Libel!

Libel! is a play written by Edward Wooll. It debuted on 2 April 1934 at the Playhouse Theatre in London's West End, where it was directed by Leon M. Lion. Producer Gilbert Miller brought it to Henry Miller's Theatre on Broadway in December 1935, with Otto Preminger directing.

Wooll, a barrister of the Inner Temple and Recorder of Carlisle, wrote the play under the pseudonym "Ward Dorane".

Wooll wrote a novelization in 1935, and the play was adapted as a movie in 1959.

Plot

Sir Mark Loddon, a war hero and Member of Parliament, is suing a newspaper for libel. The paper claims that he is an impostor, a fellow soldier and friend of Loddon from the war who happened to resemble the original Loddon. The play is set in the courtroom as the trial for the lawsuit takes place. Loddon takes the stand as the first witness. He recounts being taken prisoner during the war, then escaping a few years later. After the war he married his pre-war fiancee, Enid, and was elected to the House of Commons. However, he says he has no recollection of events from before he was taken prisoner, a condition he attributes to shell shock. On cross-examination, defense lawyer Thomas Foxley accuses Loddon of being Frank Wenley, a soldier who escaped with Loddon and had strikingly similar features. Another soldier from the escape, Patrick Buckenham, testifies that Loddon and Wenley looked so much alike that they could have been twins. He believes Wenley killed the real Loddon. Loddon's attorney elicits testimony that Buckenham is being paid a stipend by the newspaper and had previously attempted to blackmail Loddon.

Defamation

Defamation—also calumny, vilification, and traducement—is the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of an individual person, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation.

Under common law, to constitute defamation, a claim must generally be false and have been made to someone other than the person defamed. Some common law jurisdictions also distinguish between spoken defamation, called slander, and defamation in other media such as printed words or images, called libel.

False light laws protect against statements which are not technically false but misleading.

In some civil law jurisdictions, defamation is treated as a crime rather than a civil wrong. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights ruled in 2012 that the criminalization of libel violates freedom of expression and is inconsistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

A person who defames another may be called a "defamer", "famacide", "libeler" or "slanderer".

Libel (poetry)

Libel is a verse genre primarily of the Renaissance, descended from the tradition of invective in classical Greek and Roman poetry. Libel is usually expressly political, and balder and coarser than satire. Libels were generally not published but circulated among friends and political partisans in manuscript.

Classical roots

In ancient Greece, invective verse generally existed in the form of epigrams written, almost always anonymously, against public figures. In Latin, the genre grew in prestige and boldness, as major authors including Juvenal and Catullus wrote extended invectives without the cushion of anonymity. One of Catullus's fiercer examples, expunged from most post-classical collections of his work until the 20th century, is Catullus 16, written against two critics:

Cicero's In Pisonem, a hyperbolic attack on Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, is one of the best-known political examples.

Renaissance English examples

In 17th-century manuscript culture, in which verses were copied out and distributed among (usually aristocratic) social groups, libel achieved a new standing. At the same time, the growing power of Parliament allowed the genre a new currency, since prominent members of Parliament could be attacked with greater freedom than could royalty. Libels frequently substituted humor and scatological inventiveness for poetic quality, as in the case of this well-known and much-circulated example, "The Censure of the Parliament Fart," which was in response to an audible emission by MP Henry Ludlow in 1607: