Changing satire: Transformations and continuities in Europe, 1600–1830

By Manchester University Press

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526146106

Book preview

Changing satire

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies promotes interdisciplinary work on the period c.1603–1815, covering all aspects of the literature, culture and history of the British Isles, colonial North America and the early United States, other British colonies and their global connections. The series welcomes academic monographs, as well as collective volumes of essays that combine theoretical and methodological approaches from more than one discipline to further our understanding of the period. It is supported by the Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.

General editors

Ladan Niayesh, Université de Paris and Will Slauter, Sorbonne Université

Founding editor

Anne Dunan-Page

Advisory board

Bernadette Andrea, Daniel Carey, Rachel Herrman, Hannah Spahn, Claire Preston and Peter Thompson

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/seventeenth-eighteenth-century-studies/

Changing satire

Transformations and continuities in Europe, 1600–1830

Edited by

Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4611 3 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

In memory of Howard D. Weinbrot

‘Guide, Philosopher, and Friend’

Contents

List of figures

Note on contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction – Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård

1The politics of formal verse satire, 1598–1808: Juvenal, Boileau, Johnson and Cottreau – Howard D. Weinbrot

2Anglo-Latin satiric verse in the long seventeenth century – Victoria Moul

3Satire between the eaters and the meat: value and indifference before and in Donne’s Metempsychosis – Luke Wilson

4Transcending boundaries: Rachel Speght’s instructive use of satire in A Mouzell for Melastomus – Mike Nolan

5Milton among the satirists – David Currell

6Petronius’ Satyricon in the seventeenth century: satire, eloquence and anti-Jesuitism – Corinna Onelli

7Behind the mask: social satire in Bernini’s caricatures and comedies – Joris van Gastel

8‘More expensive of their powder, than of their lead’: fops, theatre and the late Stuart military – Máire MacNeill

9The visual and the verbal: the intermediality of English satire, c. 1695–1750 – Andrew Benjamin Bricker

10Aesop, intermediality and graphic satire, c. 1740 – Kate Grandjouan

11Typesetting the borders: satire as a mediator in post-revolutionary Europe – Camilla Murgia

12The interconnections of satire and censorship in Goya’s prints and drawings – Reva Wolf

13Jumping the broom: a common-law wedding custom’s bristling visual satires – Lizzie Marx

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1Isaac Robert Cruikshank, ‘Dandy Pickpockets, diving, Scene near St. James Palace’ (1818). Farmington: The Lewis Walpole Library. Public domain.

6.1Schoppe’s Satyricon. Florence: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Scioppiano 226, in-quarto. Permission to reproduce image granted by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo. Further reproduction by any means prohibited.

6.2Title-page of the second edition of Bartolomeo Beverini’s Selectiores dicendi formulae (Naples, 1689). Subiaco: Biblioteca Statale del Monumento di Santa Scolastica, shelf-mark: ANT. 600 XXXVI A 25, in-12°, 156 pages. Permission to reproduce image granted by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo. Further reproduction by any means prohibited.

7.1Gianlorenzo Bernini, Caricature of Innocent XI, c. 1676–80. Pen and ink on paper, 11.4 × 18.2 cm. Leipzig: Museum der bildenden Künste. Photo: bpk / Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

7.2Jacques Callot, Bello Sguardo and Coviello, c. 1621. Etching, 7.3 × 9.3 cm. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

7.3Gianlorenzo Bernini, Caricature of Cassiano dal Pozzo, before 1654. Pen and ink on paper, 10.6 × 11.6 cm. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

7.4Annibale Carracci, Various Caricatures, c. 1575–1609. Pen and ink on paper, 19.4 × 13.5 cm. London: British Museum, inv. no. pp, 3.17. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

7.5Gianlorenzo Bernini (after?), Caricatures of Lelio Orsini and a Military Captain, before 1644. Pen and ink on paper, 18.8 × 25.6 cm. Rome: Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Fondo Corsini 127521 (579). Permission to reproduce image granted by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo. Further reproduction by any means prohibited.

7.6Gianlorenzo Bernini (after?), Caricature of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, c. 1632?. Pen and ink on paper, 27.2 × 20.4 cm. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Fondo Chigi P.VI.4, f. 15.

7.7Gianlorenzo Bernini, Saint Teresa, 1646. Marble, 3.5 m (height). Rome: Santa Maria della Vittoria. Photo: Enrico Fontolan/Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome.

7.8Gianlorenzo Bernini, Members of the Cornaro Family, 1644–7. Marble. Rome: Santa Maria della Vittoria. Photo: Enrico Fontolan/Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome.

9.1Title page of [Daniel Defoe’s] The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church (London, 1702). San Marino: The Huntington Library.

9.2Title page of [Jonathan Swift’s] A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick (Dublin, 1729). San Marino: The Huntington Library.

9.3[Alexander Pope’s] The Dunciad, Variorum. With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus (London, 1729), p. 1. San Marino: The Huntington Library.

9.4William Hogarth, Satire on False Perspective (1754). Farmington: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, lwlpr22643.

9.5Frontispiece to The Dunciad: With Notes Variorum, and the Prolegomena of Scriblerus (London, 1729). New Haven: General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

9.6Herman Van Kruys’ Frontispiece to Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility Examin’d (London, 1729). Los Angeles: The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, f PR3633 .P82*.

9.7George Bickham Sr., Medley Print: Sot’s Paradise (London, 1706–7). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

10.1[Anon] engraved by Mosley, The European Race, Heat III, 1739. Etching with engraving. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

10.2[Anon] engraved by Mosley, The European Race, Heat II, 1738. Etching with engraving. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

10.3Romeyn de Hooghe, Europe nooit voor Een, 1701/2. Etching. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

11.1Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast, 1787. Etching and aquatint, 37.2 x 46.9 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 42.121(2).

11.2La France outragée. Le cruel rit des pleurs qu’il fait verser, 1815. Hand-coloured etching, 18.1 x 24.8 cm. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection De Vinck, 9806. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

11.3La France vengée. Elle rit de ses larmes, 1815. Hand-coloured etching, 19 x 25.1 cm. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection De Vinck, 9807. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

11.4James Gillray (copy after), Politeness, c. 1779. Hand-coloured etching, 23.2 x 32.8 cm (sheet). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24.63.274.

11.5James Gillray, French Liberty, British Slavery, 1792. Hand-coloured etching, 26.8 x 36.9 cm (sheet). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976.602.26.

12.1Francisco de Goya, Caprichos, plate 23, ‘Aquellos polbos’ (‘These Specks of Dust’), 1799. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, 21.5 × 14.8 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 18.64(23), Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918.

12.2Francisco de Goya, Caprichos, plate 24, ‘Nohubo remedio’ (‘Nothing Could Be Done about It’), 1799. Etching and burnished aquatint, 21.3 x 14.8 cm (plate). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 18.64(24), Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918.

12.3Francisco de Goya, Caprichos, plate 1, ‘Fran.co Goya y Lucientes, Pintor’ (‘Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Painter’), 1799. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, 21.7 × 15 cm (plate). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 50.558.33, Gift of Mrs Francis Ormond, 1950.

12.4Bernard Picart, Les habits des Personnes condamnées par l’Inquisition (The Outfits Worn by Persons Condemned by the Inquisition), illustration in Bernard Picart and Jean-Frédéric Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World) (Amsterdam: Chez J. F. Bernard, 1723), vol. 2, plate facing p. 96. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

12.5Francisco de Goya, Locura (Folly, or Madness), c. 1819–23. Brush-and-ink drawing, 22.5 x 14 cm. New York: Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection, 2017.105.

12.6Francisco de Goya, Caprichos, plate 53, ‘Que pico de Oro!’ (‘What a Golden Beak!’), 1799. Etching, burnished aquatint and burin, 21.4 x 15 cm (plate). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 18.64(53), Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918.

12.7Elogio de la locura, Spanish translation of Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509), trans. D. J. L. A. y G. from the French version by Nicolas Gueudeville, bound manuscript, c. 1802, p. 7 recto. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/17893.

12.8Indice ultimo de los libros prohibidos y mandados expurgar: para todos los reynos y señorios del catolico rey de las Españas, el señor don Carlos IV (Latest Index of Prohibited and Censored Books: For All the Kingdoms and Dominions of the Catholic King of the Spanish Realm,His Majesty Charles IV) (Madrid: Imprenta de Don Antonio de Sancha, 1790), listing of the French translation by Gueudeville of Praise of Folly on p. 87. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España.

12.9Anthony van Dyck, Erasmus Rotterdamus, c. 1635. Etching, 2nd state, 25.0 x 15.5 cm. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, ER/123 (113).

12.10Attributed to Francisco de Goya, Erasmus Rotterdamus, after Anthony van Dyck, n.d. Ink drawing, 19.8 x 14.5 cm. Collection of Chantal Carderera.

12.11Attributed to Francisco de Goya, Erasmus, after Anthony van Dyck, n.d. Ink drawing, 20.3 x 15.0 cm. Madrid: Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Inv. no. 8651.

12.12Antonio Guerrero (design) and Juan Carrafa (print), ‘Hace Fr. Gerundio su primer ensayo en el refectorio, y deja asombrada toda la Comunidad especialmente al los legos y donados’ (‘Friar Gerund makes his first try at a sermon in the refectory, and leaves the whole community, especially the laity and donors, astonished’), frontispiece to José Francisco de Isla, Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas (History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas), vol. 2 (Madrid: En la Imprenta que fué de Fuentenebro, 1813). Madrid: Universidad Complutense, Biblioteca de Derecho, D 50092.

12.13Desiderius Erasmus, ‘C’est la Folie qui parle’ (‘Folly Speaks’), illustration (traditionally attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger) in L’Éloge de la folie (Praise of Folly), trans. Nicolas Gueudeville (Amsterdam: François l’Honoré, 1731), p. 2. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Arsenal, RESERVE 8-NF-6448.

12.14Francisco de Goya, La madre Celestina (Mother Celestina), Album D.22, c. 1819–23. Photograph © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Brush-and-ink drawing, 23 x 14.5 cm. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, William Francis Warden Fund, 59.200.

13.1P. Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs (detail), Antwerp, 1559. Oil on panel, 117 x 163 cm. Berlin: Gemäldegalerie. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, photo: Jörg P. Anders.

13.2H. Shade after N. Lunatic, The Prince of Wales Looks from a Window of Carlton House …, London, c. 1785–6. Hand-coloured etching, 13.8 x 18.7 cm. Wellcome Collection, CC BY.

13.3S. W. Fores (published by), The Lover’s Leap, London, 1786. Hand-coloured etching, 26 x 36.2 cm. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

13.4J. Catnach (published by), The Poisoned Family, London, c. 1813–22. Typeset and woodcut, 23.7 x 18.8 cm. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

13.5W. Heath (published by T. McLean), The Separation or the Grey Mare – the Better Horse, London, 1830. Hand-coloured etching, 26.2 x 37.6 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

13.6I. R. Cruikshank (published by G. Humphrey), A Scene for a New Peice at Astley’s Theatre!, London, 1826. Hand-coloured etching, 25.8 x 36 cm. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

13.7W. Heath (published by T. McLean), Jumping Over the Broomstick, London, 1830. Hand-coloured etching, 25.5 x 36.9 cm. London: British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Contributors

Andrew Benjamin Bricker is Assistant Professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University and a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. His first book, Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022), studies English satire and the development of defamation law.

David Currell is Assistant Professor and Chair of English at the American University of Beirut, where he teaches early modern poetry and drama. He is co-editor of the collections Reading Milton through Islam (2015) and Digital Milton (2018). Other work on Milton has appeared or is forthcoming in the journal Translation and Literature and in several edited volumes. He is writing a book on Renaissance epic and satire.

Joris van Gastel is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern Art at the University of Zurich. Having studied Psychology and Art History in Amsterdam and Venice, and holding a PhD from Leiden University, he has been part of various interdisciplinary and international research projects. He has published widely on early modern art, with a particular focus on the art of baroque Rome and Naples.

Kate Grandjouan is Assistant Professor of Art History at the New College of Humanities/Northeastern in London. Her current research on visual satire and national identity relates to a book called Hogarth’s French. She has been published in French with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment/Liverpool University Press and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. Her research in English has appeared in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, British Art Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies and on the website of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Máire MacNeill received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017, in which she analysed the role of the sword on the London comic stage between 1660 and 1740.

Lizzie Marx is a History of Art PhD candidate at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where she explores the visualisation of smell and its meanings in seventeenth-century Dutch art. Marx completed her History of Art BA at King’s College, Cambridge in 2014, and in 2016 she received her MPhil in History of Art at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 2018–19 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Victoria Moul is a Reader in Early Modern Latin & English at University College London specialising in the role of Latin in early modern literary culture. She is the editor of Neo-Latin Literature (2017) and director of the major research project Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies. Her most recent work is A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England (2022).

Camilla Murgia studied History of Art at Neuchâtel (BA, MA) and Oxford (PhD) Universities. She specialises in French and British visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has worked extensively on printmaking, caricature and satire. Currently she is Junior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Lausanne.

Mike Nolan is Adjunct Research Fellow in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His teaching and research interests include the literature, especially plays, of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; French plays of the seventeenth century; and recovering the voices of French peasants of this period. He has published on Robert Daborne and Shakespeare and has completed a new translation of the casket sonnets attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Corinna Onelli holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the Università di Roma Tre and has been a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the EHESS-CRH-Grihl in Paris. Her current research interests focus on the reception of classics in the early modern period, the circulation of forbidden books (in manuscript and in print), editorial practices, the history of scholarship, libertinism and satire.

Cecilia Rosengren is Associate Professor of History of Ideas and Science at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests include the history of the public sphere and more specifically early modern women philosophers’ public strategies, as well as the culture of the Baroque. She is the author of Conway. Naturfilosofi och kvinnliga tänkare i barockens tidevarv [Conway: Natural Philosophy and Women Thinkers in the Age of the Baroque] (2009) and is currently working on public, social and private actions in the work of Margaret Cavendish.

Per Sivefors is Associate Professor of English Literature at Linnaeus University. His research focuses on early modern, particularly Elizabethan, satire, masculinity and authorship, as well as on the reception of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries. His latest book is Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: ‘A Kingdom for a Man’ (2020). He is currently co-editing two collections on Shakespeare and Northern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Howard D. Weinbrot was Ricardo Quintana Professor of English, Emeritus, and William Freeman Vilas Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as a reader at the Huntington Library. His many publications on satire include The Formal Strain (1969), Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (1978), Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (1982), Eighteenth-Century Satire (1988) and Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (2005).

Luke Wilson is Associate Professor in the English Department at Ohio State University. He is author of Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (2000) and of essays on various aspects of law in the early modern period (contract, insurance, bribery, homicide), as well as on tools and tool abuse, early modern aesthetics and numbers and narrative. His current project is a poetics of use and the useful from Augustine to Milton.

Rikard Wingård is Senior Lecturer of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg. After the publication of his dissertation, Att sluta från början: Tidigmodern läsning och folkbokens receptionsestetik [To End from the Beginning: Early Modern Reading and the Reception Aesthetics of the Volksbuch] (2011), his research interests have ranged from early modern book history and bibliography to ocean and animal studies. He is currently preparing a collection on ecocritical research methodology.

Reva Wolf is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (1997) and Goya and the Satirical Print (1991) and has recently co-edited Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (2020). She has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Harvard University, the Yale Center for British Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is a recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Acknowledgements

Writing in 1994, Dustin Griffin commented on ‘satire’s immense and perhaps incomprehensible variety’, which could ‘through parody invade any literary form: epic, pastoral, travel book, song, elegy, and so on’. It is, perhaps, in confirmation of this claim that this book aims to both understand that variety and expand it even further. Including but not limited to literary forms, the book discusses how satire could both persist in old, sometimes ancient shapes and slowly mutate into new ones. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the diversity of the investigation is in the very nature of its subject.

The diversity of the project, however, extends beyond its object of investigation to the range of people who have made it possible. Between them, the scholars working in Australia, Belgium, France, Lebanon, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US who have contributed to the project prove that collaboration across borders and disciplines is indeed still possible today, despite much recent evidence to the contrary. Many ideas took shape during a conference on early modern satire in Gothenburg in 2017. Before, during and since that event, we have received invaluable support from the Faculty of Humanities and the Early Modern Seminar at the University of Gothenburg, particularly Matilda Amundsen Bergström, with all matters practical.

Collectively, the editors are extremely grateful to Meredith Carroll and the editorial team at Manchester University Press, as well as the anonymous readers for their astute comments on the book in its earliest stages. More than words can express or space can allow, we are indebted to all the scholars of satire, many of them mentioned in this book, who participate in the conversation on an endlessly variable and endlessly fascinating topic.

Per would like to thank Ellinor Broman, for being there and for being her; the faculty at the Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, for remaining model examples of steadfastness and good spirits; and his students, for their stimulating conversations and their commitment to the study of early modern culture. Cecilia and Rikard would like to thank the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg for providing an inspiring and encouraging research environment. Cecilia also wants to thank Mats Rosengren for his caring support and good humour. Rikard offers his special thanks to Syréne, Gustaf and Alvar Wingård, without whom he could not survive a day, and even less the editing of an anthology.

The publication of this book has been supported through a generous grant from the Sven och Dagmar Saléns Stiftelse. Additional funding was provided by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University.

During the final stages of the editing, we were reached by the immensely sad news of Howard Weinbrot’s death. As anyone interested in the topic of this book will know, he was an outstanding scholar in the field, and he was a vital contributor to the present project from its inception. His chapter in this book is a testimonial to the range and depth of his learning, but, more than words can express, his wit, warmth and consistent encouragement have been crucial to all of us. It is only fitting, though inadequate to express our debt, that the volume be dedicated to his memory.

Introduction

Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård

This volume examines satire in Europe, c. 1600–1830. In this period – routinely described by scholars in terms like ‘the age of satire’ followed by ‘the waning of satire’ – satire proliferated in a variety of forms and media, with new genres absorbing satirical elements and the medium of print not only disseminating satire on an unprecedented scale, but also transforming it into a more graphic, less genre-driven form of expression. The volume represents an interdisciplinary juxtaposition of literary history and art history and contributes to the study of a shift towards graphic formats and away from classical representations of genre. Although scholarship has increasingly embraced terms like ‘mode’ as opposed to the more restrictive ‘genre’ to describe satire, the full implications of such a view have not been fully explored.¹ Partly contesting such views, this volume seeks to historicise genre as itself being subject to change in the period. The volume moreover examines the increasing dependence of satire on a proliferation of formats, including visual and textual media and various combinations of them, but also manuscript circulation as well as the use of ‘non-satirical’ forms for satirical purposes. While themes and forms in some cases did persist throughout the period under examination, the conditions under which they were disseminated obviously changed, and satire, much as a result of these changing conditions, had become a largely different cultural phenomenon towards the end of the eighteenth century. In short, the volume sees satire both in terms of change and continuity – change in, for example, the sense of increasing reliance on visual formats, continuity in the sense of a lingering reliance on classical genre systems and the recycling of certain well-known themes and conventions.

While it is a critical commonplace that satire, particularly Menippean satire, always had a propensity for diversification, for ‘cuckoo nesting in different media and genres old and new’,² the volume indicates that the changing shapes of satire in the period cannot be simply understood as a function of satire’s innate elasticity. ‘The age of satire’ was not simply the age of ‘great’ satire; it was also a time when satire was disseminated at an unprecedented scale and existed increasingly across limitations of genre and type. In that sense, we insist, the diversity of satire needs to be carefully historicised instead of being construed as an unchanging attribute. A consequence of this insistence is practical; while calls for an interdisciplinary approach to satire have been common in recent decades, scholarly practice has largely remained within disciplinary boundaries. The volume therefore grows out of a perceived need for literary historians and art historians to engage more in dialogue across disciplines and treat satire as a phenomenon that is subject to change as well as continuity.

As such, a single volume can obviously not claim to provide a full history of two centuries of satire, although, taken together, its chronologically presented series of case studies does give a picture of the various changes that satire was subject to. There are three main reasons why we have opted for a broad approach to satire that spans across a wide range, in terms of chronology, media and geography. These are also areas that, we think, future research on satire will have reason to address in even more detail.

First, as regards chronological scope, the transformations of satire c. 1600–1830 can be traced back to a series of relevant historical and social changes preceding or taking place during the period. The use of the print medium for the dissemination of propaganda during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; the growth of institutions of control and censorship; the lapsing of pre-publication censorship in England in 1695; the emergence of a public sphere and the concomitant rise of the newspaper press; the gradual waning of the classical curriculum that defined satire in terms of Latin imitation; the French Revolution of 1789, with the turmoil it raised in Europe – these are all contexts that in various ways contribute to the changing conditions of satire.³ Significantly, all of these contexts are directly or indirectly related to the transformations of media in the period, which crucially affected the production of satire. At the same time, the printing revolution in Europe did not simply entail breaks with the past. Visual satire and mockery had been part of medieval culture, and there was clearly material that existed prior to the period examined in this volume but was remediated in various ways. As stated, the volume traces continuities in the recycling of specific themes and forms; for example, the ‘jumping the broom’ motif extended back to before the period under discussion (Marx), just as the visual language created by satirists in the eighteenth century exerted an influence beyond the early 1800s.⁴ Works with a long pedigree could be reinvented for satirical purposes in other media (Wolf), just as the circulation of printed matter could sometimes entail surprising uses of classical material for new purposes (Onelli) and satire could migrate between media even in the works of single artists (van Gastel). In short, the implications of transforming media behind the changes and continuities of satire are an area of research that remains underexplored; despite efforts in specific areas, ‘satire’ has remained an unsatisfactorily static concept, and, in the eyes of many scholars, more textually and verbally based than it actually came to be.

Second, in its selection of material the volume moves beyond canonical satire by the likes of Boileau, Dryden, Pope and Swift. While such material is certainly referenced in some chapters (Bricker; Weinbrot), it is embedded in the multiplicity of other satirical voices and forms. The volume grows out of a perceived need to approach satire from what previous criticism implied to be its ‘margins’. Verse satire or satirical features of the early novel have been extensively treated by criticism, but they were obviously not the only forms of satirical expression in the period. It makes sense, we believe, to look at early modern satire from the broadest perspective, for even canonical writers like Donne or Milton treated satire as an elusive entity with a complex and changing relation to both itself and to other genres (Currell; Wilson). Moreover, approaching satire from the perspective of ‘marginal’ voices (Nolan) or situating it in debates on norms and standards across popular media (MacNeill) means that we are able to pay more than lip service to the oft-reiterated claims on satire’s ‘staggering diversity’.⁵ If the volume can therefore be said to present a deliberately skewed perspective, it does so because it aims to shed light on changes that more traditional focuses have ignored. One of these changes is, simply put, quantitative; it is another characteristic of the period that the sheer amount of material – in print or in manuscript – that was labelled satire became larger and more accessible than ever before. In applying such a perspective, we draw on recent scholarship that has begun to broaden the field.⁶

Third, the volume seeks to place satire in a wider European context. It is another aspect of the changing face of satire in the period that it was characterised by porous borders. While research, and this volume, emphasises England as a significant country in the production of satire, several chapters examine satire as a transgressor of borders also in a political and national sense. Satire produced in England could reach abroad to, for example, France (Weinbrot) and Spain (Wolf).⁷ However, such influences could move in the other direction, with English artists picking up on what seems to have been a Dutch pictorial motif (Marx). Indeed, satire could both cross national borders (Grandjouan) and help to define them (Murgia). What is more, national literary cultures in the period never were monolithic entities even linguistically; in seventeenth-century England, verse satire was frequently produced in Europe’s predominant language of learning, Latin (Moul). As these brief examples suggest, research needs to take into consideration both the changing political landscape and the continuing, although fading, influence of classical culture. While therefore acknowledging the obvious significance of English satire, the volume relates it to a broader European context, with discussion also of, for example, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.⁸ In other words, although the volume cannot pretend to treat satire in the period in full in all its incarnations throughout Europe, it does aim to give a sense of the geographical spread of satire in the period.

As stated, one premise of the volume is that genre, although often dismissed by recent criticism, remains crucial to understand how satire operated. Satire’s increasingly fluid intersection with other, well-established genres like epic, or its implied resistance to genre as such, is examined especially in chapters that deal with the seventeenth century (Currell; Wilson). Furthermore, what unites many of the contributions is their engagement with satire as it transgresses strict generic boundaries; for example, didactic treatises (Onelli) and theatre (van Gastel; MacNeill) all accommodate satire as part of their appeal to audiences. Genre, while certainly not unchanging, remains a significant conceptual framework in order to understand the early modern transformations of satire even into the nineteenth century. In that sense, genre encapsulates many of the tensions between change and continuity that this volume seeks to consider.

Also vital for our purpose is the point that satire in the period can be said to go from ‘form’ to ‘format’; while classical theories of satirical form slowly lost much of their importance, the later spread of satire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entailed an unprecedented diversity of visual and textual formats. Between them, the chapters of this book chart a process during which satire more and more came to be practised in visual terms. In other words, we concur with recent scholarship that has begun to nuance the traditional notion that satire ‘waned’ in the second half of the eighteenth century.⁹ What we see is instead a widening of the media platform for satire during the century and beyond; while old forms persisted to some extent, they also migrated to other, more pictorially based formats (Bricker). Obviously, this process is fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies, as several of the chapters show, and, again, there is reason to consider that visual satire existed well before the eighteenth century, as witnessed by, for example, Bernini’s parallel activities as caricaturist and playwright, which Joris van Gastel discusses in this volume.¹⁰ And, also in terms of continuities, in the nineteenth century Juvenalian satire could find a late afterlife in the little-known text by Jean-Hugues Nelson Cottreau – itself a loose imitation of Samuel Johnson – which is discussed in Howard D. Weinbrot’s chapter.¹¹ It also bears emphasising that despite its transformations of form, satire demonstrated thematic continuities, not least in standard elements such as the depiction of gender. For example, the depiction of fops on stage in the decades around 1700 served to confirm social anxieties about effeminate men that were a staple already in Juvenalian satire (MacNeill), and more or less stereotypical depictions of women persisted also in newer, graphic formats.¹² On the other hand, even in the earlier seventeenth century female writers could utilise well-worn satirical conventions for decidedly unconventional purposes (Nolan).

These examples show that the political and propagandistic edge of satire was largely transferred to graphic representation in the later part of the examined period, as discussed in several chapters in this book (Grandjouan; Marx; Murgia; Wolf). Scholars have noted that visual satire was becoming increasingly personal and aggressive during the eighteenth century.¹³ Conversely, satirical poetry in England in the later eighteenth century became more of a literary exercise that veered away from the direct political confrontation of earlier ages.¹⁴ Again, though, there were exceptions even towards the end of the period we examine; for example, the satirical output of George Canning in the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8) is both confrontational and reliant on traditional forms, although also part of burgeoning news culture that itself incorporated a variety of new satirical formats. Even the seemingly innocuous satire of John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’) has been considered more radical than meets the eye¹⁵ – not to mention more obvious cases like, say, Byron.¹⁶ It is worth pointing out, however, that research has increasingly drawn attention to the interaction of supposedly elite satirical culture with ‘popular’ formats.¹⁷ Such interaction could entail an interreliance on visual and verbal presentation, as in the collaborations by William Hone and George Cruikshank in the early nineteenth century.¹⁸ At the same time, continuities are notable in, for example, the migration of traditional fable motifs into a more pictorial domain (Grandjouan).¹⁹ In general, in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was graphic satire rather than classicising poetry that supplied the most biting political commentary, even if such satire could also have a mediating function (Murgia).

The present volume reflects this interpenetration of changes and continuities in its organisation. Notably, rather than attempt a strict division between ‘old textual’ and ‘new graphic’ satire, in its chronological structure the volume strives to bring the various contributions into dialogue with each other. There is a predominance of contributions dealing with textual satire until the mid-eighteenth century, whereas graphic satire tends to dominate in contributions on the later part of the period – as it did historically. Satire’s process of ‘deverbalization’ – to borrow Andrew Bricker’s recent term – is arguably due to a series of interrelated factors; for example, the well-documented rise of caricature,²⁰ the problems of the legal system in dealing with offensive pictorial representation,²¹ and the wide spread of mezzotint and hand-coloured prints in the mid-eighteenth century²² are all contexts that remain important to the contributions to the present volume.

In emphasising such changes, however, we do not imply a straightforward narrative of progress towards more tolerance and freedom for the producers themselves or their audiences. Indeed, the period this volume covers is framed by acts of repression against satire at its beginning and its end; for example, in Britain, from the Bishops’ Ban of 1599 to the various legal measures taken against satire during the Regency period, the narrative if anything is one of relative tolerance alternating with more or less energetic attempts at suppression.²³ Satire in other words has a troubled relation to institutions of control and repression, particularly so in countries where such institutions were strong (Wolf). In responding to pressure, writers were able to make their work an instrument of both critique and flattery; at the same time, the Renaissance predilection for classical imitation could make satire a didactic tool in the hands of the right people (Onelli). Perhaps even more than in its formal transformations, satire’s relationship with power is – and remains – far from linear.

Defining satire

As for the concept of satire itself, the volume does not assume that it is possible, or even desirable, to adopt one single unitary definition. Even the most anodyne of generalisations, such as the idea that satire is an ‘attack’ on something, are belied by the contributions to the volume. Satire might frequently spell edification, as evident by the use of Petronius in didactic material (Onelli), and texts could be deliberately serious and admonitory in their character (Nolan). What is more, different types of satire might co-exist or overlap in single works or within the oeuvre of one author (Weinbrot), and satirical elements could be transferred between media and genres by versatile artists like Bernini (van Gastel). For these reasons, rather than operate from one specific definition, the volume seeks to understand satire as a multiplicitous phenomenon that is subject to change yet also displays continuities.

Theories of satire in the early modern period were generally concerned with its classical roots and primarily textual form, although by the late seventeenth century such theories were in ‘considerable flux’ and often disagreed over, for example, whether it was a ‘form of drama, or poem’.²⁴ Indeed, Leon Guilhamet observes that ‘the satires of Dryden and the great Scriblerians appeared just at a juncture when the high Renaissance regard for genre was giving way to formal promiscuity and the outright rejection of forms’.²⁵ However, such a juncture is not only reflected on the level of canonical satire but in the diversification of satirical expression across formats and media. Material change affects the dissemination of satire but also its form. It has often been asserted that printing – of which more in the next section – privileges sight and that, therefore, hearing in the course of the early modern period yielded to sight as the dominant sensory paradigm.²⁶ While such theories have not gone uncontested, recent studies have begun to emphasise the significance of visuality in early modern satire, although their understanding of satire has, implicitly or explicitly, tended to privilege either graphic representation²⁷ or a text-based notion of printed satire.²⁸ Even monographs or anthologies that purport to be general introductions or discussions of satire often pay little attention to visual and graphic dimensions, and thus imply a mainly textual definition.²⁹ Hence, a more synthesising approach to the broad phenomenon of satire and the changes it underwent has hitherto been missing from, or has been underplayed by, criticism. This volume makes a contribution to such research.

To redress the balance, we insist that satire has to be considered in a way that does not privilege either graphic or textual formats, but instead sees satire as changing with respect to the predominance that graphic formats came to have. Such a broad understanding obviously requires an interdisciplinary understanding of its topic. What is more, periodisations like ‘early modern satire’, while clearly relevant to the present volume, can be problematic in that they assume sharper breaks than were the case. Drawing the boundaries at 1600 and 1830 in one sense goes beyond the ‘early modern’ in a strict sense, although it also allows us to see the wider ramifications of satire in the sense of continuities as much as paradigm shifts.

In terms of defining and understanding satire, it moreover bears pointing out that perceptions of change are not just the result of present-day investigation; they are also there in the writings of authors at the time. While classical imitation continued to be part of the agenda, imitators were aware of the specific conditions that their own changing society created, and in some ways what was once first-hand dialogue with the classics (Moul; Onelli) seems to have mutated into imitations of imitations by the end of the period (Weinbrot). Whereas satire in, for example, the Elizabethan 1590s spent considerable energy on questions of classical imitation, John Donne would raise the question of form as such in his Metempsychosis, which in Luke Wilson’s reading in the present volume becomes a striving towards satire rather than the finished product itself.³⁰ The genre system was unquestionably in a process of transformation by the late seventeenth century, and a writer like Milton would make the previously clear line of demarcation between satire and epic more fluid (Currell). However, such transformations were not simply activated at the theoretical level; writers could, for example, utilise the polemical possibilities offered by other popular formats like chapbooks (Nolan). Hence, writings of the time reflect a series of transformations of ‘satire’ as both a theoretical concept and a set of practices.

In other words, for all its concern with the thematic and referential dimensions of the material, the present volume signals a renewed attention to questions of form, since form itself is very much subject to change in the period. Satire continued to be written in media like manuscript (Moul) but the significance and influence of those media also changed significantly over time. As suggested, it is this ‘historicity’ that the volume seeks to trace. Thus, the point of the volume is not to define satire according to its degree of referentiality or according to its topical concerns – as the contributions indicate, there are all kinds of degrees involved, from attacks on specific individuals to attacks on highly generalised vices, or, indeed, no attacks at all. The volume moreover represents a step away from the definition of satire as an ‘open-ended inquiry’ which has been common in discussions indebted to deconstructionism.³¹ In fact, as some of the chapters show, open-endedness is a far from universal characteristic of satire. Instead, the volume seeks to understand satire as an embodied artefact whose incarnations are represented in specific moments of technological and social change. The emphasis on form and genre in the seventeenth century is in itself made possible by the dissemination of the printed word, but the spread of print also had the consequence of making other satirical formats more attractive, as exemplified by several contributions to this book. It is fitting therefore to discuss the factor of printing in some more detail.

Satire and the medium of print

‘Good God! how many dung-botes full of fruitles Volumes doe they yearely foyst vpon his Maiesties subiectes, by lying Titles, insinuations, and disparaging of more profitable Books! how many hundred reames of foolish prophane and sensles Ballads do they quarterly disperse abroade?’³²

The resentment of the poet and satirist George Wither in his address to the Stationers’ Company from 1624 clearly speaks of the situation authors and readers found themselves in after the invention of printing. A world flooded – or so it appeared – by the printed word, for good or bad. In relation to pre-Gutenberg times the feeling was fully understandable. During the fifteenth century an estimated 5 million manuscript books were produced, while printing, in half that time, produced just above 10 million copies. During the sixteenth century the number of printed books in Europe grew to at least 200 million copies, a tenfold increase compared to the previous century. The seventeenth century witnessed over 500 million printed books, and the eighteenth century almost 1 billion.³³ How much satire – however one wants to define it – was printed during these centuries is hard to estimate. Through the studies of Ashley Marshall, we can at least say that for England during the long eighteenth century satire in print exceeded 3,000 individual works, in all sorts of literary genres, most of them anonymously published.³⁴

Figures apart, the more interesting question is what the medium of print and the rapid spread of it meant for satire. For such an analysis, several theories on the general impact of print on European society have been introduced during the last half-century. One of the best known is Elizabeth Eisenstein’s wide-ranging The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in two volumes, 1979), which concludes that without, for example, the enhanced distribution, documentation, systematisation, standardisation and preservation of knowledge made possible by the new technology, the humanist movement during the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution would not have come about. The new world view that grew out of the printed books, maps and illustrations, and reached new audiences, made the former world view ripe for critique, and had in more general terms a destabilising effect on all sorts of traditions and authority figures.³⁵

One does not have to agree with John Peter’s suggestion