Anti-Court Satire, Religious Polemic, and the Many Faces of Antichrist: An Intertextual Reading of Donne’s “Satyre 4” and Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Abstract

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and John Donne’s “Satyre 4” are related in several ways; both works critique the vices of the Elizabethan court, both feature a putatively virtuous individual’s morally compromising sojourn at court, both explicitly address the didactic function of poetry, and both—according to Joseph Wybarne’s The New Age of Old Names (1609)—portray the Antichrist in terms that evoke Roman Catholic polemical writing. These points of intertextual correspondence invite a reading of Donne’s “Satyre 4” that explores the images, narrative details, and thematic emphases shared by Donne’s poem and specific episodes in Spenser’s allegory: Redcrosse’s battle with Errour and his visit to the House of Pride in book 1 and the defeat of Malengin in book 5. Wybarne’s commentary, which links Spenser’s and Donne’s works to the writings of the Counter-Reformation polemicist Fr. Nicholas Sander, helps to establish an early seventeenth-century reader’s perspective on these texts’ relationships to one another and facilitates new insights into Donne’s satirical agenda.