoration the talented playwright Aphra Behn gained a living by selling her literary work to producers and printers. Increasingly, the forces of the market had moved to include the business of printing and thus to both liberate and captivate the energies of the nation's writers. It was obvious to those in power and authority that the printing press was an agent of change; the question they had to answer was how to control it. Under Elizabeth I, all printing was regulated (in effect, subject to censorship) by the Stationer's Company, which had the exclusive right to print and sell literary work. The theater was also controlled. From 1574, all plays had to be licensed by the Master of Revels, a servant and appointee of the monarch, before they could be produced. These conditions bound writers to observe royal and ecclesiastical policy, at least in their direct statements. Some resorted to coded critique; others openly defied custom. In 1579 John Stubbs wrote a pamphlet against the Queen's proposed marriage to the French king's brother, the Duke of Alençon, entitled The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be Swallowed; he was arrested and had his hand cut off as punishment. This situation, in which publication was officially regulated, was altered early in the seventeenth century by the development of a new institution: journalism. By the middle of James I's reign, there was a market for a periodical news pamphlet known as a "coranto," or current of news, which contained foreign intelligence taken from foreign papers: the first was actually printed in Amsterdam and shipped to England. Within a short time, English printers were publishing their own news in the form of sixteen-page "newsbooks" or Diurnalls, and by 1646, Londoners could read fourteen different papers in English. The rapid growth of the news industry promoted a public readership increasingly informed of political affairs. Parliament grew alarmed and discussed imposing stringent forms of licensing; in 1649 it approved the publication of only two newspapers, both dedicated to printing official news. Underground presses continued to publish on current affairs, however; some of them took a royalist point of view and others endorsed Parliament's position. Their writers enjoyed a risky freedom, but it was still a freedom. The boldest of them was Marchamont Nedham, a supporter of Parliament and the chief author of the Mercurius Britanicus (still an important source of information about the Civil War and the Interregnum); he had to flee to Holland at the Restoration, although he subsequently was pardoned and returned to England. But journalism did more than provide news; it also created a basis for the freedom of writers in general. The most eloquent attack on a state-controlled press was by Milton, whose Areopagitica protested the practice of licensing books before their publication—that is, before readers had a chance to make up their minds about what these books contained. Milton drew on ideas of democracy from ancient Athens and on the Puritan notion that good emerges only in contact with evil: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," he announced; no true virtue is untested, unchallenged, unexamined—it is valid only when it has deliberately and consciously rejected what is false. The journalistic enterprise of this period fostered the right to free speech and a free press that is now the bedrock of modern democracies.
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