English Satire Research Articles

Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: “A Kingdom for a Man.” Per Sivefors. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. viii + 162 pp. $160.

Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: “A Kingdom for a Man.” Per Sivefors. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. viii + 162 pp. $160.

Per Sivefors. Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: “A Kingdom for a Man.” Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 170. $160.00 (cloth).

Per Sivefors. Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: “A Kingdom for a Man.” Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 170. $160.00 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 2

Commodifying the Author: The Mediation of Aretino’s Fame in the Harvey-Nashe Pamphlet War

This essay considers the ways in which one of the key literary events of the 1590s, the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet war, was influenced by the posthumous reputation of the controversial Italian author Pietro Aretino. This literary quarrel was important not only in defining the more aggressive tone of English satire in the 1590s, but also because it marked a key development in conceptions of authorial identity. Aretino was known as the prototypical professional author, having garnered fame and wealth through publication. However, by the time of the Nashe-Harvey debate he had become a symbol of Italianate vice in the minds of most English commentators. This essay suggests that the transformation of Aretino’s posthumous reputation was enacted by a process of ‘vanished mediation’ and will argue that a eulogy to Aretino from The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) displays Nashe’s acute awareness of the ways in which Aretino’s literary history had been rewritten by his detractors. The example of the posthumous treatment of Aretino’s reputation informed Nashe’s concerns over the reliability of print to preserve his own literary fame, an uneasiness he expressed most fully in Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596). [K.D.]

Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa

Reviewed by: Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa Evelyn Adkins Christopher Nappa Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018 Pp. xii + 224. $75.00. Christopher Nappa offers a new reading of Juvenal's Satires that moves beyond persona theory to examine how the author and his works simultaneously critique and participate in what he fears is the decline of traditional, elite Roman masculinity. Nappa analyzes not only how the idea of "Juvenal" constructs and is constructed by the Satires, but also how he undermines himself and his project through his own rhetoric. In the introduction (1–22), Nappa describes his use of and departure from persona theory, then lays out the book's central concepts of identity, anxiety, and autonomy. The elements of identity that Nappa says he will focus on are class, ethnicity, gender, and wealth, though he treats ethnicity only sporadically. Likewise, the discussion of gender could be more consistent, especially in the first few chapters, and better theorized, with reference to more recent publications such as Kirk Ormand's Controlling Desires (2009) and the essays in Mark Masterson et al.'s Sex in Antiquity (2014). Turning to autonomy, Nappa rightly points out that full autonomy was possessed by almost no man in the Imperial period. The Satires express Juvenal's anxiety that the criteria of masculinity have changed in such a way that he and those like him are being dragged down the social ladder and made ridiculous. Nappa explores the implications of this for Juvenal's literary project in Chapter One, "The Failed Satirist and the Failed Man" (23–60). Through an extended close reading of Satire 1, he shows how Juvenal undermines himself and his works by: participating in the literary culture he critiques, yearning for the wealth and status of those he attacks for gaining these through unorthodox means such as gender and class inversion, and saying that he will use anger to compensate for a lack of poetic talent. He fails as a man and satirist because, unlike his literary model Lucilius, he lives under an imperial system that makes open critique dangerous. In Juvenal's inabilities to escape from literary tradition and speak freely, we see his "first and greatest example of manhood unmanned" (60). The next two chapters focus on ways in which manhood may be unmanned. "The Body and the Failure of Autonomy" (61–92) draws on the theory of "mind-blindness" developed by Blakey Vermuele for eighteenth-century English satire to analyze how Juvenal uses bodily imagery to dehumanize his targets. Nappa demonstrates how individuals in the Satires are reduced to body parts, beaten, obliterated, emasculated through old age, and transformed into unstable symbols such as decaying or reused statues or a schoolboy's declamatory exercise. These images of bodies deprived of autonomy express Juvenal's fears about loss of status and masculinity. Where Chapter Two examines external factors that may make a man involuntarily ridiculous, Chapter Three, "The Dangers of Debasement: Manhood and Class" (93–126), explores what happens when men willingly debase themselves. Nappa argues that figures such as Lateranus, Creticus, and Gracchus [End Page 148] in Satires 2 and 8 display anxieties about class betrayal through markers such as inappropriate religious behavior and gender transgression. Juvenal fears not only that individuals will act badly, but also that their bad behavior will spread to others. Freedom from social restraint is shown to be attractive, even to Juvenal, who undermines his project by displaying and thereby potentially spreading the very behavior he critiques. The final two chapters turn to Juvenal's greatest anxiety: that there may be no real, Roman men in the first place. "A Woman's World" (127–65) focuses on Satire 6 and Juvenal's fears that women from adulteresses to empresses are excluding Roman men from a world that should be theirs. Nappa argues that the poem is less about women, however, than it is about "failed masculinity" and even "a failure of Romanness" (130). Juvenal targets adultery in particular out of a concern that elite Roman blood may be diluted through the birth of illegitimate children...

The Literary Lumpen: The Naksha Narratives of Binoy Ghosh

This essay outlines the condition of emergence of a cultural phenomenon in India which may be called “the literary lumpen.” Karl Marx had, famously, disparaged the “lumpenproletariat” as social “refuse,” which, for him, included such colorful members as “rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars” and numerous other persons incapable of revolutionary class-consciousness. In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, many participants in international Marxist movements followed Marx’s lead in writing about the urban political scene, simultaneously inflecting and nuancing the lumpen in local terms. Here I focus on one such mid-twentieth century Bengali writer and cultural critic: Binoy Ghosh. I discuss how the literary lumpen emerges as a contradictory inhabitant of urban space in mid-twentieth-century Calcutta, negotiated in Ghosh’s refashioning of the literary naksha, a nineteenth-century Bengali hybrid of English satire and Persianate naqshah. Blending critique, parody, and hyperbole, the literary genre of the naksha formally paralleled the interaction between indigenous and colonial cultures, articulating the tensions between the Left’s attempt to conceptualize as well as to mobilize the itinerant poor and deviant classes in the postcolonial city. A consideration of Binoy Ghosh alerts us to the imbrication of literary form, precarious subjectivity, and postcolonial nationalism, even as the lumpen prove resistant to representation.

Civil War Treasures: English Satire on the American Civil War From the Pages of Punch

Civil War Treasures: English Satire on the American Civil War From the Pages of Punch

Cast Adrift With No Conclusions: New Evidence on Women Pirates and English Satire

Cast Adrift With No Conclusions: New Evidence on Women Pirates and English Satire

Persius' Prologue and Early Modern English Satire

The established perception that early modern English satirists imitated either Juvenal or Horace has left the reception of Persius under-explored. This paper demonstrates with particular reference to the ‘Prologue’ to Satire 1 that early modern writers were eager to engage the Roman poet, indeed more eager to adapt Persius than merely imitate him. Persius is less easy to detect, being so often more creatively interwoven with English poets’ own concerns, than the other two Roman satirists. What makes his satiric presence among these authors unique is the variety of modulations.

Art to Cheat the Common-Weale: Inventors, Projectors, and Patentees in English Satire, ca.1630–70

This paper explores early modern ideas about invention and progress by examining the satirical projector character in English literature from the 1630s to the 1670s. It focuses on Simon Sturtevant’s treatise on invention, Metallica (1612), and two satires based on it: Thomas Brugis’s pamphlet Discovery of a Projector (1641), and John Wilson’s stage comedy The Projectors (1665). These satires offered a common critique that was not based on, or even expressed in terms of, scholasticism or the “reverence of antiquity” that Bacon had accused his critics of. Rather, they called out hypocrisy on the rhetoric and politics of what Sturtevant had termed “inventional progression.” Just as royal patronage through patents and monopolies was seen as abusive, projects, too, were depicted not as a force of progress but simply as another means to further enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. Because poets and playwrights were themselves inventors and patentees dependent upon royal favor, their satires were sometimes duplicitous and self-serving.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 and the Ideology of English Satire

AbstractOn June 1, 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London banned the further printing of satires, epigrams, and unlicensed histories and plays. Furthermore, the order demanded the immediate recall and burning of specific works, many of which were verse imitations of the Roman satirist Juvenal. Although the order itself lacks specific motivational language, current explanations tend to foreground the potentially obscene and/or libelous nature of the recalled works. Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to the internal ideologies of the banned satires themselves and to the dialogue between the satires and the cultural and political conditions that inspired them. Instead of an ad hoc response to any one particular transgression, this essay argues for the Ban as an attempt to stem the growing cultural influence of a particularly unorthodox mode of Juvenalian imitative satire expressed most forcefully in John Marston’s banned work, The Scourge of Villanie. Marston’s rejection of all established belief systems, especially the conservative literary traditions of native English and Horatian imitative satire, in favor of a highly individualistic and indecorous mode of social representation, was simply too ideologically destabilizing for the bishops to tolerate. In support of this reading, two relatively underexplored pieces of evidence are examined: first, the reprieve granted to Joseph Hall’s imitative satire entitled Virgidemiarum, which attempts to negotiate an ideologically safe middle‐ground between the radical Juvenalian mode and the conservative Horatian tradition; and second, the contemporary reflections on the bishops’ prohibition within John Weever’s 1599 Epigrams, his 1600 pastoral Faunus and Melliflora, and his 1601 direct attack on Marston in The Whipping of the Satyre. Weever’s support of the bishops’ actions derives from his identification of the banned Juvenalian mode as not merely morally offensive or personally defamatory, but as a tangible threat to the ideological stability of the English nation.

The perplexities of satire

Juan Francisco Elices Agudo: Historical and Theoretical Approaches toEnglish Satire. Munich: LINCOM, 2004. 200 pp.Satire is a persistent irritant to all who wish to establish a unified theory,or to write a history over the long duration. The word itself is notoriouslyslippery, raising questions of whether it is definable in terms of a core fea-ture, or a related syndrome of characteristics. Surveying the wealth ofmaterials deemed satiric might even lead to the conclusion that the nounhas come to refer to no more than a historically contingent family resem-blance of discursive phenomena, corresponding to no coherent or singularcreative activity. Yet most people, even without the dubious aid of defini-tions, appear to be able to recognize a piece of satire when they read orsee it. With English satire, there is even fair measure of agreement as towho the major satirists have been.Perhaps the problem, then, is less about arriving at a definition than ofknowing how and where to apply one. Nevertheless, to conclude that thecategory is useful only in limited contexts of time, place and activity, andthus is amenable to no single history or theory, may indeed be conceptu-ally rigorous, but does not easily explain the fact of recognition. So, theconceptual itch to find a theoretical solution to a troublesome identityremains. Such imponderables are important and may justify a ratherlengthy assessment of a slim tome devoted to them.Agudo’s book is divided into three main chapters. The first surveysthe history of satire from its putative beginnings as invective in ancientArabic history, Esquimeaux culture and archaic Greece. From there itfocuses on Rome before concentrating mainly on England, rather thanthe range of satire found in the English language as a whole. It endswith the twenty-first century. In the second chapter Agudo catalogues

The Werste Lay that Euer Harper Sange with Harp: The Forms of Early Middle English Satire

There is a persistent view in criticism which characterizes satirical discourse in Middle English as profoundly conservative. It is routinely asserted that satirical discourse was capable only of simple moral pronouncements, and that it was predisposed to champion the ideals and conventions it drew upon. The article challenges these conceptions. It revisits some of the earliest examples of satire in English to counter such views, paying particular attention to the texts collected in Jesus College MS 29, and the Harley MSS 913 and 2253. Through examining these sources, a range of more scurrilous and defamatory devices are identified. Far from being inflexibly censorious, satire is found to have a strong element of deprecation and deflation in its arsenal of techniques. The article also reviews existing scholarship on medieval vernacular satire to suggest how existing conceptions of the literature may be refined, to reflect the findings it reaches.

George Eliot and the Sequel Question

While from its first appearance in 1876, many Jewish and Christian readers alike have endorsed performing some kind of reductive surgery on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (most famously, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, who advocated excising the "Jewish part" and renaming the remainder Gwendolen Harleth), there is another related but largely forgotten line of response to the novel that cuts in somewhat different ways: the arrival, in the immediate wake of the publication of Deronda, of two sequels by other hands, a shorter English satire and a full-blown American novel. Gillian Beer has argued that Deronda is a novel "haunted by the future," one (or more than one) ultimately and deliberately left unwritten by Eliot. But the sequels manifest that future: more precisely, they attempt to impose closure on a novel that notoriously resists it. The ethos of the sequel as a genre typically is one of cooperation and integration with the earlier work. The sequel usually represents a means to honor the power of the original, and an attempt to recapture and further extend that power. But for Eliot, and especially for Deronda, the sequel is a reproach. In aesthetic and ideological ways the sequels and related "variations" on Deronda offer critical attacks on Eliot's plot, structure, and characters, but particularly her treatment of the Jewish Question. I suggest that these continuations are significant not only for their content, offering as they do reactionary responses to Eliot's controversial book, but also for their printed forms. Emerging alongside an analytical tradition of desires for "simple surgery" upon the object of scrutiny, these texts cut their literary forebear a glance that mocks Eliot's tolerance even as they underscore the status and identity of her novel and corpus as material objects. The sequels in turn provide a new opportunity to understand the unique position and implicit legacy of Deronda within modernity.

Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context

Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context Scott Peeples (bio) Most teachers of Early American Literature devote considerable time and energy to contextualizing (or intertextualizing) the poems, tracts, relations, narratives, and sermons on the syllabus. For good reason, Americanists have moved away from justifying the teaching of early texts by referring continually to cultural and literary traditions they establish or foreshadow, as if they were all merely precursors to the real American literature; instead, we encourage students to examine these texts in relation to their own times, their own discourse communities. That's certainly what I try to do in my pre-1800 survey—and yet, I think there are still useful ways to read early texts in light of later texts that reflect back on them. Think, for instance, of "A Modell of Christian Charity" and Ronald Reagan's repeated allusions to the "city upon a hill." A less obvious example, perhaps, is Ebenezer Cook's "The Sot-weed Factor" (1708). I say "less obvious" because, although the poem is frequently taught in early American courses, few students I have encountered are already familiar with either Cook's poem or John Barth's 1960 novel inspired by and named after it. Of course, Cook's "Sot-weed Factor" should be read in terms of European images of "the American" in the early eighteenth century, Chesapeake regional identity during that period, the economic and cultural importance of tobacco, the conventions of English satire in the period following the restoration, and so on. But in his essay in Teaching the Literatures of Early America, David Shields suggests an additional framework: This caricature of Maryland . . . dramatizes the problem of publicity: If reputation is everything, then how does one counter a bad report? You take its language and imagery and blow it up until it is a flagrant fiction incredible even to the dull-witted. This fantasy Maryland becomes disassociated with people's conceptions of the actual place. [End Page 351] Shields goes on to draw an analogy with caricatures of the modern-day South seen on Hee-Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard (132). I also think that temporarily leaping out of historical context can help students to better understand "The Sot-weed Factor," but I ask students to consider this poem as part of a comic, surreal tradition, in which a hapless everyman (usually an outsider) suffers exaggerated abuse and humiliation, staggering about in a constant state of confusion. The emphasis in these texts is on the compounding of misfortune; the audience, recognizing the exaggerated, comic nature of the story, enjoys seeing things go from bad to worse to even worse. We could probably all brainstorm various texts that continue this tradition, but my own list would include Poe's story "Loss of Breath," in which a man is continually mistaken for a corpse and subject to all manner of ill treatment, parts of Roughing It by Mark Twain, Harold Lloyd's silent films, and Martin Scorsese's After Hours. However, the text I use in class with "The Sot-weed Factor" is "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which epitomizes this surrealist suffering tradition and offers several parallels with Cook, despite the fact that there's no evidence Dylan knew the poem. (It's worth noting that the song is particularly easy to incorporate into a class session because it takes up only 6½ minutes.) Often my students do not get "The Sot-weed Factor." They need to understand that Cook's intentions are comic. The anthology's head note can say it's comic, and the instructor can point out the objects of satire, the hyperbole and absurdity, and so on, but my students still don't process the poem as comedy. Presenting them with something obviously similar in its structure, in its tone, helps them to recognize what's familiar in the poem. "Dylan's 115th Dream" is much shorter than Cook's poem, and, as the title suggests, more dreamlike and surreal, but I tell my students that I think Dylan and Cook are playing the same kind of game, and that Cook's readers might have heard his poem much as Dylan's listeners heard...

The Satirist, the Text and 'The World Beside': Pope's First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated

The media of translation and imitation stand in a seemingly paradoxical relationship to concepts of originality and integrity in literary art. Yet many of the most original works are based on the 'creative reinterpretation of predecessors in a genre',1 and this is nowhere more apparent than in the field of verse satire. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formal imitation of classical models became firmly established as a vehicle for social and political criticism in English satire. Alexander Pope was perhaps the most original and effective practitioner of this literary form. His Imitations of Horace embody some of his funniest and most telling acts of literary aggression; at the same time, they allow space for a serious examination of the ethical and political problems raised by such a mode of writing. In all of this, the relationship between the original and the imitating text is of the utmost importance. This paper seeks to show how a close reading of the manuscript materials for Pope's first full-length Horatian imitation provides a new and revealing account of his response to his model.

Thalia's Revenge: Ethnography and Theory of Comedy

This article compares theories of comedy to the development of modern ethnography. The discussion begins with a review of 18th-century English satire, followed by commentary on the place of comedy in Western intellectual traditions. In considering the relationship between theories of comedy and modern ethnography, I argue that the genres have in common the regular use of literary modes of exaggeration, exceptionality, reversal, and practice. These shared modes suggest similar critical intent. Recognizing a relationship between theories of comedy and modern ethnography adds to our appreciation of the plurality of the ethnographic endeavor.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Edited by CLAUDE RAWSON, assisted by JENNY MEZCIEMS. Pp. xiv+290. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Cloth, £22.50; paper, £7.50 net. GRAHAM MIDGLEY GRAHAM MIDGLEY St Edmund HallOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIX, Issue 154, May 1988, Pages 331–332, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIX.154.331 Published: 01 May 1988

English Satire and the Satiric Tradition.

English Satire and the Satiric Tradition.

English Satire and Connecticut Wit

THERE WAS LAUGHTER ON THESE SHORES, OF COURSE, BEFORE THERE WERE SCRIBES to record it, and for this reason any study of early American humor is likely to begin with notions easier to suppose than to demonstrate. Europeans met Indians in solemn conclave, and then each party went home with their own people to mock the dress, burlesque the manners, and parrot the mispronunciations of the other. Between decks of the Mayflower children whispered together, making foolish faces and mimicking the solemnity of their parents. Near New Amsterdam English travelers mocked Dutchmen, and the Dutch in their turn ridiculed the English. In the South children had to be taught not to snicker at the great man's funny-sounding name, General Oglethorpe. Everywhere older settlers tested the gullibility of newcomers by telling tall tales; new arrivals laughed uncertainly and looked forward to the day when they would possess the humorous self-assurance of older settlers. And, as with every great venture, things went wrong-it was rainy and muddy, or snowy and cold, or hot and dusty; mosquitoes were everywhere, or chiggers, or flies; crops failed or were eaten by pests; guns misfired and wagons broke; food spoiled and neighbors gossiped; children died, wives complained, and men got drunk and people laughed ruefully at all these things because there was little else to be done. In a sense, then, there is no identifiable beginning to a native tradition of American humor. By the same token we should recognize that nearly all of the early American humor that we do possess now is belated humor, humor that had to wait until people had the time, detachment, and inclination to write it down, along with the expectation of an audience to share it. Recording humor in a literary