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This collection examines the transformations of early modern European satire from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing together literary scholars and art historians, the book maps the changes that satire underwent in becoming a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium. The collection traces the increasing dependence of satire on a proliferation of formats, including visual and textual media and various combinations of them, but also manuscript circulation as well as the use of ‘non-satirical’ forms for satirical purposes. In doing so, while discussing canonical satire in both its textual and visual incarnations, the contributors also move extensively into less charted territory, with material on satire that previous criticism has ignored or relegated to the margins. Satire was a particularly important phenomenon in England in the period and, while acknowledging this, the collection also contains material on France, Italy and Spain. In short, in its wide sweep across time and formats, the book discusses the role satire had as a transgressor of medial and political borders.
This book examines the satirical poetry of Edmund Spenser and argues for his importance as a model and influence for younger poets writing satires in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The book focuses on reading satirical texts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in relation to one another, with specific attention to the role that Edmund Spenser plays in that literary subsystem. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton, and George Wither to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England. For scholars of satire, the book offers a fuller discussion and theorization of the type of satire that Spenser wrote, “indirect satire,” than has been provided elsewhere. A theory of indirect satire benefits not just Spenser studies, but satire studies as well. For scholars of English Renaissance satire in particular, who have tended to focus on the formal verse satires of the 1590s to the exclusion of attention to more indirect forms such as Spenser’s, this book is a corrective, an invitation to recognize the importance of a style of satire that has received little attention.
1 Indirect satire: theory and Spenserian practice In Edmund Spenser’s Prosopopoia; or, Mother Hubberds Tale, a tonal shift characterizes the final episode, in which the villainous Fox and Ape, having wreaked havoc in the three estates as husbandmen, clerics, and courtiers, go even farther by usurping royal power. The self-conscious Chaucerianism of the first episodes—summarized by Kent van den Berg as “the recreative fiction that animals are like men”—gives way to a more fully developed, and more clearly satirical, fictional world in which “men are like animals
III Satire and panegyric In the dedication to Annus Mirabilis , John Dryden announces the subject matter of his 1667 long poem as an account of ‘a most just and necessary War’, followed by a narrative of the great fire. ‘I have call’d my poem Historical , not Epick ’, he explains, ‘though both the Actions and Actors are as much Heroick
2 Spenser’s satire of indirection: affiliation, allusion, allegory The previous chapter provided a preliminary analysis of how indirect satire works to create a sense of an allegorical connection to the real world and real situations and discussed how allusions, symbolism, and analogy prompted allegorical projections that inflected contemporaries’ understanding of the message of Mother Hubberds Tale, Spenser’s best-known satirical work. In this chapter, I will continue analyzing Spenserian indirection in satire, but with an additional concept in play by
John Donne’s Metempsychosis (composed c. 1600–1), that curiosity of the English vogue for Pythagoras, satire and Pythagorean satire late in the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth, begins with an ‘Epistle’ in which the author presents (among other things) his account of the Pythagorean transmigration of souls: ‘the Pythagorean doctrine doth not only
Figure 10.1 [Anon] engraved by Mosley, The European Race , Heat III , 1739. Graphic satire: the European race This large satirical print ( Figure 10.1 ), published in
4 Spenserian “entry codes” to indirect satire In his own satirical poetry, Edmund Spenser criticized indirectly, requiring readers to interpret clues carefully to access satirical meanings. For some readers, such as Joseph Hall and William Bedell, Spenser’s reputation as a decorous, conservative poet seemed to obscure awareness of him as also demonstrating an interest in or affinity for satirical writing, as discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter offers a corrective in the form of “case studies” of three poets who were quite sensitively attuned to the potential
Television satire in 1976 and 2005 6 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill Comic self-referentiality, and satire at the expense of television, are staples of Rosenthal’s television writing throughout his career. In the situation comedy Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) Sadie Potter only finds happiness at the end of six episodes when her husband Norman promises to sell the television set. In an early episode, she sits unwillingly watching a television play with her husband and daughter. We see only her astonished reactions, her face bathed in television’s unearthly blue
British satire from about the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century holds pride of place among students of satire. French readers would add their nation’s achievements to the mix, and I suspect that eighteenth-century Britons grudgingly would have agreed. 1 There are many reasons for such success. The chief of course is the happy confluence of satirists – Dryden, Swift