Anonymity by John Mullan

Author:John Mullan [Mullan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691139418
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

MOCKERY AND DEVILRY

In 1601, late in Elizabeth I’s reign, there appeared a pamphlet entitled The Whipping of the Satyre and signed ‘W. I.’, which condemned the ill spirit of some of the writers of the age. Its speaker describes in stanzaic verse how he comes as a pilgrim to an earthly paradise, a ‘blessed Land’ of eternal Spring whose inhabitants sit by ‘Azure brookes’ in fragrant ‘bowres of shady wandring vines’, clapping their hands and ‘Singing Eliza’.1 All is well in this happy Elizabethan country, yet three madly malcontented characters, ‘the Satyrist, Epigrammatist, and Humorist’, snarl and complain, ‘peevishly displeasing all that heares’.2 These three are the authors of satires, compositions achieved only by perverse self-torment. ‘O, ye were as busie as a Bee, and as angry as a Wasp, the heate of your colour euaporated her imagination, and the liberality of your tongue maintained most absolute lyes for the atchieuing of the whetstone,’ W. I. tells one of the authors.3 The baleful satirists deserve punishment for their poisoned inventions.

Was not one hang’d of late for libeling?

Yes questionlesse. And you deserve the same.4

(The ‘one hang’d of late’ was the unfortunate lawyer’s clerk mentioned in Chapter 5.)

We now know that the three sour characters were, respectively, John Marston, Everard Guilpin and Ben Jonson, though it is not certain that W. I. knew their true identities. Marston and Guilpin had both contributed anonymously to a flurry of versesatires published in the 1590s. In his hostility to the genre W. I. had the authorities on his side. In 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift (the same man who had been the target of the Marprelate pamphlets, a decade earlier) and the Bishop of London Richard Bancroft (active in the pursuit of the Marprelate printers) had issued an order to the Stationers’ Company banning the printing of satires. ‘Satyres tearmed Halls Satyres, viz’ Virgidemiarum, or his tootheles or bitinge Satyres’ were named first on a list of those to be collected and burned.5 The other books included ‘Pigmalion with certaine other Satyres’, ‘The scourge of villanye’, ‘The Shadowe of truthe in Epigrams and Satyres’ and ‘Snarlinge Satyres’. The authors of these were not named. They were duly ‘called in’ and burned on 4 June 1599. (Hall’s satires were eventually reprieved from destruction, perhaps in order to be examined further.) It is clear that the two bishops were acting with the approval of the Queen’s Privy Council, and specifically of Secretary of State Robert Cecil.6

A vogue for formal verse satires had been excited by Joseph Hall’s collection Virgidemiae (the title means ‘a harvest of rods’), which had appeared anonymously in 1597, with a second part, to which Hall set his initials, in 1598. A Latin epigram by Charles Fitzgeoffrey suggests that it excited speculation about its authorship.7 Virgidemiae mocked the followers of the age’s literary fashions: tragedians, romancers and the ‘loue-sicke Poet’.

Then poures he forth in patched Sonettings

His loue, his lust, and loathsome flatterings.8

The satirist was to be distinguished from the favour-seekers of the day.

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