Book excerpt: In this work, Janet Clare maintains that to understand dramatic and theatrical censorship in the Renaissance we need to map its terrain, not its serial changes and examine the language through which it was articulated. In tracing the development of dramatic censorship from its origins in the suppression of the medieval religious drama to the end of the Jacobean period, she shows how the system of censorship which operated under Elizabeth I and James I was dynamic, unstable and unpredictable. The author questions notions which regard censorship as either consistently repressive or as irregular and negotiable, arguing that it was governed by the contingencies of the historical moment.