Verse Satire

by David Hamilton (October 2014)

The Nature of Satire

Doctor Johnson defined satire as, “A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.” Now we would substitute literature as the field of satire not just poetry with the use of “irony” and “Wit.” Satire is a way of responding to society whereas Pastoral is a way of looking at the world as well as a style and conventions. Pastoral grew out of nostalgia for a bygone golden age and a sense of disparity between the cities and courts, the corruption, artificiality and the idealised notion of how it once was, whether in childhood, a distant past, or far-away arcadia. The satirical vision is in human nature like Pastoral and gives expression to the disillusioned realisation of the gulf between the way the world is and how it ought to be. It is a mood and a style of writing in a tradition rather than a genre. It is expressed in various generic forms, but we can isolate the essence by comparing examples from different periods.

The reign of Domitian in Rome, the end of the Elizabethan era in England and the early 18c are notable periods of satire. This is from “Juvenal” translated by John Dryden:

What indignation boils within my veins,
When perjured guardians, proud with impious gains,
Choke up the streets, too narrow for their trains!
Whose wards, by want betray’d, to crimes are led
Too foul to name, too fulsome to be read!
When he who pill’d his province scapes the laws,
And keeps his money, though he lost his cause:
His fine begg’d off, contemns his infamy,
Can rise at twelve, and get him drunk ere three;
Enjoys his exile, and, condemn’d in vain,
Leaves thee, prevailing province, to complain!

Away! Who is so patient of this impious world,
That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue?
Or who hath such a dead unfeeling sense,
That heaven’s horrid thunders cannot wake?
To see the earth crack’d with the weight of sin,
Hell gaping under us, and o’er our heads
Black, ravenous ruin, with her sail-stretch’d wings,
Ready to sink us down, and cover us.
Who can behold such prodigies as these,
And have his lips seal’d up? Not I: my soul
Was never ground into such oily colours,
To flatter vice, and daub iniquity:
But, with an armed and resolved hand,
I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time
Naked as at their birth —

Another satirist driven by love of truth and common sense cannot behold the folly and vice around him and not speak out. These human flaws are to be lampooned and larked in the public interest.

Asper:

Tut, these are so innate and popular,

That drunken custom would not shame to laugh,

And yet, not one of these, but knows his works,

Yet hourly they persist, grow rank in sin,

Puffing their souls away in perjurous air,

To cherish their extortion, pride, or lusts.

Ridicule in comedy originates in Aristotle’s Poetics. In the eighteenth century it is associated with Henry Fielding who, in his Preface to Joseph Andrews, states “The content of all comedy (at least if it is to distinguish itself from the burlesque) should be based upon what is “light and ridiculous.”

Vices, and all those who exhibit them, deserve to be ridiculed and laughter is the necessary instrument to expose folly and encourage reformation. Alexander Pope, in the second of two dialogues “Epilogue to the Satires” II, 208–1 appended to his satires in 1738, raises the explanation of the satirical imperative to a higher level, “O sacred weapon! Left for truth’s defence, Sole dread of folly, vice and insolence!”

For Pope the weapon to attack the vices and follies of society was satire. Oliver Goldsmith and his contemporaries softened the harsh connotations of “satire” by naming it “ridicule.” The satirist censures from a zealous concern not spite or malice, for the good of his society. The sacred weapon of ridicule is a gift from God to purge vice and stir the consciousness of those in hall and stall, state and church who should guard public morality. In these examples the satirists indignation and zeal is presented as a passion borne of a personal imperative to speak protestingly when all about condone or tolerate vice. Pope would say it’s sanctioned by right standards and decent values.

The function and method of satire is to use the horror and absurdity of the negative side of human behaviour that it shows to force the audience back onto right principles and values.

The origins are in the impulse to be indignant, protest and morally criticize imperfect humanity.

The Purpose of Satire

Among the classical poets great exemplars were Horace (65-8 BC) and Juvenal (c60-130AD). They wrote different types of Satire and founded two traditions.

Horace was urbane, witty and dealt with the follies and eccentricities of human society, not the vices. Juvenal was acerbic, with a savage indignation who attacked vices, not aberrations.

Joseph Hall was a leading Elizabethan satirist, a contemporary of Ben Jonson and John Donne, dividing his own work into two types. Toothless, is the category for the after Horatian satires and Biting satires for harsher work, which probably derived from Juvenal.

John Dryden wrote an Essay on Satire, which was prefixed to his translation of Juvenal (1693), where he made the distinction between the rallying of Horace and the railing of Juvenal. The word “railing” became a denotative description of the abusive stance and verbal excess of the 1590s. It’s a trigger word in the period that denotes Satirists as zeal denoted Puritans.

How dull, and how insensible a beast

Philosophers and poets vainly strove

In every age the lumpish mass to move:

But those were pedants, when compared with these,

Who know not only to instruct, but please.

Poets alone found the delightful way,

Mysterious morals gently to convey

Pleased with their poems, they grew wiser too.

Satire has always shone among the rest,

And is the boldest way, if not the best,

To laugh at their vain deeds, and vainer thoughts.

In satire too the wise took different ways,

To each deserving its peculiar praise.

Some did all folly with just sharpness blame,

But of these two, the last succeeded best,

As men aim rightest when they shoot in jest.

Subjects and Literary Devices of Satirists

There are three broad types of subject matter:

1) Particular follies and vices were ridiculed and censured. Common targets were ornate dress, use of cosmetics, foreign affectations of speech and modes of behaviour learned on travels in Europe.

4) A blunt style was featured in many satires. The form of the type of satire of the 90s had a dramatic element. There were often two speakers, the satirist and a companion, the Adversarius, who was a foil to the verbal and emotional excesses of satire. The Adversarius had a calmer, less jaundiced view of human behaviour. Their dialogues were held in public places, a crowded street, and were commentaries on the figures they met. Each figure is a type of a social or moral absurdity.

Most verse Satirists use a projection of a persona as a consciousness whence the attacks on the abuses around are directed. Indignation, the need to vent an outraged morality was a feature of the Satirist’s persona. Another feature was the adoption of a plain, even coarse, style of speaking, which denoted an honesty and integrity and regard for truth. Sometimes with a scholarly stance.

Away thou fondling motley humorist,
Leave mee, and in this standing woodden chest,
Consorted with these few bookes, let me lye
In prison, and here be coffin’d, when I dye;
Here are Gods conduits, grave Divines; and here
Natures Secretary, the Philosopher;
And jolly Statesmen, which teach how to tie
The sinewes of a cities mistique bodie;
Here gathering Chroniclers, and by them stand
Giddie fantastique Poets of each land.
Shall I leave all this constant company,
And follow headlong, wild uncertaine thee?

Prooemium. I.

As in the greatest of societies,

Beare with their neighbors poore infirmities:

But after, when ambition controules

Theyr calme proceedings, they imperiously

(As great things still orewhelme the[m]selues with weight)

Envy their countrimens prosperity,

And in contempt of poorer fates delight.

So Englands wits (now mounted the full height,)

Hauing confounded monstrous barbarismes,

Puft vp by conquest, with selfe-wounding spight,

Engraue themselues in ciuill warres Abismes,

Seeking by all meanes to destroy each other,

The vnhappy children of so deere a mother.

Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies?

Is not our mistress, fair Religion,

As virtue was in the first blinded age?

The usual stance is that the spleen, the loathing of vice is choking him but this one reverses it and says that impulse itself is being choked by pity, by kind pity, natural pity. The appropriate approach to the dismemberment of the church should be tears and pity but the satirist says, “Brave scorn forbids those tears to issue.” “I must not laugh nor weep sins.” Neither ridicule nor weeping is appropriate to sins, not if you want to be wise.

Can the railing of the satirist cure these worn maladies? Is the quest for true religion or the fragmentation of Christendom a fit subject for mockery, ridicule and scorn? It is too much for them as they can only deal with little people and common foibles. Pity is more fitting and should choke the satirist’s spleen. Sins are fundamental to our condition, not so foibles and follies or even vices. They are inherent in human nature through original sin and neither laughter nor tears is a wise response to human sinfulness.

The condition of fallen humanity which is precursor to all aberrations which the satirist uses for correction. How can railing cure fundamental flaws in human nature? “How can any man presume, as the persona of satire, to hate and judge all this town” when he too is part of this fallen humanity with its sins, follies, foibles and vices. These ambiguities and moral contradictions made the satirist a suitable subject for the stage.

The Transfer of Satire to the Stage

One event especially seems to have driven satire to the stage. On the 1st of June 1599, the bishops ordered the calling in of some volumes of satire because they were becoming blasphemous and offensively obscene. They also banned further verse satire. It died out until a few appeared in the 17c. Dramatists like John Marston and Thomas Middleton, who had written collections of verse satires, began writing stage satires.

In the induction to his next play Every Man out of His Humour (1600) Jonson states clearly the Renaissance theory of humours psychology:  

That year Shakespeare was noting the vogue for satire and humours on the stage and introduced a satirist into the pastoral world of As You like It. Shakespeare used romantic to satiric comedy as a method for exploring human nature. Jacques: “Invest me in my motely, give me the need to speak out.” This harks back to Juvenal and the need to speak out and the wish to purge the world. Those are their customary justifications for their attitudes to life. Shakespeare used the Duke to expose Jacques self-righteousness. He is tainted with the sinful human nature he presumes to judge and correct.

 

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