Satiric Mimicking in Henry Chettle's Kind-Hartes Dreame

Abstract

This study seeks to understand Henry Chettle's 1592 pamphlet, Kind-Hartes Dreame , ostensibly a collection of invectives by four dead contemporaries, along with a letter from the recently dead Robert Greene, all delivered from the netherworld. The invectives rail against ballads and balladeers, cheap medical texts and unqualified medical practitioners, plays and playgoers, and jugglers (cony-catchers), while Greene makes a plea to Nashe to retaliate Gabriel Harvey's recent attack on him. This study argues that this pamphlet was part of a larger polemic involving writers like Greene, Nashe, and Harvey, and that it indirectly addresses larger issues such as declining patronage, emerging marketplace of print, burgeoning ranks of educated but unemployed youth, and the question of what kind of writing was legitimate. It also reflects the print world's constant suspicion of authorities and the fear that writers of pamphlets, ballads, and other cheap and popular books felt, especially in light of what had just happened to the Marprelate writers and Greene. Pamphleteers such as Nashe, Greene, and Chettle internalized this fear and created in their pamphlets a phantom enemy that was a composite of censorship, religious disapproval, scholarly disdain, and aristocratic neglect. Once we situate this pamphlet within these multiple contexts, we can see that Kind-Hartes Dreame is a complex satire against what it sees as figures of authority who sought to control expressions of speech by print and other media and activities, and that this satire is achieved through mock invectives that adopt and mimic the language of official discourse against print-mediated dissemination of ballads, cheap medical texts, play texts, and cony-catching pamphlets.