NB&P: Joseph Mansky - Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU English Professor Joseph Mansky about his new book Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book traces the practice of libel across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. It shows that our present-day preoccupation with free speech and fake news has a long literary history. Like social media today, libels gave ordinary people a public platform to criticize the ruling classes. But also like social media, the discourse they disseminated was often vicious and vitriolic, a volatile cocktail of rumors, threats, and populist grievance. Debate and defamation, free speech and fake news, went hand in hand. This paradox runs through the representations of libel on the early modern stage, and their plays chart a late Elizabethan public sphere animated by forces that remain uncannily familiar: partisanship and populism, misinformation and sectarian strife, proto-celebrity and political demagoguery.