Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603

"A Kingdom for a Man"

Per Sivefors

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000047899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Engaging with Elizabethan understandings of masculinity, this book examines representations of manhood during the short-lived vogue for verse satire in the 1590s, by poets like John Donne, John Marston, Everard Guilpin and Joseph Hall. While criticism has often used categorical adjectives like "angry" and "Juvenalian" to describe these satires, this book argues that they engage with early modern ideas of manhood in a conflicted and contradictory way that is frequently at odds with patriarchal norms even when they seem to defend them. The book examines the satires from a series of contexts of masculinity such as husbandry and early modern understandings of age, self-control and violence, and suggests that the images of manhood represented in the satires often exist in tension with early modern standards of manhood. Beyond the specific case studies, while satire has often been assumed to be a "male" genre or mode, this is the first study to engage more in depth with the question of how satire is invested with ideas and practices of masculinity.

1
John Donne’s Satires and the Precariousness of Masculine Self-Control

It may seem as if the topic of masculinity in Donne’s satires were controversial mainly for two reasons: firstly, they are satires, and secondly, they are written by Donne. But while excoriating terms like ‘masculinist’ have been applied—often with justification—to both satire and Donne’s poetry, critics writing on gender in Donne have usually not showed much interest in his satires.¹ Conversely, criticism on Donne’s satires has mostly ignored aspects of gender.² In fact, when critics actually have discussed implications of masculinity, they have often done so in order to compare other Elizabethan satirists unfavourably to Donne. If A. Alvarez could claim in 1969 that Donne’s writing is ‘masculine’ because it is ‘rigorous, independent and sane’, Annabel Patterson would declare in 2006 that Donne’s satires are ‘simply better, more interesting’ than, for example, Marston’s ‘hysterical overstatement’.³ Judging from such pronouncements, the positioning of Donne as an important satirist has somehow hinged on identifying his satires as manly: they are ‘rigorous’, ‘sane’ and, above all, not ‘hysterical’.⁴

It is no exaggeration to say that these notions of attractive and by implication masculine composure have been reproduced by many critics.⁵ However, such notions are not only reflections of twentieth-and twenty-first-century values but also a set of ideas that had been well established by Donne’s death. This is evident from the various elegies that were appended to Donne’s Poems of 1633. For example, Thomas Carew’s ‘Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, D^r. Iohn Donne’ praises Donne for having ‘drawne a line/Of masculine expression’. Sir Lucius Carew’s ‘An Elegie on D^r. Donne’ deals more directly with Donne himself in describing him as ‘a two-fold Priest; in youth,/Apollo’s; afterwards, the voice of Truth,/Gods conduit-pipe for grace’. While ‘we knew him man’, Donne, the poem eulogises, ‘conquer’d rebell passions’.⁶ Whereas the first poem thus identifies manhood with Donne’s poetry, the second one somehow makes him more of a man for curbing his ‘rebel passions’—which, we may infer, also include their expressions in poetry. Subsequent writings on Donne in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries make frequent allusion to the masculine qualities of his writing.⁷ Coleridge would assert that even the Satires had a ‘manly harmony’ in them that an attentive reader might catch.⁸ In other words, it seems that restraint and manly self-control were always de rigueur in shaping Donne’s reputation.

In all fairness, such interpretations touch upon something that is present in the satires: the quandary over religious belief in Satire 3 and the emphasis on the via media in Satire 2 are unusual in other Elizabethan satire and in many ways do seem to present an alluring image of scepticism, thoughtfulness and manly intellectual rigour. At the same time, such an image seems complicated by actual reading of the texts. Throughout, Donne’s speakers demonstrate an inability to comply with standards of moderation. This is obviously not to say that they are straightforward embodiments of Donne’s point of view.⁹ Nor do they express a belief, however, in the ability of moderate behaviour to produce balance and control. Several of the satires begin by placing us in the midst of a strongly voiced emotional reaction—a reaction that is not necessarily that of the conventional ‘angry satirist’.¹⁰ In the end, though, they turn away from an affirmation in the power of manly composure to remedy the emotional turmoil that the satires depict.¹¹ This is crucially a question of masculine role standards, for self-control is, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume, an integral criterion of patriarchal masculinity in the early modern period.¹² In other words, the present chapter contends that Donne’s satires throw into question the validity of moderation and self-control as masculine virtues.

Such a claim obviously requires contextualising the notion of male self-control. It has been common for historically inflected scholarship to argue for a shift in the emotional regime during the Renaissance.¹³ According to such scholarship, in the period we witness ‘a new court culture, where the prime emphasis was placed on sophisticated manners and where courtiers and gentlemen were compelled to control and repress their emotions’.¹⁴ This narrative has not gone unchallenged.¹⁵ But even if we accept the basic idea that there was a change in attitudes towards emotion, the ‘compulsion’ towards self-control was far from unproblematic: ideals, in short, were one thing; practice was quite another. This discrepancy does not always get the scholarly attention it deserves. Discussions of moderation are sometimes close to conflating patriarchal norms with actual social practices. For example, according to Ethan Shagan, moderation in the early modern period was ‘routinely described as quintessentially masculine, and masculinity as quintessentially moderate, since […] both were ideally defined by self-control’.¹⁶ The adverb ‘ideally’ deserves emphasis, however, for assertions of masculinity may be predicated on standards different from, and sometimes diametrically opposed to, notions of moderation or self-control. As Alexandra Shepard observes, the immoderate behaviour of young men at the time can be considered anti-patriarchal ‘not because it was the most threatening to men wielding patriarchal authority (indeed, much of it was licenced misrule) but because it was a deliberate inversion of the norms commonly claimed for patriarchal manhood’.¹⁷ Shepard lists activities like window-smashing or binge-drinking, which may be more obvious examples of immoderate behaviour than the meanderings of Donne’s subtly (or sometimes unsubtly) emotionalised persona. The precarious emotional climate of Donne’s satires cannot easily be described as ‘patriarchal’. Nor, however, are the satires ‘radical’ in a comfortable way to contemporary criticism: they may in some ways reflect anti-patriarchal attitudes, though hardly in the sense of threatening or challenging patriarchy. ‘It is extremely hard to generalize in any satisfactory or conclusive way about the progressive or conservative nature of [Donne’s] gender politics’, Ben Saunders generalises, but this difficulty may be due to the Manichean implications of the alternatives ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’.¹⁸ At least as regards Donne’s satires, it is hard to avoid the inference that they are capable of both transgressing the boundaries of patriarchal norms of self-control and doing so within the bounds of a socially acceptable pattern of masculinity.

However, regardless of whether the hypothesis about increased emotional repression is true, there is no questioning that there was a social gain for Elizabethan men in achieving self-control. This included softening too sharp displays of wit. ‘Iests, when they doe sauour of too much truth, leaue a bitternesse in y^e mindes of those y^t are touched’: so Lord Burghley to his son.¹⁹ But Donne’s Satires—arguably themselves a series of ‘jests’ that ‘savour of too much truth’—express misgivings about the efficacy of self-control to attain advancement or other forms of advantages. The implications of anger and passion in the writing of satire obviously did not offer much by way of shortcuts to such advancement. Donne himself famously claimed in a letter to Henry Wotton that ‘to my satyrs there belongs some feare’—a statement that seemingly concerns their voicing of critique, but which also, as Howard Erskine-Hill points out, may be ‘a good, though not total, summary of the spirit of Satyre IV’.²⁰ That Donne could conceive of his own satirical writing in terms of irrepressible and damaging emotion is suggested by an epistle to Rowland Woodward, whose poems, Donne says, have ‘halfe quench’d [the] Satirique fyres which urg’d me to haue writ/In skorne of all’.²¹ In other words Donne—who may have been moving from the student community of the Inns of Court to a professional identity as Sir Thomas Egerton’s secretary during the writing of his satires—perceived his own satire as socially counterproductive, at least in retrospect.²² It may be an exaggeration to read Donne’s satires as strictly determined by his professional trajectory or that they were predominantly written out of personal frustration (for one thing, their dating is far from definitively established).²³ At the same time it seems hard to doubt that they are implicated in wider patterns of moderation and excess, at least if we are to interpret Donne’s later words about his ‘hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning and languages’ in his younger years as referring also to his production of satire.²⁴ If later readers could praise Donne’s satires, they have tended to understand them retrospectively—as Donne himself did—from the perspective of his ‘mature’ years, so that the ‘tough witty voice’ of the satires is moderated by the ‘rigorous’ and active Dean of St. Paul’s.²⁵

But while the immoderate writing of satire may have presented an obstacle to social achievement, restraint and self-control are not necessarily depicted as effective alternatives. Whereas, as Joshua Scodel has shown, decorum and restraint were often subsumed to the end of advancement in Renaissance courtesy books, Donne’s satires paint a bleaker picture of a world where masculine self-control does not serve an ulterior purpose.²⁶ Stoic self-control is clearly beyond reach for the roving speaker in Satire 1, which has the satirist encounter a ‘humorist’ who drags the not-too-unwilling satirist out on a capricious city walk; in Satire 2 moderation is flaunted only to reveal what seems to be a much more genuine sense of hatred for the target, Coscus, a talentless poet who has launched a new career as a pettifogger; Satire 3, which does not depict a specific situation so much as a moral and theological quandary, seeks the position of a sceptical, controlled outsider without actually attaining it in the end; Satire 4, with its relation of two visits to a court densely populated by snobs and bores, demonstrates the failure of self-control in the face of courtly decadence; and Satire 5, again more discursive than descriptive of a physical location, questions the validity of constancy as a means to the end of attaining worldly power.²⁷ Together, the discussion of this chapter does not necessarily trace a ‘progression’ from the first satire to the last, although it recognises the connections between the indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Texts Used
• Introduction: Satire and Masculinity
• 1 John Donne’s Satires and the Precariousness of Masculine Self-Control
• 2 Violence and the Male in John Marston’s Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie
• 3 The Failure of Husbandry in Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum
• 4 Age and Manhood in Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia
• Coda: The Ban on Satire and the Representation of Masculinity
• Index