Satire in the Elizabethan Era

An Activistic Art

William Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351181068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the satire of the late Elizabethan period goes far beyond generic rhetorical persuasion, but is instead intentionally engaged in a literary mission of transideological "perceptual translation." This reshaping of cultural orthodoxies is interpreted in this study as both authentic and "activistic" in the sense that satire represents a purpose-driven attempt to build a consensual community devoted to genuine socio-cultural change. The book includes explorations of specific ideologically stabilizing satires produced before the Bishops' Ban of 1599, as well as the attempt to return nihilistic English satire to a stabilizing theatrical form during the tumultuous end of the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr. Jones infuses carefully chosen, modern-day examples of satire alongside those of the Elizabethan Era, making it a thoughtful, vigorous read.

1 Satire, History, and Ideology

I like it that jokes can hurt. I like it that [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un was wounded by a movie. [i.e. The Interview, Sony Pictures, 2014] If you’re a satirist, that’s winning.¹

—Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

In 1964, United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously remarked that although he was unable to define precisely the distinguishing characteristics of obscenity, “I know it when I see it,” and this same intuitive response is often applied to the understanding of satire. At some point during a novel or a film, a play or a television program, a poem or a song, whether comic, tragic, romantic, etc., readers and auditors will be suddenly struck by an awareness that the work in question was merely a ruse, a host fiction employed by a parasite lying within, waiting to leap forth and skewer its unsuspecting victims. What, then, is it, precisely, that sets off the satire alarm bell? A consistent critical perspective and manifest targets are two potential factors that alert us to satire’s presence, but when pressed to codify other defining features of ‘Satire,’ or to identify a specific tipping point that morphs a genre containing satiric elements into a Satire proper, readers and scholars often find themselves adrift in a sea of subjective judgments. Because of its antagonistic nature and concomitant need for self-protection, perhaps more than any other artistic genre—a problematic term, because while satire has qualities and antecedents that grant it the vaunted status of genre, it can, and often does, function more like a mode, a form, a tone, an attitude, or as Charles Knight describes it, a “frame of mind” shared between author and reader—satire regularly defies, subverts, and manipulates attempts to impose clarity and uniformity on its farraginous practices.² For literary scholars, the end result of such dissimulation is a history of eminently useful formalist, Historicist, Reader Response, and many other approaches to satiric literature that are nonetheless plagued with manifold exceptions, uncomfortable generalities, and interpretive dead ends.

Indeed, the chasm between theoretical approaches to satire and the practice of satire remains as broad and deep today as it has ever been, particularly with regard to satiric historicity, or the nature and degree of contact a particular form of satire has with the various material conditions of its historical moment. On the academic side of the expanse, scholars of satire have long acknowledged the need to account for the presence of historical forces in the interpretation of satiric literature, but more often than not, they have subsumed satire’s overt historicity beneath the genre’s more legitimizing formal features. The ephemeral nature of satire’s unapologetic interest in topicality, of representing “particular events,” and as a consequence, becoming “inescapably tied to those events but at an uneasy tension with them” (Knight 50), is certainly valuable to scholars. That engagement provides a tantalizing window into, or more precisely, a distorted mirror that reflects (a popular metaphor for the satirist’s art) contemporary realities, those “things that men do, their desires, their fears, their rage, their pleasures, their joys, their fumbling around” as Juvenal writes (85–86).³ However, as fascinating as topical referentiality is, it should come as no surprise that literary exegetes have tended to prefer the “universal” in satire over “dated” representations because an excessive focus on topicality in satiric literature threatens to anchor the work in question too firmly, too materially, in a precise temporal moment whose political and cultural specifics are largely unrecoverable, not to mention risking the devaluation of the aesthetic complexity of the work. It is certainly important for literary scholars to admit, for example, that John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel represent, at one level, the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Shaftesbury, or that Jonathan Swift’s King of Lilliput is, again, at one level, a parody of King George I. However, in early-twentieth-century Historicist criticism, such analogical parallels only served to diminish the role of history in the interpretation of satire by presenting such historical components as little more than an intriguing Roman-à-clef requiring more biographical than literary fortitude to unlock the ‘true’ identity of the satirist’s target. Once the mask of satiric fictions and other self-protective distancing strategies were successfully removed, the critic’s task, with regard to history at least, was deemed complete.

A related danger of an excessive focus on history in satire is the deterministic effect inherent in the Historicist approach, an effect which renders satire as primarily a knee-jerk response to historical change. For example, Oscar Campbell’s 1938 Historicist study, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, relies on a unidirectional cause-and-effect relationship between historical forces and satire.⁴ Campbell posits that the transition to formal verse satire in the 1590s was

partly the result of conscious imitation of Latin satirists and partly a natural reaction to a changing social world… For in the final analysis it was the disordered economic structure which stimulated writers of all sorts with zeal to reform the world in which they lived.

(15)

For the Historicist critic, satire is a purely retaliatory form whose shape is dictated by both social determinants and the author’s bias with respect to such determinants; satire reacts, never initiates, and to understand the history is to understand the satire. There are echoes here of Juvenal’s famous pronouncement that in a vicious, degraded society, “it is difficult not to write satire” (30), that the satirist is always responding like a moral watchdog, barking at the newest and greatest threats to society, an image which, to be fair, has some veracity behind it. However, the deterministic perspective renders satire less potent, which is clearly unsatisfactory as it negates the degree of artistic autonomy behind such factors as the choice of target, the timing of the attack, and the best methods for assault. And yet, it is important to remember that those artistically defined targets refer to real historical antecedents that demand, at some level, a historical focus. Thus scholars of satire find themselves in a catch-22: foreground the historicity of satiric literature, and you run the risk of being labeled a bad historian, your work “degenerat[ing] into discussion of an author’s moral character and the economic and social conditions of the time,” but if you ignore the history, you run the risk of being labeled an insufficiently rigorous scholar.⁵

This predicament was at the heart of the Historicist-formalist binary prevalent in early- to mid-twentieth-century satire scholarship. Dustin Griffin outlines the tendentious relationship between the Old Historicist Chicago School of satiric criticism dominant in the 1930s through the 1950s and the Yale Formalist School that evolved in order to address the Chicago School’s perceived shortcomings:⁶

The Yale formalists of the early 1960s now seem to have insisted too much on satire’s transcendence of the particular… The older Chicago historicist claims about “discernible historical particulars,” unable to account for a satire as canonical as Gulliver’s fourth voyage, now seem based on a narrowly positivist view of historical “facts.”

(119)

The most notable early attempt to transcend, as Fredric Bogel describes it, this “preformalist investigation of satire, devoted to unearthing historical targets,” was made by Maynard Mack, whose essay advanced rhetoric as the dominant mediating force in satiric exegesis:

Inquiries into biographical and historical origins, or into effects on audiences and readers, can and should be supplemented, we are beginning to insist, by a third kind of inquiry treating the work with some strictness as a rhetorical construction: as a “thing made,” which, though it reaches backward to an author and forward to an audience, has its artistic integrity in between—in the realm of artifice and artifact.⁷

Mack does not wholly disavow the utility of satire’s connection to historical incidents (its role as “artifact”), but his emphasis on “artifice” is intended to raise satire up to the realm of legitimate genre and out of the realm of untidy and unpleasant personal responses to supposed slights whose relevance was lost long ago.

Although satire has been subjected to a great deal of critical sophistication since the formalist period, the majority of critics continue to highlight rhetorical forms and strategies while downplaying history, leading to critical inertia. Robert Phiddian offers a number of reasons for this stagnation: “a simple and economical explanation is that the formalist satire boom of the 1950s and 1960s glutted the market. Theorists could see that satire had been ‘done’ and could feel no need to add to a mature body of scholarship.”⁸ Phiddian also argues that in addition to a plethora of formalist analyses, the animosity to authorial intent inherent in the influential literary theories of William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and Roland Barthes was particularly damaging to the study of satire because satire relies so heavily on the reader’s perception of a “shaping intention” to assault a manifest, recognizable target:

as satire is a mode or attitude rather than a genre or identifiable set of textual practices, the removal of recourse to arguments about a deliberate intent to persuade an audience (of the beastliness of Domitian’s Rome, of Walpole’s duplicity, of Thatcherism’s brutality, etc.) makes it close to untheorisable.

(Phiddian 48–9; 51)

A few mid-century theorists swam against the persistent tide of formalist studies represented by such studies as David Worcester’s The Art of Satire (1940; reissued 1960) and Ronald Paulson’s The Fictions of Satire (1967), both of which were bent on advancing an autonomous “rhetoric of satire” largely free from what Worcester derides as “historical survey.”⁹ For example, in 1963, Edward Rosenheim attempted to bring historicity back to the fore by insisting on the veracity of satire’s referential imperative:

All satire is not only an attack; it is an attack upon discernible, historically authentic particulars. The “dupes” or victims of punitive satire are not mere fictions. They, or the objects which they represent, must be, or have been, plainly existent in the world of reality; they must, that is, possess genuine historical identity.

(Bogel 8)

Similarly, in 1983, R.B. Gill posited satire as akin to temporally specific “occasional literature”: “confrontation with historical people in occasional literature enlivens it and gives it a biting edge” (Griffin 119). However, in the decades that followed Gill’s work, Formalism continued to hold the high ground. For example, in 2001, Bogel argued for a brand of “intenser formalism” to account for the persistent historical references in satire, while Griffin rejected the utility of such an interpretive system as too prone to relegating “history and the world ‘out there’ to the formal order of satire” (119). However, Griffin’s own work also tends to diminish the importance of historical referentiality in satire by advancing a rhetoric of “inquiry,” “provocation,” “display,” and “play” (39). In addition, while Knight admits that satire “straddles the historical world of experience and the imaginative world of Ideas and insists on the presence of both,” he advances his own rhetoric of satire, in this case, a performative one (45).

A number of alternative theoretical approaches to satire stepped outside the historical-formalist binary. Robert Elliott’s The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960), for example, provides an indispensable anthropological engagement with satire’s origins in ancient magical ceremonies and apotropaic rituals, while Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) posits satire as one of the archetypal pre-generic mythoi, specifically, a form of “militant irony” whose “moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured” (223). In addition, Leon Guilhamet (1987) offers a compelling analysis of satire’s intricate strategies for inhabiting and deforming other, more venerated genres for its own persuasive ends.¹⁰ Such innovative approaches aside, the continued emphasis on the formalist perspective on satire is curious considering the impact of modern and postmodern cultural studies methodologies on the understanding of other literary genres. Hermeneutic systems such as Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory, Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies, etc. have much to offer to an historically saturated genre like satire. However, instead of benefiting from more multifarious interpretive systems, satiric theory remains largely, as noted by Bogel, in an outdated stasis, “poised guiltily between a formalist analysis that seems incomplete and an historical analysis that seems retrograde and antiliterary” (8).

Despite such academic hand-wringing, striking events on the world stage continue to demonstrate, in no uncertain terms, the primacy of satire’s historicity, and the pressing need for more assiduous scholarly attention to satire’s most salient defining feature: its purposefully antiliterary synchronic dialogue with its immediate historical and cultural contexts, as well as the sociopolitical effect of that dialogue. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, for example, satire had a very visible presence in many military conflicts, but nowhere more dramatically than in the war-torn Middle East. For example, in 2011, as a response to the increasingly oppressive actions of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government, a group of ten Syrian artists known collectively as Masasit Mati began posting a satirical puppet show called “Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator” on the Internet platform YouTube. The popular series revolves around “Beeshu,” a diminutive finger-puppet parody of the Syrian president, who suffers from both a God-complex and feelings of persecution. Two of the more popular episodes of “Top Goon” parody the American television programs American Idol and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; in “Syrian Idol,” Beeshu and other thinly veiled representations of members of the al-Assad regime compete for dominance, and in “Who Wants to Kill a Million?,” Beeshu strives to supersede the notorious autocrats Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. A public statement by Jameel, a pseudonym used by Masasit Mati’s spokesperson, underlines the link between the defamatory images in the videos and Mati’s political agenda: “[al-Assad] is a puppet; you can carry him in your hand, you can break him. You can a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Satire, History, and Ideology
• 2 Satire and Empire: The Ideological Encoding of English Renaissance Imitative Satire
• 3 Satire Unleashed: The Rise of Juvenalianism and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599
• 4 Anti-Feminist Satire and the Bishops’ Ban
• 5 Shakespearean Satire: Redux
• Index