Historically, local newsgatherers played a key democracy-enhancing role by keeping their communities informed about local events and holding local elected officials to account. As the market for local news has evaporated, more and more cities have become “news deserts.” Meanwhile, fewer national legacy news providers can afford to invest in the processes and expertise needed to produce high-quality news about our increasingly complex world. The true crisis of press legitimacy is the declining cultural investment in the systematic gathering of high-quality news produced by independent, transparent, and trustworthy sources.

Although scholars usually point to a handful of cultural and economic factors as undermining news quality and press credibility, various critics now identify a more covert culprit: the US Supreme Court. The Court is partly to blame for the press’s declining credibility, these critics claim, because the Court’s First Amendment decisions hinder the ability of state defamation law to hold the press accountable for defamatory falsehoods. The implication is that the press would regain much of its credibility if the Court would remove these constitutional barriers – especially the requirement that public officials and public figures demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of the press for a defamation claim to prevail. Nonetheless, as this chapter explains, the current landscape of high-profile defamation cases, and the public reaction to them, casts doubt on whether things could be so easy.

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).