Touching Words: Marvell’s Satires in Hand

Abstract

It is now understood that Marvell’s Painter poems were initially circulated as manuscript and printed singles and then transcribed into or collocated with a diversity of other political manuscript materials, including materials hostile to the Painter poet and those of his persuasion. Yet this fate is not as inappropriate as it might appear, for the very process of circulation in singles is often an intrusion, an invasion that crosses the boundaries of selection. When Samuel Pepys receives a Painter poem single thrust through the window of his carriage, he is accepting a physical contact that broaches the boundaries of personal space – even as the satire touched Pepys, a bureaucrat in the naval office, in another way. Drawing on these and other examples, this chapter considers satire as something that seeks to intrude itself where it is not wanted, to stamp itself on the skin of its victim, and thus the circulation of satire as an encounter with what Didier Anzieu has termed ‘the skin ego’. Anzieu’s theory sheds light on the material strategies by which early modern readers, writers, and printers responded to the physicality of the text and specifically to the ways in which satires refused to be contained.