Changing satire

Transformations and continuities in Europe, 1600–1830

Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors, Rikard Wingård

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526146106
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection brings together literary scholars and art historians, and maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Changing satire demonstrates how satire proliferated in various formats, and discusses a wide range of material from canonical authors like Swift to little known manuscript sources and prints. As the book emphasises, satire was a frame of reference for well-known authors and artists ranging from Milton to Bernini and Goya. It was moreover a broad European phenomenon: while the book focuses on English satire, it also considers France, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain, and discusses how satirical texts and artwork could move between countries and languages. In its wide sweep across time and formats, Changing satire brings out the importance that satire had as a transgressor of borders.

1

The politics of formal verse satire, 1598–1808: Juvenal, Boileau, Johnson and Cottreau

Howard D. Weinbrot

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, Pope, Boileau and armies of lesser but substantial talents. A parodist like Charles Cotton cannot chase Dryden from the laureate’s throne, but it is easy to enjoy a poem that begins: ‘I sing the man (read it who list, / A Trojan, true, as ever pist)’.² Trojan urinary practice could not replace satirists’ need for tools, options, a proper audience and something worth satirising. The union of Renaissance and later scholarship with political and often religious conflict contributed to satire’s growth, and especially to that species we call formal verse satire. The received title of Dryden’s dedication, or preface, to his translation of Juvenal and Persius (1693) is ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’. ‘Progress’ depends upon origins unearthed by commentators Dryden includes and from whom he and others learned.

These developments alert us to a paradox. Satirists surely need options, different devices and conventions that add attractive complexity to their works – as in the remarkable blend of genres in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad in Four Books (1743). Formal verse satirists are more direct. They often address their poems to a specific person, time, place or moral issue; witness Of the Use of Riches (1731, 1733), An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), London (1738) or One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. Pope was especially adept at using the several different satiric tones discovered by his scholarly ancestors, but he tended to do so in phases. As his despair regarding the Walpole government grew, Pope’s Horatian polished exchange, letters to the Great and the Good and civilised restraint give way to the uneducable adversarius in Persius and the outrage at national collapse in Juvenal.

I will briefly discuss reclamation of satire’s varied conventions, what they were thought to be and how political events from the English Renaissance to the French Revolution helped modern satirists adapt classical arts to contemporary settings. The story takes us to Continental Renaissance scholarship, formal verse satire’s changes in late-seventeenth- and earlier-eighteenth-century France and England, and a later Franco-English adaptation of Juvenal’s third satire by way of Samuel Johnson. In that sense, this chapter discusses virtually the entire time span of the present book. It moreover deals with the broader international ramifications of satire in the period, and finds echoes of canonical satire in some unexpected and little-researched places.

From singular to plural options

Satirists sought to know the original derivation of their form, the better to see what satire should be in practice. The dominant candidate for pater familias was the Greek satyr as angry voice and hostile punisher.³ This cross between a human and a goat inflicted harsh medicine upon the morally sick. He aimed less to teach virtue than to punish vice. He did so in Renaissance English satyr-Juvenalian poems that are dark responses to dark events.

Many of these satires play variations on themes of national corruption. Grim satirists like Marston in The Scourge of Villanie (1598) and Middleton in Micro-cynicon: Sixe snarling satyres (1599) carp, lance, lash and scourge the sinners they abuse. The poet confronts danger by labelling and anathematising a malign opponent or culture. Marston’s cankered world deserves the ‘issue’ of his brain that will ‘raile, barke, bite’. Joseph Hall’s satirist is a porcupine who shoots sharp, wounding, quills from every line. Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia (1598) knows that ‘base lewd vice’ deserves his ‘Strappado, [and] racke’. These assaults have a source presumably consistent with the satyrs who again presumably inspired Juvenal, to whom Hall alludes in his own rhetorical question: ‘Who can refraine, that’s guiltless of their crime, / Whiles yet he liues in such a cruell time’.⁴ This was not the only Renaissance concept of satire, but it remained powerful well into the eighteenth century.⁵

Satirists feared both national and international turmoil and being labelled as seditious for attacks against individuals in disorderly and rapidly growing London. In June of 1599 the government indeed declared satire temporarily illegal, unpublishable and unfit for decent eyes or the state’s protection.⁶ Moreover, Catholic Spain might invade again and use English recusants to help change the national religion. Native Puritans themselves might destroy the established church. Ageing and childless Elizabeth’s heir to the throne was a Scot about whom his pending subjects knew little. Change of dynasties breeds uncertain times, certain anxiety and amplification of rage. Donne began his second Satyre with ‘I do hate / Perfectly all this towne’. He then dealt with corruptions in poetry, but his concerns grow in Satyre 5, where he movingly asks: ‘If Law be in the Iudges hart, and he / Haue no hart to resist Letter or fee / Wher wilt thou appeal?’.⁷

Heartless worlds allow little room for Horace’s subtle sermones often written from a sedate countryside rather than a crowded city. One of Horace’s achievements is to be urbane without being urban even when in Rome. Nominally Horatian satires by Ben Jonson and John Donne cannot adapt Horace’s confident voice of a secure poet in the Sabine farm provided by his patron Maecenas to whom and to Augustus Horace writes and celebrates. Poet and patron share a center of value. Patronless Renaissance satirists and commentators thus tend to remake Horace as a better-mannered snarler capable of what Isaac Casaubon called ‘vulgar unpleasantness’.⁸

Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) adapts Horace’s Satires 1. 9 and 1. 2. This often harshly punitive Horace, however, is more ‘Juvenalian’ than ‘Horatian’, and thinks of himself as correcting serious error. He berates Lupus for his ‘false lapwing cries’; Demetrius is a ‘poor and nasty snake’ and a ‘viper that eats thy parents’; Horace’s enemy Tucca insists that he is a ‘fusty satyr; he smells all goat’; he ‘carries hay in his horn’; he has ‘poison in his teeth and a sting in his tail’.⁹ Other commentators could ignore the Horace they thought insufficiently goat-like, as Joseph Hall does in his ‘Post-script to the Reader’ in the second part of Virgidemiarium (1598). Some think satire unlawful or too sharp; some think it ‘vnsatyrlike’ if mild, and the ‘learned too perspicuous’ as with ‘Iuuenall, Persius, and the other ancient Satyres’.¹⁰ Horace is an unmentioned ‘other’.

Donne’s fourth satire both adapts and darkens Horace’s Satires 1. 9. There, a chattering social climber on Rome’s Via Sacra accosts Horace, insists upon an introduction to Maecenas and fantasises that he then will acquire a Great Man’s power. He glues himself to Horace until a litigant sees the bore and arrests him. Horace is saved by the prosecuting ally and, whether as a figure of speech or literally, by the gods; ‘sic me servavit Apollo’ is the poem’s final line from the sacred street.¹¹ Horace, the gods and Maecenas as the benign court’s unsoiled emblem are as one. Donne’s fourth satire (there is a lesser adaptation in the first satire) changes Horace’s framework from self-promotion as rebuffed soiling of the virtuous state, to religious and social disruption in a debased Renaissance world.

Donne’s poem lacks protective intervention and a Maecenas to protect. Instead, the court attracts the vain, witless, lustful and false.¹² The intruder is dressed as a freak of nature who is stranger than things that creep out of the ‘Niles slime’ (l. 18). The gods punish rather than protect Donne, who thinks himself a victim of ‘wraths furious rod’ (l. 50). He rids himself of his visitor by paying him a ‘crowne’ as ransom (lines 144–6) – only then to find hordes of hellish court creatures, painted women, prostitutes, blather and over-bearing men. After 240 lines of purgatory (l. 3), Donne only responds with hopes that wise men, none of whom appear in his poem, will at least ‘esteeme my writts canonicall’ (l. 244). Donne adapts Horace’s plot of the self-interested intruder victimising the poet, and imposes modern depravity upon it. We see Juvenalian contact with widespread vice in London’s normless world in which the court reflects the nation’s decay and incoherence. Horace’s plot becomes the vehicle for an un-Horatian satire that raises the temperature in Donne’s already feverish poem.

Poets could not long sustain satire as perpetual outrage or exclude Horace’s devices and the different kinds of pleasure his satires and epistles produced. Editors paved the road towards change. Major scholarly texts helped to alter formal verse satire by altering its ‘original’ derivation. This development confirmed Scaliger’s 1561 awareness of the three different kinds of Roman satire.¹³ Isaac Casaubon’s 1605 De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira fostered the revolution. He argued that the Greek goat-like satyr was not Roman satire’s true parent. The word derived from satura, a full plate of different foods, with lanx understood; satire is both varied and nourishing. Its generic link is comedy not tragedy, sociable amendment of flaws not hostile denigration of vice. This view reinforced Quintilian’s insistence that ‘satura … tota nostra est’.¹⁴ Native Roman satire is not Greek goats’ posterity.

Casaubon encouraged three other major advances in discussion of classical satire. The ‘Prolegomena’ to his 1605 edition of Persius placed him in the same rank as Horace and Juvenal. Persius added easily borrowed conventions absent from his colleagues’ works – namely, necessarily obscure but overt opposition to Nero’s tyranny rather than to less specific villains, and the uneducable, un-Horatian adversarius who supports corrupt Caesar. Casaubon also discriminated among each satirist’s special talents; Horace was familiar, well-connected, but humble; Persius was philosophical and political; Juvenal was sublime and elevated. Casaubon both grants these discrete virtues and grants that each satirist is superior to the others in his own gift and is inferior to the others’ special gifts. Horace’s unique talent freed him from Juvenal’s shadow and indeed became a prop for Louis XIV as it was for Augustus Caesar. Boileau as establishment poet, and formal verse satire as acceptably ‘Horatian’ among the right sort were cognate literary and cultural events. In 1680 Pierre Richelet thus defined satire as a poem that agreeably corrects men’s vices, errors and follies: ‘Elle doit être vive, plaisante, morale & variée’.¹⁵

Awareness of varied choices and the benefit of combining them were clear on both sides of the Channel. An epigram beneath the engraving of Boileau in several editions concludes with ‘J’ay sçeu dans mes Ecrits docte, enjoüé, sublime, / Rassembler en moy Perse, Horace & Juvenal’. John Brown later praised Alexander Pope’s satiric versatility. He has collected ‘ev’ry [Roman] Poet’s Pow’r in one’– that is, ‘Gay Smiles, collected Strength, and manly Rage’.¹⁶ Satire uses different weapons for different purposes.

Casaubon was not alone. There were major editions of Horace by Heinsius (1612), who argued against Casaubon, and of Juvenal by Rigaultius (1616), among several others. These splendid efforts nonetheless were not the chief forces that turned satire away from dominant Juvenalian high-dudgeon. That award belongs to André Dacier’s seminal and often reprinted editions and commentaries upon Horace: Oeuvres d’Horace en Latin et en François avec des remarques (1681–9) and Remarques critiques sur les oeuvres d’Horace (1689–1700). These moved the most persuasive aspects of Dacier’s Renaissance predecessors from crabbed scholastic Latin to clear and easily accessible French prose.

Royal success encouraged scholarly success. The sixth volume of Dacier’s Oeuvres d’ Horace en Latin et en François, for example, begins with a dedication ‘Au Roi’. Horace’s praise of Augustus applies to Louis XIV: ‘votre image vit dans ses Vers. En effet il peint un Prince, dont le regne est une suite continuelle de prosperitez & de victoires, qui tenant dans ses mains la fortune de l’Univers’. He uses his infinite power only ‘pour le bonheur & pour le repos des hommes’.¹⁷ The gloriously omnipotent Sun King nurtures France’s and hence Europe’s and hence the world’s civilising culture. The French language and achievements improve Europe from Paris to Moscow and create arts superior even to those of the ancients, with whom French authors regularly compete and whom they regularly translate and imitate.¹⁸ Horace’s corrective comic genre was appropriate for civilised France. Boileau acknowledged Juvenal’s sublim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Note on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The politics of formal verse satire, 1598–1808: Juvenal, Boileau, Johnson and Cottreau
• 2 Anglo-Latin satiric verse in the long seventeenth century
• 3 Satire between the eaters and the meat: value and indifference before and in Donne’s Metempsychosis
• 4 Transcending boundaries: Rachel Speght’s instructive use of satire in A Mouzell for Melastomus
• 5 Milton among the satirists
• 6 Petronius’ Satyricon in the seventeenth century: satire, eloquence and anti-Jesuitism
• 7 Behind the mask: social satire in Bernini’s caricatures and comedies
• 8 ‘More expensive of their powder, than of their lead’: fops, theatre and the late Stuart military
• 9 The visual and the verbal: the intermediality of English satire, c. 1695–1750
• 10 Aesop, intermediality and graphic satire, c. 1740
• 11 Typesetting the borders: satire as a mediator in post-revolutionary Europe
• 12 The interconnections of satire and censorship in Goya’s prints and drawings
• 13 Jumping the broom: a common-law wedding custom’s bristling visual satires
• Bibliography
• Index