Hubbub and satire

Abstract

The hubbub is an onomatopoetic term for the Irish war cry, which was also used to describe the sounds of non‐European peoples, English workers and religious nonconformists. This essay traces the history of the hubbub to explore the relation between nonsense and power. It focuses on Barnabe Rich's satirical 1617 pamphlet, The Irish Hubbub, which takes hubbub as a sign of Irish emotional intemperance, the indecorous mixture of affects, and the publicizing of domestic or private grievances, all of which are both faults and useful to the work of satire. If hubbub, like keening, showed the Irish to be bestial and uncivilized, the satire – regarded as the invention of wild, godlike creatures, half‐human and half‐beast – was also a regressive genre, which overturned the civilizing myth of poetry and threatened to turn the satirist into a figure as cruel as those satirized.