Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLibel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792. Andrew Benjamin Bricker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xii+326.Nicholas D. NaceNicholas D. NaceHampden-Sydney College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThere is a nonaction of central importance to the histories of British law and publishing that has thus far received remarkably little attention by scholars who study the literature of attack: the decision, in 1695, not to extend the Licensing Act that had been instituted in 1662 (though it had roots as far back as the formation of the Stationers’ Company). This was the precise moment when prepublication licensing gave way to postpublication prosecution, thus prompting, as Andrew Benjamin Bricker’s Libel and Lampoon argues, a new depth of scrutiny and peril to any writings with personal attack as their agenda, particularly parodies, lampoons, pasquils, burlesques, invectives, or any form of calumny that might rise to the name of satire. The law changed. Satire changed in response. More importantly, reading itself changed as the law developed an understanding of intentionality that satire increasingly sought to evade with a wink to the reader.The lapse of the Licensing Act features in some excellent studies of satire, such as Melinda Alliker Rabb’s Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650–1750 (2007), yet its impact has still to be fully understood in the history of literary reading and writing. Though Libel and Lampoon proclaims in its subtitle to investigate an unconventional and unusually lengthy period, it nonetheless works forward and backward from 1695, this pivotal year for the courts of law, after which satires are read, published, and produced in view of legal consequences. In investigating the mutual shaping of law and literature, Bricker looks at verse satires, such as John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (chap. 1) and Pope’s Dunciad (chap. 4), and prose satires, like Daniel Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters (chap. 3) and Delarivier Manley’s New Atlantis (chap. 5), and gives us a new purchase not only on how those works were understood by writers, publishers, purchasers, lawyers, judges, and jurors, but also, indirectly, on the troubled periodization within histories of satire.Of course, literary history of the late seventeenth century already suffers from an abundance of defining moments. Writers of the time were a hopeful bunch, able to come out on the other side of reigns, revolutions, fires, and wars with a feeling that they were in the midst of an annus mirabilis to beat all anni mirabiles, any one of which might now provide the literary historian with an epochal break. Books covering late century literature have found reasons to conclude in 1702, 1707, 1710, or 1714, while others have picked up the trail of textual phenomena in 1681, 1680, 1670, or 1665. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy has long provided the front-end alignments for literary histories of satire, inconvenient as 1660 has been to critics looking to cleanly situate, say, Andrew Marvell, who proves the date’s importance by taking up satire only after the Restoration. Choosing authors to define the age distorts differently, though some candidates, such as Dryden, himself a literary historian, obligingly passed away with the calendar century in 1700. Focusing on political, social, religious, or technological developments yields still different periods. Looking internally to literature for ways to partition its own history results in either marketing tools such as the quaintly unspecific “Golden Age of Satire” or narratives about the rise and fall of genres, which tend to embrace the arbitrariness imposed by the clean dates that structure course catalogues.Yet, as Bricker is quick to point out, satire is not a genre. In fact, it is not confined to any kind of writing—or even to writing at all, as his final chapter addressing “the deverbalization of satire” (chap. 6) brilliantly makes clear—though the word “satire” has been applied by early authors and publishers who may have had something in mind. Because he focuses on the interpretation of satire, Bricker takes us closer to that sense of how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers conceived of this thing they read, or claimed not to have read, and in subtle and not-so-subtle ways interpreted. Of course, readers’ roles determined how they read, and the most interesting type of readership that Bricker analyzes is that of the jurors, readers who were disinterested enough to resist looking for certain things that prosecutors told them might be there. After all, intentionality is central to the law and essential to reading satire, even if literary study itself has largely dropped the issue of intention, a fact that may account for why such a sensible and necessary examination of this century-long debate on intentionality and its dissimulations has taken so long to be written.Even considering the inconsistently segmented era, the dates of Bricker’s study are eccentric, though well reasoned, on both ends. Its wide span, which extends across various disciplinary pales and partitions, seems chosen for the inclusion of visual material that might at first seem to have been better served in a separate book. Were Libel and Lampoon to end with the prosecution of John Clark for his Jacobite allegory in the popular Mist’s Weekly Journal, the subject of a particularly strong chapter late in the book, it would have very few pictures at all. But Bricker’s trajectory—from publishers taking the heat for their authors’ works, to authors becoming more circumspect and evasive, to language itself being evaded in favor of harder-to-prosecute images—perhaps finally makes sense of the fact that the history of visual satire from William Hogarth to Thomas Rowlandson does not overlap much with the earlier efflorescence of verbal satire, which extends from the court lampoons of Rochester to the novels of Fielding nearly a century on. Bricker’s chosen dates—from King v. Lake, which establishes “common intendment” in the early 1670s, to Fox’s Libel Act of 1792, which “determined the jury’s purview in trials of defamation” (205)—usefully do not correspond to what might be understood as a conventional periodization through which satire is seen as a distinct kind of writing.Even critics who might be called formalists have largely pulled back from proposing family resemblances among satires in order to clarify their literary kind or “mode.” Not being confined to any genre, satire can infect all through a pregeneric decision to target some thing or, more perilously, someone. Bricker accepts this position so readily that he asserts “generic, transhistorical, and transcultural definitions of satire are bound to fail” (20). Though his own idea of satire follows a “formally loose definition” (22), there is nonetheless a formal hallmark among the texts Bricker examines: a tendency toward evasion, indirection, and ambiguity that he convincingly asserts is always seeking to outpace developments in the law. If this book could be seen as a history of how a certain sort of evasive irony “came to typify the satire written during the final decades of the seventeenth century and across the eighteenth century” (269), this typification comes close to the kind of generic classification that Bricker believes is doomed to failure. However, to say, now or in the eighteenth century, that satire has a tendency toward dissimulation and irony would surprise nobody. No satire has ever come out and said quite what readers rightly or wrongly take it to mean. Yet the extent to which this dissimulation had to be maintained by authors, artists, and publishers in the face of the legal system’s notion of “common intendment” is the most repeatedly impressive finding that Bricker makes across all six of his chapters. Even if Bricker is coy about his offering of a defining formal characteristic, choosing instead to call evasive ambiguity “a major qualitative aspect of satire from this period” (23), he nonetheless demonstrates how qualitatively ambiguous texts respond to legal pressures by continually changing their “rhetorical qualities and physical forms” (269).Of course, one comes back again to “this period” as a slippery deictic for a study whose value is precisely that it rolls across conventional periods, be they regnal, intellectual, or literary. Centering his study on the way satirists engage in a “rhetoric” of evasion rather than a satirical poetics that might lead to higher-resolution generic qualities, Bricker himself evades troublesome formal definition for the acknowledged benefit of being able to address a wider selection of texts. Within those texts, Bricker allows us to see that what have come to be recognized as generic markers of satire are really genetic markers of the struggles early eighteenth-century authors used to evade prosecution. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722819HistoryPublished online November 11, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.