English formal satire: Elizabethan to Augustan [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9783111342498, 9783110991192

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana

University

Series Practica,

19

ENGLISH FORMAL SATIRE Elizabethan to Augustan

by

DORIS C. POWERS Arizona State

University

1971

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

L I B R A R Y OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD N U M B E R : 77 - 134344

Printed in Hungary

To D.B.P.

PREFACE

As is well known, in the 1590's still another classical form joined those already being imitated in English, when verses modelled on the Latin formal satires mainly of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal started to appear in numbers. The Elizabethan satire quickly took on its characteristic general appearance as a medium-length poem in decasyllabic couplets, whose burden was entirely or mainly destructive criticism. It found a ready audience: Donne's five works in the genre were popular in manuscript, Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597-8) and John Marston's The Scourge of Villanie (1598) soon saw several printed editions; well before the end of the Jacobean period, the number of such poems that had been published was very high. And it is to this Elizabethan and early Jacobean era of the genre that most of the studies that deal with formal satire before the Augustan Age confine themselves. The effort of this study has been to find what links might connect those early poems with formal satires that appeared, again in large numbers, after the Restoration — and, to ask if in fact the genre might not have had a continuous history through the seventeenth century, particularly through the generally neglected years between about 1610 and the beginning of the Restoration period. Accordingly, my first procedure was to determine from the satires of the first period - including those of Wyatt as well - what, exactly, the formal characteristics of the English 'kind' were considered by their writers to be. Using a definition gained this way, it becomes possible to demonstrate that poems fitting it were published (and republished) in every decade from the 1590's to that of the Restoration - and in increasing numbers from then well into the eighteenth century. The persistence of their appeal, in fact, is suggested in one way by such a detail as that Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613) was still being re-printed in the

8

PREFACE

1660's, and in another way by the circumstance t h a t a succession of well-known writers tried their hand at them. Jonson was one of those, with Middleton, Chapman, Cleveland, Marvell, and Lovelace, in the period before the Restoration - and after it, Butler, Rochester, Oldham, Prior, Shadwell, and Dryden himself. I n short, there was a continuous flow of poems through the seventeenth century t h a t exhibit formal characteristics of the 'kind'. My second procedure was to ask what the contours of the history of this 'kind' might be, for it seemed possible to re-examine the usual assumption about English formal satire t h a t it flourished briefly at the turn of the seventeenth century, not to re-appear until well into the second half of t h a t century and then mainly as translations or 'imitations' of particular Latin poems. An answer to t h a t question makes up the contents of this volume: it is, in essence, t h a t a history of seventeenth-century English formal satire can indeed be described, in terms of an early-established set of basic formal elements from which each writer in turn made his selections and which he handled in accordance with the gradually shifting emphases of his times. I n a demonstrable sense, Augustan formal satire is a direct descendent of Elizabethan formal satire. I wish to acknowledge, with real appreciation, the generosity to me of the Arizona State University Grants Committee during the preparation of this study.

CONTENTS

Preface

7 PART ONE

I. Introduction

13 PART TWO

II. Verisimilitude as Evidence: Elizabethan and Jacobean . .

33

I I I . The Satirist as Authenticating Device: Elizabethan and Jacobean A. The Moralist

72 72

B. The Stylist

90

IV. Verisimilitude as Evidence: Caroline and Restoration . . . 125 V. The Satirist: Caroline and Restoration

141

PART THREE

VI. Some Typical English Formal Satires

175

Bibliography

203

Index

209

PART ONE

I INTRODUCTION

I n demonstrating the continuity of English formal satire, one might begin with two passages of dialogue, from poems by Marston and by Rochester. I n each of these, the writer is trying to duplicate realistically the effect of thought verbalized as it is forming. Here is the Elizabethan Satirist speaking with his Companion: A Man, a man, a kingdome for a man. W h y how now currish m a d Athenian? Thou Cynicke dogge, see'st not streets do swarme W i t h troupes of m e n ? No, no, for Oirces charme H a t h t u r n ' d t h e m all to Swine; I neuer shall Thinke those same Samian sawes authentieall, B u t r a t h e r I dare sweare, t h e soules of swine Doe liue in men, for t h a t same r a d i a n t shine, T h a t lustre wherewith natures Nature decked Our intellectual p a r t , t h a t glosse is soyled W i t h stayning spots of vile impietie, And m u d d y d u r t of sensualitie, These are no men, b u t Apparitions, Ignes fatui, Olowormes, Fictions, Meteors, Ratts of Nilus, Fantasies, Colosses, Pictures, Shades, Resemblances.1

The Satirist, challenged, presents his thought t h a t men have taken on an animal-like nature. He implies t h a t this is not physical metempsychosis - he does not believe, as he puts it, in the "Samian sawes" - then, turning the idea over, he rephrases it to say t h a t it is rather t h a t the souls of swine abide in men. Proceeding to his elaboration, he moves through a continuing pattern of revision, introducing the expression "radiant shine" and 1 J o h n Marston, The Scourge of Villanie, " S a t y r e V I I " , ("A Cynicke Satyre"), 1-16. I n The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold D a v e n p o r t (Liverpool, 1961), p . 140. Hereafter cited as Scourge.

14

PART ONE

reexpressing it as "lustre", before finishing the thought in a relative clause - then in a final effort at getting just the right word, adding "glosse" with the apparent intent that it be understood as a substitute for "lustre" and, of course, to function in its place in the clause. He is thinking on his feet, turning his private reflections into discourse. That this is not intended to appear the polished statement of leisured thought is further suggested by the Satirist's closing remarks about what men are. In this succession of epithets, random acts of association loosely bind the first three ("Apparitions, Ignes fatui, Glowormes")- and these in turn suggest the fourth. "Meteors" appears then to rise from a subliminal image of fire in "Ignes fatui" and "Gloworme"; similarly, "Ratts of Nilus" evolves from the implicit suggestion of the swamp in "Ignes fatui", and "Fantasies" from "Fictions", and back further, from "Apparitions". "Colosses" may connect here, as large or grotesque "Fantasies". The series then dwindles to three terms ("Pictures, Shades, Resemblances") that are variations upon themselves — and this close points up the character of the whole succession: there has been no real forward movement, but rather a kind of circling motion, a verbalizing of near-synonyms, in search for the right expressions. There is also a typically Elizabethan cumulative effect in the piling-up of words, which adds to the impression of extempore, familiar speech. And now hear Rochester's Satirist speaking some 80 years later: Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange prodigious creatureB Man) A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh and Blood I pleas'd to weare, I'd be a Dog, a Monkey or a Bear, Or any thing but that vain Animal, W h o is so proud of being rational. The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five: And before certain Instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err. Reason, an Ignis fatuus, in the Mind, Which leaving Light of Nature, Sense behind; Pathless, and dang'rous, wandring ways, it takes, Through errors Fenny-Boggs, and Thorny Brakes; Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain, Mountains of Whimseys, heap'd in his own Brain: Stumbling from thought to thought, falls head-long down, Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, and make him try,

INTRODUCTION

15

To swim with Bladders of Philosophy; In hopes still t'oretake th'escaping light, The Vapour dances in his dazl['d] sight, Till spent, it leaves him to eternal Night. 2

As extempore discourse, this seems very far from Marston's modes. Here a mind is seen as able to project quite complex grammatical structures in the act of speaking and to handle the parts in turn (as well as to vary effects within them) without breaking down. The Satirist opens his subject with the conditional (and 'rhetorical') "Were I . . . ", then suspends the thought while he establishes the basis for a comparison with his actual state. Taking up the main strand again, he supplies the complement and proceeds smoothly to the main clause: a statement of what he would be. This is offered in three parallel forms - just three, to reveal to his audience (by the use of the conventional number) that it is the class he is stressing and not any individual member. The term "Animal" which he applies to man, derives logically (rather than aasociatively) from the animal figures just presented; it pivots on their class-designation, and with its pejorative implications further diminishes "Man". The development of the idea of man's choice between instinct and reason proceeds in two compact antitheses, which are united in sound and sense by the expansion of "Five" in the first to "Fifty" in the second. Then, the effects of his choice of Reason are developed by means of an extended metaphor which controls the presentation for some thirteen lines. Reason is an "Ignis fatuus", and leads the follower in an action located with geographical realism and choreographed as it were to a climax and then to a conclusive end. The fallacies and false beliefs about natural reason are related to specific features of the topography: Error is keyed to Fenny-Boggs and Thorny Brakes, Whimseys to Mountains, Doubt to Sea. Exploiting the physical senses (the Follower climbs, stumbles, falls headlong, and so on), the Satirist draws the figurative and literal meanings together just halfway through the thought, and at the climax of the action. There he points out that the "mountains of Whimseys" a r e " h e a p ' d in [the Follower's] own Brain". Returning to the physical setting again, the Satirist renews his excitation of sensory reactions 2 "A Satyr against Mankind", 1-24. In Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London, 1953), pp. 118-9.

16

PART

ONE

by picturing Man in the sea, struggling still to overtake the "escaping light", which dances as a Vapour before him. The Satirist ends the scene here, with the expertise of a showman, darkening it as the light (the "Vapour") is extinguished which he turned upon it in the opening. There is little sense here of the mind straining at its work; what emerges in language is the rounded thought. There is no pulse of creative activity as it is occurring, no pouring out of raw material, no urgent search for the best term (and heaping-up for the bludgeoneffect of them all). Those phenomena of verbalizing we saw in Marston's Satirist. Yet Rochester's poem is intended to represent realistically the speech practices of ordinary conversation, too; and it is even occasionally homely, as in the expression, "like to drown". Rochester tried in another way to manage the effect of living dialogue, by giving the Satirist's Companion a somewhat contrasted manner of talking. Here is the Companion: What Rage ferments in your degen'rate Mind, To make you rail at Reason, and Mankind? Blest glorious Man! to whom alone kind Heav'n, An everlasting Soul hath freely giv'n; Whom his great Maker took such care to make, That from himself he did the Image take, And this fair Frame in shining Season drest, To dignifie his Nature above Beast.3

I n his occasionally elevated language and in his several inversions (here, of object and verb), the Companion sounds different from the Satirist, who has used a simpler diction and a word order t h a t is almost uniformly normal. On the other hand, as it was with the Satirist, the Companion utters completed thoughts, and in sophisticated structures and a diction t h a t is right in its first version. Marston's and Rochester's modes come together - as representations of realistic speech - when we see them as varieties of a single style. I t is the style Croll has called baroque, 4 in distinguishing its planned effect of "natural" speech from the "unnatural" effects of the neatly rounded Ciceronian coherence t h a t is gained through often abundant logical and grammatical symmetries and the careful 3

Ibid., 58-65, p. 120. See Morris Croll, " 'Attic Prose' in the Seventeenth Century", X V I I I (1921). 4

SP,

INTRODUCTION

17

use of connectives. Marston's Satirist speaks in ways related more to the 'curt' than to the 'loose' varieties of baroque. I t is 'curt' in the elliptical beginning of his answer to the Companion. This is cast as a dependent clause, following the Satirist's "No, no", and elaborating those negatives - b u t the clause on which it is dependent is not supplied. And in his next statement, the emphasis is wrong; he p u t s the matter of the "Samian sawes" as something he disbelieves ("I neuer shall. . . "), whereas the requirement of his point is t h a t it be stated otherwise — as not meant literally by him, for instance. He blurts out the general idea, t h a t is, before he has thought out its best form, and characteristically omits a connective t h a t might help relate it to the preceding idea even in the form he has given it. I t is further 'curt' in the unplanned, extempore effect of its rephrasings and in the string of appositives t h a t the Satirist ends with - as well as in the relative brevity of the grammatical constructions. The clause beginning "for t h a t same radiant shine" is after all developed by rephrasings of the same ideas rather than by, say, division and discussion of the parts thus produced; and the rephrasings themselves are in relatively brief constructions. The same thing should be said about the Satirist's final period; considered as a vehicle simply for appositives, it is brief indeed. Finally, the constructions throughout (the exception is "stayning spots . . . , and muddy d u r t . . . ") avoid obvious parallelisms in form — generally a mark of the baroque style. Rochester's Satirist, then, speaks more in the patterns of the 'loose' style. Still avoiding measured parallelisms, his constructions are relatively extended, although the individual members may be brief (and, in this, more 'curt'). Ellipses are almost entirely missing; the full sense is almost always given in complete constructions. Many connectives are supplied — although, characteristically, in the loose style, they may make only a loose connection. I n the statement, "Senses are too gross, and he'll contrive . . . ", the coordinate 'and' is an example - where one would expect a logically subordinating conjunction. B u t these are marks of the extemporizing speaker, rather than of the man with a prepared and polished speech in his hand. Another mark is the parenthetical expression, which accommodates something the speaker forgot to say earlier - or cannot conveniently structure otherwise then and there. Rochester's Satirist almost immediately interrupts himself with one: "Were I (who

18

PART ONE

t o m y c o s t . . . )". H e also r u n s down, a f t e r making his p o i n t t h a t men t r u s t Reason over their senses (line 11) — t h e n gains a new impetus on t h e word " R e a s o n " . H e repeats i t and is off again, omitting t h e verb of the new construction, t o develop t h e geographical m e t a p h o r of t h e thirteen lines t h a t conclude t h e passage. The development of t h a t last section shows other evidences of an extempore style. T h e first two actions of t h e "misguided follower" (he climbs, he falls) are simply juxtaposed; no conjunction is used. And whereas his movements are f i r s t expressed in active verbs with 'follower' the agent-subject, t h e Satirist suddenly makes him t h e object of t h e remaining clauses, with some grammatical awkwardness as one result. I n the final lines, t h e "follower" falls " I n t o d o u b t s boundless Sea", where like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, and make him try, To swim with Bladders of Philosophy; In hopes still t'oretake th'escaping light, The Vapour dances in his dazl['d] sight. . .

H e r e the Satirist's g r a m m a r again shows t h e effect of a speaker shifting constructions unconsciously as he extemporizes. The expression "like to d r o w n " modifies "follower" - until it becomes ambiguously connected t o the " b o o k s " of the n e x t line, because the Satirist has m a d e " b o o k s " the subject now of the n e x t clause. F u r t h e r mild confusion appears in the final lines when another dangling modifier is created because of t h e Satirist's failure t o keep his e x t e n d e d grammatical structures coherent. This is t h e scene t h a t has the " V a p o u r " in hopes - whereas, of course, it is the "follower" who should be grammatically so described. The p a t h f r o m Marston t o Rochester clearly is continuous in the handling of a t least one aspect of formal satire - t h a t is, of speech as realistic extempore discourse. A similar continuity can also be d e m o n s t r a t e d in other rhetorical aspects. This can be done best, perhaps, when t h e passages f r o m t h e two poems (so far discussed only with respect t o linguistic matters) are seen in their contexts - t h a t is, the actions a n d the arguments of the whole poem of which each is a p a r t . Then it will be possible to p o i n t o u t other features which, because Rochester when he wrote in c. 1669 was drawing on a set of conventions t h a t h a d been in s t e a d y use since their lively adoption in the 1590s, t h e two poems share.

INTRODUCTION

19

A realistic setting in Marston's poem is lightly indicated when the Companion says to the Satirist, . . . see'st not streets do swarme With troupes of men?

The two stand there, discussing the passers-by. The Satirist had come on the scene calling, "A man, a man, a kingdome for a man". The Companion points out t h a t there are men all around them, b u t the Satirist sees the flaws t h a t make them less than men. H e calls the Companion's attention to one of them. " H o Linceus", he says, "Seest thou yon gallant in the sumptuous clothes . . . ?" and tells him t h a t underneath the clothes is an incarnate deuill, That struts in vice, and glorieth in euil. 6

The Companion tries to modify his misanthropic mood: . . .peace Cynick, yon is one, A compleat soule, of all perfection.

B u t the Satirist breaks out indignantly: What? mean'st thou him that walks al open brested? Drawne through the eare with Ribands, plumy crested? He that doth snort in fat-fed luxury. . , 6

and again it would seem t h a t the Companion has been naive in accepting someone uncritically. B u t he himself sees the Satirist as hypercritical, and retains a faith in his own judgment; and when the Satirist points out still another offending figure: Loe yonder I espie The shade of Nestor in sad gravitie; Since old Sylenus brake his Asses back, He now is forc'd his paunch, and gutts to pack In a fayre Tumbrell,

5 6

Scourge, 17-8, 26-7, pp. 140-1. Ibid., 28-32.

20

PART

ONE

the Companion urges an alternate point of view: Why sower Satirist Canst thou vnman him? Here I dare insist And soothly say, he is a perfect soule, Eates Nectar, drinks Ambrosia, saunce controle. A n invndation of felicitie Fats him with honor, and huge treasurie,7

- and so on. This satire, in short, is a dialogue, with a setting and a dramatis personae of two. A n d in this particular poem, the Companion is not only an on-the-scene auditor, a dramatic device to give the effect of a dialogue taking place; he functions as well in a more basic capacity. I t is he who stimulates the Satirist to express himself about the several individuals who pass before them. The Satirist has simply come on the scene like Diogenes looking for a 'man'; the Companion points out individual men, and the Satirist reacts to each with a critical evaluation stimulated solely b y the Companion's volunteering single 'men' to him. The Companion, that is, is partially responsible for moving the action along. The Companion serves also as an opposing point of view; the matters that he and the Satirist discuss are thus talked out, argued from at least two critical positions. The Companion is a straw man, to be sure; one is to understand his remarks as naive and idealistic. B u t because of his opposing point of view, the dialogue becomes argument, and a point seemingly at issue is debated and then settled - right before the reader's eyes. A 'truth', that is, is recorded in the act of being established. Clearly, the intended effect is that of 'real' life, going on as it is being recorded. Here, ideas occur in the mind of the Satirist, and, verbalized b y him they stimulate ideas in the mind of the Companion as both stand there in the midst of the particulars of 'real' life that they are evaluating. In the give-and-take of their contrasting opinions, they expose various angles from which the offenders themselves may be viewed - and often describe in realistic concrete detail the specifics of appearance and action which violate the code of values from which the Satirist and Companion speak. Then, in one final move - again, occurring there - the point at issue is settled; ' Ibid., 46-55, p. 141.

INTRODUCTION

21

here, the Satirist tests his impression against the 'real' people there before him and has the impression corroborated again as true, through the same kind of direct, personal observation on which, presumably, he formed it in the first place. Rochester's poem uses the same dramatic devices and is concerned with the same object: the probing, through the direct observation of life, and the discussion of t h a t experience for significant truths. The action in Rochester's poem is managed as follows: as the Satirist is telling to an unspecified audience his objections to the general esteem for Reason, he pauses to recognize the approach of t h e Companion, who evidently intends to challenge the points he has made: But now methinks some formal Band, and Beard, Takes me to task,

and addresses him directly when he has drawn close enough: come on Sir I'm prepar'd. 8

The Companion then takes the effective role seen in Marston's poem; his remarks stimulate the Satirist to make further comments. The Companion here agrees with what the Satirist has to say against Wit, b u t objects to his general denigration of Mankind. The Satirist thus is motivated further to clarify, refine, and elaborate his remarks; in fact, he is so stimulated by his Companion's interruption t h a t he stops the latter from further speech — Hold mighty Man-

so he himself may start his rebuttal immediately — and begins, all this we know. . ., 9

and proceeds with his opinions, which by now are more developed than they were before the Companion challenged them. The Companion had spoken for the spiritual in "Blest glorious Man", while also seeing man "in shining Reason drest". He is for the proper use of Reason

8 9

Lines 46-7, p. 119. Ibid., 72, p. 120.

22

PART

ONE

by whose aspiring influence, We take a flight beyond material sense, Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce, The flaming limits of the Universe. Search Heav'n and Hell, find out what's acted there, And give the World true grounds of hope and fear. 10

He, like earlier Satirists, holds an ideal of man as capable of a kind of perfection - 'perfection' connoting here a full intellectual grasp of the mysteries of God and the universe (which leads to a correct knowledge of moral values), rather than the simpler moral goodness (sought through faithful obedience to traditional moral precepts) which the Elizabethan Satirist often proposed. Given his particular stand, however, the Companion's role is still basically to be a sounding board for the Satirist. In this poem he is more than this, of course; he has a profound philosophy of his own, which represents the thinking of those of Rochester's contemporaries who did see Man optimistically as a "blest, glorious" creature who with his mind would penetrate all the "Mysteries" of the cosmos. B u t in the strategy of this satire, he becomes the straw man whom the Satirist as moral center will talk down. To the Satirist, Man has neither used his reason well for intellectual purposes nor developed a moral system that ranks him above the animals. He elaborates each of these two points in turn, demonstrating first that Man is given to speculative thought —which activity is not only pointless (because it does not lead to action) but also pretentiously gullible in its expectation that it can "pierce" "The limits of the boundless Universe." 11 The Satirist's summary of the ideas expressed in this section is cast in a neat couplet: Our Sphere of Action, is lifes happiness, And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass. 12

His second point - that Man is, morally, a base creature - is developed with currently-held pessimistic ideas in complete disagreement with the idealistic views of the Companion. Man is cruel and faithless, "Not through necessity, but wantonness". 13 The virtues he

10 11 12 13

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

66-71, p. 120. 85, p. 120. 96-7, p. 121. 138, p. 122.

INTRODUCTION

23

claims - honor and fame - are at bottom motivated by fear. An equally strong drive within him is the love of power; to gain power, he will play the person who is "gen'rous, affable, and kind" 14 but this is deliberate and base hypocrisy. With this, the Satirist closes; this is the 'true' view of the matter. Clearly Rochester's poem draws on many of the structural ideas that Marston's did. Both poets faced the intellectual necessity of having their Satirists specify accurately and reliably the prevalence of the human errors they observed. Each chooses a somewhat different rhetorical strategy. Marston's Satirist charges mankind with sensuality and follows his generalization with the evidence of living examples there on the street before him, whose pertinent features he identifies briefly but in concrete particulars. He gives them fictional names, for to Marston, that was "the nature of a Satyre, (which is vnder fained names, to note generall vices)." 15 Rochester's Satirist remains, rather, on the level of generalization; he speaks of 'Man's' reason, elaborating his points in considerable fullness. His technique is thus to provide a mirror in which individual auditors may recognize themselves in some or all of the respects the Satirist has specified. He provides generalizations, in short, and invites those listening to verify them by seeing themselves as the examples. But each of these Satirists had made his choice of the means he would use, from among the same variety that was (and is) available for discussing human aberrations: describing a single offender - or multiple offenders - and giving the actual name or names; describing actual individual or multiple offenders and giving them names that half conceal, half reveal their identity; constructing a fictional figure who exemplifies a prevalent offense (personal, social, professional, or other) and giving him a fictional, often type, name; regarding the distribution of a vice or folly as universal, and 'Man' thus as the appropriate figure; and abstracting qualities and using personifications of them as figures. Other Satirists throughout the period would also choose from among these means. If Marston and Rochester met a common need in their methods of generalizing and or giving supporting evidence, they also faced common needs in other particulars of handling - the need to communicate a tone, for example. The Satirist's choice of tone might be 14 16

Ibid., 148, p . 122. Scourge, " T o h i m t h a t h a t h p e r u s e d m e e " , p . 176.

24

PART ONE

related to the ends he had in mind in speaking out, and t h e choice of ends was sometimes seen as those presented b y the Latin satirists: t h a t is, to prevent someone's error b y showing him someone else already committing it, or to reprove the offender himself. B o t h of these might be subsumed under the larger object, seen as derived from Stoic thought, of introducing someone to a deeper self-knowledge; b u t we can distinguish between Rochester's intent to reproach and the apparent purpose of Marston's Satirist — namely, to point out to the Companion a current h u m a n vice which, presumably, he should avoid. To come to tone, then: again, Satirists throughout the period clearly felt they h a d a choice — a n d all the choices were established early. These ranged, for w a n t of more precise terms, from the harsh, through the sardonic and the amused, to the reasonable a n d quietly resigned. Any of the first several might be either combined with excitement or displayed alone. Before defining the tones of Marston's and of Rochester's Satirists as they speak, we should first consider t h a t each Satirist has a unique personality, and t h a t he quite properly projects it; the substance of his satiric statement is the verbalized result of his personal observations of particulars, felt and judged b y him as an individual. I t might seem t h a t the idea of conventional tones would offer possible conflicts with the idea of tones t h a t are uniquely and sincerely the Satirist's own because they are a factor of his personal response. I n practice this apparently produced no dilemmas, for judging by their poems, the English satirists, like Horace, regarded the formal satire as an a r t form t h a t produced life-mirroring effects, according to principles of language usage already established as viable b y t h e Latin authors. I t evidently was desirable to individualize Satirists, to give the effect of a real individual assimilating and feeling the experience he speaks of. And something of the individual English writer might, of course, form p a r t of the persona he created (one remembers the extensive autobiographical material furnished by Wither's Satirist in Abuses Stript and Whipt, 1613). The Satirist m a y thus be seen as a figure constructed on conventional principles t h a t include his taking one or another emotional stance, b u t who is an 'individual' to the degree t h a t his author consciously a n d unconsciously distinguishes him from others adopting the same tone. W i t h all this in mind, we can move on now to a rough description of the tone of Marston's and Rochester's Satirists as t h e y speak

INTRODUCTION

25

of the offenses they see around them. Both writers reveal tone through the persona's choice of diction and sentence patterns, and so on. Marston's Satirist, as the analysis of his speech suggests, is in a serious, excited mood. H e spontaneously overflows with disgusted, denigrating images, which he keeps coining until at one point he has piled u p nearly a dozen upon the heads of the offenders he is attacking. His tone is harsh and urgent. The Satirist's tone in Rochester's poem is another common one in the period under survey here; it is harsh and despairing, b u t composed and under the control of another rhetorical purpose: coolly to make 'Man' look so miserably foolish and wrong t h a t he has no reasonable choice b u t to change his ways. We may look on the Companion in Rochester's poem as a Satirist, too, when he joins in on the attack against Wit. The tone in which he speaks is more like t h a t of Marston's Satirist; he is disturbed into excited indignation (which his diction reveals), and elsewhere he is so offended by 'Wit' t h a t he says angrily, " I long to lash it in some sharp Essay". 1 6 His speech patterns reveal a less impulsive man than Marston's Satirist, however, as we've seen above; he channels his rage into polished structures in the first casting of his sentences. There is, in short, a common aim b u t a variety in these several means alone by which a Satirist could present his critical observation and make his moral point. And analysis of the wealth of English formal satires shows that, from the beginning, flexibility within the form characterized the situation for writers. Theory as recorded in contemporary critical statements by others and by the satirists themselves does not reflect this, in the very limited, imprecise, and even obscure ways it states what formal satire was thought to be. The very form as extempore dialogue is late in being mentioned (and even a t the end of the 17th century, in another imprecision, critics are describing as gentle 'Horatian' raillery the coolly savage satiric attacks of some of their contemporaries). Also, as is well known, many Renaissance critics believed satire to have been descended solely from the Greek Satyr play and Old Comedy. To be sure, one set of tones, and certain methods found in English formal satires may derive from this belief, which was reinforced b y some of the practices of Persius and Juvenal - notably Juvenal, in his bitter denunciations. 16

Line 55, p. 119.

26

PART

ONE

But the genre seems now to have derived from a view of satire's intent, form, and methods as originating in the Socratic dialogues. Horace's satires were imitations of these, and certainly much closer in spirit to them than were the poems of Persius and then of Juvenal, which followed. And the English poets who imitated - and so worked closely with the Latin satires - understood the laws of t h a t kind as, however modified by Juvenalian (or native homiletic) harshness, based in the Socratic idea of informal discourse used as a mode for examining experience and arriving at some new moral awareness. 17 Some evidence of this is the statement in poem after poem t h a t implies the writer's serious philosophical purpose respecting the gain and recording of accurate knowledge. The idea was reinforced for the Elizabethan and Jacobean satirists by contemporary neo-Stoic philosophical thought, and by the trend in their times of the new science which preferred fresh, personally-apprehended experiences and interpretation of phenomena to inherited impressions concerning them. As instances of a stated concern of this kind in the satires themselves, one recalls for example Donne's urgent lines in "Satyr I I I " concerning the need to search out and experience religious t r u t h for oneself. The same idea, b u t with reference to all experience, lies beneath the invocation in Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597): "Goe daring Muse, . . . Truth be t h y speed, and Truth thy Patron bee." 18 Understood at one level, this is a simple promise to his readers t h a t what follows is a faithful picture of the vices and follies of his age. That Hall, as well as many of his contemporary formal satirists, did focus on genuine, current conditions has been well verified by modern scholarship. 19 B u t understood in the broader context of late 16th-century anti-Ciceronian philosophical thought, this is Hall's promise to his readers t h a t he will avoid both traditional ideas of knowledge and modes of representing it. Briefly — for the history is familiar - traditional, inherited ways of 'seeing' and thinking about things were being rejected, along with 17

A thoughtful treatment of this point is given in the final chapter of A. L. Soens, Jr., "Criticism of Formal Satire in the Renaissance" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1958). 18 (London), Liber I, "Prologue", 19 and 24, p. 11. In The Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 75. 19 Cf. Oscar James Campbell, Gomicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Gressida (San Marino, 1959), pp. 40-8.

INTRODUCTION

27

the conventionalized discourse in which they were embodied. Stimulated by the concepts and methods of the new science, which derived as well from the Socratic procedures t h a t lead to new awarenesses as from revived evaluation of Aristotle's thought concerning the valid connections between logic and rhetoric on the one hand and experience on the other, the new attitude placed a value on fresh experience - on each individual's making his own observations and coming, thus, directly to a 'true' knowledge of life. These ideas had been expressed with respect to writing by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, 20 and the implications - philosophical, logical, rhetorical - of this position were accepted, late in the Renaissance, as p a r t of the whole movement toward experimental inquiry into all areas of human thought and action. The philosophical implication was t h a t if 'real' life were examined 'real' truths would be determined. When Hall wrote in the 1590's: Nor Ladies wanton loue, nor wandring knight, Legend I out in rymes all richly dight. Nor fright the Reader with the Pagan vaunt Of mightie Mahound, or great Termagaunt. . . Nor vnder euery banke, and euery tree, Speake rymea vnto m y oten Minstralsie, 21

he was announcing t h a t the fanciful creatures of romance and pastoral were not fit subjects for the poet. For the purpose of coming to understand oneself and other men, one must choose only 'real' life, and one's own observations of it, as subject-matter. And although none of the satirists explicitly affiliate themselves with, for example, specifically Stoic thought respecting literary practices, their general concern with finding out this kind of t r u t h clearly shows their commitment to current doctrines respecting reality and its representation in honest, realistic, unambiguous form. The particular connections of formal satire and current philosophico-literary theory occur, of course, through the fact that their immediate models were the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, and t h a t they were themselves devoted to a parallel aim: t h a t of mirroring 'real' life in 'real' language and at the level of ordinary events. 20

The connections between classical rhetoricians and English practice have been explored in some detail. See, for example, Part I of Wesley Trimpi's Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, 1962). 21 Virgidemiarum, Liber I, "Satire i", 1-4, 15-6, p. 12.

28

PAKT ONE

The numerous references by other early satirists to 'truth' may therefore be held against the sense just discussed - as when Marston's Satirist says, Y e e scrupulous obseruers, goe and learne Of Aesop's dogge; meate from a shade discerne.22

The distinction Marston is making is that between appearance and reality - the idea that recurs so often in works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. His satires have to do with what seems to be but is not, what is but does not seem to be - that is, with the difficulties of knowing, and the special immorality of hypocrisy to an age aware of the difficulties, under normal conditions, of knowing. John Lane expresses a general concern for 'truth' in his title, Tom Tel-Troth's Message (1600), and it continues to recur, as in Thomas Scot's "Sarcasmus Mundi" (1616): H o w apt is man to erre? Antiquitie Thinkes it sees right, and yet sees all awry Our sight is important, the help we haue B y art-full spectacles, doth much depraue The truth of objects. . . 23

where the idea - the difficulty of getting at truth — again appears to be considered at the philosophical level. In the same spirit conscientiously accurate reporting, as against distortions, is urged by John Stephens in his prefatory letter to Henry Fitzgeffrey's Certain Elegies . . . with Satyres and Epigrams (1620), in his hopes that [he] suruive[s] to Write More out of true discerning then of S p i t e d

Reverberations of this idea continue to be heard through the century. Alexander Brome shares the general attitude that fact has its value and validity over fantasy; " I am no poet", he says in his "Satire on the Rebellion", "for I speak the truth."25 And well into Scourge, Liber secundus, " A d Rithmum", 37-8, p. 129. I n Philomythie (London), sig. < Tl r . 2i (London), sig. Cl v . 25 I n The Works of the English Poets, ed. Alexander Chalmers (London, 1810), vol. V I , p. 688. Printed by Chalmers from the 1661 ed. of Brome's Songs and Other Poems; probably composed in the 1650's or somewhat earlier. 22

23

INTRODUCTION

29

the Augustan period proper, Robert Gould may still be heard echoing the thought in the prefatory matter to his satires: Truth is m y aim, with Truth I shall impeach, And I'll spare none that come within m y reach. 26

These means of representing the pursuit of truth - the extempore Socratic dialogue as it controls the basic framework and some of the inner strategy of the poem, the specific devices for achieving realistic representation, the Satyr play as it too suggests tone and method - all were available to the English formal satirists, and in their use provide us with the basis for discussing the continuity of English formal satire from its beginnings to its establishment as a major genre after the Restoration. English satires, t h a t is to say, are unified by their adherence to the idea of giving to the significant moments they choose to comment on the air of truth, through providing an authentic, life-like feeling of discourse taking place - an idea centered in presenting as realistic drama the conceptual material involved in the single poem. Many use the true dialogue situation for this presentation, and draw upon the cluster of related devices most commonly used through the period under survey: the Satirist, of course, of a certain temperament, attitude, and style; and an auditor (a companion, or the offender, if the Satirist speaks directly to him); indications, often, of setting and some action; and certainly colloquial language and speech patterns (that is, 'natural' ones), and a discussion t h a t may even generate its own directions as it goes along. Not all formal satirists used all the above elements (some poems are the Satirist's monologues to a silent auditor, and some of the poems are epistles, with what this implies of special handling); b u t the effort to dramatize, to authenticate the ideas via the personality of the Satirist and to give all the speeches the feeling of actual discourse, and the whole, the air of action taking place right now, characterizes poems through the entire period under survey here. I n short, many writers adopt the informal discussion, with its air of fresh attention to current moral problems, and base it on directly apprehended, immediate, living experience as felt and communicated by individual personalities. 26

"Prologue" to "Love Given Over" (1688), in Gould's Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles (London, 1689), sig. K3 V .

30

PAßT ONE

Differences among poems, then, lie in the choices that single writers made from the range of techniques that quickly developed with respect to the details of working each presentation out as an effective vehicle of a moral stand. Individual writers took various positions, for example, between the poles represented by the Socratic procedure (which involved using, among other rhetorical strategies, a pleasant tone), and the other, which drew its attitudes perhaps from the Satyr play and Old Comedy, perhaps from native English homiletic tradition, and which saw the Satirist's speeches as properly delivering abusive reproof and psychological pain. The persisting debate over whether the Satirist's procedure should be harsh or genially laughing presents a familiar dichotomy in this connection. Another range of choice, in that of language, is suggested in the well-known debate (usually but inaccurately connected with just the early satires) concerning the Satirist's speech as more effective when it is clear than when it is deliberately 'darksome'. In short, the features that help distinguish one poem from another, and, ultimately, Elizabethan from Augustan poems, have their locus within the larger framework outlined above, and it is the purpose of this study both to demonstrate in detail the varied but continuous practice of formal satire in the period leading up to the Augustan age, and to point up the debts of Augustan formal satirists to many ideas and devices already long in use.

PART TWO

II VERISIMILITUDE AS EVIDENCE: ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN

I n following the development of formal satire from Donne (and before him, Wyatt) to, roughly, Dryden, it will be useful to focus our discussion in the desire of the writers of the period to present satiric observations that would be accepted as true. On this basis we can discuss the various rhetorical means t h a t the writers used to 'authenticate' their poems. My procedure, as in my survey of Marston's and Rochester's poems, will be to discuss several features of the poems which are capable of such 'authenticating' treatment: first, b y considering the satires as realistic dramaturgy, then by examining the figure of the Satirist in more detail for certain additional (and changing) persuasive features the writers gave him. I shall begin, in this chapter, by illustrating certain dramatic devices of verisimilitude adapted or originated by the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers of formal satire, who in turn established conventions for later English writers of formal satire to choose from. The structure of accusation and its grounds is the logical heart of each satire, and the earliest formal satirists used all b u t one of the logical means listed in Chapter I to represent human aberrations in their poems. Convention and other restrictions against identifying actual offenders temporarily restrained satirists from naming names, and thus from giving the most authoritative evidence of the t r u t h of their statements. I t is to these restrictions t h a t Thomas Lodge makes reference in the prefatory epistle to A Fig for Momus (1595). " I n them", Lodge says of the satires published in this work, "(under the names of certaine Romaines) where I reprehend vice, 1 1 purposely wrong no man, b u t obserue the lawes of 1 (London, 1595), "To the Gentlemen Readers whatsoeuer", sig. A3 V . Hunterian Club Reprint N o . X L I I , 1878. I n The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (Hunterian Club ed., 1883), vol. I I I .

34

PART TWO

t h a t kinde of poeme; if any repine thereat, I am sure he is guiltie, because he bewrayeth himself." The m a t t e r is later reconsidered b y Hall; he reflects a direct knowledge of Juvenal's idea of attacking only the dead, a n d with a conservative independence characteristic of him, he rejects it: I t a x e t h e liuing, let dead ashes rest, W h o s e faults are dead, a n d nayled in their chest.2

H e will deal, t h a t is, with the aberrations of his contemporaries - b u t he will n o t go so far as to use names, and he gives his reasons. C o n c e r n i n g [ h u m a n v i c e a s a t o p i c of s a t i r e s ] . . . I c o n f e s s e n o n e c a n be m o r e open t o danger, t o enuie, sith faults l o a t h n o t h i n g m o r e t h a n t h e light, a n d m e n love n o t h i n g m o r e t h a n their f a u l t s a n d therefore w h a t t h r o u g h t h e n a t u r e of t h e f a u l t s , a n d f a u l t of t h e p e r s o n s , i t is i m p o s s i b l e so violent a n a p e a c h m e n t should b e quietly b r o o k e d . B u t w h y should vices b e v n b l a m e d f o r f e a r e of b l a m e : a n d if t h o u m a i s t s p i t v p o n a T o a d e v n u e n o m e d , w h y m a i s t t h o u n o t s p e a k of a v i c e w i t h o u t d a n g e r ? E s p e cially so w a r i l y a s I h a u e i n d e a u o r e d , w h o in t h e v n p a r t i a l l m e n t i o n of s o m a n y vices, m a y s a f e l y p r o f e s s e t o b e a l t o g e t h e r g u i l t l e s s e i n m y selfe t o t h e i n t e n t i o n of a n y g u i l t i e p e r s o n w h o m i g h t b e b l e m i s h e d b y t h e l i k e l y h o o d of m y c o n c e i v e d a p p l i c a t i o n , t h e r e u p o n c h o o s i n g r a t h e r t o m a r r e mine owne verse then anothers name.3

I t is true, he says, t h a t men resent being identified with their faults, b u t the satirist m a y attack men's vices, and this is w h a t he will do — although omitting offenders' names vitiates ("marres") the satire. His disclaimer of personal reference follows along lines t h a t become conventional in their expression: he has n o t "blemished" any individual guilty person, and in fact, if anyone feels he has been singled out, "it is a short answere: Art thou guiltie ? complaine not, thou a r t n o t wronged; a r t thou guiltles? complaine not, thou a r t not touched." 4 Formal satirists long continued to oppose the use of frankly personal attack. George Wither was to react against it in his extensive satiric work, Abuses Stript and. Whipt (1613). This stand was f u r t h e r reinforced when the first scholarly editions of the Latin 2

Virgidemiarum, L i b e r V , " S a t i r e i " , 1 9 - 2 0 . I n The Poems Hall, e d . A r n o l d D a v e n p o r t ( L i v e r p o o l , 1949), p . 75. 3 Ibid., " A P o s t - s c r i p t t o t h e R e a d e r " , p . 98. 4 Ibid.

of

Joseph

VERISIMILITUDE AS EVIDENCE: ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN

35

satires began to appear, in which the editors of the individual Roman satirists tried to construct universal theories of satire (each on the practices of his own poet). For example, in the essay published with his 1615 edition of Juvenal, Nicholas Rigault recommends for the satirist t h a t while he should be plain with respect to the evils he speaks of, he should be prudent with respect to identifying the specific individuals who are guilty of them. This to be sure is the point made in Juvenal's "Satire I " — and Rigault also adopts the idea of using parallel figures from history for satiric butts, because (as Juvenal had implied) one can claim if challenged t h a t one has simply been writing history. 5 There is, in short, abundant evidence t h a t the convention against naming names was a strong one. The degree of its strength is shown by the unfailing attention t h a t satirist after formal satirist gave to it - even those who gave the prohibition only lip service. A declared preference for general over personal satire continued into the Augustan age; b u t by t h a t time the philosophical basis for it had shifted because the serious search for the general laws of the physical universal and of human nature was providing quite another rationale for general statements about the vices and follies of man. Dryden, it will be remembered, in "An Essay on Satire", admitted the lampoon's use only against an enemy of the government, or in response to a personal attack against oneself. Still another view is expressed later, then, as a clear voice against general satire, in the 1730's when Pope, in letters to Caryl and Arbuthnot, declared t h a t he was now going to attack individuals because general satire simply was not effective. 6 And all along, at the same time t h a t personal satire was stigmatized, writers had felt the difficulties of presenting their satiric statements only in general terms. When Hall says t h a t his readers have complained that some of his satires were too transparent, 5 C h e s t e r H . C a b l e , " M e t h o d s of N o n - d r a m a t i c V e r s e S a t i r e , 1 6 4 0 - 1 7 0 0 " ( u n p u b l i s h e d d o c t o r a l d i s s e r t a t i o n , U n i v e r s i t y of C h i c a g o , 1948), p . 17. I a m i n d e b t e d t o t h i s s t u d y f o r t h e c o n t e n t s of t h e p r e f a c e s t o t h e L a t i n e d i t i o n s of H o r a c e , P e r s i u s , a n d J u v e n a l t h a t w e r e p u b l i s h e d a t t h e c e n t u r y ' s beginning. 6 See, f o r e x a m p l e , P o p e ' s l e t t e r t o A r b u t h n o t , A u g . 2, 1734. Q u o t e d in Imitations of Horace, e d . J o h n B u t t (vol. I V of The Poems of Alexander Pope, T w i c k e n h a m ed., L o n d o n , 1939), p . 313, w i t h d i s c u s s i o n i n " I n t r o d u c t i o n " , p p . x x f. a n d x x x i x .

36

PAKT TWO Not ridle-Iike obscuring their intent B u t packe-staffe plaine vttring what thing they ment, 7

he is surely revealing himself as a writer whose instincts were to write personal satire and who approached specificity, but whose readers did not feel right about his using this procedure. Hall protested against the pressure of contemporary taste by contrasting his times with the classical age, which he evidently believed to be under fewer such restraints: Y e Antique Satyres, how I blesse your daies, T h a t brook'd your bolder stile, their owne dispraise,

but agreed "our eares beene of a more brittle mold". 8 Another difficulty is reflected in Marston's, and later Wither's, protests that readers nevertheless read personal references into 'general' poems. As Marston wrote in The Scourge of Villanie (1598), he feared the reader who being ignorant, not knowing the nature of a Satyre, (which is vnder fained priuate names, t o note generall vices,) will needes wrest each fayned name to a priuate vnfained person.

And there was also the "too subtile" reader who bearing a priuate malice to some greater personage then hee dare in his owne person seeme to maligne, will striue by a forced application of m y generall reproofes to broach his priuate hatred.

There was no defense against this, and Marston says (and perhaps disingenuously) more in sorrow than anger, I durst presume, knew they how guiltlesse, and how free I were from prying into priuatenes, they would blush to thinke, how m u c h t h e y wrong themselues in seeking to iniure me. 9

His only defense is to repeat the defense used by Horace; 10 in Marston's version, " . . . I am free from endeuoring to blast any priuate mans good name. I f any one (forced with his owne guilt) will turne Virgidemiarum, "Prologue", 3 - 4 , p. 33. Ibid., V, iii, 5 - 7 , p. 83. 9 " T o him t h a t hath perused m e e " , in The Poems of John Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), p. 176. 10 Sermones, I I , i, 6 2 - 8 . 7

8

Marston,

ed.

VERISIMILITUDE AS EVIDENCE: ELIZABETHAN A N D JACOBEAN

37

it home and say Tis I, I cannot hinder him. Neyther do I iniure him." 1 1 We have heard this already from Lodge and Hall; and, according to Campbell, "these ideas became a commonplace of Renaissance criticism". 12 They were far more than this, however; they constituted a convention strong enough to delay the development of frankly personal formal satire in the same period t h a t saw personal attack in other forms, such as in the Nashe-Harvey controversy and on the stage. Observing the convention, then, as well as for other reasons, writers chose among other procedures for making a charge and backing it up. Restrained from naming particular persons and describing too revealingly their personal behavior, the writer usually structured his poem on the ostensibly fictional details of a single figure, or of a series of figures. How near any writer might come to particularizing with literal details, and so approach personal satire, depended on his discretion — or, for a while, his daring. And some wished to come very close, as one can see when Hall says with satisfaction, Labeo is whip'd and laughs mee in the face: Why? for I smite and hide the galled place. 13

He has phrased a comment, in other words, t h a t one or more quite specific "Labeos" would understand privately, and did - as the defensive "laugh" inadvertently reveals. I t is not surprising, then, t h a t the technique of abstracting and personifying human qualities was less often used than the thinly-veiled particular, which undoubtedly lent itself to the Elizabethan trend toward pictorial realism in literary forms. A charge to so broad a category as 'mankind' might be illustrated with concrete particulars in the poems most concerned with authentic and detailed evidence. B u t the more usual approach was to group as a class offenses of a narrower distribution, or to use a type figure given a Latin or a common English or no name, b u t so presented as to illustrate well 'his' addiction to the offense. A poem might thus be structured of the details of

11

The Scourge of Villanie, in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961). Hereafter cited as Scourge. 12 Oscar James Campbell, Gomicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, 1938), p. 40. 13 Virgidemiarum, IV, i, 37-8, p. 50.

38

PART TWO

a single figure, and so illustrate the type with considerable fullness and variety of detail, or it might use a series of 'characters' of like nature with each expanded more briefly. Unqualified reference to classes m a y be seen in Donne's " S a t y r V", in which Officers, Judges, and 'Suiters' occur as broad groups. Types are seen in Coscus, the lawyer in Donne's " I I " , a n d again in Lodge's series: Find me a niggard that doth want the shift, To call his cursed auarice good thrift? A rakehell (sworne to prodigalitie) That dares not terme it liberalitie? A letcher, that hath lost both flesh and fame, That holds not letcherie a pleasant game? 14

Lodge's series here is accompanied b y another series of type-figures, each developed with a name and a fuller cluster of characterizing details, e.g., He is a gallant fit to serue my Lord Which clawes, and sooths him vp at euerie word; That cries, when his lame poesie he heares, T'is rare (my Lord) t'will passe the nicest eares: This makes Anphidius welcome to good cheere; And spend his Master fortie poundes a yeere, And keepe his plaice-mouth'd wife in welts & guardes: For flatterie can neuer want rewardes.15

And the whole group constitutes the 'human' evidence for the generalization which is the thesis of the poem: t h a t the "world sooths sinne, because it sinfull is". I n the earlier satires, the type-figure more often occurs in a series; as the seventeenth century moves on, more poems appear t h a t are structured of the details of a single 'character'. 1 6 The series presentation is Marston's favorite, and he experiments with various means for incorporating the series into his total structure. "Satyre I " of Gertaine Satyres (1598) introduces t h e m in a conventional way: a "vizard-bifronted-Ianian r o u t " is announced in the opening lines, 14

"Satyre I", sig. B2 r . Ibid., sigs. Bl r -B1 T . 16 A well-known example of the multiple-character formal satire is Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot". 15

VERISIMILITUDE AS EVIDENCE: ELIZABETHAN A N D JACOBEAN

39

and five 'characters' follow which illustrate the thematic idea t h a t is expressed in the satire's title, "Quedam videntur, & non sunt". Each of these instances is fully elaborated, e.g., Tell me, browne Ruscus, hast thou Qyges ring, That thou presum'st as if thou wert vnseene? If not. Why in thy wits halfe capreall Lett'st thou a superscribed Letter fall? And from thy selfe, vnto thy selfe doost send And in the same, thy selfe, thy selfe commend? 17

And so on, for a total of fourteen lines. The poem closes with an additional group of three briefly-developed characters, who are in a contrasting relationship to the first series; the Satirist explains t h a t he can bear these latter types, for although they are troublesome they do not pretend to be something they're not. "Satyre I I " with its variant thesis ("Quedam sunt, & non videntur") is again basically a series of characters presented as evidence. "Satyre I I I " , in still another variation of this thematical and structural type, is made up of three characters, with brief statements interjected by the Satirist (sometimes in mid-character) t h a t sum up the particular qualities t h a t the details are illustrating. The third character is expressed through narrative detail rather than by description - and each character is followed by a passage of sometimes quite extensive reflection or moralizing. One more poem ("Satyre V") is of this same logical and organizational type, in still another variation; a long series of examples from mythology precedes the statement of the thesis that . . .petty thefts are payed and soundly whipt, But greater crimes are slightly ouerslipt.18

All of these four poems, then, are of a type in which a single item of contemporary human experience is represented through the use of a number of briefly-developed fictionalized type or class figures. Most remote from 'real' life, to be sure, is "Satyre V " with its substantiating evidence drawn entirely from classical mythology, for even the most ingenious reading fails to persuade one t h a t it is a poem a clef. On the other hand, the characters of human subjects, 17 Lines 5-10. In The Poems of John Marston, (Liverpool, 1961), p. 67. Hereafter cited as C. S. 18 Ibid., 35-6, p.'88.

ed. Arnold Davenport

40

PART TWO

although still explicit 'examples', are very often described with well-chosen, pointed concrete English detail (except for the persistently Latinate personal names) - as for example in the following passage from Marston's Certaine Satyr es: W h o would imagine yonder sober m a n , T h a t same deuout meale-mouth'd Precisean, T h a t cried good brother, hind sister, makes a duck A f t e r t h e Antique grace, can alwayes pluck A sacred booke, out of his ciuill hose, A n d a t th'op'ning, and a t our stomacks close Sayes with a t u r n ' d - v p eye a solemne grace Of halfe an houre, then with silken face Smiles on t h e holy crue, and t h e n doth cry O manners ! o times of impurity ! . . . 1 9

This is clearly a contemporary type, the Puritan, shown here in his affectations of manner t h a t have to do with his religious observations. The series presentation does not end with the Elizabethans; in fact in the hands of one 'R.C.' it gained certain refinements. I n The Times Whistle (1615), in the series he used to illustrate lasciviousness, the poet manages to introduce details and characters t h a t illustrate the variety of the offenses within one type of abuse. So we find, Philogonous who has seduced his neighbor's wife, the preacher Eulalius who keeps a mistress, Drugo who has just escaped the penalty of death for rape, Claudia who has caught a venereal disease from her fiance, Sodomeo who keeps a boy 20 - and so on, all individualized sketches t h a t taken together show the many ramifications of, in this case, the sexual impulse unchecked and encouraged. The series of characters thus served all its users as evidence, both to suggest an inductive process (by supplying numbers of instances) and to reveal in detail the nature and variety of the offense they were guilty of. The type-figure who by himself constitutes the single example is represented by the 'humorist' in Donne's "Satyr I " and the courtier in his "Satyr IV", in a number of the many poems of Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597-8), and in several of Marston's Scourge of 19

Ibid., " S a t y r e I I " , 55-64, pp. 73-4. "Satira 6", passim, ed. J . M. Cowper, E E T S X L V I I I (London, 1881), pp. 75-91. 20

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Villanie (1598). And as was said earlier, the number increases. Soon entire sets of poems are comprised of single-character satires: e.g., Thomas Middleton's Micro-cynicon (1599), Samuel Rowlands' The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine (1600), Henry Hutton's Follies Anatomie (1619). And when, not long after this, the custom of presenting satires in sets falls away, the single-character poem then often appears alone. 21 Donne's well-known "Satyr I " is a typical example of the poem structured oh the details of just one human figure. The victim is the anonymous "motley h u m o r i s t " - s o introduced and in fact nowhere referred to by any other name. Characterizing is done through details of action t h a t reveal with some fullness his extravagant, affected, naive, will-of-the-wisp nature, and through the several conversational exchanges between him and the Satirist. As it happens, no details of his personal appearance are given; what one comes to know about him is conveyed entirely through what he does and says. B u t the single-character presentation allows for some fullness of detail: the victim in this satire is shown in the complex of attitudes t h a t define him as a 'humorist'. I t is shown, b y his lack of concern for the Satirist's taste for study, t h a t he scorns learning; by his interest in the size of another's estate, t h a t he is materialistic; b y his unwillingness to walk other than b y the wall, t h a t he is too proud; in his valuing the company of "euery fine silken painted fool", t h a t he lacks perspective; in his elaborate rituals of courtesy, t h a t he is ludicrous; and so on. The singlecharacter-as-instance, thus, could offer a certain richness of evidence. I t was in such ways as these t h a t formal satirists from the first managed the representation of 'real' behavior through the use of fictionalized human figures — fictionalized because the writers accepted the convention t h a t actual people must not be specified. Personifications of human qualities and statements about mankind proved less popular than figures representing a human type or class, and for several decades these latter figures were used as the only allowable personae through which human behavior could be represented directly in satire. Given his choice of logical structure (the basic frame by which he would make his charge and offer the evidence t h a t it was true), 21

Young's The Universal Passion (1725-8) is an exception, with some of Pope's poems.

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PART TWO

the writer moved on to his decisions respecting diction and the speech patterns in which it would be cast - on which matters (with tone) individual satirists often enough had some theory to offer. We recognize the contemporary theory of language to which Hall refers in his often-quoted statement that he would surely be clear. The classical purpose of satire, in contrast to some of the other genres, was, as Hall knew, to inform men of the nature of everyday life, to show them the actual features of contemporary life, and particularly to show them where their daily errors lay. The general purpose would not be helped at all, for one, by the use of a mannered style with "symmetries and melodious cadences".22 The Ciceronian schemes and tropes, as Trimpi has put it, [were] not flexible enough to reproduce the variety of individual experience* Their inflexibility in denotative representation impairs m o s t severely the connotative precision in the definition of feeling. A rhetorical scheme or phrase, especially one that has become a conventional figure in the treatment of a particular subject, carries with it a commitment to p a s t connotation, which will become a burden in the definition of a new feeling or insight. The corrosion of p a s t associations, which are immediately evoked when the figure is used, m u s t be stripped away by separating the words and returning them, as if to a solvent, to their original referents. They can be recombined to take hold of a new experience and will have regained their original, unspecialized flexibility, which is necessary to explain such an experience. 2 3

Hall rejected Ciceronianism for the plain style. He then chose within it a range, from the 'loose' mode to far short of the most cryptic 'curt' - as his poems show. As he put his general principle, it was to "speake with my mouth open that I may be vnderstood", and further on, "[to] be plaine, with hope of profit [that is, by reforming his fellows], rather than purposely obscure only for a bare names sake". 24 He would not, that is, veil his meanings by duplicating the extremes of the terse, fragmentary, and elliptical manner characteristic of one kind of 'natural' speech.

Morris Croll, " 'Attic Prose' in the Seventeenth Century", SP, X V I I I (1921), p . 105. 23 Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, 1962), p. 15. 24 Virgidemiarum, " A Post-script", p. 99. The key terms in his statement could ambiguously refer to unclear allusions, except that the p a s s a g e is from a statement on 'manner', which he distinguishes from 'matter'. 22

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In contrast, William Goddard tells his readers to expect a verbal minimum from his Satirist, who is typified by the ancient stylists described by Vives: The most brief and clipped of all were t h e Lacedemonians, who used, for instance, certain very a b r u p t clauses [punctis] rather t h a n steady discourse [sermone]. This is n o t called speech, nor is there a n y disposition for oratory in t h e Spartans who prided themselves on being held t o be military men, more prepared to act t h a n t o speak, and who even would have preferred t o use gestures rather t h a n words if in t h a t way t h e y could have been understood. 25

As Goddard puts it, introducing his satires,

Mastif Whelp (1599):

E x p e c t noe fine phrase f r o m a Souldyers p e n n F o r (Reader) wee t h e bluntest are of m e n Our Elloquence we v t t e r with our swordes Makinge our deedes to pollishe o're our wordes,

and invited his contemporaries, . . . if thou likst a harshe vnpollisht vaine W h y then reade o're this infant of m y braine. 26

Neither the 'loose' nor the 'curt' mode was argued for as the only appropriate mode. And it was sometimes the case that a writer would stand for clarity and write other than clearly (as Marston at his most cryptic did). But objections to extremes of the curt mode continued - as in Henry Fitzgeffrey's description of a contemporary (in Satyres: and Satyrical Epigrams 1617): Takes he b u t so m u c h Paine, To write obscurely: adding so m u c h Braine As end his crabbed sencelesse verse in Rime • This might a Poet been in Perseus time. 27

Cleveland, though, was to support the 'crabbed' style in practice, and the author of a poem in praise of Martin Lluelyn's Men-Miracles (1646) even defended an aristocratic obscurity, in complimenting Lluelyn for including Things of a deepe uncommon marke, Beyond course eyes on this side darke, 25

De Batione Dicendi, I I , praefatio, in Joannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini Opera Omnia (Valencia, 1782), I I , p. 136. Quoted in Trimpi, p. 48. 26 (London), "To t h e R e a d e r " , sig. A2 r . 2 ' (London), " S a t y r a P r i m a " , sig. A5 r .

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PAßT

TWO

However he also reflected a continuing pressure for lucidity, in commending Things writ to all too, as to th'Best A t once a Dole of Wit and Feast,

and dwelt onLluelyn's clarity in general, and avoidance of 'rhetoric': Words thy minds Tiffany imploy'd To cloth thy matter not to Hide Which by their Genuine fitnesse tell T'expresse is not to sound and knell. 28

Within the range then, suggested by Goddard's stand for terse brevity and Hall's for clarity, many individual writers worked out their ideas of the speech appropriate to satire - which, according to the rhetoricians, involved at a minimum colloquial diction and a natural word order, and as a negative quality, the avoidance of elaborate and symmetrical schemata (particularly figures of sound). If figures were used - and they were not considered inappropriate — they were to be figures of wit, which would convey as effectively as possible the substance of the idea. Frequently used were antithesis and aphorism; metaphor was also valued for what it might contribute to exactness in expression. A passage from Marston illustrates the constructions of the curt style in an extreme form in the satires: Hange thy selfe, Drusus, hast nor arms nor braine? Some Sophy say, the gods sell all for paine, Not so. Had not that toiling Thebans steled back Dread poysoned shafts, liu'd he now, he should lack. Spight of his farming Oxe-staules. Themis selfe Would be casheir'd from one poore scrap of pelfe. If that she were incarnate in our time Shee might luske scorned in disdained slime, Shaded from honor by some enuious mist Of watry foggs, that fill the ill-stuft list Of faire Desert, ielous euen of blinde darke Least it should spie, and at their lamenes barke. 29

The role of this passage is to introduce the thematic idea: t h a t it is not merit which gets rewards in contemporary society, b u t force and guile. (This is the more likely, I think, of the two suggestions 28 29

J. H., "To the Author on his Poems", sig. A7 r . Scourge, V, 1-13, p. 130.

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made by Davenport.) 3 0 The Satirist's scorn and indignation have caused a strangulated delivery a t first, in which the subject of 'hast' is omitted in the opening question - and subject and verb fail to agree in the statement t h a t follows. An elliptical "Not so" is spit out. After t h a t a confused statement occurs, whose incoherence may be the result of an incompletely verbalized 'dread', for the speaker quickly - and without transition - supplies what is apparently the literal meaning of the figurative idea he'd just expressed: "Liu'd [Hercules] now . . . ". Still one more blurted thought, a fragment: the phrase beginning "Spight", which itself in omitting the preposition 'in' t h a t should precede it for full sense, is elliptical. At this point the Satirist's mood modulates, and he then begins to form complete (and in t h a t sense more coherent) constructions, with which he continues to his close. But up to t h a t point he had expressed himself in the rapid, shifting, fragmentary manner of the curt style, used here to represent bitter charged feelings. The curt style was also seen as suitable to represent an imperious mood, as in Samuel Rowlands' ludicrous 'seruing-man' who with his inferiors, "Stomps on the ground, &beteth both his thoms/Vnlesse he be commander where he corns." Some of his 'commands', then, sound like this: You damned whores, where are you? quieke eome heere, Dry this Tabacco. Fill a dozen a Beere: Will you be briefe? or long ye to be bang'd? Hold, take this Match; go light it and be hang'd 31

And it also lent itself to jaunty improvisation on a single theme - as here, in the address of R. C.'s Satirist to someone pretending to bravery: Doe not I know, for all thou lookest soe big, Thou never yet durst see a sillie pig Stueke to the heart ? A frog would make thee run ! Thou kill a man? No, no, thy mothers sonne, Her only son, was a true coward bred. I'le vndertake a sword shall strike thee dead, And never touch thee !32 30

Notes, p. 306. The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine (1600) "Satyre 3". In The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands (Hunterian Club ed,. 1880), vol. I, pp. 65-6. 32 The Times Whistle (London, 1615), "Satira 2", p. 25. 31

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PAET TWO

Still another Satirist accurately distinguishes the laconic style of a farmer who is offered a book in a shop, from the fuller 'loose' style of an articulate Puritan offered the same book. The Satirist quotes the farmer first: I t m a y b e g o o d (aaith h e e ) f o r t h o s e c a n u s e i t . S h e w e m e e King Arthur, Bevia, o r Sir Quye,

and then the Puritan: F y e o n ' t ( s a i t h he) t h a t a n y m a n s h o u l d b u y e S u c h B o o k e s p r o p h a n e of f a i n e d P o e t r i e , T h a t t e a c h e t h vice, w o r s e t h e n y o u r P l a y e s o n S t a g e s , A n d i t is a s h a m e t o o l d e a n d f u t u r e A g e s . 3 3

An easier 'natural' style was used as early as W y a t t . Here it is in a passage from the "Second Satire": Alas, m y P o y n z , h o w m e n do seke t h e best, A n d f y n d e t h e wourst b y error as t h e y stray ! A n d n o m a r v a i l l : w h e n s i g h t is s o o p p r e s t , A n d b l y n d e t h e g y d e , a n o n o w t e of t h e w a y G o e t h g y d e a n d all i n s e k i n g q u y e t e liff. 3 4

The simple diction is cast at one point into a set of parallel constructions ("seke . . . , fynde . . . ") to sharpen up the antithetical nature of the ideas they express. B u t the speaker does not cast into a second set of parallel forms the parallel ideas t h a t the sight is oppressed and the 'gyde' is blind. Connecting the two sets then is the casually elliptical, "And no marvaill" - with the neutral 'and' used comfortably, in place of the more rigorously logical 'which [is]', as it is used to relate "fynde the wourst" to its series (where a conjunction such as 'but' would relate it much more precisely). I n these several practices, W y a t t is following the 'loose' style. He does use a relatively high number of variations from normal word order in this short passage: "blynde the gyde", and "goeth gyde and all" - which itself is part of an inversion, in being preceded rather than followed by the adverbial modifier, "owte of the way".

33

H e n r y P a r r o t , The Mastive, or Yowng Whelpe of the Olde-Dogge. Epigrams and Satyrs ( L o n d o n , 1615), " T r a h i t . . . V o l u p t a s , " Big. I l r . 34 I n Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, e d . K e n n e t h M u i r ( L o n d o n ,

1949), pp. 189-90.

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With fewer of the inversions (which occur often throughout his poems), Wyatt's speech practices, too, become part of the common repertory of the formal satirists who wrote during the real rise of the genre in the 1590's, and who wished to represent with reasonable clarity an unplanned, accumulating sequence of thoughts as they rise, rather than the pre-analyzed effect of the Ciceronian period in which the parts of each of the subdivisions of the idea were cast each into its own set of symmetrical members and carefully laced together with the conjunctions t h a t showed their precise interrelationships. The loose style is Hall's choice for the following passage, in which the Satirist describes a miserly farmer in a series of syntactic additions linked, the next one to the one just stated, with the simple coordinating connectives ('and', 'else', 'or') t h a t show him to be expressing ideas as they rise, rather t h a n verbalizing them into a preformed, logically tight structure, the relationships having all been foreseen. The farmer rides to market, W i t h a m a u n d charg'd w i t h h o u s h o l d m a r c h a n d i s e W i t h egs, or w h i t e - m e a t e , f r o m b o t h D a y r i e s : A n d w i t h t h a t b y e s h e rost for s u n d a y - n o o n e , P r o u d h o w h e m a d e t h a t w e e k s prouision: E l s e is h e stall-fed o n t h e w o r k y - d a y W i t h browne-bread crusts s o f t e n e d in s o d d e n w h e y , Or water-grewell, or t h o s e P a u p s of m e a l T h a t Maro m a k e s his Simule, a n d Gybeale: Or once a w e e k e perhaps for n o u e l t y , R e e z ' d B a c o n soords shall f e a s t h i s f a m i l i e . . . 3 5

and so on. The link, 'else', is used by the Satirist to turn into a bypath from the line he was developing; the farmer's plan to stretch out the 'rost' for a week reminds him of the miserably thrifty fare the farmer usually serves. And another link is used imprecisely: the 'or' in "Or once a week" does not introduce an item strictly parallel to those t h a t preceed it - t h a t is, the preceding ones in the series have to do with food served daily during the week, and the addition linked by " o r " is an alternative for an occasional single day. B u t these little imprécisions characterize the flow of unpremeditated speech as the loose style represents it.

35

Virgidemiarum,

I V , ii, 2 7 - 3 6 , p. 55.

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PART TWO

The more usual choice of style is somewhere between the choppy, unlinked brevities of the extreme curt mode, and the loose mode t h a t is characterized b y a roving, extended, sometimes shifting syntax spliced with conjunctions t h a t often merely tack the next member on, and interlarded with parenthetical and absolute constructions that present the substance without insisting on a formal introduction or a more conventional merger. Examples from this range being abundant, as they make up the practice of the first satirists, they might conveniently be displayed in some of the ways t h a t they were handled then, within the metrical requirements of the decasyllabic couplet — for writers had to make their decisions respecting realism in this area, too. Poets had the job of expressing their deliberately-chosen irregular rhythms (those produced by avoiding parison and other devices of symmetry in the members of the clause) in metrically regular units. The individual writers met the challenge in either of the two possible ways. Donne often met it by ignoring the restraints of the single line, splitting the grammatical units, and letting not only parts b u t even split words run over to the next line: As women do in divers countries goe In divers habits, yet are still one kinde, So doth, so is Religion; and this blindnesse too much light breeds. 36

Again, more conspicuously, They are the mills which grind you, yet you are The winde which drives them; and a wastfull warre Is fought against you, and you fight it; they Adulterate lawe, and you prepare their way Like wittals. 37

Particularly in this latter passage, there are two rhythmic patterns in force: the one in which one half in each pair of clauses, in the three sets of antithetical statements, answers the other, and the one established by the decasyllabic line. The stronger is surely t h a t of the clausal relationships - t h a t is, the one t h a t has to do with stressing the contrasted sense units in the lines. And t h a t 36 "Satyr III", 66-9. In The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. CGrierson (Oxford, 1951), vol. I, pp. 156-7. 37 Op. cit., "Satyr V", 23-7, p. 169.

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pattern has the irregular rhythms of speech itself, since although the clauses utilize parallelisms, the second and third pairs of clauses are of unequal length. Donne's major concern seems to have been to give the surge of speech rhythms; as negative evidence of this, the rhyming words t h a t mark the rhythmic ends of the lines do not really stress sense elements, b u t appear partly to satisfy the formal requirement t h a t there be end rhyme. This effect of Donne's - the tug between meaning and formal structure - has been much discussed; in the opposition between the two rhythms here, however, it seems clear that Donne intended the speech rhythms to be strongly felt. Other formal satirists worked for the most part entirely within the conventional restrictions of the decasyllabic line, conveying the varied patterns of natural speech while at the same time observing the formal requirements of meter and rhyme. Hall was a particularly careful prosodist, in the sense t h a t the usual unit of his expression is the couplet, and his continued use of closed couplets for a series of lines gives a compactness to his discourse that typifies his style no matter what the subject or other mode of treatment. A particular feature of his work as compared to, say, Donne's is his management of complete rhetorical units in this brief metrical form: Old driueling Lolio drudges all he can, To m a k e his eldest sonne a Gentleman. W h o can despaire t h a t sees another thriue, By lone of twelue-pence to an Oyster-wiue? W h e n a craz'd scaffold, and a rotten stage, W a s all Naevius his heritage. N o u g h t spendeth he for feare, nor spares for cost: And all he spendes and spaires besides is lost. 38

As can be seen, the Satirist, advancing the four sense-items in four neat couplets, first states the generalization about Lolio, then offers an example of a situation t h a t assures Lolio t h a t he too can increase his estate, then a contrasting situation (of a father's failure to provide his son with a gentlemanly patrimony) which Lolio would avoid. The next item is a concise description of Lolio's particular method of saving: he spends nothing where he can avoid it, and where he must pays out as little as possible - remembering t h a t everything he spends diminishes his estate. And so on, in an easy 38

Virgidemiarum,

IV, ii, 1-8, p. 54.

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PART TWO

but carefully measured progress, with the colloquial effect sustained. The word order, for example, is normal throughout, with a single exception in "nought spendeth he . . . , nor spare". Additional possible features of this handling show up as the satire on Lolio continues. "Let giddy Cosmius", says the old miser, "change his choyce aray/Like as Turke his Tents thrise in a day", and ends his description of this peacock with what is a conventional observation, when he sees Cosmius as Bearing his paune-layd lands vpon his baoke As Snailes their shels, or Pedlers do their paoke,

but one that is cast in what will be a familiar Augustan line. However, instead of letting the line climax the section with its balanced and neat compression, the Satirist adds one more (and diffusely moralizing) couplet and dissolves that pointed effect: Who cannot shine in tissues and pure gold, That hath his lands and patrimony sold? 39

Hall does not invariably constrain the sense to a single couplet; an extended simile may run to four and more lines, as will, say, a piece of extended description, or an account of an action. However the lines are almost always end-stopped as are Lodge's, Rowlands', and others'. Within Hall's metrical patterns, then, there is often considerable syntactic variety, as here in a passage from a sardonic attack upon astrologers: In th'heauens High-streete are but a dozen roomes, In which dwels all in the world, past and to come: Twelue goodly Innes they are, with twelue fayre signes, Euer well tended by our Star-diuines. Euery mans head Innes at the horned Ramme, The whiles the necke the Black-buls guest became: The'arms by good hap, meet at the wrastling twinns, Th'heart in the way at the Blew-lion innes. The legs their lodging in Aquarius got, That is Bridge street of the heauen, I wot. The feet tooke vp the Fish with teeth of gold: But who with Scorpio log'd, may not be told. What office then doth the Star-gazer bear? 39

Ibid., 11-12, 15-6, pp. 54-5.

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Or let him be the heauens Ostelere: Or Tapsters some: or some be Chamberlaines, To wait vpon the gueste they intertaine. 40

Hall's method, it can be seen, is to use some free constructions and many near-parallel constructions, the latter providing variation freely within themselves for the effect of colloquial, extempore speech. But if there is evidence of a wish to work within the couplet form, or at least within the boundaries of the decasyllabic line, there is as much evidence of a wish to work flexibly with the formal rhythmic and metrical patterns. Donne's passages above are examples of speech units that make their own force felt, by running over lines and past the couplet close. And here is Marston's Satirist talking about the same human type as Hall's Lolio, the man who puts all his money into fancy wear: Now after two yeeres fast and earnest prayer, The fashion change not, (lest he should dispaire Of ever hoording up more faire gay clothes) Behold at length in London streets he showes. 41

And Thomas Middleton on 'Insatiate Cron' at the Bourse, a writhen-faced mass Of rotten mouldering clay. . . .42

Wither, then, in his Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), is simply continuing the line of those who, like Donne, Marston, Middleton, and others before him, felt that the rhythms of extempore speech were best represented by a combination of end-stopped and run-on lines. His Satirist is speaking against revenge: He that condemns m y milde and gentle course, May in his wisdome light vpon a worse. I must confesse, I let his error passe; Nor have I done amisse; for say an Asse Had strooke me with his heeles; how should I quit 40

Ibid., II, vii, 27-42, p. 30. This is the passage that Milton, in his Apology for Smectyrrmuus, it will be remembered, criticized heartily for being too 'low' for a satire. But Milton was one of those who allied satire with tragedy. 41 C. S., n i , 7-10, p. 147. 42 Micro-cynicon (London, 1599), "Satire I", 23-4. In The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1886), vol. VIII, p. 118.

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PART TWO

The harme he doth me? You wold blame my wit If I should kill him. If I went to Lawe; Who would not count me the most Asse? a daw; Or worat of fools? 43

In short, given the regular decasyllabic couplet as the vehicle of their prosody, satirists early introduced a rich variety of ways to make it carry the irregularities of informal, spontaneous speech as still another way of achieving the desirable effect of verisimilitude. In other aspects of the poem, too, satirists chose, emphasized, or originated devices that would give as realistic, immediate a feeling as possible. Considering the poem as the representation of an action, for instance, one can see that the very opening was regarded as capable of introducing a lively situation - even one already under way. The typical English poem, in fact, often springs from a specific present occasion, which its opening quickly and dramatically establishes. The Satirist may just have reached the bursting point of his impatience: Shall I still myeh in silence and give ayme To other wits which make court to bright fame? A schoole boy still, shall I lend eare to other, And myne owne private Muses musicke smother? Especially in this sinne leapered age? 44

Or: Who'd not at venture Write? So many waies A man may proue a Poet now a daies ? Does Nature Witt afford to break a lest? This is a Poet: and his friends protest He is to blame he Writes not. . , 45

Lodge's Satirist has just learned something disconcerting about his friend: I heare of late (but hould it verie strange) (That such vaine newes is common in the change) How being old, and drawing to the graue, Thou waxest greedie, and desir'st to saue. 46 George Wither, "Satire 5", in Wither's Juvenilia, Part 1 (Spenser Society Publ., London, 1871), vol. IX, p. 59. Hereafter cited as Abuses. 44 Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia (Shakespeare Association Facsimile No. 2, Oxford, 1931), "Satyra prima", sig. C2V. 46 Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres: and Satyrical Epigrams (London, 1617), "Satyra Prima", sig. A5 r . 46 A Fig for Momus, "Satyre 4", sig. F2 V . 43

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53

And Donne's Satirist has just returned from an intensely disturbing experience in Court: Well; I may now receive, and die; My sinne Indeed is great, but I have beene in A Purgatorie, such as fear'd hell is A recreation to, and scarse map of this. . . I had no suit there, nor new suite to shew, Yet went to Court.47

One often-used opening finds the Satirist stimulated to comment when one or more persons who deserve reprimand come into his line of vision. This happens in Marston's Certaine Satyres: Yon is a youth, whom how can I ore'slip. Since he so jumpe doth in my mashes hit? 48

The opening, then, can disclose to the reader a situation under way, and preferably plunge him into it at a crucial moment - a t the start of the Satirist's reflections upon an experience he has just had, or better still at the very time something is striking his eye and critical sensibilities and shocking him into statement. The surprise in his response is represented often enough with an exclamation in the opening element. "Who knows not Zodon? Zodon!" says the Satirist in Middleton's "Satire II". 4 9 And in another mood, Guilpin's Satirist exclaims, "Marry and gup ! have I then lost my cap ?" 50 Later Cleveland will start off, "How, Providence ? and yet a Scottish crew?" 5 1 B u t not always is the Satirist startled into a comment. Rowlands' speaker is shown as his awareness is caught and only gradually settles on what is of real interest to him: Oh, let the Gentlewoman have the wall, I know her well; tis Mistris; What d'ye call. It should be shee, both by her Maske and Fanne: And yet it should not, by her Serving-man; For if mine eyes do not mistake the foole, He is the Vsher of some Daunoing Schole, The reason why I doe him such suppose, Is this: Mee thinkes he daunceth as he goes. 52 " "Satyr IV", 1-4, 7-8, pp. 140-1. 48 "Satyre III", 3-4, p. 77. 49 Micro-cynicon, p. 120. 50 Skialetheia, "Satyra tertia", sig. C7V. 61 "The Rebel Scot", line 1. In The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. John M. Berdan (Yale University Press, 1911), p. 146. 52 The Letting. . ., "Satire 3", 1-8, p. 57.

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One might point out t h a t here, in the attention first to the woman (and the nice detail of the name t h a t ' s slipped his mind), t h e n to the t r u e subject - the affected serving-man — there is a very realistic indirect, irregular movement which finally brings the Satirist's focus to where it will stay for the remainder of his discourse. Such details t h a t establish the occasion of the satiric utterance help to give it an air of authenticity b y tying it to 'real' life. Many writers tried to reveal early also the specific dramatis personae of the action - again as a way of bringing the scene down t o concrete terms by identifying as a particular character the opposing partner in the dialogue, whether in a face-to-face contact or an epistolary one. Among writers of the epistolary satire, Lodge, for example, used the obvious means of furnishing his "Satyre I " with the subtitle, "To Master E. Dig(bie)", and proceeded, Digbie whence comes it that the world begins, To winke at follies, and to sooth vp sinnes. . . 5 3

a n d so on. The Satirist's audience is thus established. N o t all writers were careful on this point. A certain number even cheerfully worked against a colloquial effect by addressing themselves to a Muse, and against a more familiar particularity b y incating no h u m a n auditor a t all. Donne does this in his " S a t y r V " ; Thou shalt not laugh in this leafe, Muse, nor they Whom any pitty warmes. 54

Marston occasionally used such an opening, or something like this: Grim-fac'd Reproofe, sparkle with threatning eye Bend thy sower browes in m y tart poesie. 55

The invocation knew no particular period of greatest popularity; in 1615, there appeared H e n r y P a r r o t ' s The Mastive, or Young Whelpe of the Olde-Dogge, whose second satire begins: Howie on yee Satyrs, whilst I sit and marke How wolvish Envie at m y Muse doth barke,56

63

A Fig for Momus, sig. B l r . Lines 1-2, p. 168. 66 Scourge, I X , 1-2, p. 158. 56 Sig H 4 r . 64

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In 1619, Henry Hutton began the first satire of his Follies Anatomie as follows: Muse, shew t h e rigour of a satyres art, I n harsh sarcasmes, dissonant and smart. 5 7

Other writers who rejected the invocation as an unrealistic touch in what was, after all, a discussion on the model of the Socratic dialogue, still might fail to disclose the exact identity of their companion or companions, or leave the matter in the air for a while. Hall's Satirist, particularly in the earlier of the forty-odd poems of Virgidemiarum, often launched a rather general address, like the following on writers of love lyrics. Great is t h e folly of a feeble braine, Ore-ruld with loue, and tyrannous disdaine: For loue, how-euer in t h e basest brest I t breeds high thoughts t h a t feede t h e fancy best, Y e t is he blinde, and leades poore fooles awrie, While they h a n g gazing on their mistres-eie. The loue-sicke Poet, whose importune prayer Repulsed is with resolute dispayre, H o p e t h to conquer his disdainfull dame, W i t h publique plaints of his concerned flame. Then poures he forth in patched Sonettings His loue, his lust, and loathsome flatterings: As t h o t h e staring world hangd on his sleeue, When once he smiles, to laugh: and when he sighs, to grieue. Careth the world, thou loue, thou liue, or die ? Careth t h e world how fayre t h y fayre one bee? Fond wit-old, t h a t would'st lode t h y wit-lesse head W i t h timely homes, before t h y Bridall bed. Then can he terme his durtie ill-fac'd bride L a d y and Queene, and virgin deifide: Be shee all sootie-blacke, or bery-browne, Shees white as morrows milk, or flaks new blowne. And t h o she be some dunghill drudge a t home, Y e t can he her resigne some refuse roome Amids t h e well-knowne stars: or if not there, Sure will he Saint her in his Calendered 8

The Satirist has opened sententiously, his observation launched and then elaborated to no specified waiting auditory. He lists some 57

I n Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages (Percy Society Publ., London, 1842), vol. VI, p. 10. 58 Liber I, vii, p. 18.

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general effects of love on men, then some particular ones on the "loue-sicke Poet". A shift of person later in the poem suddenly introduces a direct address: Careth the world thou loue, thou liue, or die? Careth the world how fayre thy fayre one bee? Fond wit-old, that would'st lode thy wit-lesse head With timely homes, before thy Bridall bed.

B u t then the Satirist immediately turns away, shifting again to thirdperson forms and returning to his critical discussion of the effects of love on any poet who "can terme his durtie ill-fac'd bride/Lady and Queene . . . ". The whole poem, then, seems to be spoken to writers of love lyrics generally, partly describing them (in the third person sections), and partly addressing them in the large, as offenders. Criticisms aimed by the Satirist a t an otherwise un-particularized group are heard again as Brathwaite's Satirist calls out, "Lands-lord to thee, addresst to speake I am". 59 B u t there is also the type of poem in which the Satirist seems a t first to be speaking to the world at large, and then reveals, when he salutes them by name, that his audience is right there and made u p of particular individuals. I n the following poem (quoted earlier), the Satirist comes down to dramatic particulars by the third line, where he identifies by class the group he is speaking to, and then in two more lines specifies by name individuals within it who are standing there before him. I cannot show in strange proportion, Changing m y hew like a Camelion. But you all-canning wits, hold water out, Yee vizarded-bifrontcd-iaman route, Tell me, browne Ruseus, hast thou Oyges ring, That thou presums't as if thou wert vnseene? If not. Why in thy wits halfe capreall Lett'st thou a superscribed Letter fall? And from thy selfe, vnto thy selfe doost send, And in the same, thy selfe, thy selfe commend. . . ?60

This is more in the spirit of the most usual handling in these poems - which is to present a situation t h a t allows for a living dialogue between the Satirist and individuals in his audience, 59 "To the Lands-lord wheresoeuer", in A Strappado for the Diuell, (London, 1615), ed. J. W. Ebsworth (Lincolnshire, 1878), p. 211. 60 C. S., "Satyre I", 1-10, p. 67.

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whether the Satirist addresses the offender directly or discusses him with a Companion. I n order to establish it quickly as a 'real', personal exchange, the writer often managed things so t h a t the Satirist named his auditor in the very opening line, as: A t h e o s ! forbear t o s p e a k e such b l a s p h e m i e !61

and T h i n k ' s t t h o u i t m a k e s t h y r e p u t a t i o n faire I f b y t h y m u d d y t o n g u e t h o u e a n s t impaire Another man?62

and Mounsier B r a v a d o , are y o u c o m e t ' o u t - f a c e , W i t h y o u r m o u c h a t o e s , gallants of s u c h p l a c e ? 6 3

The role of Companion will be discussed more fully in a later section, b u t some illustrations may be given here of the Satirist's audience as clearly Companion rather than satiric butt. Donne, in his "Satyr I I " and again in "IV", used the Companion as a silent and nonparticipating auditor. The Satirist opens "Satyr IV", an account of his visit to Court, with the sardonic opening quoted earlier and then proceeds with his narrative to him: I h a d n o suit there, nor n e w suite t o s h e w , Y e t w e n t t o Court. . , 6 4

The Companion makes no response; his role is simply t h a t of auditor. Donne's "Satyr I I " is, it will be recalled, a reflection on the evils t h a t lawyers do; the Satirist again addresses his Companion directly. Sir: t h o u g h (I t h a n k e God for it) I do h a t e P e r f e c t l y all t h i s t o w n e . . . 6 5

and continues with his comments. The presence of the Companion is not mentioned again until near the end, when the Satirist seems to include him in his final, ironic thought: (Oh) w e allow, Good workes a s good, b u t o u t of f a s h i o n n o w L i k e old rich w a r d r o p s . . . 6 6 61 62 63 64 65 66

The Times Whistle (1615), "Satira I " , line 1, p . 4. J o h n Andrewes, The Anatomy of Baseness (1615), sig. E 3 r . Follies Anatomie (1619), [Satire 4], p . 17. L i n e s 7 - 8 , p . 159. L i n e s 1 - 2 , p. 149. L i n e s 1 0 9 - 1 1 1 , p . 154.

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Hall's Satirist complains to what is clearly a Companion; Can I not touch some vpstart carpet-shield Of Lolios Sonne, that neuer saw the field, Or Taxe wild Pontice for his Luxuries, But straight they tell me of Tiresias eyes ?67

And Brathwaite similarly directs a question to a silent Companion: Now in the name of fate what Saint is she That keeps a shop of publicke Brothelrie V68

These, then, are some of the opening means by which English poets gave an air of real and immediate life to the context in which the satiric statements were presented: in the liveliest poems, by revealing an authentic and deeply motivating occasion for the Satirist's outburst, and often by providing a clear sense of the contemporary audience with whom he is having his dialogue, which in turn duplicated the ordinary diction and natural patterns of colloquial speech. As drama, moreover, many of the poems managed some action within the framework of discourse. A setting is often suggested, usually (and conventionally) some public place, like the sidewalk in Hall's "Liber I I I , iv": Were yesterday Polemons Natales kept, That so his threshold is all freshly stept With new-shed bloud? could hee not sacrifice Some sorry morkin that vnbidden dies. . . But he must needes his Posts with blood embrew And on his way-doore fix the horned head, With flowers, and with rib-bands garnished? 69

The location of Hutton's action is even more clearly the street: Pack hence ! it is an humor to contend, In a bravado, with your neerest friend. Wee'l not contest or squabble for a wall. 70

67

Virgidemiarum, IV, iv, 1-4, p. 62. Richard Brathwaite, "A Satyre called the Coniborrowe", 1-2, in A Strappado for the Diuell (1615), ed. J. W. Ebsworth (Lincolnshire, 1878), p. 150. 69 Virgidemiarum, III, iv, 1-4, 6—8, p. 38. 70 Follies Anatomie [Satire 4], p. 17. 68

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So is t h a t of Guilpin's: Here corns a Coach (my Lads) let's make a stand, And take a view of blazing starres at hand: Who's here? Who's here? Now trust me passing faire, Thai're most sweet Ladies. . . 71

The locations are usually merely indicated, and usually public and urban. Donne's "Satyr I " (like its imitations by Guilpin and Marveil) is exceptional in its private setting as well as in the fullness with which it is detailed. The reader is helped further to visualize the scene when the Satirist's remarks reveal such nice details as t h a t the offender is within his line of vision but out of earshot: Yon is a y o u t h . . , 72

Very often, of course, the victim and Satirist are close enough to converse: Write, poetaster: f y for shame, your dayes Will dy without remembrancers of praise. 73

I n half a line — " W a y for an innocent, ho !"74 - Thomas Middleton's Satirist suggests t h a t the victim is moving toward or near him. And so on, the writers in these ways giving to the satiric statement about fictional people an apparently factual concrete setting. A device of action frequently used was simply to have the Satirist begin to address individuals one by one, pointing out the flaws of each. I n his Certaine Satyres, "Satyre I " , Marston varies this pattern to overcome its unrealistic symmetry, by having the Satirist address the first two in a series directly, using the second person form of address, and then shift to the third person form, to describe rather than speak directly to individuals among the remaining offenders. The effect of this handling by the Satirist is to p u t himself first in a position against them all as the sole critic, and then, having drawn ridicule down upon the first two (and got the rest to laugh or sneer at them), to have thus subtly shifted the remaining ones to his side as allies. They thus become a group of critics, 71

Skialetheia, "Satyra secunda", sig. C5T. 0. S., I l l , 3, p. 77. 73 Hutton, Follies Anatomie [Satire 5], p. 19. 74 Micro-cynicon, "Satire VI", p. 134. 72

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whose total weight is directed by him against the remaining individual offenders among them. This strategy can be demonstrated with the Satirist's attack on one Tubrio. The Satirist has already addressed the first two on their flaws, then changes his method: Great Tubrios feather gallantly doth waue, Full twenty falls doth make him wondrous braue. Oh golden Ierkin! royall arming coate ! Like ship on Sea, he on the land doth flote.

One voice calls out in Tubrio's defense: He's gone, he's shipt, his resolution Pricks him (by heauen) to this action.

B u t the Satirist knows Tubrio better: The poxe it doth: not long since I did view The man betake him to a common stew. And there (I wis) like no quaint stomack't man Eates vp his armes. And warres munition His wauing plume, falls in the Brokers chest.

He turns then to address Tubrio, who apparently has been trying to make himself small: But now, thou that did'st march with Spanish Pike before, Come with French-pox out of that brothell dore. The fleet's return'd. . .' 5

and so on. Marston has in these ways turned a potentially static and unrealistic situation - t h a t in which the Satirist on some apparently social occasion addresses a series of offenders - into one in which the characters act and interact in a quite human and credible manner. A related and equally simple device used by the English poets is to bring the Satirist and the offenders to a site where they will pass before his eyes. Again Marston and others develop as realistic a dramatic action as possible upon this pattern. Marston's Gertaine Satyres, "Satyre I I I " , introduces the Satirist as commenting in full to his Companion about first one offender visible at a distance to both of them, and then another. The Satirist is then reminded, in his disgust, of still another foolish person - and in telling the Companion about him, shifts the mode from description n

0. S., I, 89-99, 105-7, pp. 69-70.

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to narration. "When my eares receau'd a fearefull s o u n d / T h a t he was sicke", he says of this third person, " I went", and there I found Him layd of loue, and newly brought to bed Of monstrous folly, and a frantique head. 76

and so on. This story in turn reminds the Satirist of "spruce Duceus" whom the Companion knows, too; the Satirist therefore introduces just a few typical details respecting him. And the series of figures which the satire has to do with has thus been presented, but again with a rhetorical versatility t h a t attempted to turn what might have been an awkward parade into something produced by quite credible spontaneous reaction to a physical situation. And the very naturalness of the action, involving as it does an associative process in which the Satirist's memory is stimulated by a figure he sees before him - is, I suggest, an effect deliberately sought for its contribution to the effect of truth-to-life in the whole poem. The problems of presenting a series of figures were met in other ways by other poets. Henry Parrot contrived an action by using a single object which he had each of his figures react to in turn. His thesis is t h a t 'envy' lies in every man's heart; the setting of the satire is a bookseller's stall; a procession of figures is again presented, here as evidence of the numbers of those who are guilty of the offense. These single figures are unified, not only by the device of the common setting, b u t by their handling and commenting on a single article, the Satirist's book. First comes a Statesman to the Stationer And many better Bookes hee passing over B y chaunce findes this, whereon he reades a while Then bytes the lippe, then frownes, then gives a smile, And to the Seller sayes such fiery braines Should warme the prison to reward their paines. Becomes it any man of his profession Reprove us of our manners, or transgression. Away goes hee: Next comes my gallant Dycer His ordinarie stomacke is more nicer Who asks for new books; this the stationer showes him Straight sweares 'tis naught unles the Poet knowes him. 76

Ibid., I l l , 55-8, p.. 78.

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Nor will hee read a Line; this Fortunes Mynion Likes forsooth nothing but his owne opinion. The mending Poet takes it next in hand Who having oft the Verses over-scan'd, O filching streight, doth to the Stationer say Here's foure lines stolne from forth my new last play. And that hee'l sweare, even by the Printers stall Although hee knowes 'tis false hee speakes in all.

And so on, as an Inns-of-Court man, a Country-Farmer, and a Puritan inspect the book. 77 The a t t e m p t to tie the illustrations to real life is there; the Satirist himself in fact is used to give authenticity to his satiric thesis; it is his book they are looking over, and the details of their reactions are presented as the Satirist's experience of them while he stands nearby, observing. The particular usefulness of the Companion in the attainment of verisimilitude was early recognized b y English satirists. I have illustrated the means b y which the Companion was introduced into Donne's satires " I I " and "IV". I n both these poems the Companion has served no other ostensible function than t h a t of an attentive auditor to what is, essentially, the Satirist's monologue. His role, however, has a psychological importance in the total effect of the poem - in the following sense. No matter how minimal his place is in the action, he by his presence provides a target (in this type of satire) for the Satirist's remarks, which otherwise might be felt b y the reader to be addressed to himself. By the use of this device, the reader is both distanced from the action (which does not technically involve him anyway) and at the same time is a spectator as it goes on before his eyes. The Companion is thus a vital factor in the achieving of verisimilitude, in the structure in which the Satirist is presented as addressing other than the offenders themselves. The Companion as simply there, was also used by Marston, as in "Satyre I V " of The Scourge of Villanie (1598). " I marry Sir, here's perfect honestie", 78 says the Satirist with irony, and goes ahead with his description (to a silent Companion) of a series of individuals who swear t h a t they will reform their ways 'tomorrow' b u t for whom tomorrow is somehow still too soon. By the simple device of having the Satirist continue to direct 77 78

The Mastive, sigs. H 4 v - I l r Line 1, p. 118.

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remarks to the Companion, the Companion takes on some dramatic form and value himself. The nature of the Satirist's comments may even suggest something of a personality in the Companion; he may be taken, for example, for the sort t h a t would find the figures as ludicrous or appalling, or whatever, as the Satirist does. Marston's fullest and most versatile use of the Companion, in "A Cynicke Satyre" (Scourge, "Satire VII"), has been illustrated in Chapter I. Efforts to use a Companion so fully appear again in Edward Guilpin's Skialetheia (1598). I n one of the five poems in this set, the Satirist has several Companions. The opening has been referred to earlier: the group stops a coach, and the Satirist says, Who's here? Who's here? now trust me passing faire, Thai're most sweet Ladies.

An immature boy among the Companions misses the irony in the Satirist's tone and agrees, "Mary and so they are". The Satirist quickly 'schooles' him: Why thou young puisne art thou yet to learne, A Harper from a shilling to diseerne?

They have been on other such sorties, and the boy should have learned from the experience: I had thought the last mask which thou caperedst in Had eatechiz'd thee from this errors sinne, Taught thee S. Martins stuffe from true gold lace, And know a perfect from a painted face: Why they are Idols, Puppets, Exchange babies, And yet (thou foole) tak's them for goodly Ladies: Where are thine eyes?' 9

The body of the poem is comprised of the Satirist's description of the cosmetic means used by the women in the coach to cover their poxed and aging faces. The Satirist is, in a conventional procedure, pointing offenses out to his Companion; Guilpin's enrichment of this procedure has been to provide a background (the companion's youth, and his failure so far to have observed these things on his own), and a reason for the Satirist thus to feel an urgency in making the lesson stick this time. Although the young Companion does not speak again, the Satirist retains his attention, (and the reader's sense of his presence) by addressing the boy directly from time to time. 79

"Satyra secunda", C5 v -C6 r .

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Guilpin's situation, to be sure, is a t bottom one unlikely ever to take place in 'real' life, a n d in fact the Satirist rather a b r u p t l y brings his remarks to a close when he realizes t h a t t h e 'Ladies' have (understandably) driven on. B u t a p a r t from this, the scene involving the Companion is handled with an a t t e m p t both a t realism in itself a n d a t enlarging the role of the Companion and shaping it to function as a significant element in the whole poem. I t is the Companion whose ignorance motivates the Satirist to educate him, and, as he does so, t h e Satirist expresses the criticisms Guilpin intended to offer. And the experience is presented as it is happening: the young puisne is apprehending a t r u t h he had not seen before. 8 0 Guilpin used the Companion as a versatile device in one other satire of the five t h a t comprised liis Skialetheia (1598). F o r this poem, " S a t y r a quinta", Guilpin borrowed the Satirist from Donne's " S a t y r I " 8 1 and altered the role of the 'motley humorist' from t h a t of satiric b u t t to t h a t of Companion. I t is the Satirist's voice one hears throughout most of Guilpin's poem, first protesting against the Companion's wish to take him out for a walk on the city streets, and then criticizing the appearance of the various men they encounter there. B u t the Companion here again has the stronger personality of the two; he takes the initiative, and although the Satirist protests against going, he does follow along. This context gives the satiric statement a dimension t h a t it might n o t otherwise have; the Satirist, t h a t is to say, m a y be extra dour toward those he sees because he has been drawn unwillingly away f r o m his solitude in the first place. This is implied when the Companion finally breaks in on t h e monologue of eloquent distaste t h a t has been flowing f r o m the Satirist since the two of t h e m started off together. The Satirist has noticed still another offending sight, a Hamlet-like figure: But see yonder (he says) One like the vnfrequented Theater Walkes in darke silence and vast solitude, 80 It is, however, a credit to Guilpin's greater wisdom in such matters that instead of having the Companion docilely agree that he knows better now, the Satirist finds that by the time he finishes his unimaginatively long lesson, he has lost his audience's attention. In disgust he says, ". . .I'me a foole,/ Which talk to deaf eares, & dull stocks do schoole" - sig. C7V. 81 Although Donne's satires were still unpublished, the close parallels between the opening scene of Guilpin's "Satyra quinta" and Donne's "Satyr I" have long invited the supposition that Guilpin, like others, saw Donne's work in manuscript.

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Suited to those black fancies which intrude, Vpon possession of his troubled breast: But for blacks sake he would looke like a ieast, For hee's cleane out of fashion.

The Companion refuses to take the black-suited fellow so seriously: What he? I think the Genius of antiquitie, Come to complaine of our varietie, Of tickle fashions.

The Satirist: Then you iest I see. Would you needs know? he is a malecontent.

The Companion, urging a more specific charge: A Papist?

The Satirist, unwilling to be pinned down to such a limiting particular, answers testily: no, nor yet a Protestant, But a discarded intelligencer,

and impatiently shifts the subject to the next offending figure t h a t comes into view. The Companion has thus been used here again as a prime mover of the action; it is he who has manoeuvered the Satirist into a position where a flow of satiric comment will be stimulated. And the circumstances of the Companion's manoeuver have to some extent determined the degree of acerbity in the Satirist's reactions to the 'vanities' he sees on the streets. The Satirist can finally stand it no longer: Enough of these then, and enough of all, I may thanke you for this time spent, but call Henceforth I'le keepe m y studie, and eschew, The scandall of my thoughts, m y follies view. 82

He too recognizes t h a t the Companion is the initiator of the action. After Guilpin, the Companion receded for some decades as a figure t h a t took an effective role in the action itself. He becomes again the silent auditor (in poems in which the Satirist describes 82

Ibid,., sig. D7 V .

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rather than addresses his victims),who nevertheless by his presence provides a live dramatic situation for what otherwise might seem a monologue to an unspecified auditor. Many poems continued to be written, however, t h a t used the Companion in this diminished role, and in them the Companion was often not addressed again after an initial remark in the opening which established the dramaticallj^necessary fact t h a t this is a present action and a dialogue. And in other poems of description (rather than of other rhetorical elements), there may be no such indication t h a t the discourse is directed to a sympathetic person present there on the scene; a reader familiar with the convention of the Companion, then, presumably must simply assume his presence. Some of the satires in succeeding decades t h a t use the Companion merely as silent audience or in another such minimal (though dramatically important) role are Richard Brathwaite's "A Satyre called the Coniborrowe" (1615), Thomas Scot's "A Description of Monsieur Pandorsus . . . " and "Sarcasmus Mundi" (both 1616), Henry Fitzgeffrey's lively "Satira Prima" (1617), Abraham Holland's ' AContinued Inquisition against Paper-Persecutors" (1625), and to project into the Caroline period, Cleveland's "The Rebel Scot" (c. 1644), Marvell's "Flecknoe" (1645), and "A Satyr against Hypocrites" (1655) b y Milton's nephew, J o h n Phillips. The figure continues in use in Augustan satire: in fact, in Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind" (1679) the Companion emerges again to take a significant role in the dialogue and in the action. Wherever one looks, one can find efforts to produce verisimilitude — with particular respect to representing the action as just occurring. To those means illustrated above, one should add the effect of someone in the poem just learning something essential - as when the Companion introduced fresh offenders to the Satirist's attention (in Marston's Scourge, "Satyre V I I " , for example), and when the Companion himself was educated (as in Guilpin's Skialetheia, "Satyra secunda", during the attack on the "sweet Ladies"). There is also a certain complexity in the Guilpin satire, in the use of an ingenue character - the young 'puisne' - who becomes an object of satire himself (within the broad plan of satirizing the aging, painted women in the coach). There are thus various levels of awareness a t work in the poem, and variously spaced moments of insight: the Satirist understands the real nature of the "sweet Ladies"; the boy thinks they are truly 'sweet'. The Satirist gains

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his insight into the boy - as we do - when the boy speaks and reveals his naivete. And the boy learns something about the women when the Satirist explains them to him. Since the explanation constitutes the bulk of the poem, an extended double satire is sustained, in which the boy's foolish ignorance is aired with each additional point the Satirist makes to relieve it. Thomas Middleton showed the realistically unfolding quality of life in still another, and complex way, in his "Wise Innocent". The opening line has been given elsewhere, as setting the scene and suggesting that the Satirist and the 'Innocent' are approaching one another: W a y for an innocent, ho ! What, a poor fool ? Not BO, pure ass. Ass ! where went you to school ? With innocents. That makes the fool to prate. Fool, will you any? Yes, the fool shall ha't. Wisdom, what shall he have? The fool at least. Provender for the ass, ho ! stalk up the beast. What, shall we have a railing innocent? No, gentle gull, a wise man's precedent. Then forward, wisdom. Not without I list. Twenty to one this fool's some satirist. Still doth the fool haunt me; fond fool, begone ! No, I will stay, the fool to gaze upon. Well, fool, stay still. Still shall the fool stay? no. Then pack, simplicity ! Good innocent, why so ? Nor go nor stay, what will the fool do then? Vex him that seems to vex all other men. 'Tis impossible; streams that are barr'd their course Swell with more rage and far more greater force, Until their full-stuft gorge a passage makes Into the wide maws of more scopious lakes. Spite me ! not spite itself can discontent My steeled thoughts, or breed disparagement: Had pale-fac'd coward fear been resident Within the bosom of me, innocent, I would have hous'd me from the eyes of ire, Whose bitter spleen vomits forth flames of fire. A resolute ass ! O for a spurring rider ! A brace of angels ! What, is the fool a briber? Is not the ass yet weary of his load ? What, with once bearing of the fool abroad? Mount again, fool. Then the ass will tire, And leave the fool to wallow in the mire. Dost thou think otherwise ? good ass, then begone ! I stay but will the innocent get on.

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What, wilt thou needs of the fool bereave me? Than pack, good, foolish ass ! and so I leave thee. 83

The effort here is to display the fool's qualities at the moment t h a t they are displaying themselves to the Satirist. The Satirist initiates the attack, and (in my reading of the poem as a dialogue) the fool ironically reveals t h a t he is wiser than the Satirist believed him to be (8). The Satirist tries to keep the upper hand, and then to get rid of him, b u t the fool is persistent in staying on to 'vex' the Satirist (16). The Satirist swells to a lofty metaphor t h a t tells the fool he may be swept away as b y a tidal wave if his anger breaks over him; the fool unexpectedly answers in kind, in fully as grand a style (21-26), and then turns the tables by offering the Satirist a coin to be on his way. And so on, through this poem which reveals an eccentric dramatically, through showing him in the very performance of some of his eccentricities. These instances of live drama are remarkable because of their vividness. A poem, for instance, which teaches t h a t the jealous man is a demoralized man, might have the Satirist describe the customary, or past, actions of one or a series of jealous men. B u t Guilpin's Satirist displays a man in the very act of showing his jealousy: See how Trebatio yonder haunts his wife, And dares not loose sight of her for his life: And now there's one speakes to her, mark his grace, See how he basts himself in his owne greace: Note what a squint askew he casts.

And another, with even more fully-observed, evolving detail: Yonder goes Gaelius playing fast and loose With his wiues arm, but not for loue God knowes, Suspition is the cause she well doth k n o w . . . Fore-wearied both, they rest, he on her gowne Sits for his ease she saith, afrayd in hart, Least sodainly she should giue him the start. 84

If 'Trebatio' and 'Caelius' are necessarily fictions, the poet makes them come to life in such a handling as this. Not every poet tried to mirror the moving moment. The satiric statement often enough took the form of observations and recollec83 84

Micro-cynicon, "Satire VI", pp. 134^5. Skialetheia, sig. D2 T .

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tions of past actions, brought to verbal form a t the present moment. B u t in recounting events from the past, the poet was still concerned with giving them a present vividness. Perhaps the best example of the techniques t h a t help accomplish this is Donne's "Satyr I " . The first half of the satire is cast as a long speech of the Satirist to the 'humorist', a speech apparently taking place in the present, in which he sets the terms on which he will go out for a walk with his visitor (13ff). B u t as line 66 suggests, the whole poem is a narration to a silent Companion; the first part, to line 67, is a repetition in the Satirist's own words of what he had said to the humorist, and at line 67 the Satirist drops the technique of direct discourse and shifts to the narrative mode to describe more fully the humorist's actions on t h a t day in the recent past on which this incident occurred. The Satirist, however, maintains the sense of the incident's immediacy b y using for the remainder of the discourse the historical present as his choice of tense. Of the humorist, when they are in the street, the Satirist says, He first of all, Improvidently proud, creepes to the wall. . . Yet though he cannot skip forth now to greet Every fine silken painted foole we meet He then to him with amorous smiles allures And grins, smacks, shrugs, and such an itch endures - 8 S

and so on. The Satirist goes further to make this account vivid, then, by casting the conversational exchanges between him and the humorist into direct discourse, as, Now leapes he upright, Joggs me, and cryes, Do you see Yonder well favoured youth? Which? Oh, 'tis hee That dances so divinely; Oh, said I, Stand still, must you dance here for company? 86

and elsewhere, even omitting most of the tags t h a t would identify this as reported conversation: But Oh, God strengthen thee, why stoop'st thou so? Why? he hath travayld; Long? No; but to me (Which understand none), he doth seeme to be Perfect French, and Italian. 87 85

Lines 67-8, 71-4, pp. 147-8. Ibid., 83-6, p. 148. 87 Ibid,., 100-4, p. 14!).

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So Donne has by these several means given the account of this incident the air of an action being described at the time that it is occurring - a desirable effect to those who worked within the precepts of the plain style and thus aimed at the effect of 'real' life. One technique illustrated above - that of giving reality to a fictional character by furnishing him with typical speech and concrete details of action - was used, to be sure, by many others than Donne.88 Lodge, for example, presents a Satirist (in "Satyre I") who supports his generalization that "no man takes delight to know his faulte" with a list of individuals who illustrate this human frailty: Anphidius, Humphrey, Rollus, Sextus' wife, Linus, and Quintus. Each is developed in relative brevity, with some details of his customary action, e.g., Tell Sextus wife (whose shoes are vnder-layd) Her gate is girlish, and her foote is splayd; Sheele raile with open mouth as Martiall dooth. 89

But he too that bring particular action, but

is careful to treat at least one of the characters in ways him most to life - i.e., not only through details of a (as contrasted with those concerning a customary) by letting him be heard in his own voice:

Last day I chaunct (in crossing of the streete) With Diffilus the Inkeeper to meete, He wore a silken night-cap on his head, And lookt as if he had beene lately dead: I asked him how he far'd, not well (quoth he) An ague this two months hath troubled me; I let him passe: and laught to heare his skuce: For I knew well, he had the poxe by Luce: And wore his night-cappe ribbind at the eares, Because of late he swet away his heares. 90

And a further effect of this anecdote is surely to validate the Satirist's other briefer references to the other characters, by implying that he knew them personally, too - i.e., that they too are 'real' people. 88

And he used it again in "Satyr II" to duplicate the legal speech practices of the lawyer Coscus, and in "Satyr IV" in the Satirist's dramatization of his encounter with the bore in Court. 89 A Fig for Momus, sig. B1 T . 90 Ibid., sigs. B 2 ' - B 2 t .

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Poet after poet turned to direct discourse, to bring a character quickly to life and let him reveal himself directly. Wither's Satirist has argued against the excesses of love, when his auditor protests: But how now; Wast not you (sayes one) that late So humbly begg'd a Boone at Beauties gate? Was it not you that to a female Saint Indited your Philaretes complaint, With many dolefull Sonnets? Was't not you? Sure twas, saies hee: but then how comes it now You carp at Loue thus in a Satyr's vaine? 91

And the Satirist must defend his position against his logical opponent. 'R. C.'s Satirist took a sturdy stand against tobacco; he describes 'Fumoso' as having nearly improverished himself through his smoking habit, and planning to recoup by opening a shop for "smoke and bottle ale". B u t he accuses Fumoso of planning to add a whore - and gives Fumoso's outrageous reply in his own words: "A whore", sayes he; "O fie ! you speake to broad; A puncke, or else one of the dealing trade; And such a one I mean to keep, and she Will help, I hope, to keep and Maintaine me. O, 'tis the only thriving means of all, To rayse mans fortunes vp by womans fall". 92

And the flavor of the country boy's language, in Rowlands' "Satyre 4", could hardly be conveyed by the Satirist in a paraphrase. The Satirist's topic is those country people with new wealth who come into London with, they think, wise airs and wise ways. This country boy's father has just died; the boy comes to a London lawyer and explains his business in the most legalistic language he can manage: Pray sir (quoth he) are you the man I meant: That haue a certaine kinde of occupation, About dead men. . . My Father he is dyed detestable: I being his eldest heire, he did prefer Me Sir, to be his Executioner: And very briefly m y request to finnish, Pray how may I by law, his goods diminish? 93 91

"Of Love", "Satire 1" of Abuses, p. 59. P. 72. 93 Pp. 65-6.

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A. T H E MORALIST

When John Marston said of Hall with lively scorn, I'll leaue the white roabe, and the biting rimes Vnto our modern Satyres sharpest lines, 1

he was commenting on the position t h a t he said had been taken by Hall's Satirist vis-à-vis the contemporaries whom he was criticizing. The "white roabe" in Persius I (15-16) clothed the self-conscious writer, carefully dressed to read his works in public, b u t here it symbolizes the superior man, and Marston was ridiculing the implied assumption t h a t Hall was such a man. Of himself, Marton said in contrast, [I] m y selfe am not imaculate, But many spots m y minde doth vitiate. 2

He was saying, in short, t h a t he was a man among men and therefore better qualified to evaluate realistically the shortcomings of his contemporaries than the one who stands at a lofty distance from them. These distinctions are important ones to discuss, for as poets soon realized, the image of the Satirist, too, could and should be developed in ways t h a t would help authenticate the t r u t h of the critical statements made through him. A series of developments, in fact, took place in the figure of the Satirist through the course of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the most prominent of which occurred early in the decades when satire was ostensibly general — t h a t is, when persuasive weight was to be given in any 1 Certaine Satyres, II, 13-4. In The Poems of John Marston, Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), p. 72. Hereafter cited as C. S. * Ibid., II, 11-2, p. 72.

ed. Arnold

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other way than b y offering as evidence the names or other unambiguous identification of actual offenders. The view of the Satirist as a morally superior man was not generally projected by satiric poets. Renaissance critical theory t h a t associated poets with priests in the early history of literature offered an immediate precedent for 'spotlesse' virtue. Puttenham, for example, stated t h a t he should be a "wise and grave man", and this standard had been expressed earlier for poets in general by Horace in the Ars Poetica. B u t superiority, as some of the Elizabethan satirists saw it, might be intellectual and cultural, rather than plainly moral. Donne's Satirist (of "Satyr I " and "Satyr IV") surely is the embodiment of the highly cultured man. He is drawn perhaps from certain features of the Elizabethan melancholy man: he is a scholar — " . . . with the Muses I conferre" 3 - and something of a wit, and while he prefers to be withdrawn from society, Leaue mee, and this standing woodden chest, Consorted with these few bookes, 4

he also tries to improve the quality of its individual members as his reforming efforts with the 'humorist' in "Satyr I " suggest. I n both of these poems, he is the cultural superior of those whom he satirizes; temperamentally, he views them from the distance t h a t intelligence, taste, and disdain for the superficial and frivolous create for him. This separation puts him in an awkward position and one t h a t he recognizes ironically as such, in t h a t he both despises offenders and yet remains, not unpleasantly unconscious of himself in the act of despising and associating with them. And while remaining, he takes satisfaction in the double-entendres of his remarks to both the humorist (of "Satyr I") and the courtier (of "Satyr IV"), and in the verbalization - notably in ingenious metaphor and simile of his mental criticisms of the courtier. The persona is a strong and complex one in these two poems of Donne's. 5 The circumstance t h a t the Satirist is aware t h a t he has little in common with his contemporaries affects his attitude toward them and toward himself in ways t h a t produce some distortion in the picture he gives of the offenders, to a degree in fact not quite 3

1 , 48, p. 147. Ibid., 2-3, p. 145. 5 The basic situation simply as a meeting of the Satirist with a bore appears, as has long been recognized, in Horace, Sermones, I, ix. 4

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possible for the reader to assess: he is ironic, he postures painfully, he exaggerates, and so on. B u t the idea of Satirist-as-culturalsuperior attracted a t least two followers, Guilpin and then Marvell, to adapt this figure from Donne and to use it in their own ways. Guilpin evidently recognized t h a t a less dramatic and self-consciously ambivalent, and a more forthright, personality was needed for a Satirist whose statements would be accepted as valid because he made them. The Satirist, therefore, who in Donne's poem found the outside world and its behavior exotic and monstrous, becomes in Guilpin's poem a man to whom the outside world is perfectly familiar and who knows t h a t he prefers instead "meditation" And calme content, whose taste more pleaseth me Than all the Citties lushioua vanity.

When his visitor comes and wants him to go out for a walk, the Satirist points to the volumes by Aristotle and Plato, by ancient and modern playwrights, by contemporary poets and writers on jurisprudence, and asks unaffectedly, What more variety of pleasures can An idle Cittie-walke affoord a man?

For one thing, the streets are noisy: There squeaks a cart-wheele, here a tumbril rumbles Here scolds an old Bawd, there a Porter grumbles.

Worse, everywhere he looks he sees men behaving foolishly: The Cittie is the mappe of vanities, The marte of fooles, the Magazin of guiles, The painters shop of Antickes,

and he has only to point in any direction to find abundant illustrations for his critical statement: one who grimaces in the latest style, one with a ' 'muffler of Cadz-beard'', one all in theatrical black, a poet who "bellows rimes like thunder", and many more.® He does not overstate the degree of the offenses; they are truly no more t h a n foolish. That is, he does not (as Donne's Satirist does) exaggerate the follies into crimes, and describe his having gone out among foolish men as having "sinn'd against my conscience". I n 6

Skialetheia (London, 1598) (Shakespeare Assn. Facsimile No. 2, Oxford, 1931) "Satyra quinta", sigs. D 5 r - D 5 v .

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fact, his language is generally without the hyperbole a n d witty metaphor t h a t characterizes Donne's. If Guilpin's Satirist sees the situation in ways t h a t are less profound a n d complex t h a n Donne's does, he makes the issue clearer: it is expressed as a cultivated man's choice between the thoughtful pleasures of his own library and the foolish a n d tedious ones of the streets. There is no qualification in his mind; he knows w h a t he is talking about, and his opinion is expressed in clear-cut and positive terms. T h e Satirist as culturally superior shows in still another form in those p a r t s of Marston's poems in which the Satirist is given passages of philosophy to explicate. The practice of incorporating tenets of a philosophy in a satire is a feature of a number of the Latin models; among the Romans, as Persius illustrates with Stoic philosophy, the satires could be used individually as explications a n d illustrations of single tenets. Marston's Satirist appears in the role of explicator most fully in "Satire I V " of the Scourge of Villanie, where in a sixty-five line passage he defends the Calvinist position respecting the depravity of man, against those of certain classical philosophers - Aristotle, Zeno - a n d the later Christian, Duns Scotus. 7 His ability to grasp and explain t h e concepts sets Marston's Satirist off f r o m his auditors, and in several of the poems this figure similarly clarifies ideas of h u m a n psychology and philosophy. I n "Satira I " of R . C.'s The Times Whistle (1615), a parallel figure explains nice points of theology to an atheist. The Satirist who is a culturally superior m a n is less common, however, t h a n the one who without claiming to be morally pure himself, exhorts his fellow-man to moral improvement. On t h e face of it, to be sure, anyone who takes a stand as disapproving critic implies a position of moral height over those whom he is criticizing. B u t we m a y make the distinction t h a t Marston made concerning the Satirist who held himself to be 'spotlesse'. Such a Satiristfigure does n o t explicitly appear in the English poems, Marston's jibe a t Hall notwithstanding. Jonson aired the idea in Every Man out of His Humour (1599): of the three types of satirist portrayed in the play (representing three different bases from which analytical 7

See Davenport, The Poems of John Marston, "Introduction", pp. 19-22, for a synthesis of the philosophic passages in Marston's satires and an analysis of their contents. As Davenport notes, taking the Calvinist position would seem to deny the usefulness of satire; but Marston's argument is that one can keep from being more depraved than he presently is.

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and critical statements could be made about the society in which one lived), Asper is the man morally superior to his fellows. His motives are noble, his efforts unceasing, his attitude objective, b u t he is unrealistic, and detached from the society he serves. And, one remembers t h a t Jonson's resolution of this dilemma was to purge him of the defects which kept him aloof from a normal human involvement with his fellows.8 I n 1615, Rigault included with his definitive edition of Juvenal a preface in which among other points he discussed this very thing again. The nature of the times, as he saw it, should determine the nature of the Satirist-persona; in vicious times, the Satirist should indeed take the position of a super-being and describe even in elevated language the aberrations he observed. I n times t h a t were not so evil, however, the Satirist could take the position of an ordinary man, and even use jests for his purpose. 9 B u t even with this sanction, and though many English formal satirists declared t h a t times had never been worse, no one made the claim t h a t he was the moral superior of his contemporaries. If the poets ignored this means of reinforcing the Satirist's judgments (by having them come from a super-being), they developed others. One set of them was combined early to produce the figure so familiarly (and often solely) associated now with the satires of the first decade or two of their production. He is partly characterized in the opening statements (discussed above, in Chapter II) t h a t reveal his strong moral shock. I t is easy to forget the significance of the fact t h a t writers felt they had a choice of appropriate moods for the Satirist-figure to project. Donne's Satirist makes some distinctions t h a t are pertinent here, when he says: Kinde pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorn forbids Those teares to issue which swell my eye-lids; I must not laugh, nor weepe sinnes, and be wise Can railing then cure these worne maladies? 10 8

See Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 254-6, for a pertinent analysis of the satiric types in this play. 9 For materials on the early seventeenth-century editors of the Roman satirists see Chap. I of the study by Chester Hubbard Cable, "Methods of Nondramatio Verse Satire: 1640—1700", (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1948). For a discussion of the point made by Rigault, see Cable, p. 16. 10 III, 1-4, p. 154.

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The reference to 'scorne' (with its 'railing') reflects, of course, the whole limited and repetitive vocabulary with which contemporary critics distinguished Juvenal and Persius from Horace (to whom the 'laughter' refers). 11 Several writers tried a range of tones. Donne did, as the differences between "Satyr I " on the 'humorist' and the remaining four of his satires show. Hall - to Milton's scorn, later - presented half of the poems in his Virgidemiarum as 'toothlesse', with the rest properly 'byting'. And Marston in his Scourge of Villanie broadened the range. In its three sections respectively, he said he would feature 'grim Reproofe', 'mirthfull iests', and something apparently in between: 'serious iest and iesting seriousness'. An even wider range than this is made explicit, when one adds the 'pitty' of the opening of Donne's "Satyr I I I " above (and of his " I I " and "V" as well). Writers then drew on all these ideas from the first, although superficial readings of their works give the impression to many that they were almost uniformly committed to scorn and railing. Wyatt with his pleasant tone, and Lodge later, are by far not the only ones of the early writers who chose other means than these. But we are concerned here, first, with the best-known of the Satirists - the 'railing' one - and specifically with his mood conceived as authenticating by the sheer force and passion of his conviction, the truth of what he charges. This Satirist has been described so often that it should not be necessary to do more than review the elements which characterize him. His dominant feature is his intense emotional reaction — of indignation, repugnance, contempt, grief: Pull out mine eyes, if I shall see no vice, Or let me see it with detesting eyes, 12

says the Satirist of the 'byting' poems of Hall's Virgidemiarum. And in others, feelings are similarly strong. Says one: My soule is vext, what power will'th desist ?. . . Who'le coole m y rage? Who'le stay m y itching fist. . . 1 3 11 The reference to 'teares' echoes Thomas Drant, who in A Medicindble Mor all (1566) presented translations of 'laughing' Horace, with passages from the 'weeping' critic Jeremiah. 12 V, i, 5-6, p. 75. 13 The Scourge of Villanie, II, 7-9. In The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), p. 106. Hereafter cited as Scourge.

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Or, O split m y hart, least it doe breake with rage. . . Who can abstaine? W h a t modest brain can hold. . . ?14

Or, Oh I am mad to see the chopping stile And cheating slaveries of these mustie dayes 1 6

His indignation is so righteous that it sustains him, characteristically, with the courage to face down those who would criticize or even harm him for making his unwelcome comments. One Satirist is a martyr to his role; he sends his poems forth "to each mans censure: which let be as fauourable, as so thanklesse a work can deserue or desire".18 Another heartens himself against the retributions that he knows will come: No no, m y Muse, be valiant to controule, P l a y the scold bravely, feare no cucking-stoole. 17

A third Satirist even invites attack, that his spirit may show its strengths: Now, windy parasites, or the slaves of wine, That wind from all things save the truth divine, Wind, turn, and toss, into the depth of spite, Your devilish venom cannot me affright; I t is as a cordial or a candy taste, I'll drink it u p . . . He spites himself who spites a Satirist. 1 8

Ibid., 104, 142, pp. 109-10. C. G., The Minte of Deformities (London, 1600), sig. A3 r . 16 Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum, "A Postcript", in The Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 99. 17 Guilpin, Skialetheia, " S a t y r a prima", sig. C2 V . 18 Thomas Middleton, Micro-cynicon (1699), "The Author's Prologue: First Book". In The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1886), vol. VIII, p. 116. The apparatus of violence so familiar to readers of Elizabethan satire is an appropriate metaphorical accompaniment of these declarations, of course, and helps to reinforce them. Hall's role seems to have been to introduce to the English poems the Satyr-figure, in the legendary rural deity associated early with pre-elassical Greek s a t y r plays. During the decade or so when the device was used of having the English Satirist express strong personal emotions, the satyr exemplified the punitive role t h a t was then seen as the Satirist's. The Satirist is, in Virgidemiarum, the agent of Nemesis, "Whose scourge doth follow all that done amisse". 14

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His fervor is also expressed, as one would expect, through his speech patterns, which in his most heightened states will be those of the curt mode: that is, producing elliptical constructions, brief members, few connectives, and so on. This has been sufficiently illustrated from the poems in Chapter II's discussion of the styles, and Barton Holyday was to verify in 1616 for the English formal satirists that some degree of the curt style was surely proper to indicate force of emotion. "Indeed", he wrote, "when a Satirist, set on fire to see the desperate security of prophaneness; the furie of his passion doth so transport him, that there is no time left for the placing or displacing, choosing or reiecting of some particular word; but as most commonly their passions are uneuen, rough, and furious; so it is that also which they write being in this poeticall perturbation." 1 9 The satyr of the Satirist might say, That scourge I beare, albe in ruder fist, And wound, and strike, and pardon whom she list. (II, "Prologue", 11-12, p. 21) The satyr continues for several years as a meaningful alter-image associated with the emotional response of the Satirist to the situations he sees about him, and then, owing to shifts in the attitude of the Satirist himself, recurs periodically but as a less pertinent convention. But in the time of its popularity the satyr was used in the poems of many of the Elizabethans in some form. Guilpin's satires are introduced with the directions, "Explicit the Satyres flourish before his [the poet's] fencing", (sig. C2 r ) and elsewhere they snarl, threaten, rake, cut, lash. And still they are inadequate to the vices that prevail, as Hall's Satirist believes: All these & more, deserue some blood-drawne lines: But my sixe Cords beene of too loose a twine." (IV, ii, 166-7, p. 54) The satyr image was perhaps the most commonly used device of this punitive type, but also used to express the nature and force of the Satirist's mood of indignation were the porcupine that "shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line" (Virgidemiarum,V, iii, 2, p. 83), the dog that "look[s] soe grym/ As yf thoudst at one snapp devour him" (William Goddard, A Mastif Whelp, 1599, Sat. 1, sig. A2 V ), and so on. Another cluster of images is made up of those drawn from the realms of disease and surgery; the Satirist sees the offenses of his contemporaries as ulcers or rotting parts, which must be pitilessly cut out. "Infectious blood", one says, yee goutie humours quake Whilst my sharp Razor doth incision make. (Scourge, V, 117-8, p. 134). See also Mary Claire Randolph, "The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory", SP, XXXVIII (1941), 127-159. 19 Introduction to A. Persius Flaccus His Satyres. Translated into English. (3rd ed., London, 1635), sig. A8. Quoted by Cable, p. 7.

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His inner state may be revealed in exclamations, cast in extended as well as briefer structures. Or it might show in his jabbing rhetorical questions, which hook the listener's attention to his mood by their special insistence on being answered. The Satirist in Donne's "III" casts them out, finally one after another: I s not our Mistresse faire Religion, As worthy of all our soules devotion, As Vertue was t o t h e first blinded age? Are n o t heavens joyes as valiant to asswage Lusts, as earths honour was to t h e m ? Alas, As wee do t h e m in meanes, shall they surpasse U s in t h e end, and shall t h y fathers spirit Meete blinde Philosophers in heaven, whose merit Of strict life m a y be imputed faith, and heare Thee, whom hee t a u g h t so easie wayes and neare To follow, d a m n ' d ? O if t h o u dar'st, feare this; This feare great courage, and high valour is. D a r ' s t t h o u ayd mutinous Dutch, and d a r ' s t t h o u lay Thee in ships woodden Sepulchers, a prey To leaders rage, to stormes, so shot, to dearth ? D a r ' s t thou dive seas, and dungeons of t h e e a r t h ? H a s t thou couragious fire to t h a w t h e ice Of frozen N o r t h discoveries? 20

and so on. And he will surely use epithets, and perhaps as a stream, again, of abusive re-namings that well up in his mind and must be delivered before he moves on to his next point: Curio, know'st me? w h y t h o u bottle-ale, Thou b a r m y froth! O stay me, least I raile Beyond Nil Ultra, t o see this Butterflie, This windie bubble taske m y balladry , . . 21

_

!

And in this context of heightened mood, animal imagery that equates man not with the 'Butterflie' but with the beast, is often used — in the plain structures that reveal the Satirist as too deeply stirred to form his expressions into any more than blunt instruments. Some Satirists cannot or will not spend time "choosing or reiecting of some particular" animal, even, from the animal world. To one speaker, women are simply 'beasts which paint themselves';22 20

Lines 5-22. I n The Poems of John Donne, ed. H e r b e r t J . C. Grierson (Oxford, 1951), vol. I, p. 154. 21 Scourge, VI, 1-4, p. 135. 22 Guilpin, op. cit., " S a t y r a secunda", sig. C6 V .

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to another, "menbeastes" fill the world. 23 Others pause to choose, b u t still p u t baldly what they settle on; offenders become "lustburning buzzards", 2 4 perfumed "Goate[s] before a brothelldore", 2 5 swine, apes, or slimy things bred on the banks of the Nile. They may have "sweatie long shag h a i r e " 2 6 - a n d so on, the Satirist thus making the ugly metaphor furnish still one more way in which he can express a reaction so strong that one knows his critical observations must be true. These, then, were some of the first means used by the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets to present a Satirist whose personal qualities were such t h a t his word would carry the weight of authority. The Satirist with superior cultural attainments and tastes was used effectively by Donne and Guilpin, but he was not to catch on yet. Neither did the Satirist with superior moral qualities catch on; he was represented in drama, as in Asper in Every Man out of His Humour (1599), b u t Marston had laughed to scorn the idea of a Satirist as a moral super-being in formal satire. The qualities which most poets settled on the Satirist at first were those of an ordinary man with a strong moral passion and the courage to act on it. These qualities authenticated the Satirist's judgments, and t h a t this was considered by the poets to be an important effect is clear; the poets are careful to display in several ways t h a t the Satirist is surely charged with earnest indignation: by the Satirist's direct statements t h a t he is so moved and t h a t he is brave, by broken and undeveloped speech patterns t h a t reveal the forces working within him, by such figures as exclamation and demanding question, and by his choice of ugly and violent imagery to show his moral stand. Originating concurrently and equally long-lived in the figure of the Satirist was the personal quality implicit in Marston's statement quoted earlier, " [ I ] my selfe am not imaculate,/But many spots my mind doth vitiate." The point of Marston's Satirist, it will be recalled, is t h a t he makes no claim to moral superiority as Marston accused Hall of doing; he has, in fact, lived as a man with man's frailties. This strategy of placing himself on the same level or a little below t h a t of his auditors, Marston may have adopted from 23

Goddard, op. cit., "Satire 2", sig. A2 V . Thomas Middleton, "Satire V", 36. p. 132. 26 Marston, G. S., I l l , 28, p. 148. 26 John Lane, Tom Tel-Troths Message (London, 1600), sig. C3V. 24

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t h a t of Horace, who utilized it in some of his satires. Daniel Heinsius was, in fact, soon to formalize this aspect of Horace's method as endowing the Satirist with self-effacing humility, or inferiority, or ignorance as devices for engaging the reader in an encounter t h a t would be pleasurable to him and forestall his hostile feelings. 27 Marston's Satirist took the strategic step of declaring merely t h a t he was not perfect, and curiously made no further explicit use of this feature in himself as critic. Others who followed Marston, however, saw t h a t a clear source of strength in this position, when the position was stated and elaborated, lay in what it would do to validate the Satirist in another way than simply b y virtue of his being in the same moral class, so to speak, as his audience. Thus begin to appear Satirists who declare t h a t they have been friends with offenders, and further t h a t they have even had experiences parallel to those they are criticizing in others; t h a t is, they validate themselves as authentic and truthspeaking critics by virtue of their having known well the vicious and foolish people t h a t they speak of, and even of having been like them before reforming. Such a device had already been suggested b y Donne's "Satyr I " . The Satirist there was implicated in the offense he criticized to the extent t h a t he agreed to accompany the 'humorist' on a stroll in the city streets. He protested t h a t he was unwilling to go, and foolish to do so - a protest t h a t implied a knowledge of the humorist based on a certain extended personal acquaintance with his whims of behavior. And so it is, as the Satirist reveals by making the humorist promise in advance, and in detail, t h a t he will stay by his side: First sweare by thy best love in earnest (If thou which lov'st all, canst love any best) Thou wilt not leave mee in the middle street, Though some more spruce companion thou dost meet, N o t though a Captaine do come in thy way Bright parcel gilt, with forty dead mens pay, Not though a briske perfum'd piert Courtier Deigne with a nod, thy courtesie to answer. Nor come a velvet Justice with a long Great traine of blew coats, twelve, or fourteen strong, Wilt thou grin or fawne on him, or prepare A speech to Court his beautious Sonne and heire !28 27 28

Cable, pp. 23-5. Lines 13-24, pp. 145-46.

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The Satirist clearly knows the humorist, as the amount of detail silently reveals. And he weakly yields again, encouraging the company of a foolish man. This feature of the Satirist's make-up continues to be utilized and expanded. I n describing the background of an acquaintance who is "poore in wit, though rich in show", Guilpin's Satirist in "Satyra tertia" reveals not only his early knowledge of the man, b u t (more pertinent to our point here) the fact t h a t he had formerly accepted his friendship uncritically. "Looke on Panduris", he says, with whom in th'infancy Of m y t h e n greene, now riper judgment, I W a s well acquainted; he sir will not speake, Thinking himselfe t h e better m a n belike Because his f a t h e r with bartring, a n d trucke, Of bad greene-sicknes wines, h a t h h e a p t v p m u c k . . . 2 8

The Satirist, t h a t is, accounts for his detailed knowledge of his victim, b u t at the same time qualifies himself as a human being. Although he lacked adequate standards of judgment in earlier years, he has gained them since. I n short, he is a human being sharing the patterns of error and strength of the ordinary man. With Thomas Middleton there begins an elaboration of this means of authenticating the Satirist t h a t continues well into the Jacobean and Caroline periods. I n Middleton's "Satire V " ("Ingling Pyander") about a "pale chequer'd black hermaphrodite", the Satirist not only has had a foolish involvement with this "cheating youth", b u t has (with many others) known the prostitute to whom the youth was born. I t is the youth, however, with whom the Satirist is concerned here, for he had loved 'her'. He gives an account of their meeting: Walking t h e city, as m y wonted use, There was I subject t o this foul abuse: Troubled with m a n y thoughts, pacing along, I t was m y chance to shoulder in a throng; T h r u s t t o t h e channel I was, b u t crowding her, I spied P y a n d e r in a n y m p h ' s attire: N o n y m p h more fair t h a n did P y a n d e r seem, H a d n o t P y a n d e r t h e n P y a n d e r been; No lady with a fairer face more grac'd, B u t t h a t P y a n d e r ' s self himself defac'd; Never was boy so pleasing to t h e h e a r t As was P y a n d e r for a woman's p a r t . » Sigs. C8 r -C8 v .

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But the experience was a bitter one: I lov'd indeed, and, to m y mickle cost, I lov'd Pyander, so m y labour lost: Fair words I had, for store of coin I gave, B u t not enjoy'd t h e f r u i t I t h o u g h t to have. 3 0

It is his experience that leads the Satirist to decide that the rest of London should be protected from a similar disappointment - a decision that is not easy, "because time was I lov'd Pyander well". He casts back and forth: True love indeed will h a t e love's black defame, So loathes m y soul t o seek P y a n d e r ' s shame. O, b u t I feel t h e worm of conscience sting, A n d summons m e u p o n m y soul to bring Sinful P y a n d e r into open view, There to receive t h e shame t h a t will ensue ! 0 , this sad passion of m y heavy soul Torments m y h e a r t and senses d o [ t h ] control!

But decides, No, no, t h e world shall know t h y villany, Lest t h e y be cheated with like roguery. 3 1

Thus the satire itself follows, based on the 'authentic' experience of a Satirist whose ignorance had led him into grief and who has learned something from his disappointment. 32 The Satirist in Brathwaite's "A Satire called the Coniborrowe" (1615) has also had personal experience with the figure he criticizes - a prostitute. He reflects on that experience, which he sees now in its true light. . . .1 was blind, when t h y sin-Syren voice, Made m e despise m y selfe, and m a k e a choice Of soules-seducing E r r o r ; I was blinde, W h e n I did hope contented ioyes to finde I n so profane a couer: Blinde was I W h e n I expected ought b u t vanitie. I n such a n odious h a r b o u r : blinde I was To looke for vertue in so vile a case. 33 30

Lines 58-69, 78-81, pp. 132-33. Lines 41-8, 56-7, p. 132. 32 The idea also takes a simpler form — in which t h e Satirist simply states t h a t his d a t a are f r o m experience itself, not f r o m books. 33 Lines 129-36. I n A Strappado for the Deuill, ed. J . W . E b s w o r t h (Lincolnshire, 1878), p. 154. 31

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The Satirist is thus rather elaborately developed, in the degree to which he becomes emotionally involved with the victim of his later disapproval. An even tragic experience is suggested: That painted cheeke. . . Shall m a k e m e h a t e , where I w a s o n c e inclin'd, Shall m a k e m e h a t e ? O t h a t I did n o t h a t e Before this t i m e . . . 3 4

R . C. displays his Satirist's involvement in still another, a n d even more elaborate, way b y means of an anecdote. The Satirist h a d beeninvited on a "progresse" into the country. "Imagine Islingt o n to be the place", he says discreetly, " t h e jorney to eat cream". The true nature of the outing came slowly to him when he observed t h a t there had been provided " a forehand", Of w i u e s & m a i d e s a i u s t proportioned b a n d I n n u m b e r t o t h e m e n of v s ; each o n ' [ e ] Might h a u e h i s w e n c h v n t o himselfe alone. 3 5

A n d he began to hear lewd talk of the coming night. He continued, however, to their destination, where after supper he was able to steal away, first conscientiously leaving some money so t h a t , as he said, " t h e y should n o t think I came to sharke/Only for vittailes". 3 6 Again, the Satirist has been implicated, as any other ordinary m a n might have been who lacked the prescience of a super-being; he is shown in this way, t h a t is, to be a m a n among men. The device is used again, in William Hornby's The Scourge of Drunkennes (1619), which presents still another relationship of Satirist to victim and their common experience. The Satirist here addresses his former companions as one who has, in fact, just taken the pledge not to drink again: Y o u R o a r i n g - b o y e s , w h i c h v s e t o drinke and s w e a r e . . . V i e w here t h e farewell of m y y o u t h s - g r e e n e folly, W h i c h breedes m y ioy, b u t y o u r sad m e l a n c h o l y . 'Tis i o y t o m e , because I n o w do leaue t h e m . . . 3 7 34

L i n e s 153, 156-8, p. 155. The Times Whistle (1615), ed. J . M. Cowper, E E T S X L V I I I (London, 1881), "Satira 6", p. 83. 36 Ibid., p . 85. 37 (London), "To all t h e I m p i o u s . . . R u f f i a n s a n d R o y s t e r s under Bacchus R e g i m e n t " , sig. A 3 V . 35

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And again, we see a Satirist who has been authenticated as knowing what he is talking about because he has experienced it himself. The claim of personal knowledge and personal frailty continues as a device of the earnest critic; one hears it still near the end of the seventeenth century as this Satirist urges the practice of satire because Our dearest F r i e n d s . . . t h o u g h t h e y k n o w our F a u ' t s , F o r pity, or for shame conceal their T h o u g h t s , W h i l e we, w h o see our railings n o t forbid, L o o s e l y r u n o n in t h e v a i n P a t h s w e did. 3 8

Surely the most thoughtful approach to this technique was made by George Wither, in his Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613).39 "The Occasion", one of the introductory pieces to the twenty satires which make up the 'Abuses', begins to lay the groundwork in presenting first an extensive and detailed review of the Satirist's formal education. As a 'Schoole-boye' he felt his thirst rise, after he "all the formes in schoole had quite run through", for the experience a t the university t h a t he and his fellows had been preparing for. H e was entered at Oxford and was at first overawed b y sheer 'atmosphere': There once arriu'd i n yeeres: a n d k n o w l e d g e raw, I fell t o w o n d r i n g a t each t h i n g I s a w : A n d for m y learning m a d e a m o n t h ' s Vacation, I n n o t i n g of t h e places situation, T h e Palaces a n d Temples t h a t were d u e V n t o t h e wise Mineraues h a l l o w e d crew, Their Clysters, Walks', a n d Oroues: all w h i c h suruei'd. A n d i n m y n e w a d m i t t a n c e w e l l apaid.

And then he was helped to attack his formal studies: B u t h a u i n g t h i s experience, and withall, A t c h i e u ' d s o m e c u n n i n g a t t h e Tennis-ball; M y Tutor (telling m e I w a s n o t s e n t T o h a u e m y t i m e , there v a i n e and i d l y spent) F r o m childish h u m o r s g e n t l y call'd m e in, A n d w i t h h i s graue instructions did b e g i n T o t e a c h ; a n d b y h i s good perswasions s o u g h t T o bring m e t o a loue of w h a t h e t a u g h t . 4 0 38

R o b e r t Gould, Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles (London, 1689), "Prologue", p . 134. 39 I n Juvenilia, P a r t 1, Spenser S o c i e t y P u b l . (London, 1871), v o l . I X . 40 Ibid., pp. 3 0 - 1 .

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Soon we begin to recognize t h a t this is an early record of what later will be termed the tabula rasa, the individual mind gaining impressions in its own way and order. His tutor instructed him in logic and rhetoric, b u t "to my dulle capacitie in vaine". 4 1 However, the boy, ashamed not to be as ready as his colleagues to 'dispute', sat down to get the knowledge from the books himself — and did: A t length I felt m y dull intelligence Begin to open; and perceived more In halfe an houre, than halfe a yeere before. And (which is strange) the things I had forgot, And till that very day remembred not, Since first my Tutor read them: those did then Returne into m y memory agen. 42

He soaked up learning, from t h a t point on, with ease; as he says, having "waded thorow Sophistrie", A little lookt into Philosophie, And thinking there the Ethicks not enough, I had a further longing yet to know The cause of Snow, Haile, Thunder, Frost, and Raine, The Lightenings, Meteors, and what here 'twere vaine For me to speake of; sith I shall but show-it, To those that better then my selfe doe know-it. Then from the causes of things naturall, I went to matters Metaphysicall: Of which when I a little newes could tell, I (with the rest in Schooles) to wrangling fell. And (as example taught me) to disgrace her, When I oppos'd the Truth, I could out-face her. 43

With ease and skill in learning, came a love of it - and then the first shocking challenge to his values. He wished to stay on in the university, thinking he "should a calling in t h a t place haue sought", but he was summoned back by his family to his duties on the family acres. He was to p u t aside the patterns he had been accustoming himself to and return to "hold your plough and tell your sheepe". And, not only were the intellectual arts he had learned at school to be useless there - and his education bafflingly focused on them — b u t they were ridiculed. Further, his education in fact estranged him from family and neighbors, as he found on his return, when 41 12 43

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., pp. 32-3. Ibid., p. 33.

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through jealousy they encouraged him to look for a profession among the "mechanick trades". This reception led him to go to the city in search of an occupation that would suit him better. But his perspective had been developed by his previous experience, and instead of settling unthinkingly into the city's patterns now, he saw those patterns in a broader view and thus inductively came to the position from which he could analyze 'man'. We may remind ourselves that Wither was only twenty-five when his poem was published, but the point is that in his poem he was making an effort to separate, enumerate, and analyze the aspects of the whole experience that lay behind the satirical - that is, the evaluative - statement. Part of that experience, as he shows it, is in the epistemological act: the awareness of reality, which to him was first identified with the content and the mastery of one's formal studies. And part of that experience is in the comparative act: the experience of perceiving various views that enables one to distinguish and refine one's sense of the conflicting variety in life, and that puts one in the position of being able, then, to perform the evaluative act. This Satirist, in a very real sense brings 'authentic' personal experience to bear on the statements he makes about 'man', and when one turns to the individual satires of Abuses Stript and Whipt, one finds what one might expect, that the Satirist's errant experience becomes part of the evidence for the poems. In "Satyr I " , "Of Love", for example (quoted earlier) the Satirist is challenged by one of the shadowy figures he has just described: B u t how now; W a s t not y o u (sayes one) that late So humbly begg'd a Boone at Beauties gate? W a s it not y o u that to a female Saint Indited your Philaretes complaint, W i t h many dolefull Sonnets? was't not you? Sure 'twas, saies hee: but then how comes it now Y o u carp at Loue thus in a Satyr's vaine.

The Satirist admits sturdily, To him I answer: That indeed, euen I W a s lately subject to this malady: L i k ' t what I now dislike: employed good times I n the composing of such idle Rimes A s are obiected: From m y heart I sent

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F u l l m a n y a heauy sigh, and sometimes spent V n m a n l y teares. . , 44

and then he presses home the point. He was foolish and had no excuse for it, for he was young and in good health; he had no bodily infirmity which would have impeded the normal workings of right Reason in its conflicts with the passions. I t was simply his irrational Affection, his desires, that he allowed to overcome Reason, as he now sees: Y e t , w h a t if I haue been thus idly bent, Shall I be now ashamed to repent? Moreouer, I was in m y Childhood than, A n d a m scarce y e t reputed for a Man; A n d therefore neither cold, nor old, nor d r y , Nor cloy'd with any foule disease a m I , W h e r e b y the strength of nature is declin'd: "Tis no such cause t h a t made me change m y mind: B u t m y A f f e c t i o n , t h a t before was blinde, R a s h and u n r u l y . . .

His 'Affection' had taken him to extremes; it "now begins to finde" T h a t it had runne a large and fruitlesse race, A n d therevpon h a t h giuen Reason place. So t h a t b y Reason, w h a t no R e a s o n m i g h t Perswade me from before, I haue out-right I u s t l y forsaken; for because I see ' T w a s vaine, absurd, and nought b u t foolery.

And so he takes a new position - not one at the other extreme, but a central one in which Reason has control of his passions and allows the right exercise of each. Y e t for all this, looke where I lou'd of late, I haue not turn'd it in a spleene to hate; N o : for ' t w a s first her V e r t u e and her W i t , T a u g h t m e t o see h o w m u c h I wanted it. Then as for Loue I doe allow it still. I neuer did dislik't, nor neuer will; B e it Vertuous, and contain'd within T h e bounds of Reason; b u t w h e n ' t will begin T o runne a t random, and her limits breake, I must, because I cannot chuse b u t speake. 45

44 45

Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., pp. 60-62.

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The Satirist is thus a butt himself, an example of his own generalizations about the abuse of, in this case, the passion of love. To summarize: one role which the Satirist took early in the history of English formal satire was that of conscious moralist. The Satirist drew on precedent in the Latin satires to reveal his personal outraged feelings in the face of the immorality he saw all around him; in the familiar manner of the plain style, and encouraged by it, too, to reveal his personal feelings, he spoke of his anger, grief, and contempt. The very force of his feelings was sufficient to persuade that the abuses he described did indeed exist, and in alarming degree; this effect was, in fact, one by which the Satirist was to 'authenticate' his comments well into the Augustan period. Another effect was produced when the Satirist revealed his personal knowledge of vice and folly through the errors he himself had made earlier in his life. His strength as a moralist lay partly in the circumstance that he talked to sinners as an equal instead of as a superior, but much more heavily in his knowledge of what he was talking about. He was a very real example of the man frail enough to be foolish, and strong enough to reform. He was a figure considerably enriched philosophically by the temperament that Wither gave him, a temperament that encouraged the effort to coordinate in detail his 'actual experience', with ideas about it. The Satirist who used himself as butt became, in Wither's hands, a thoughtful man who observed the development of ideas of reality in himself, and the growth (through his own varied experiences) of his sense of the range in human behavior, and who then drew upon all this to match his conduct to a reasonable norm.

B . T H E STYLIST

In the same period was evolving another kind of Satirist with another set of qualities - qualities related to controlled mental and emotional balance. These, of course, are in direct contrast to the unselfconscious moral earnestness with which the Satirist just reviewed was endowed. And whereas the earnest Satirist 'authenticated' his observations with the strength of his feelings about the situations he described, the other one would validate his charges with every evidence he gave of personal control, balance, and perspective.

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The Satirist as showing mental poise and a manner under easy control h a d already been exemplified in W y a t t ' s poems, and was again in Lodge's. A critical analysis, in fact, of the earnest Satirist was invited, when, because of one line of development he was taking, Jonson could represent him in Every Man out of His Humour (1599) as the scurrilous, extreme, and indiscriminate attacker, Carlo Buffone; and for this same reason the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, in the same year, signed t h e edict t h a t called in a rather long list of satiric works t h e n in circulation. Of the formal satires, all of Hall's, Marston's, Guilpin's, and Thomas Middleton's were required to be brought in and, with the exception of Hall's (which on second thought and no doubt a sober reading were removed f r o m the list) were burned in Stationers Hall. B u t before these criticisms from outside were stated, formal satirists were already offering objections to extremes in positions as well as in language, and recommending stances somewhere reasonably between them; t h e y did this in ways t h a t h a d implications n o t only for the Satirist's choice of topic, b u t also for t h e tone and other means he would use to comment upon it. Donne's Satirist had p u t t h e idea of a middle position in general terms when he said, in his attack on greedy lawyers: In great hals Carthusian fasts, and fulsome Bachanalls Equally I hate; meanes blesse. 46

And even Marston recommended discrimination — the most truculently undiscriminating of them all. His adherence to a reasonable norm as the basis of a system of values takes one form in his criticism t h a t Hall relentlessly searched out faults in his fellowwriters, down to the smallest and least i m p o r t a n t ones. "Cannot a poore mistaken title scape", the Satirist cries, But thou must that into thy Tumbrell scrape ? Cannot some lewd, immodest beastlines Lurke, and lie hid in iust forgetfulnes, But Orillus subtile-smelling swinish snout Must sent, and grunt, and needes will find it out? 47

Marston specified in addition (although he did n o t meet his own specifications) the need in a Satirist not only for accurate obser46 17

"Satyr II", 105-7, pp. 153-4. C. S., "Satyre IV", 27-32, pp. 81-2.

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vation but also for objective evaluation: "Love, nor yet Hate, had ere true iudging eye", he says to Hall. And asks ironically, with reference to Hall's vision, Who would imagine that such squint-ey'd sight Could strike the worlds deformities so right? 48

Elsewhere too he insists on the "unpartiall eye" 49 and "true iudging eyes" 50 in those who would be censurers. In this spirit, in short, critics should avoid the relentless pursuit of trivial offenses and regard all offenses with balanced judgment. 50 there were counter-tendencies to the writers who described their times as totally degenerate, an age of rusty iron, and who were furnishing colorful evidence of it. And the reactions continued against the undiscriminating nature and manner of the more extreme attacks. In 1601, objections to sensational material were expressed in the form of two satires, John Weever's The Whipping of the Satyre, and Nicholas Breton's No Whipping, nor Tripping: but a kinde friendly Snipping.51 In Faunus and Melliflora (1600) Weever had already objected to one development in contemporary satire; there he criticized its emphasis on the disgusting: Sinne' s like a puddle or a mattery sinke The more you stir them, stil the more they stinke. 62

Besides objecting to the satirists' preoccupation, as he saw it, with ' 'beastlinesse'', with showing the world to be a shop o f ' 'vile iniquitie'', he criticized their searching out hidden and unnatural vices, for they revealed and taught to those who were unaware of them "novel pastimes, new-found sinne". 53 In the preface to The Whipping of the Satyre, Weever accuses Marston personally of foul language and of failing to recognize 48

Ibid., "Satyre II", 40 and 37-8, p. 73. Scourge, "To those that seeme iudiciall perusers", p. 101. 60 Ibid., "In Leetores prorsus indignos", 87, p. 99. 51 These, with Edward Guilpin's answer to them, The Whipper of the Satyre his Pennance (1601), comprise the 'Whipper Pamphlets'. 52 " a p r ophesie of this present yeare, 1600", 106-7, p. 69, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1948). 63 Ibid., 69-99, p. 69. 19

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virtues while concentrating entirely on vices.54 Weever's point about ignoring virtues might not be entirely apropos of Elizabethan satirists, b u t his charge of foul language is fair if he is referring particularly to Marston's descriptions of characters who practice venery. The combination in Marston's Satirist of moral indignation and a wish to be clear would inevitably produce 'foul' details, given such a subject, and a recent study of English Renaissance satire finds prurience (among other qualities) to characterize the "basic satiric persona" of the period. 55 B u t the point is t h a t a distaste for extremes was becoming evident. Both Weever and Breton urge that the Satirist reproach in love and "Charitie"; in Breton's words, "play with mee, b u t hurt me not; iest with me; b u t disgrace me not". 66 I n his answer to them, Guilpin understandably took the side of the satirists and ridiculed the idea of trying gently to win the wicked: k i n d e persuasion will n o t do, Sling f r o m t h e t o n g u e of d u l c e t pietie, L e t ireful Fury w h i p and scourge t h e m to, S o u n d i n g their soules perpetuall miserie. 6 7

Needless to say, the gentleness advocated by Weever and Breton was not to develop as a new tone in satire; b u t some satirists did in general begin to move away from extremes toward a middle ground. A less stringent tone begins to be heard, for example, in Minte of Deformities (London, 1600) wherein the author states t h a t he is interested only in immediate and important troubles, not in the compulsive clean sweep: " I do not seeke to take flies", he says, " b u t to remoue fleas, which as I would not troble my selfe with the one, so I would willingly reduce the other." 5 8 And these are all signs, needless to say, of the whole shift t h a t was under way, in 54

(London), "To t h e Vayne-glorious, t h e Satyrist, E p i g r a m m a t i s t , a n d H u m o r i s t " , sig. A3 r , in The Whipper Pamphlets, ed. Arnold D a v e n p o r t (Liverpool, 1951), p. 5. 56 A l v i n K e r n a n , The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance ( N e w H a v e n , 1959), p . 28. 55 No Whippinge, nor trippinge: but a kind friendly Snippinge (1601), " T o all Gratious. . . spirits", sig. A2 V , i n The Whipper Pamphlets, p . 147. 67 The Whipper of the Satyre his Pennance, sig. C4 r , in The Whipper Pamphlets, p . 47. 68 C. G., "To t h e Fauorable readers", sig. C4 r .

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which reason rather than the right moral feelings would come to seem the more dependable guide to man's proper footing in life - and which, for satire, was to introduce additional means for making effective critical comments. Again, it is Wither who explores and records in some detail this consideration (a basic one, with the importance of authentic experience) related to the writing of satire. I n the prefatory material to Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), he describes man in half rationalistic, half theological terms, as "A Reasonable lining Creature" consisting of a body and a soul. His body is subject to sin and "from his very birth therewith infected / Growes riper in uncleannesse". Wither equates 'soul' with 'reason', and the Fall of Man is seen as the Fall of Reason from its joint rule with Appetite. That union had brought about a desirable state in which the Passions under sweet obedience, than, Kept that faire place, th'vnblemisht lie of Man.

B u t the balance was lost, and "Instead of Reason, we haue set v p Will."^ This is not a new idea, b u t it has a different context now — one in which 'reason' is seen as penetrating to reality rather than choosing wisely among the unquestioned inherited 'givens' from the past. The human intellect, t h a t is, has become a faculty of extreme importance in a wholly new sense from what it had, say, twenty-five years before. I n this statement of Wither's, we have an early explicit affirmation in formal satire itself, whose ideas and norms of human psychology ideally determine its methods, of the shift t h a t took place during the seventeenth century and affected satire specifically b y changing its assumptions about man as more susceptible to reasonable than to emotional appeals. The philosophical position of the Satirist in Wither's "Satyr I " , "Of Love", 6 0 illustrates this early neo-classical tendency as it is adumbrated by Wither in the prefatory poems to Abuses. I n this poem, it will be recalled, the Satirist reviews and concludes upon his recent experience in love: he had let his 'Affection' lead him to foolish excesses of emotion and behavior, b u t fortunately his 'Reason' then intervened to recommend a balanced view. One should notice t h a t to him the objective facts about the woman he loves 69 60

"Of Man", p. 53. Abuses, p. 59ff.

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remain the same: she has still the "Vertue and . . . W i t " t h a t first appealed to him. The action involved here is a shift in his apprehension of w h a t man's proper footing is in life. His conclusion is t h a t it should be "contein'd within / The bounds of Reason". 6 1 A n d Wither m a y again be seen to be a pivotal figure in the philosophical shift t h a t was to introduce to satire neo-classical ideas of intellectual decorum. These ideas, which are based in a relativistic value-system, did not displace the earlier ideas of an absolute standard (and the rhetorical modes t h a t supported them) b u t they did in time, come to prevail. Wither's position exemplifies the tentative n a t u r e of the shift a t this time, in t h a t he draws on elements of b o t h t h e older and the newer ways of thought. H e flourishes the scourge a n d t h e surgeon's knife in the prefatory m a t t e r (those attributes of t h e absolutist, morally indignant Satirist), b u t on the other h a n d is even so kindly in the satires themselves t h a t he occasionally finds laughable experiences of his own to use as illustrations of one or another error. T h a t one could be so tolerant as to laugh indulgently a t some kinds of lapses would have been an unusual attitude in most of the earlier satires. A n d dissatisfactions with narrow limitations in contemporary satire continue. One point made b y H e n r y Fitzgeffrey, in his Satyres: and Satyrical Epigrams (London, 1617), is a repetition of earlier complaints t h a t nothing is allowed to escape the satirists' pens, b u t Fitzgeffrey goes f u r t h e r to make a more serious charge t h a t they guesse inuectiuely at Sinnes Bite with sharpe censure; and seuerely scan The inward Virtues, by the outward man. 62

T h a t is, they come to conclusions about character on the basis of superficial appearance. H e questions the w a n t of perspective t h a t sees for example the slightest outward vanity as a sin: Let me no oftener then Apollo appeare To Laugh, to skip (like Phoebus) once a yeare. To goe more formall then m y wonted fashion, Corrected in m y Taylours last Edition. To rectifie my Fore-top: or assume, For one nights Reules a 3. story Plume. . . 61 62

Ibid., pp. 61-2. "Satyra Secunda", sig. B3 r .

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Straight 'tis surmised, rumord round about I roare, I score, I lauish, lash it out. Trifle Times Treasure: And keepe open port, To all Companions of licentious sort,63

and for this the critic "throwes vs in number of the damned Crue".84 And not only does this show a lack of balance in the satirists' judgment but it is not even true that the externals conventionally taken as tokens of inward decay are accurate indexes at all: A s if a Frounced,

pounced,

A s much Braine

Pate

coo'd n o t ,

couer, as a Stoiche cut.

Or practique Vertue, might not lodge as soone Under a Silken, as a Gynicke gowne. Fond fond Philosophers: who e're definde Vertue

a Habite

o f t h e Cloathes

b u t [sic - ' n o t ' ? ]

minded

Nor does association with the vicious or merely foolish breed those ills in one; in fact, one can learn more about what vice is like by meeting it than by avoiding it: Know I can Frolique be with (Fregio) Court it in Comptest phrase with (Curio) Come deepe the Caster: and Carouse it free. (As farre as Vertues limites Licence mee.) I n a s r i c h Grograns, A s Florence, Carles,

Sattins, Tartary

Tissues, goe can showe.

Meet, and cry farwell, to those spirits bolde By Pistoll tenure that their Liuings holde, Confer with Crop-eard knights ath'post; heare tell Of Stangate prizes, and of Shooters Hill, Of Brothells,

Stewes,

of vilest

villanies,

And learne out Vertue by her contraries.66

Eitzgeffrey, in sum, reflects the reaction from restrictive conventional attitudes in his colleagues and takes a more thoughtful and realistic stand. It is true that although satirists since Hall had called for self-examination for 'secret' sins, many words had been spent on criticism of such externals as the dress and social habits of the courtier, the gallant, the vain woman, the Puritan, the traveller, and so on. (Fitzgeffrey, by the way, also called for "fresher 63

Ibid., sigs. B7 v -B8 r .

64

Ibid., sig. B 6 r . Ibid.

66

66

Ibid., sig. B 8 r - B 8 v .

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97

game, / Some mayden matter, some vnchasedTheame".) 6 7 His objection is a fair one t h a t satirists often, as Heinsius was also to say, tried to make a clean sweep of vice and folly - and appeared to give as m u c h weight a n d fervor to minor as to m a j o r faults of h u m a n behavior, in the effort to get them all off the stage. The critic, Fitzgeffrey says, was often enough guilty of excess himself. Take yon Masse of m a n : yon load of Guts, T h a t all he handles in his belly p u t s : W h o euery meales m e a t e makes a Massecry. Of Shambles, Poultry, Sea variety. H o w on t h e Table he his P a n c h doth rest, And stuffes it as a Wallet of t h e best. . . Yet. . . cries out of Fashions, as of Fasting-dayes, Rebukes Excesse: gainst Vanityes inueyes: H a t e s Vice as Hunger: and abhorres to stand I n sight of a (Sir reuerence) Saffron-band. Tell him his Worship is so strictly wise: His closest Trounces, full as full of vice. As wide f r o m Vertues meane as largest size. 68

T h e expression "Vertues mean", in the final line, takes us to the heart of Fitzgeffrey's position, which is one of balance and perspective, one t h a t avoids excesses in either direction. I t was to be expected t h a t this idea of the via media would be heard more and more through the earlier decades of the seventeenth century as the neo-classical ideal gained adherents. I n The Scourge of Drunkennes (London, 1619), William H o r n b y repeated it, in a context t h a t like Wither's curiously combined it with passionate severity. The prefatory poem is retrospective: Come Drunkennesse, untrusse, and naked strip thee: For without mercy I will soundly whip thee. I haue prepar'd a Scourage I hope will smart, Because I doe abhorre thee with m y heart. The will I pinch, nip, seare, and burne t h y skinne, 69

and so on. The dedicatory letter t h a t introduced the satire a n d 67 68 69

Ibid., sig. B3 r . Ibid., sigs. B 3 v - B 4 r . Sig. A4 V .

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states its raison d'etre closes, however, with this clear declaration of a neoclassical position: 'Tig euer best a golden meane to keep, And not to climb too high, nor wade too deepe, Lest climbing high the greater be their fall, And by deepe wading they be drown'd with all. To keepe us then from falling either way, Upon this staffe let our affections stay Of blessed Golden Meane, there let us rest, So liue, so die, and dying so be blest. 70

So in this period of emergent new attitudes, one in which the old attitudes toward social and moral aberrations were weakening in the sense t h a t a perspective was being developed toward them, a poem like Richard Brathwaite's Natures Embassie (1621) seems even more startlingly anachronistic t h a n it might on a reading o u t of this context. The underlying purpose is to make the reader examine himself for each of the t h i r t y 'iniquities' the writer discusses (one is reminded of medieval instructions for confession) a n d to rid himself completely of all those he finds. The Satirist's norm was virtuous action rather t h a n reasonable action, and virtuous action in an absolute sense. H e urges m a n to aim for "spotlesse Vertue", [which] neuer there appear'd Where true Humility that fruitfull vine Hath no plantation. 71

T h a t is, one should meet in its absolute form the Christian ideal, which is based in a view of m a n as deeply sunk in sin. B u t the tendency of t h e times was, as the works of Brathwaite's contemporaries show, to find the ideal in relative rather t h a n absolute modes of thought and behavior, and ultimately to evolve a world view r a t h e r more complex t h a n t h a t implied b y the Christian neo-Stoic morality of the earlier satires. These ideas, then, suggested a second set of means b y which a Satirist could authenticate the contents of his satiric statement. The point a t which the means seemed a distinct and different complex to poets is not really capable of being determined, because 70

Ibid., sig. A3 r . (Lincolnshire, 1877), "An Admonition to the Reader vpon the precedent Satyres", st. 1, p. 173. 71

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evidences of neoclassical style — for this is what the new means consisted of - may be found in the earliest of the Elizabethan formal satires. On the other hand, as late as 1617 Henry Fitzgeffrey complained t h a t poets in general among his contemporaries seemed unaware t h a t Nature

Horace in hia book reherses and Arte are both requir'd in verses,72

English formal satirists from the first had used 'arte' of course, b u t for another purpose. As we know, the Satirist's utterances were often purported to be made under the force of strong indignation, and his rhetorical structures were affected by this emotional state. Or to p u t it another way, they were planned with 'arte' to give the effect of strong feelings in the Satirist. I n the balance of 'Nature' and 'arte' the latter served to give the effect of the former. That Fitzgeffrey's idea of 'arte' is allied with the newer stylistic taste is revealed as he continues, in his complaint about his contemporaries: "when their Inuention faile, / Straight they begin abuseiuely to raile". 73 And we know from Fitzgeffrey's positions discussed earlier t h a t he appreciated in point of view a cool judgment — which implies an 'arte' t h a t would reveal the Satirist as endowed with that. B u t well before Fitzgeffrey's complaint, evidence of 'arte' of this kind's being used can be found, and in time it was to affect formal satire in the following way: the Satirist who gave force to his statement through the relatively 'spontaneous' effect of his vehemence is joined by a Satirist who uses as a weapon his stylistic skills in maintaining cool control over his ideas. To the Satirist, t h a t is, who helped authenticate his statements by the very force of his outraged feelings about the offense he describes is added the type of critic who qualifies himself by demonstrating an intellectual control over his materials - a control t h a t ultimately would show in his ability to organize quite elaborate rhetorical structures, for example, and to develop and vary sophisticated rhetorical and tonal effects within them, including of course those gained from the use of irony and humor. Newer techniques did not replace the older ones, however much Fitzgeffrey might personally have preferred that they would. They simply continued, undergoing their modifications separately and 72 73

" S a t y r a P r i m a " , sig. A5 V . Ibid., sig. A6 r .

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together, sometimes combined and later, in the Augustan period, emphasizing the newer. One final point should be made: the newer Satirist turns finally into an intellectually superior individual. He is not this, at first; for a while he may be the man who has himself learned wisdom through experience, and whose 'superiority' shows only in his more elaborate manipulation of style. I n time, however, most Satirists drop this man-to-man posture and become scornful critics speaking from an intellectual height above the level their offending fellowmen are occupying. All these lines of strategy with style for satiric purposes, then, contribute directly to the conventions available to the post-Restoration satirists when they come on the scene. I n discussing individually some of the practices t h a t become stylistic evidence of the cooler Satirist a t work, we might start with diction itself — the staple of the poem. C. G., the author of The Minte of Deformities (1600), has this criticism of metaphysical imagery: T h e newer v i e w i n g w a r e h o u s e of conceipt, L i k e (olde Silenus asse) w o u l d f a i n repeate, V n t o t h e o p e n world, darke ignorance, Making it g l o w e w i t h harsh intellegence, Y o u shall n o t surfet o n t h e guilded crummes, W h i c h w i t h u n c a p a b l e conceipts begunne, Making t h e world beleeue their high p i t c h t vaine, R e n o w n e d eloquence admired straine, W i t h sounding t e a r m e s t o cracke t h e o p e n v a u l t , Of v n c o n c e i u e d labors, a n d t o w a l k e T h e s t a t l y round of all s o u g h t loftinesse, D a i n i n g fayre entrance t o each c o m m o n meanesse, T h i s doe I h a t e , all m e n m a y m e conceiue, I seeke t o please, and n o t y o u r w i t s bereaue. 7 4

C. G.'s contemporaries had criticized metaphysical imagery for its obscurity — t h a t is, for its often cryptic quality, which like the elliptical phrasing of the curt style could simply make it hard to understand what the satirist was trying to communicate. B u t this writer objects not so much to the obscurity of the "uncapable conceipts", as to their connection with "all sought loftinesse". I t is this latter idea which is interesting to us here, for with it the passage becomes a discussion of the proper level of diction for the poem. 74

"To t h e gentle Perusers of m y v n p o l i s h t P r i m i t i v e " , sig. A2 r .

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Clearly C. G. prefers language t h a t is characterized by, in his expression, 'common meanesse' - t h a t is, the level of familiar, colloquial speech. 75 Needless to say, the expressions 'common meanness', 'low', 'familiar', 'colloquial', and such, had no very precise referent to writers of satire in the first several decades. B u t there were efforts to establish the boundaries of an appropriate range, and if some writers and critics were interested in setting a ceiling to t h a t range, others wanted to define the floor. And voices were very soon heard t h a t spoke for a good quality of what we would now call Standard English. The lowest level of diction in the satires themselves can be exemplified in Marston's crudest, slangy vulgarisms. But another level within the concept 'colloquial' had been implied in Sir J o h n Harington's definition of satire as the "mannerly and covertly [reproving] of all vices" (1591).76 The term 'mannerly' implies the courtesy of refraining at least from crude epithet, and suggests more, such as the use of the vocabulary, in general, of a politely well-mannered man. And as we know, the level of the 'mean' was gradually to rise through the period we have under survey here. Edmund Bolton, in his Hypercritica (c. 1618) urged for his times what Dryden was to prescribe later: t h a t the model for colloquial diction be the language used in the court and by the better sort in London. 77 B u t the diction of Wyatt, and certainly of Lodge, is dignified. There are few terms in their poems one would call 'low', and one might further characterize their vocabulary - especially Wyatt's - simply as drawn much more heavily from an AngloSaxon stock than from a Latinate one. This will distinguish it later from the dignity (and the air of greater learning) rising out of the most more Latinate vocabulary of the later, and certainly of the Augustan, formal satire. Thus from the first, writers had reasons and the linguistic materials for one aspect of the 'arte' Fitzgeffrey 75

Heinsius in 1612 would argue further against 'high' diction, although on different grounds. Describing the object and the methods of Juvenal as characterized by the desire to sweep one into reform — and so using exalted language as one means — Heinsius reveals a preference for the practices of Horace, which, involving 'low and familiar' words, were more appropriately designed to convince. - Cable, pp. 20-1. 76 "Apologie of Poetry". In G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1937), vol. II, p. 27. 77 In Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel F. Spingarn (Oxford, 1908-9), vol. I, pp. 82-115.

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seems to have preferred over 'railing': the sort t h a t showed a Satirist as under the self-control which shaped his discourse in such ways t h a t one recognized behind it the power of the balanced, discerning mind. Careful choice of vocabulary is a prime mark of this power. Another area in which the Satirist could show his stylistic finesse was in the strategic management of figures of speech. The epithet, for example, was introduced early and remained in favor. The Satirist aware of the power of style could elaborate it, and refine it into a weapon t h a t gained as much from how it was structured as from what its contents were. There is no difference in kind between Marston's brief spate of name-calling: "thou bottle-ale,/ Thou barmy froth ! . . . Butterflie, . . . windie bubble . . . " — and this stream of epithets, running to many lines, in Brathwaite's "A Satyre called the Coniborrowe" (1615). The Satirist, here, attacks a prostitute as A Sodome-apple, a lasciuious staine To vertues habite, or a whore in graine, A sucke-blood, Hyene, feigning Crocodile Worse then the monster bred on th'banks of Nyle, A purple Strumpet, Gangrene to the state, Earths-curse, hels-blisse, soules-soile & Angels hate, Smoothed Damnation, smothered infamie, Horror to Age, and youths calamity, Pritty-fac'd diuell of a ginger pace, Grace-lesse in all saue that her name is Grace, Soules-running vlcer that infects the heart, With painting, purfling, and a face of Art. Star-blasting honour, vertues foe, exprest B y hating where she seemes to fancy best. Vow-breaking periure, that her selfe adornes, With thousand fashions, and as many formes. Creature of her owne making, hollow trunke, A Christian paganiz'd with name of Punke. A Cell, a hell. . . A cage of vncleane birds, which is possest, Of none saue such as will defile their nest. 78

B u t the Satirist in Marston's poem is quite outshadowed by Brathwaite's - by his fertility and inventiveness, by his sheer ability to sustain a series of variations on this single figure alone; the epithet structure gains a range from the four-unit one (which was of 'B In A Strappado

for the Deuill, pp. 150-1.

THE SATIRIST AS AUTHENTICATING DEVICE

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course adequate in its own context) in the 1598 work, to an extended address t h a t by its very duration attracts attention to the Satirist's ability to achieve copia. And the Satirist thus displays himself as superior in t h a t he has so mastered the ideas he is dealing with t h a t he can, for example, elaborate one a t length in terms of a single stylistic figure. H e is in control both of the idea and himself in its expression. A closer look a t the details of this passage shows, further, the conscious molding of materials t h a t in the hands of the earnest Satirist might be used in a more 'natural' way. The passage from Marston's poem is brief, developed as a series of simple variations on the idea of something lacking in weight and substance. Still, isocolon is used in the first three of the four epithets, and alliteration throughout. When one turns to Brathwaite's passage, one sees the effects of a mind t h a t similarly has a t t e m p t e d to get the material of his discourse under evident and subtle rhetorical control, b u t the material is not only more extensive b u t more complex in its interrelationships. One should notice the ways in which Brathwaite points t h e m u p - b y alliteration, for example: " A Sodome-apple, a lascivious staine"; and alliteration used with parallel construction to express like ideas: "Smoothed Damnation, smothered infamie"; similarly linked references, here to three orders of existence, in like constructions: "Earths-curse, hels-blisse, soules-soile, a n d Angels h a t e " ; a meaningful play on words: "Grace-lesse in all saue t h a t her name is Grace"; and so on, all of which produces a passage of quite varied rhetorical and conceptual texture using a single figure. One can see Satirists' stylizing hands in other figures as well, as for example anaphora. A particularly effective passage is to be found in Lodge's "Satyre 4 " - an epistle — in which the Satirist is repeating criticisms he has heard others make about this m a n : T h e y s a y t h e m a n y p a c k s before t h y doore, A r e b u t t h e pawnes, and w a g e s of t h e poore, T h e y s a y t h e buildings w h i c h t h o u doest begin, A r e rich w i t h o u t , b u t y e e l d n o rest within; T h e y s a y t h y deerest friends are sure t o p a y Great forfeitures, a n d if t h e y misse their d a y : T h e y s a y t h e interest of t e n n e a yeere I s held t o o little t o m a i n t a i n e t h y cheere, A n d y e t t h y selfe, t h y wife, t h y m a i d , t h y knaue, Scarce butter'd t u r n e p s v p o n Sundaies haue,

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They say a t New-yeares-tide m e n giue thee cakes, And t h o u t h e n e x t d a y sels t h e m for their sakea, They say t h o u sel'st t h e chipping of t h y bred For feare t h y seruants should be ouer fed, They say one horse m a y beare t h y household stuffe Where for t h y coyne three carts are not enough; They say t h y welted gowne, and ruffes of lawne, W h e n thou wert warden last was b u t a pawne; They say t h y plate is forfeited a n d lost F o r halfe t h e money t h a t a t first it cost, They say t h y wiues cast kertle is become A paire of breeches to enskonce t h y b u m . Briefly, they say t h a t for t h e world thou a r t Too wretched, and for God too false in h a r t .

And the Satirist's voice continues: All these reports thou knowest as well as I Spring f r o m some grounds, things sould b y common cry Are quickly sould, men hardly stop t h e noice Of slanders published by common voice: If these be true, reform t h e m ; if vntrue, Take t h e m for warnings w h a t t h o u should'st eschue W h a t ere they be, now thinke v p o n t h y graue. 79

This on dit device, as C. S. Lewis says of its use in Skelton's poems, has a "strange and disquieting potency". "A vast muttering and growling of rumours fills our ears . . . " 80 and this is the effect that Lodge gains and uses as a satiric weapon against the miser he addresses. Such extended and symmetrical use of single figures, however, is rather rare. In the 16-line sardonic description of the zodiac, quoted earlier from Virgidemiarum, the Satirist has formed his material on the 'houses' into basically parallel constructions, but is careful still to vary one from the other - breaking into the series occasionally and then breaking away from the series structure itself for the last 'house'. I n th'heauens High-streete are b u t a dozen roomes, I n which dwels all in t h e world, p a s t and t o come: Twelue goodly Innes they are, with twelue fayre signes, E u e r well tended b y our Star-diuines. 79

A Fig for Momus, sigs. F3 V [misnumbered E 3 ] - F 4 r . English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954) (vol. I l l of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F . P . Wilson and B o n a m y Dobree), p. 139. 80

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Buery mans head Innes at the horned Ramme The whiles the necke the Black-buls guest became: Th'arms by good hap, meet a t the wrastling twinns, Th'heart in the way a t the Blew-lion innes. The legs their lodging in Aquarius got, T h a t is Bridge street of the heauen, I wot. The feete tooke vp the Fish with teeth of gold: B u t who with Scorpio log'd may not be told. W a t office then doth the Star-gazer beare? Or let him be the heauens Ostelere: Or Tapsters some: or some be Chamberlaines, To waite vpon the guests they entertaine.

And in the first satires, parallel constructions, if used, are more likely to account for relatively brief portions of the total attack, as in Thomas Middleton's (Micro-cynicon, 1599) upon the cheater, "who takes more shapes than the chameleon", Sometimes he jets it in a black furr'd gown, And t h a t is when he harbours in the town; Sometimes a cloak to mantle hoary age, Ill-favour'd, like an ape in spiteful rage. 81

Or a little more fully, yet still simply: B u t O, her silver-framed coronet, W i t h low-down dangling spangles all beset, H e r sumptuous periwig, her curious curls, H e r high-pric'd necklace of entrailed pearls, Her precious jewels wondrous to behold, H e r basest gem f r a m ' d of the purest gold !82

Brathwaite's Satirist in contrast, can use parallel constructions as a more complex ordering device. I n another section of "The Coniborrowe" (1615), he merely uses the forceful and unifying repetition of a single tag in the manner of Lodge: I t ' s you damn'd prostitutes t h a t soyle this land, W i t h all pollutions, haling down the hand Of vengeance and subuersion on the State, Making her flowrie borders desolate. I t ' s you t h a t ruine ancient families, Occasion bloodshed, pillage, periuries. I t s you t h a t make the wicked prodigall, 81 82

"Satire I V " ("Cheating Droone"), 2-6, p. 127. Ibid., "Satire I I I " ("Insolent Superbia"), 66-71, p. 125.

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Strips h i m of fortune, heritance, and all, I t s you t h a t makes new Troy with factions bleede, As m u c h or more then euer old Troy did. I t s you (sin-branded wantons) brings decay, To publique states. I t s y o u t h a t h a t e t h e day, B u t honour night.*3

And in another (quoted earlier), reflecting on his error in choosing the prostitute's company, the Satirist presents his matter in parallel constructions with individual variations that both preclude monotony and keep the reader consciously aware of the Satirist's rhetorical versatility: True, I was blind, when t h y sin-Syren voice, Made m e despise m y selfe, and m a k e a choice Of soules-seducing E r r o r ; I was blinde, W h e n I did hope contented ioyes to finde I n so profane a couer: Blinde was I W h e n I expected ought b u t vanitie. I n such an odious harbour: Blinde I was To looke for vertue in so vile a case. 84

But in the following passage, in which the Satirist addresses a landlord respecting his impoverished tenants, the parallel constructions work skillfully to organize and bring to a climax the cumulative effect of the Satirist's charges: Must his night cares and early rising to, His dayly labours, when and where t o sow, His painefull tillage, and his slender fare, His griefe when's crops t h e lesse successiue are, His m a n y howers of want, few of content, His special care t o p a y his Lands-lords rent, Must he t h a t earnes his liuing best we know (Being as God command'd) in's sweat ofs Brow, Must he t h a t sleepes with m a n y a troubled head, To finde his wife and hungry children bread, Must he (I say) for all his lifes disquiet, Maintaine t h y whoredome and excessiue riot, Must he support thee in t h y vaine delights, T h y midnight reuels, and t h y pagent sights, T h y new inuented fashions, and t h y port, Must he a t th'Cart, maintaine t h y pride a t Court, If this he doe, this doome to thee is giuen, Court it on earth, thou's neuer Court in Heauen,85 83 84 85

A Strappado for the Deuill, p p . 151-2. Ibid., p. 154. "To t h e Lands-lord wheresoeuer" (1615), ibid., p. 217.

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The Satirist's controlling series, each item beginning with " m u s t . . . " , accounts for the questions by which the Satirist reveals first the details of the tenant's life as laborer, then the contrasting details of the landlord's as supported in 'pride' by the rents paid to him. The contrast is, in fact, emphasized by the insertion in line 11 of " I say" (which both breaks into the series and calls attention to the contrast) followed by the expression, "life's disquiets", which summarizes what he wishes to be noted about the tenant and provides a compact idea as turning point into the next section. Within the passage are additional supporting parallelisms: the series depending on "his" (which itself is developed in a variety of parallel ways), the series on " t h y " , and so on. And notable of course is the epigrammatic line near the close, "Must he at th'Cart, maintaine thy pride a t Court" - which with its neat antithesis sums u p the idea of the passage, and foreshadows what the Augustans will do with this particular rhetorical device. As the style-conscious Satirist used parallel constructions to indicate relationships of likenesses and differences, so he used others of the so-called figures of wit and at the same time managed versatile internal effects. I n "The Coniborrowe", again, the speaker gives the inconveniences of the prostitute's company in a list - another extended, formal pattern. If she (I say) bring forth no fruit at all, Saue news from th'Spittle, or the Hospitall. Drie rewmes, catarchs, diseases of despaire, Puritane-sniueling, falling of the haire, Akes in the ioynts, and ring-worme in the face. Cramps in the nerues, fire in the priuy place, Racking in the sinews, burning of the gall, Searing the vaines, and bowels most of all: Drying in the head, which natur's wont to feede, Sucking the blood, whence all distempers breede. If best of pleasures haue no other end, Mong'st earth's delights, then haue we cause t'extend, Our pure affections to an higher ayme, Then to corrupt the honour of our name.86

I n this structure one may observe the alternations of the series of gerunds with other noun forms, and the successions of noun-plusprepositional phrase constructions - again, all means of clear organi86

Pp. 152-3.

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zation and presentation that at the same time, by their internal variety, draw some attention to the skill involved in their use. The effect, then, of all these various usages, is of a strong and fertile emotion, but one under a control that shows in the careful ordering of the materials of its attack. In the handling of larger rhetorical units, these first Satirists also showed deliberate stylistic skill. The 'character' has been discussed earlier in its logical use - with respect to its substance, as the evidence presented in support of charge. We may look at some now with respect to their rhetorical handling, noticing first that in managing the descriptive details, the earnest Satirist's usual manner was simply to supply them as such - either directly to the offender, or to a Companion. But occasionally one of those Satirists would use narration for variety, to make his point. Donne did this, in his "Satyr I " (of the Satirist's walk with the humorist) and "Satyr IV" (of the Satirist's visit to Court). Marston included at least one narrative passage, the Satirist's call (in Certaine Satyres, III) on the love-sick Lucian; and the Satirist's 'jorney to Islington', in It. C.'s The Times Whistle (1615), is still another instance. But the basic structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean satires was likelier to be composed of static details of characters, and usually in the earlier poems characters in a series. But if a typical presentation consisted essentially of the Satirist's generalization, followed or preceded by details of one or a series of instances that illustrate it, this basic structure itself invited stylistic refinements, and the Satirist again found ways to demonstrate an obvious control of his materials through them. He might introduce them in ways that simply emphasized the common quality - as here, the dislike of criticism: Tell pursie Rollus (lusking in his bed) That humors, by excessiue ease are bred.. . He will not sticke (after a cup of sacke) To flout his counseller behind his backe. Tell Sextus wife (whose shoes are under-layd) Her gate is girlish, and her foote is splayd; Sheele raile with open mouth. . .87 87 Thomas Lodge, A Fig for Momus (London, 1595), "Satyre I", sig. B l r . Hunterian Club Reprint No. XLII, 1878. In The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (Hunterian Club ed., 1883), vol. 3.

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And it was possible to introduce them with grammatical variety, too. The theme of Richard Middleton's Times Metamorphoses (1608) is a re-expression of its epigraph, "Témpora mutantur & nos mutamur in illis." "Ovid", says the Satirist, thy writ is true; times changed then, But how much more now amongst this race of men. 88

Following this statement is a procession of some dozen and a half examples from the professions, classes, and so on. Each typifies the decay of virtues t h a t earlier generations, according to the Satirist, had preserved: as in the knight, the householder, the traveler, the heir. The Satirist introduces each character by addressing him in terms of the change t h a t is typified in him. Are not times chang'd when Gains progeny Can flash it out in courtlike gallantrie, Sweare, but precisely, talke demurely too? Not as his pleading father wont to doo, To make his ieering voice sound in the eares Of's clients, iudges; no, Equestro feares To attempt ought, vnworthy the degree Of his new knight-hood, staine to gentrie.

And so on, through the series, each introduced in a somewhat different way: Time changes ho ! when lisping Cassius Is turn'd venerian lasciuious. . . What? sinstering Sylvio, thou art chang'd with time: And therefore subiect to a criticke rime. . . Mounsieur Liberio how hath time changed you? You are not at Ierusalem or now. . . 89

More refined considerations respecting the organization of characters concerned the earlier poets, too. I have mentioned (with respect to The Times Whistle, c. 1615), the Satirist's management of his examples, in which, while he illustrates a particular offense by a number of examples (as earlier Satirists often did), he sometimes makes a point of using each example to display a somewhat different aspect of the particular offense under view, so t h a t a shocking 88 89

In Epigrams and Satires Ibid., sigs. D 3 r - D 4 v .

(London), sig. D3 r .

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range of aspects is illustrated as well. This of course is a logical, not a rhetorical matter, b u t his further technique is to arrange his material often enough in climactic order. I used earlier as an example from "Satire 6", a passage composed of illustrations of sexual license. The unit on sodomy within this passage opens with the instance of a single citizen who practices it. The Satirist moves on, to reveal how wide a distribution this particular offense has: " . . . 'tis no marvell", he says to the culprit, Sodomeo, though thou not be free From the contagion of this villanie, When the whole land's thus plagued with this sore, Whose beastlinesse then now was never more.

I n "Academie, country, cittie, Court", he goes on, Infinite are defiled with this spurt [sic]

and the worst villany is t h a t it is rampant in the Universities: How many towardly young gentlemen . . .sent vnto thee by theyr friends For art & education, the true endes Their parentes aime at, are with this infection Poysned by them whose best protection Should keep them from all sinne ! Alacke the while ! Each pedant Tutour should his pupill spoile.

" 0 " , he concludes, how I grieve at this vnhappy fate, Because this vice is so inveterate Growne to so strong a custome that (I fear) The world shall end ere they this sinne forbear !90

R. C. has thus arranged his instances so t h a t the worst (the corruption of the young) comes last, and though he reinforces his climaxes with ejaculations or moralizing passages, rather than with, say, elaborative detail or an epigrammatic summary (which later poets were to come to consider more effective), the point is t h a t R. C. was among the earlier satirists who arranged their structures with a deliberately controlled formal art. As to uses of the decasyllabic couplet that would mark the conscious stylist at work, I have illustrated Hall's practice of developing so

P. 80.

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his units of sense to fit the decasyllabic lines and often to fit the confines of the couplet, singly or in a series. His practice, in this, was entirely different from Donne's, which emphasized the natural flow of speech in its irregular structures and rhythms. B u t while certainly most of the Elizabethan satirists sought, like Donne, to create the effects of spontaneous speech by the patterning of their lines, there were a number who worked for t h a t effect carefully and in a controlled manner, within the prosodic requirements of the chosen verse form. Consider this passage, from very close to the same year as Donne's first satires: It is as common as vnkind a fault In youth, (too subiect to this worlds assault) To imitate, admit, and daylie ehuse, Those errors, which their lawles parents vse. For what by vaine example youth conceaves, The same for lawfull, daily he receaues, If damned dice the father doth affect, The selfe-like follie doth his heir infect, If lust: to lust the sonne is too procliue, If fraud, by fraud his wanton race will thriue: If surfet, surfet is esteemed no sinne, For youth perseuers, as he doth beginne. 91

The idea, which runs twelve lines to its rounded completion, moves in a logical pattern: from generalization to examples to summary. Each section is the product of a state of mind t h a t permitted the Satirist to consider style as he spoke (or in the case of this epistle, wrote), and to form all b u t one of the units into end-stopped lines, while managing a strategy of balance, parallelism, and alliteration within them t h a t makes the logical relationships among the units as clear as possible - and, while still avoiding the extended, harmonious intricacies of a 'Ciceronian' passage. The first section of four complete lines describes the 'fault' in two of its aspects, and continues with the generalization t h a t young people will learn the errors of their parents - a process divided into three aspects: imitating, admitting, preferring. The two aspects of the 'fault' t h a t the Satirist presents are stated antithetically and compactly as 'common' and 'unkind' (that is, unnatural), in a single line. The three aspects of the process which hardens the 81

Lodge, "Satyre 3", sig. El".

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young into error, again are in parallel grammatical form — here, infinitives — and again, by compact expression, fitted into the limits of a line. And if line one is awkwardly run-on, the remaining three are end-stopped, and all end in 'strong' words: nouns in lines one and two, verbs in lines three and four. The same shaping mind shows in the rest of the passage. The idea elaborated in lines 1—4 is re-stated epigrammatically as lines 5-6. The series of examples begins with one in couplet form - a clause per line, worked out in near-parallel form; as it goes on, the items are presented elliptically, their full form derivable from what has preceded. They are also presented compactly and trimmed each to an even line's length, and each line is opened with an identical grammatical structure. The whole closes as neatly, then, with a summary t h a t again is compactly contained within a single line. From the first, it is clear, examples were early available to English formal satirists of what were to be a number of the favored Augustan prosodic practices. And one can enumerate additional features of Lodge's poem t h a t later would characterize the most typical of the Augustan poems: the precision of the vocabulary, for instance, t h a t requires no recastings for a better word on this Satirist's p a r t and which helps create the feeling of neat compression we have remarked on. The management of rhythm, unit b y unit, and line by line, is also prophetic of later usages: the sense of linos 1 and 3 flows over into the next lines, respectively, and so creates its own rhythm, b u t all lines have clearly felt (and over half, clearly punctuated) caesurae. The pauses shift easily, varying the rhythms of lines 1-6. Where they fall uniformly, in lines 7-8, and 9-11, it is to re-inforce the parallels in the thought. This kind of well-wrought effect, though, was not quick to be sought after. B u t it is evidence of the early origins of the prosody of Augustan verse satire, as is the occasional epigrammatic piece of devastating imagery cast in a line — for instance in the following description of a lustful preacher: On[e] wench cannot suffice his appetite ! The first must then be baude vnto another, She to a third, the daughter to the mother, Til like the parish bull he serves them still. 92 92

R. C., p. 77.

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Although the author of this poem has not exploited the particular possibilities of the couplet itself for satiric effect (in omitting to cast the sense into closed couplets), in clarity of language and in compactness of satirical expression alone, a poet occasionally managed just such a neo-classical effect. Humor, also, was to become a major stylistic weapon, and was also introduced early in the history of formal satire. We have seen some evidence of dissatisfaction with the bludgeoning line of satiric practice, in Fitzgeffrey's view of railing as evidence of a want of invention. The prologue to another satire published in 1617, the same year as Fitzgeffrey's, suggests a refreshing alternative: Muse, shew t h e rigours of a satyres art, I n t o harsh sarcasmes, dissonant arid smart. 9 3

I n Puttenham's definition 'Sarcasmus'isa"Bitter taunt", a deriding remark t h a t has a "certaine severitie". B u t his example, " I have gone a hunting many times, yet never tooke I such a swine before", shows also t h a t it is or can be a worked taunt, an idea delivered with a rhetorical polish. I n the example, the speaker has created an ambiguity in "hunting", and cast his sentiments into iambs t h a t neatly measure out two clauses of equal length. The earliest uses of humor, however, were not even this sophisticated. English Renaissance critics had early enough affirmed it is properly one of the possible devices of satire: Sidney, for example, described among the three modes of the poetry of reproof, the 'Satyric', which "sportingly neuer leaueth until hee make a man laugh a t folly, and at length ashamed, to laugh at himself; which he cannot auoyd, without auoyding the follie.. . ", 94 And Sidney is distinguishing here on the basis of classical formal satire; the first Latin passage in his definition — "Omne vafer vitium ridenti tangit amico?" is adapted slightly from Persius, 95 and the second —

93 H e n r y H u t t o n , Follies Anatomie [Satire 1], I n Early English Poetry, Percy Society ed. (London, 1842), vol. VI, p. 10. 94 I n Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1, p. 176. 95 Ibid. Smith gives t h e original: " O m n e vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico / Tangit et admissus circum praecordia l u d i t " . (I, 116-7) - Smith, I , Notes, p. 391.

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" E s t Ulubris, animus si nos non deficit aequus?" from one of Horace's Epistles.96 Nashe was to recommend devices of "mirth and pleasure", rather t h a n the use of "all gall and no spleene", which he felt characterized the practices of the satirists he knew. 97 B u t the 'mirth' in the satires was usually a laugh of bitter pleasure, heard from the Satirist who declared he saw his victim cringe under a blow, and so knew he had touched guilt with an accurate finger. Humor of another familiar kind was produced when other satirists copied some of the practices of the Marprelate and anti-Marprelate writers. As Holden says, a tradition of tumbling, rambling, fluent, lively invective developed with them, 98 and certainly in a number of the formal satires there is a kind of fiercely good-natured, confident, savage jauntiness. That this occurs in Marston and others of the Elizabethans for humor hardly needs demonstration; one hears it in this attack of Marston's on his plagiarist : Hence ye big-buzzing-little-bodied Gnats, Yee tailing Ecehoes, huge tongu'd pigmy brats, I meane to sleepe, wake not m y slumbring braine With your malignant weake detracting vaine"

and in Goddard's address to his poem, in which certain means for achieving the tone are figuratively defined: Goe Mastijj Whelpe disdenn thy selfe a while With sullen sport make thou thy maysters smyle: Be wanton: yet amidst thy best delight N o t onlie barke, but make as yf thoudst bite Grynn, snarle, and on thy best freind look soe grym As yf thoudst at one snapp devouer him 1 0 0

Such writers as Thomas Scot, J o h n Taylor the Water Poet, and later Cleveland were to help continue this line of what has been called energetic raillery on into the seventeenth century. 96

Ibid. The passage in Horace is as follows: "Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus". (I, ii, 30) - Smith, I, Notes, p. 391. 97 Strange News (1592). In The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), vol. I, p. 285. 98 William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire: 1572-1642 (Yale University Press, 1954), p. 49. 99 Scourge, "Satyre VI", 101-4, p. 138. 100 A Mastif Whelp (1599), "Satire 1", sig. A2^.

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The somewhat more clever humor t h a t Sidney suggested appeared just often enough in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods for one to realize t h a t it was at least recognized. With respect to verse satire, Daniel Heinsius, in the prefatory essay to his edition of Horace (1612), was to include a section on this use of humor; there he would suggest such particulars as parody as a means of making a person laugh, and the surprising reversal of expectation, and the presentation of the great in terms of the small and the small in terms of the great. But some of these had already been introduced to English formal satire by the time he wrote. Farce, not mentioned b y Heinsius directly, is perhaps the most obvious of the forms of humor used in the Elizabethan and Jacobean satires. Donne created a scene with touches of the farcical in his "Satyr I " , when he said of the humorist, in their stroll through the city streets, Now leaps he upright, Joggs me, & cryes, Do you see Yonder well favoured youth? Which? Oh, 'tis hee That dances so divinely. . .

That is, the movements are exaggerated to ridiculous degrees in the description of the humorist's action - and the Satirist himself provides a norm to measure them by, in his own wry answer: Oh, said I, Stand still, must you dance here for company? 1 0 1

There are also farcical passages in Donne's "Satyr IV", in the exaggerated descriptions of the affected courtier: He, like to a high stretcht lute string squeakt, O Sir, 'Tis sweet to talke of Kings 102

and in those of the Satirist's reactions to him: He with home-meats tries me; I belch, spue, spit, Looke pale and sickly, like a Patient; Yet He thrusts on more; And as if he'd undertooke To say Gallo-Belgicus without booke Speakes of all States, and deeds, that have been since The Spaniards came, to the losse of Amyens. 101 102

Lines 83-6, p. 148. Lines, 73-4, p. 161.

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Like a bigge wife, at sight of loathed meat, Readie to travaile: So I sigh, and sweat To heare this Makeron talke. 103 A n d elsewhere, in Marston's description of a Satirist's difficulties with the "pitchy clouds" of another writer's poem: O darknes palpable ! Egipts black night! My wit is stricken blind, hath lost his sight. My sins are broke, with groping for some sence To know to what his words haue reference.. . . Reach me some Poets Index that will show. Imagines Deorum. Booke of Epithites, Natales Conies, thou I know recites, 104 and so on. One of the most extended pieces is the description of the 'Inamorato Lucian'. The Satirist describes thus: When my eares receau'd a farefull sound That he was sicke, I went, and there I found Him layd of loue, and newly brought to bed Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head. His chamber hang'd about with Elegies, With sad complaints of his loues miseries: His windowes strow'd with Sonnets, and the glasse Drawne full of loue-knots. I approacht the Asse, And straight he weepes, and sighes some sonnet out To his faire loue. And then he goes about For to perfume her rare perfection With some sweet-smelling Epitheton. Then with a melting looke he writhes his head, And straight in passion riseth in his bed; And hauing kist his hand, stroke vp his haire, Made a French conge, cryes, 0 cruell feare To the antique Bed-post. 106 The intent to ridicule b y farcical means is clearly here. Parody, mentioned b y Heinsius, is also to be found. A n d this appeared early for the purpose of ridiculing the original, as in Marston's objection to this kind of passage in Hall: Nay: let the prouder Pines of Ida feare The sudden fires of heauen: and decline 103 104 105

Lines 109-117, p. 163. O. S„ "Satyre II", 21-4, 26-8, p. 72. Ibid., "Satyre III", 55-71, pp. 78-9.

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Their yeelding tops, that dar'd the skies whilere: And shake your sturdy trunks ye prouder Pines, Whose swelling graines are like be gald alone, With the deepe furrowes of the thunderstone, 106

and so on. The parody, then, leaves no a m b i g u i t y about the poem which is being ridiculed: Yee For Yee Yee

Pines of Ida, shake your fayre growne height, love at first dash will with thunder fight. Cedars bend, fore lightning you dismay, Lyons tremble, for an Asse doth Way. 107

Like the other devices for suggesting personal identities, this device seems to have been used infrequently during the first several decades of formal satire's history. There was a certain a m o u n t of cheerful complimentary plagiarism; expressions f r o m Marston's poems are echoed in Guilpin's, f r o m Wither's in Brathwaite's, and so on. Another t r y a t parody for the purpose of ridicule itself was a t t e m p t e d a t least once more in our period, b y H e n r y H u t t o n in his Follies Anatomie (1619). Fitzgeffrey's " S a t y r a Secunda" had included remarks on the surfeit of critics; according to the Satirist, critics were everywhere, and he himself could scarcely appear on t h e street b u t he would become the b u t t of some scribbler's attack. The point he was making, it will be recalled, was t h a t criticism had become mere carping a n d h a s t y generalization upon externals. H u t t o n ' s Satirist takes the position t h a t this is hypersensitivity, indeed, on the p a r t of Fitzgeffrey's. Without naming him, he describes a gallant on the street who 'jets', and with a stern face "passengers doth chase" from the position b y the wall he wants for himself. "Muse", says H u t t o n ' s Satirist sardonically, touch not this man, nor his life display, Ne with sharpe censure gainst his vice invey; For, sith his humor can no jesting brooke, He will much lesse endure a satyre's booke. 108

I n the remainder of the satire, the gallant himself speaks. I n Fitzgeffrey's poem, the speaker has said, 106 107 108

"His Defiance to Enuie", st. 1, p. 7. C. S., "Satyre IV", 5-8, p. 81. [Satire 1], p. 10.

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PART TWO

Beshrew mee (Sirs) if I dare strout in street, Winke at a Window: A God-dam-me greet: Vsher a Lady: but salute her Gloue: Or Kisse a Maide for Manners more then Loue Cringe to a Soriuener: be conuersing seene In Ludgate, with a broken Citizen: Turne o f t in Pauls: call for a stoole o'th Stage: Or walke attended with my Hackney Page: Pace Turnball, Shorditch, Long-Lane: or Piekt-hatch Least I be taken by this heedful watch These pickthanke Pesants; that with Lynceus eye Inspect mans Actions too Iniuriously. 109

The passage as it is parodied in Hutton's poem is rephrased and considerably elaborated; details t h a t in Fitzgeffrey's poem merely characterize the Satirist as going about his inoffensive business, in Hutton's become ludicrous and damning: Beshrew me, sirs, I durst not stretch the streete, Gaze thus on conduits scrowls, base vintners beat, Salute a mad-dame with a french cringe grace, Greete with "God-dam-me", a confronting face, Court a rich widow, or m y bonnet vaile, Converse with bankrupt mercers in the gaile, Nor in a metro shew my Cupide's fire, Being a french-poxt ladies apple-squire, 110

and so on, with the tone of injured innocence carefully preserved from the original. The speech, of course, is intended to show the butt, the Satirist, as ridiculous in both his presumptuousness and his wish t h a t he be spared criticism for it. And the means t h a t H u t t o n has used, to bring this effect about, is parody. A merely pleasant humor shows often enough in Hall, whose manner, like Lodge's, is generally mild. One recalls the Satirist's speech to Pontice, who feels t h a t his lineage is enough to establish his own position in life without further effort at greatness on his part. The Satirist asks him how pointing to the genealogy, the church windows honoring his forefathers, and the statues of ancient members of the family actually bears on Pontice's merit; and in this list the Satirist unexpectedly includes a ludicrous detail as well. " W h a t boots it thee", he asks, 109 110

Sig. B3 r -B3 v . P. 10.

THE SATIRIST AS AUTHENTICATING DEVICE

119

To shew t h e rustie Buckle t h a t did tie The Garter of t h y greatest Grand-sires knee? 1 1 1

The intended effect, of course, is to shift Pontice's perspective to the point where he can see that his pretensions are ludicrous, too. The detail, incidentally, is not in the parallel scene in Juvenal's VIII, which Hall is drawing on. Still another device of humor is also essayed. Irony - in the sense of saying one thing and meaning another — could be used in obvious ways, as in this address to 'Mounsieur Bravado', where neither is the handling smooth nor the thought profound: Where's your tobacco box, your Steele and t o u c h ? Roarers respect, and value these too m u c h . Where is your larum watch, your Turkies rings, Muske-comfits, bracelets, and such idle things? Y'are n a k ' t as A d a m if you have not these, And your endeavours cannot ladies please. If you t h e gallants title will assume, Goe use th'apothecarie for perfume, Weare eare-rings, jewels, cordivant's strong sent, Which comely ornaments dame N a t u r e lent. F y , f y : you are to blame, which times misspend; T h a t for a trifling cost will lose a friend. 1 1 2

Elsewhere, irony might be used within a passage in a longer poem whose tone otherwise is solemn and whose method is direct. And it could be competent enough, even by later Augustan standards: Till sanctified Ignatius and his broode Found out t h e lawfull way of shedding blood, And proued it plainely t h a t a subiect might Murther his Prince, we fondly usde t'indite Such persons of high treason: Now before t h e m Wee kneele, we pray, we worship and adore them. For with their merits now wa're more acquainted And know for zealous Patriots they are saincted. 1 1 3

The syntax is manipulated to bring the antithetical aspects of the idea together, and at the midpoint of the passage — by making 111

Liber I, iii, 11-3, p. 59. H u t t o n [Satire 4], p. 18. * 113 Thomas Scot, "Sarcasmus Mundi", sig.