International News Networks

News is “essentially connective and dynamic,” linking those who read or heard it to other places and people, sometimes over great geographical and temporal distances.¹⁰ It is this connectivity that, for Joad Raymond, constitutes news: individual news publications “exist at the end of a network” and should be considered “epiphenomena” rather than “the thing itself”; news is a process (or, rather, multiple interrelated processes) of informational mobility.¹¹ Chiara Palazzo notes the ways in which this connectivity might shape awareness of and feelings of connection to the wider world: “the circulation of news implies contacts, awareness of different realities, geographical and cultural reference points, the development of the collective imagination.”¹² The relationships news formed and reflected might be multiple and (as the work of numerous scholars demonstrates) they might cross significant distances.¹³ International news traveled between cities via various networks: primarily along postal routes, but also via the movements of merchants, scholars, diplomats, and other travelers.¹⁴ It moved in reports and/or paragraphs, which were translated, reformed, and recombined along the way. Early modern England—prior to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, at least—consumed far more news than it produced; relatively little English news flowed back over the sea to mainland Europe.¹⁵

News gathered in entrepôts: well-connected cities such as Venice, Vienna, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Antwerp in which textual and professional networks converged. News entrepôts were home to communities of those who processed the news: scribes, printers, translators, postal workers, ballad singers, and varied and nebulous crowds of people who shared and discussed spoken news. They were where news consumers might look for news, not just of the entrepôt and its surrounding area, but of places beyond it. Venice, for example, was where news from the Ottoman and Safavid empires entered Europe and also a source (via its connections to communities of Venetian merchants in places like Damascus and Aleppo) for news from Africa. English readers interested in news from the battlefields of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War looked toward the news entrepôts of the Netherlands and through them to Frankfurt and Vienna. Manuscript and printed paragraphs of foreign news carried with them traces of some of the entrepôts they passed through, often in headings listing where the news was sourced from and the date of the communication(s) that carried it.¹⁶ Such “metadata” contributed to “the development of the collective imagination,” in Palazzo’s terms: to the sense of interacting with international textual and informational networks and of being connected to far-flung people and events.¹⁷ Those who consumed news might even get a sense of the “news topography” of cities they had never visited: “What news on the Rialto?,” several characters ask in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, testifying to awareness that the city’s famous covered bridge was (along with St Mark’s Square) a key area for the exchange of mercantile and political news.¹⁸

The media by which news moved were varied and interconnected and developed in key ways through the 16th and 17th centuries.¹⁹ Professional anonymous manuscript newsletters, known as avvisi or gazettes, developed in the 16th century.²⁰ Printed news serials—including the semiannual Latin Mercurius Gallobelgicus—developed in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain in the 1600s and 1610s.²¹ Meanwhile, there was a long-standing European tradition of news ballads, often performed by singers in urban settings. These too often moved into print, in forms that supplemented but (for many, at least) did not replace oral performances.²²

News Publication in England

The early modern period saw marked changes in the way news was published and marketed in England, especially in print. Prior to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the majority of printed political news in England—in particular, printed pamphlets—dealt with foreign news. The lack of printed domestic news from the period has led to the perception that this was prohibited, but no evidence of a ban survives, and some revisionist historians of news and censorship have argued from this that the lack in fact reflects not a prohibition but an absence of interest on the part of consumers. However, in his discussion of the historiography of early modern print censorship, Joad Raymond points out that the existing archival record cannot be taken to represent “a full and sufficient account of what happened” and that a ban on printing domestic news might have been recorded in the “Red Book” containing the Stationers’ Company’s 1562 Ordinances, now lost.²³ Raymond argues for “a more complex history” of print censorship, “one constrained by a mixture of laws, social norms, and anxiety” in which petitions to print foreign news should be understood as evidence of an implicit prohibition, if not necessarily an explicit one, on printing news about domestic politics.²⁴

At any rate, prior to the 1640s, most printed English news dealt with events (in particular, military ones) outside of the kingdom. The 1580s and 1590s saw increasing numbers of printed news publications—both broadsheet ballads and quarto pamphlets—dealing with foreign news, especially regarding the wars in France and the Low Countries.²⁵ One especially notable development came in the early 1620s in response to conflict in the Holy Roman Empire (the early years of what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War). Dutch publishers began to export serialized broadsheets of international military and political news in English—known as “corantos”—to London booksellers.²⁶ These were soon joined by English-printed serialized news texts, first in broadsheet and later in quarto pamphlet form, sold on a somewhat erratic but more or less weekly schedule (I use the term “news pamphlets” to distinguish these publications from broadsheet corantos, but “corantos” was used for both forms by many contemporary readers).²⁷ The most prominent of these were produced by a shifting “syndicate” (in Folke Dahl’s term) of booksellers, including (in various combinations) Nicholas Bourne, Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, Bartholomew Downes, William Sheffard, and Nathaniel Newbery. Butter became especially associated with the retail of serialized news.²⁸ These publications were controversial: several stationers were punished for their early experiments in them, and printed newsbooks were prohibited by a Privy Council decree in 1632. This prohibition continued until 1638, after which Butter published news sporadically and unprofitably, with Bourne and then on his own, until 1642.²⁹

While pre-1640s printed news texts rarely carried domestic political news, this did circulate both orally and in manuscript (both in personal and professional letters and in manuscript “separates” conveying, for example, proceedings in Parliament or trial reports). Alexander Bellany has traced the circulation of news and comment about the 1613 murder of Sir Thomas Overbury through oral report, letters, and manuscript separates.³⁰ Other domestic news did make it into print as pamphlets and ballads which dealt with grisly crimes, disasters and portents, and remarkable natural or supernatural events; events might be reported in both ballad and pamphlet form. These texts indicated their genre in their titles, not always—and, at least after the 1620s, not usually—with the word “news,” but with an array of terms stressing the movement of information (many of which drew on terms used elsewhere in European news networks): “occurrences, transactions, proceedings, passages, affairs, relations, intelligence, informations, and, of course, mercury and gazette.”³¹

News and London

England was fairly peripheral to international news networks in the early modern period. However, London might still be considered a news entrepôt, at least for news moving within the British archipelago. The capital’s centrality to governance, trade, banking, and legal education—and, crucially, to the production of both printed and manuscript texts—meant that, for most people throughout England and Wales, London was where one looked for news. News moved out through the archipelago in various interconnected forms: through sociable letters, paid-for manuscript news services, printed news texts purchased from regional booksellers or chapmen, or forwarded from London booksellers, and oral news received from travelers arriving from London.³²

Within London, as within Venice, particular areas and landmarks became associated with news. In Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (first performed in 1626), the newsmonger Cymbal assigns a newsgatherer to each of the “four cardinal quarters” for the exchange of news in and around London: the Royal Exchange and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City, and the court and Westminster Hall in neighboring Westminster.³³ Cymbal’s “Staple” is a clearinghouse in which the city’s news is collected and “vent[ed] as occasion serves,” and his staffing choices reflect a keen understanding of the city’s news topography.³⁴ The forms of news that could be obtained from these places were various and overlapped with one another. Court news and news about English politics could be sourced from Westminster and more “public” (or, at least, more publishable) news from the City. The Royal Exchange was—like similar locations such as Amsterdam’s Bourse—a gathering place for merchants and those involved in international finance, and thus a good place to gather news that arrived through mercantile networks. The middle aisle of St. Paul’s was well-known as a place where men of various ranks and occupations “walked” together in the late morning and afternoon, sharing news and seeking employment. Fittingly, Cymbal’s newsgatherer in St. Paul’s is “Master Ambler, [. . .] A fine-paced gentleman as you shall see walk|The middle aisle.”³⁵ The neighboring churchyard was the center of the city’s print trade, and became especially associated with news through the activities of Nathaniel Butter, whose shop (the Pied Bull) stood in the southeast corner of St. Paul’s churchyard, near St. Austin’s Gate. The early 1620s “syndicate” of news publishers, and the collaboration between Butter and Nicholas Bourne that continued through the decade, can be seen to offer a similar form of “coverage” to Cymbal’s Staple (and, indeed, Jonson’s play satirizes Butter in particular, although Cymbal’s news is “vented” in manuscript). Aside from Butter and Bartholomew Downes (whose shop was to the west, near Fleet Bridge), most of the syndicate had shops near the Royal Exchange; Bourne’s stood at the main (south) entrance of the Exchange, on Cornhill.³⁶ The syndicate thus covered two of the “cardinall quarters,” exploiting both the fact that news could be obtained from the crowds that gathered there and the fact that news could be sold to them, too. Early modern London’s news topography was exploited by those who sought and sold news, and by those who brought news onto the stage and into satire.

Topical Fictions

Topicality was as key to the early modern textual marketplace, and to public discourse, as it is to the 21st-century one. In particular, we can think of it as essential to early modern England’s multiple, overlapping “performance cultures.” An early modern person might encounter news through the use of topical reference in a sermon, or through hearing a ballad singer, or by attending a play that dealt with recent history, or even ongoing events.³⁷

The boundary between news and history is an extremely permeable one; this is especially evident in literary and historical texts that deal with the early modern period’s many lengthy conflicts. The 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was fictionalized in Anne Dowriche’s 1589 poem The French Historie and Christopher Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris (1593); in both cases, an event from years ago was mobilized to speak to an ongoing conflict and to contemporary domestic religious and political concerns. George Chapman’s series of plays on French politics—Bussy D’Ambois (1607), the two parts of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613), and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (c. after 1611; published 1639)—all dealt with events from relatively recent history; the two parts of Byron, in particular, drew on A General Inventory of the History of France (1607) by Chapman’s cousin, Edward Grimeston, and represented the life and death of Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, executed in 1602. The relative topicality of Chapman’s Byron plays prompted controversy: the French ambassador objected to the first part and attempted to have the play banned, and it was published with controversial scenes removed.³⁸

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt was even more topical. It staged the trial and execution of the Dutch politician Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and was performed only three months after van Oldenbarnevelt’s death. Fletcher and Massinger’s play was censored—albeit in a fairly minor manner—by both the Master of the Revels and the Bishop of London.³⁹ More controversial was Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (first performed in August 1624), which satirized contemporary Anglo-Spanish politics and—as Lena Steveker has argued—engaged closely with the 1620s news market.⁴⁰ Middleton’s play proved extremely popular: it was performed at the Globe for an unprecedented nine consecutive days before being suppressed by order of the Privy Council following a complaint by the Spanish Ambassador. Middleton went into hiding, his son was arrested, and it is likely that Middleton himself was imprisoned for a time in the Fleet. The play itself became international news: “[a]ccounts of it were dispatched to Brussels, The Hague, Madrid, Florence, Rome, and Venice.”⁴¹

A close relationship between the news market and professional theater can also be seen in a number of plays that catered to English interest in overseas travel, trade, diplomacy, and crime—and, in particular, with the Islamic world. The battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco in 1578—particularly notable for English audiences for the death of Sebastian I of Portugal, which prompted the Spanish annexation of the entire Iberian peninsula—was represented in two plays, both centering on the English mercenary Thomas Stukeley: The Battle of Alcazar, ascribed to George Peele (c. 1588, first published 1594), and the anonymous The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley (c. 1596).⁴² Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) recounted the conversion of the English pirate John Ward (Yusuf Raïs) to Islam around 1608. Daborne’s depiction of Ward was based on two 1609 pamphlets: Andrew Barker’s A True and Certaine Report of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrowes, and now Present Estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker, the Two Late Famous Pirates From Their First Setting Foorth to this Present Time, and the anonymous Newes From Sea, of Two Notorious Pyrats Ward the Englishman, and Danseker the Dutchman With a True Relation of All or the Most Piraces [sic] by Them Committed unto the Sixt of Aprill 1609.⁴³ Both of these publications might be considered news texts: each flag their “newsworthiness” in their titles (“True and Certaine Report,” “Newes from Sea,” “True Relation”), each stress their topicality (they cover Ward’s exploits up until “this Present Time,” or “the Sixt of Aprill 1609”), and Newes from Sea was printed for Nathaniel Butter, later to become the most prominent publisher of serialized news. Daborne reworked news texts that were a few years old; “stale” news became new again through being staged. The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, staged adventures based on those of the travelers and diplomats Anthony, Thomas, and Robert Sherley. The play was commissioned by Thomas Sherley as part of (in Jonathan Burton’s words) a 1607 “public relations campaign” that also included the publication of a pamphlet by Anthony Nixon, The Three English Brothers.⁴⁴ The staging of topical stories could be a way to influence (or, at least, to attempt to influence) popular opinion.

Sensational domestic news also found its way onto the stage. The 1605 trial and execution of Walter Calverley for the murder of his children and attempted murder of his wife was reported in printed news texts. Nathaniel Butter published a pamphlet in June (while Calverley’s trial was ongoing) and another after his execution in August, while Thomas Pavier published a ballad.⁴⁵ In succeeding years, the story formed the basis of two plays: George Wilkins’ Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607) and The Yorkshire Tragedy (anonymous, attributed on its title page to William Shakespeare but now thought to be by Thomas Middleton) of 1608, which addressed its chronological relationship to its source material in its subtitle, “not so new as lamentable and true.”⁴⁶

More newsworthy—in chronological terms—were two plays focusing on notorious trials for witchcraft. The Witch of Edmonton, by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, was published in 1658, but first performed in 1621 (there is a record of a performance at court on December 29, but it was probably played at the Cockpit in London earlier in the year). It staged the story of Elizabeth Sawyer, a woman tried for witchcraft and executed on April 19, 1621. Soon after Sawyer’s death, a pamphlet by the churchman Henry Goodcole was published, which recounted her trial and prison confession; the playwrights drew on this extensively.⁴⁷ The Witches of Lancashire, by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was first staged by the King’s Men at the Globe sometime between August 11 and August 13, 1634—as we know from an account of it by Nathaniel Tomkyns, dated August 16—and published as The Late Lancashire Witches later in the year. The title used for the printed text distinguishes these Lancashire witches from earlier ones, this being the second witchcraft scandal to center around the small Lancashire community of Pendle.⁴⁸ However, it also stresses the recency of the events it represents. The performances in the summer of 1634 took place while four of the women accused of witchcraft—Frances Dicconson, Jennet Hargreaves, Margaret Johnson, and Mary Spencer—were in London for examination by a medical team headed by William Harvey, the king’s physician. The women were imprisoned at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, only a few miles down the river from the theater where crowds gathered to see them represented.⁴⁹ Tomkyns judged the play “full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible,” but wrote that it “passeth for a merry and excellent new play,” both for its entertainment value and “in respect of the newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here).”⁵⁰ The play is bookended with references to its own topicality. The Prologue begins

Corantoes failing, and no footpost late Possessing us with news of foreign state, No accidents abroad worthy relation Arriving here, we are forced from our own nation To ground the scene that’s now in agitation, The project unto many here well known: Those witches the fat jailor brought to town.⁵¹

Heywood and Brome make reference to the lack of serialized foreign news pamphlets following the 1632 Privy Council decree banning their publication. Bereft of “news of foreign state” through lack of both printed news and news brought by messenger (“footpost”), the playwrights are (apparently) “forced” to turn to domestic events for topical content to stage. The fact that the women’s case had not yet concluded is referenced in the Epilogue, where it is noted that “What their crime|May bring upon ‘em, ripeness yet of time|Has not revealed,” and that “What of their story further shall ensue,|We must refer to time, ourselves to you.”⁵² The women were, in fact, eventually acquitted by their London examiners and returned to Lancashire where, despite their acquittal, they remained in prison for several years. Herbert Berry (the discoverer of Tomkyns’ account) has argued that Heywood and Brome’s use of interrogation records may indicate that they were commissioned by the Privy Council to write a play making the case for the prosecution, a reading that Alison Findlay supports.⁵³ However, Helen Ostovich (the play’s most recent editor) warns against discounting the importance of “scepticism” in the play and its “critiques of credulity,” and Charlotte A. Coffin has explored the ambivalence with which governmental and judicial authority is treated within the play and the additions Heywood and Brome made to their sources.⁵⁴ Coffin stressed that “[t]he play does not just illustrate a contemporary case but incorporates its protagonists in a recognizable world of fiction and dramatic patterns,” with the “unmistakable consequence [. . .] that it fictionalizes the supposedly real witches. Or perhaps more accurately, it reveals their fictive status.”⁵⁵ Coffin’s argument is a useful corrective to the temptation to see topical plays as in some way documentary. Topical plays incorporate news into their plots, and in doing so, can be seen to distort it, to bend it to fictive purposes, or, as Coffin argues, to raise questions about truth and representation, about power, and about legal and governmental fictions.

News and Satire

News also turns up in literary texts that mock and satirize both it and the people who engage in its circulation. The genre of the satirical “character sketch”—modeled on the satires of Theophrastus—became especially fashionable in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and both “character books” and writers that drew on this genre often featured “characters” in part defined by their obsession with news.⁵⁶ The anecdote from Percevall with which I started sits in a tradition of mocking those who mis-consume news: both those who (like “little Guzman”) take bland statements that are neither “new” nor interesting to be news, and those who gullibly believe untruths. Perhaps the most famous example of a gullible newsreader in early modern literature is Sir Politic Would-Be in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, whose interest in the news and desire to be seen as a statesman make him an easy mark for deception.⁵⁷

Meanwhile—according to satirists, at least—unscrupulous newsmongers were only too happy to provide their customers with unreliable news. The anonymous Horae Subsecivae (1620) satirizes an “affected Statist” who “will translate the very Gazzette, the most ordinarie and uncertaine newes in the World, to send over by whole bundles into England.”⁵⁸ Printed news in particular was stigmatized as untrue. In Ben Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (performed at court on January 12, 1621), a “Printer” declares that he will “give anything for a good copy now, be’t true or false, so’t be news.”⁵⁹ Jonson developed his satire of news in The Staple of News (1626), in which the newsmonger Cymbal founds a clearinghouse in which his “Emissaries” gather and process news from the various “news centers” of London. This news is, however, ludicrous: it includes reports of “an invisible eel” with which the Dutch plan to sink the Spanish fleet at Dunkirk.⁶⁰ Like the Printer in Jonson’s earlier masque (and even though the news they retail is oral and in manuscript), these newsmongers don’t care about whether their news is true, but about whether it will be attractive to customers. Punning on Nathaniel Butter’s resonant name, Abraham Holland leveled an accusation of falsity at printed news sourced at Paul’s: “behold the wals|Butter’d with weekely Newes compos’d in Pauls,|By some Decaied Captaine” (the “Captaine” being the editor of Butter’s pamphlets, the ex-soldier Thomas Gainsford).⁶¹ Jonson’s Cymbal also references Butter, accusing “Mercurius Britannicus” (the name under which Butter and Bourne published their pamphlets from January 1625) of passing off old news as new by “buttering over again [. . .] His antiquated pamphlets.”⁶²

News-seeking was also satirized as idle and frivolous, a distraction from work and worship. Robert Burton mocks the idle gentry, aligning newsreading and news-seeking with other fashionable and unprofitable entertainment: “If they read on a book at any time, t’is an English Chronicle, S^r Huon of Burdeaux, Amadis de Gaul &c. a play-book, or some pamphlet of Newes, & that at such times only, when they cannot stir abroad, to drive away time, their sole discours is dogs, hawks and horses, and what newes?.”⁶³ John Earle goes beyond accusations of idleness, and connects news-seeking to transgressive sexuality, describing Paul’s Walk as “the eares Brothell, [which] satisfies their lust, and ytch.”⁶⁴ A similar connection is made by the malcontented Malevole (the disguised Altofronto, deposed Duke of Genoa) in John Marston’s The Malcontent (c. 1603), who replies to the question “what’s the common news abroad?” (asked by his usurper, Pietro) with “Common news? Why, common words are ‘God save ye,’ ‘Fare ye well’; common actions, flattery and cosenage; common things, women and cuckolds.”⁶⁵ Malevole replies to the “wrong” part of Pietro’s question, picking up “common” rather than “news” and listing things that are familiar—greetings, deception and flattery, and female sexual misbehavior. The reference to “women and cuckolds” also brings in another sense of “common.” Women (in Malevole’s misogynist terms) are “common” both in the sense that there are plenty of them about, and in the sense that they are sexually available to multiple men. As Ruth Mazo Karras has explained, “‘common woman’ in England expressed the [. . .] idea of a woman who moved into the communal realm, becoming sexually available.”⁶⁶

At the same time, “common” brings in a class dimension: news is shared among the common people as well as those with high social or political status, becoming matter of “common fame.”⁶⁷ News might be exchanged in public, lower-class spaces like taverns and (in a stereotype that crossed Europe) barbershops. John Taylor mocks the exchange of news “[a]t Ordinaries, and at Barbers shopps,” where (inaccurate) “tydings vented are, as thick as hopps.”⁶⁸ Satirists dwelt on the idea that news, democratized in this fashion, might end up in the hands, ears, and speech of those who did not have the necessary knowledge or intelligence to deal with it. John Smith mocked news consumers who extrapolate from news reports to “proportion Kingdomes, Cities, and Lordships, that never durst adventure to see them”; these newsgatherers “can neither shift Sun nor Moone, nor say their Compasse,” but they “will tell you of more than all the world, betwixt the Exchange, Pauls and Westminster: so it be newes, it matters not what, that will passe currant when truth must be stayed with an army of conceits.”⁶⁹

News Processes

The processes of acquiring and interpreting news meant that early modern people cultivated (to varying levels of detail and accuracy) knowledge of how it moved, of the places and languages it might pass through, and (as in relation to London) of the locations, forms, and even the people most associated with it.⁷⁰ This knowledge, and the methods by which one might acquire and practice it, is one of the more nuanced ways in which news appears in literary texts. For example, understanding of the centrality of Venice to European news networks is reflected in Shakespeare’s two “Venetian” plays—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1599) and Othello (c. 1603)—which are both deeply concerned with the movement and interpretation of information and misinformation. In The Merchant of Venice, characters ask each other for news on numerous occasions, and there are several prominent references to one of the city’s most famous “news locations.” Shylock describes his understanding of Antonio’s mercantile ventures as something he has heard “upon the Rialto,” the same public location where, we soon learn, Antonio has previously upbraided him for usury and subjected him to antisemitic abuse.⁷¹ This space of public discourse, mercantilism, and conflict is also where news is shared: Solanio’s “Now, what news on the Rialto?” at the start of act 3, scene 1 prompts Salerio to reveal to him—and to the audience—that Antonio’s ship has been lost.⁷²

Othello is especially concerned with interpreting the news: with the skills required to assess truth or falsity within news reports. David Randall has argued for the development during the early modern period of multiple methods of assessing credibility in news texts, which interact with each other and allow readers to judge the likelihood of the different kinds of report they receive. “Intensive” and “sociable” forms of newsreading establish credibility through interpreting details of accounts (such as claims to be eyewitness reports) and the reputations of named writers. “Extensive newsreading”—a later development—is the comparison of “numerous essentially partisan and flawed reports” by which “a newsreader could come up with his own judgement of the actual, credible truth out of his flawed sources.”⁷³ Act 1, scene 2 of Othello stages an instance of this sort of comparative newsreading at a governmental level as the Venetian council of war receives first a report that the Turkish fleet is heading to Rhodes rather than to attack Cyprus. The First Senator’s assessment that this is “a pageant|To keep us in false gaze” is based on detailed knowledge of Turkish tactics and quickly proved correct when a report arrives describing how the fleet has joined with reinforcements there and now heads toward Cyprus.⁷⁴

This measured, comparative treatment of information contrasts, of course, with Othello’s treatment of Iago’s falsehoods. Othello goes through some of the motions of responsible newsreading but does so poorly and inconsistently. He assesses Iago’s reports according to the latter’s reputation for honesty, applying the “sociable” standard of credibility, but neglects to apply the same standard to Desdemona. He interprets them not in the light of his own knowledge, but of his paranoia and misogyny. He corroborates them through external “proof,” both aural and “ocular,” but in both cases his interpretation is directed by Iago. Othello fails in what Noah Millstone calls “seeing like a statesman”: he allows himself to be taken in by information that is “cooked: manufactured by actors specifically to make the truth more difficult to discern.”⁷⁵ Millstone’s model is specifically political—he argued for a prevalent early modern belief that information might be manipulated by political agents, and thus that early modern readers learned to interpret with “politic” skepticism—and so, judged according to it, Othello’s failure is twofold: his failure to assess information correctly in the domestic realm is a damning indictment of his ability to operate in the political one. Reading Othello’s informational failures in relation to early modern “news culture” is one example of how the skills and processes of early modern newsreading might be brought to bear on literary texts.