Satire: Closure, Provocation, and Performance

Satire tends to resist closure. As Griffin notes, “it is concerned rather to inquire, explore, or unsettle than to declare, sum up, or conclude” (95). Satirical endings are often “obtrusively open, not because the end of one story is always the beginning of another, or because literary constructions are subject to deconstructing or unraveling, but because the form and purpose of satire seem to resist conclusiveness” (96). I suggest that satire resists closure primarily for three reasons. The first two are formal: first, there is a great deal of flexibility in individual satires’ length and prosodic structures. Most Renaissance satirists, including Hall, employed heroic couplets. While the frequently end-stopped rhythm can increase the sense of closure at a given point (Griffin 113), couplets also allow any number of verse units to be strung together, as with the sixains in Venus and Adonis that I discussed in the preceding chapter.39 Hall’s satires vary in

39 No poetic form can effect closure for every reader. Commentators on Renaissance satire have ascribed a startling degree of power to the heroic couplet itself, however. K. W.

Grandsen suggests that this otherwise prosodically unadventurous form became the dominant meter for satire in the seventeenth century because it could serve as “an instrument for witty antithesis” (26): it gestures toward “Augustan wit and poise” (an idealizing claim at best), or a “synthesis of Horatian poise and Juvenalian aggression” (26). Similarly, Griffin proposes a link between the heroic couplet and satiric purpose, which he argues are both

length from twelve lines (I.v.) to 305 lines (VI.i.). Because of this flexibility, a reader of satire will not be primed to expect a turn at any particular point (as opposed to the reader of a sonnet, for example), although he might expect a stinging conclusion if the satirist’s work has adopted an epigrammatic or acerbic style in the vein of Martial or Juvenal. The second aspect of satirical form that resists closure is that it tends to be non-narrative, so its endings are more or less arbitrary and its conclusiveness provisional. The Dutch philologist Daniel Heinsius, a pupil of Joseph Scaliger, defined this quality of satire in his commentary on Horace in 1612: “Satire is a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in which human vices, ignorances and errors . . . are severely reprehended . . . partly . . . in a facetious and civil way of jesting, by which either hatred or laughter or indigation was moved” (qtd. in Salmon 74). Satire, according to Heinsius, has no plot; in this regard, it shares with lyric the challenges of shaping resolution through other means.

The third reason that satire resists closure is also adumbrated in Heinsius’s definition. The satirist may attempt to articulate a definitive condemnation of vice, but the sense of

a mix of witty closure and forward movement. End-stopped couplets permit the satirist to write with what used to be called point (which Johnson defines as “the sting of an epigram; a sentence terminated with remarkable turn of words or thought”) . . . So too satire as a form builds to moments of narrative, moral, or rhetorical closure. But the moments pass and turn out to be pauses. (113-14) Nevertheless, the heroic couplet can be more protean than these readings suggest. Its subject is not limited to the urbane or the aggressive, and its effectiveness depends on the prosodist’s skill and purposes.

fulfillment toward which satire aims is a reader’s viscerally-felt emotion: the resolution of a satire lies in its audience, not its formal structure. Satire is a provocative form that elicits

responses borne of shame or outrage, as the quarrel between Hall and Marston demonstrates. Of course, readers react to literary forms of all kinds, not just satire: Renaissance audiences were certainly gratified by sonnets, titillated by epyllia, and moved by elegies and devotional verses; authors were moved to respond in kind to these and other poetic genres, as well as prose forms such as sermons and polemical pamphlets. But satire is an inflammatory form that rouses readers to respond from a posture of anger, whereas many other responsive and adaptive early modern genres do not. Elizabethan authors who theorized satire often reiterated the notion that satire’s fulfillment lay in emotional reaction. Philip Sidney described the genial moral effect of satiric mockery in his Apology for Poetry: satire is the form that “sportingly never leaveth until

he make a man laugh at folly, and at length ashamed to laugh at himself” (97). Amusement gives way to shame, according to Sidney. In The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham claimed that satire was invented by the Greeks as a type of “poe[m] reprehensiue,” an invective intended for “correction of [the citizens’] faults” in the absence of “sermons or preachings” (I. 24). Puttenham also employs the common Renaissance etymology of satire that associates it with satyrs, the gods who were supposedly the originators of “those verses of rebuke” and who were necessary as performative stand-ins to deliver rebukes so that “their bitternesse should breede none ill will, either to the Poets, or to the recitours” (I. 24).40 _{The audience of satire,}

40 This etymology is false, but it was “popular in the Renaissance, when it was used to justify the rude, spirited, and defamatory character of satire” (Knight 19). First compiled by Diomedes, the possible sources for “satire” included satyroi (satyrs), lanx satura (a full dish

Puttenham suggests, will naturally be provoked to anger—the reproof will be embittering, and the delivery, as he explains it, is not literary but dramatic (and thus godlike figures were needed to present the message and to lend it gravity, lest an irate audience turn against the vulnerable human satirist).

As Puttenham’s account of dramatic satirical recitation suggests, Renaissance authors’ preference for associating satire with satyrs reflects an understanding of satire as a rhetorical performance. Like such a performance, satire was shaped by some of the same considerations of audience reaction and the skill or authority of delivery. The Roman satirists Lucian and Juvenal were both “rhetorical performers,” and a “declamatory element” was essential to satire of the 1590s (Griffin 77). Rhetorical training was a standard part of the late sixteenth-century

curriculum; Hall’s education was steeped in it, and he evidently excelled. While at Cambridge, he participated regularly in public disputations and was elected in two consecutive years to the University Lectureship in Rhetoric, “in which he was markedly successful” (Davenportxvi-xvii). The Virgidemiae reflect the sensitivity to readers’ responses that Hall’s rhetorical training and engagement in disputation exercises would have cultivated. Attentive to the need to establish an ethical and artistic voice, Hall worked concertedly to establish firm boundaries between his satirical persona and the objects of the scornful laughter he not only urges but scripts for his audience.

of assorted fruit), farcimen (sausage or stuffing), and lex per saturam (an omnibus law) (16). Charles Knight explores the background and application of each of these possibilities (16- 27).