SIX years after the death of the great Elizabethan satirist, Thomas Nashe, a contemporary writer, Thomas Dekker, imagined his tormented afterlife: ‘still haunted with the sharpe and Satyricall spirit that followd him heere upon earth’.1 What kind of ‘Satyricall spirit’ stalked Nashe even after the grave? For Dekker, it issued from a sense of personal rancour at the fatal neglect of his talent. The refusal of philistine and miserly patrons to offer support meant that this gifted writer subsisted on an impoverished diet of pickled herrings that shortened his days. This mordant reflection offers a broader insight into the period’s understanding of satire and some of the perils that attended it. Dekker suggests that the undoubted forcefulness of the mode issues from perceived slights and iniquities. On this view, the satirist’s anger derives from despair at the obtuseness of the world, its culpable failure to recognize what is truly valuable. As Nashe’s unhappy fate shows, the world is unlikely to reward this exposure of its failings.
That satire should be abrasive and attack poor judgement, corruption, and delusion was certainly perceived as its essential quality in early modern culture. The mode was understood to be unconstrained either by the deference accorded to privileged individuals or institutions or by the decorum expected when addressing sensitive experiences. This was reinforced by a misunderstanding of the term’s etymology. It descends from ‘satura’, meaning a mixture or medley of different things, but it was long thought to derive from the satyr play of classical theatre. In this mode of performance, the actors imitated satyrs, half-men and half-goats, and, with the extensive licence accorded by this role, they assailed the moral failings of the society around them.2 As George Puttenham explained in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), poets committed to this form also ‘intended to taxe the common abuses and vices of the people in rough and bitter speeches, and their invectives were called Satyres’.3
In many instances, therefore, early modern satire easily accommodates the tendency towards polarized thinking that, according to Stuart Clark, pervaded the period.4 Satire was a powerful medium for polemical attack. By excoriating individuals, practices, and beliefs that obstructed those principles which should govern social and spiritual life it answered to the needs of authors ‘with a sense of moral vocation and with a concern for the public interest’.5 In this form of polemical satire, the reprobate was distinguished from the responsible and widespread deficiencies in prevailing moral standards were identified.
Yet, this was not the only path that prose satire followed. Indeed, the intentions of some instances of the form remain debatable rather than clear-cut. Satire was also a compelling medium for those who sought to question, rather than reinforce, sectarian boundaries and moral oppositions. Indeed, in its more experimental forms, such polarized thinking itself becomes the object of satirical inquiry and this suited writers of a more sceptical temperament, allowing them to query those habits of thought that underpinned moral discrimination. This technique also called into question the author’s own relationship to their satirical material, as well as their authority to pass judgement.
In this chapter, these distinct potentialities of prose satire will be examined in three phases. In the first section, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly will be shown to revive the sceptical quality of Menippean satirical form to cultivate toleration and to inhibit oppositional thinking. In the second part, the undoubted utility of satire for the much more single-minded purpose of polemic will be considered in Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse. Finally, the chapter will return to Nashe, the pre-eminent satirist of the period, and consider how the significance of his work derives from its undoubted polemical forcefulness, as noted by Dekker, but also its double-sidedness. A key aim of this account is to question two critical assumptions concerning early modern satire. First, is its consideration as primarily significant for poetic composition and as a shaping influence upon later sixteenth-century theatre.6 Second, and more recent, is an emphasis on its prominence during the seventeenth century, when it helped to consolidate political divisions. The latter view has tended to set aside earlier instances of satire as deriving from a period where an ‘orthodox Tudor commitment to consensus and harmony’ existed, in contrast to the much more disputatious culture of Stuart England.7 In contrast, this chapter will consider the radical potential of earlier instances of prose satire in the spirit of Lorna Hutson’s observation that ‘prose is more capable than poetry of accommodating and objectifying the various accents and forms of contemporary discourse’.8 The capacity to scrutinize contemporary values is a crucial quality of sixteenth-century satire, which also allowed it to question ‘dominant cultural assumptions about the relation between morality and power’ with a remarkable degree of energy and flexibility.9
‘[I]n all humaine thynges, there is so great darkenesse and diversnesse, as nothyng maie be clerely knowne’, observes Folly in Erasmus’s great mock encomium, the Praise of Folly (1509; printed 1511), translated into English by Thomas Chaloner in 1549. This viewpoint, which Folly claims for her own, was also: ‘affirmed by my Academicall philosophers [i.e. classical sceptical thinkers], the lest arrogant amonges all theyr Sectes’.10 In the Praise of Folly, Erasmus revived the classical legacy of satire as a medium for scepticism and this had crucial implications for the mode. Folly believes that laughter is the best response to the absurdity of the world, although this does not inhibit anger at abuses of power. Her commitment to sceptical reflection resonates strongly with Erasmus’s broader intellectual and moral attitudes. In particular, it reinforces his commendation of a simple Christian piety, along with the imperative to suspend judgement on all matters that did not conflict directly with the decrees of the Church. Over a decade later, in his response to Luther in De Libero Arbitrio (‘The Freedom of the Will’ [1524]), Erasmus attacked the presumption of securing absolute certainty in matters of theological judgement and the intolerance this promoted.11 Erasmus concedes that the teaching of the Church might not be comprehensible on all questions. However, it preserves an enduring wisdom that it would be foolhardy to challenge on the basis of one’s own limited intellectual powers. Yet, as we’ll now see, Erasmus did not exempt the Church or even himself from his strictures regarding human vanity and corruption; far from it. His satire advances a devastating and wide-ranging critique of the illusions and misjudgements that distort understanding of the world and that damage the lives we lead within it.
To reveal how drastically we misconstrue our own experience, Erasmus’s satire sets out to challenge acceptance of what is self-evident, along with what distinguishes the serious from the absurd. Folly finds an analogy for this approach in the Silenus, a small carved wooden figure with a repugnant exterior, but which could be opened to display something uniquely precious such as the beautiful features of a God. What provokes Erasmus’s satire is the continuous failure to grasp the wisdom embodied in this object. Human life and affairs, Folly proposes, can be considered as Silenus-like because all that is regarded as pleasing and imposing is, with a switch of perspective, grotesque and what appears to be degraded is beautiful. The inability to realize this is all too common and Erasmus’s text exposes a world characterized by drastic forms of misrecognition. The Silenus reminds us that our habitual understanding of what is truly desirable and repellent is founded poorly and this example has an obvious correspondence with satire because it too can be said ‘to represent or portray varieties of ugliness by assuming their external shape’, yet the alert reader ‘will be able to uncover the rare quality of imaginative wisdom within’.12 However ridiculous Folly may appear, she possesses more insight than we suspect.
The principal aim of Erasmus’s satire, therefore, is to inhibit polarized thinking, to break down the habitual patterns by which we judge the world around us. For example, the forms of authority that shape our social and spiritual lives possess enormous power and elicit a striking degree of consent, but to what purpose? Folly describes how the commonly accepted hierarchies that stratify the Renaissance world are, in fact, absurd. Vast disparities in status and resources are secured in ways that are merely the result of theatrical imposture. The principle of the Silenus helps with this as it reveals the widespread misapprehension of values, notably with regard to temporal power. A king may be acclaimed and showered with honours even though ‘so meane and poore a caitive as he is, [is] least deseruyng them, as not seldome the veriest tirannes that ever reigned, have natheles with publike ceremonies been cannonised into the noumbre of the gods’ (sig. E2r). An aristocrat may flaunt pride in his ancestry, but he should rather be called ‘a villaine, and a bastarde, because he is so many discentes disalied from vertue, whiche is the onely roote of true nobilitee’ (sig. E4r). Everywhere, falsehood is taken for reality. Those worldly figures who are revered as being worthy of emulation are, in fact, atrocious: ‘evin this great prince, whom all men honor as their god and soveraigne, deserveth skarce to be called man, seyng like the brute beastes, he is trained by affections, and is none other than a servaunt of the basest sort’ (sigs. E3v–E4r). Laughter helps to free us from delusions like this: the more we laugh at the world, the more its deceits and iniquities are revealed.
Yet, the form of authority most responsible for exposing such follies only compounds them. The satirical asperity of the Praise of Folly is acute when it documents the failure of the Catholic Church. The latter was divinely instituted to act as the custodian of God’s word and to shape the lives of the faithful towards salvation. Yet, it now advances forms of superstition and delusion that are wildly remote from the simplicity and force of Christ’s teaching. Indeed, as Erasmus observed elsewhere, the whole conception of ‘the Church’ had become distorted. Its most exalted members—priests, bishops, and popes—‘are in truth nothing but the Church’s servants’ and the privileges accorded to them invert a true sense of Christian hierarchy because ‘it is Christian people who are the Church, whom Christ himself calls “greater”, in the sense that bishops ought to serve them’.13 The loss of this perspective means the spiritual life, which should proceed under the awareness of death and God’s judgement, has become indistinguishable from a life of ambition and material gratification. In Folly’s account, the seeming reality of the world is best regarded as a theatrical performance and ‘the human attachment to illusions’ is perceived ‘as a constitutive feature of human desire itself’.14 Yet, under Folly’s satirical gaze, religious hierarchies and practices are not revealed to be ridiculous and fraudulent simply because of a general human propensity towards credulity, but because they help to maintain worldly advantages. Folly denounces the Church’s practice of selling indulgences, whereby the remission of sins could be purchased, rather than atoned for in Purgatory. She observes how ‘some usurer, or man of warre, or corrupte judge’ will be so chronically deceived and self-deceived that he will expend ‘one halfpenie of all his evill gotten goods’ and ‘straight thynke that the whole hoorde of his former mislife, is at ones forgevin hym’ (sig. H3v). Most heinously, the Church has squandered its religious authority because its material interests are best served by promoting illusions. Anyone who questions this wild distortion of Christian virtue brings down upon his or her head the wrath of the Church’s claque of loyal theologians who will readily denounce any perceived threat to their interests as heresy: ‘[F]or that is the thunderbolt, wherwithall they threten suche, as stande not best in theyr favour’ (sig. L4v).
In its outrage at corruption the Praise of Folly fulfils a traditional purpose of satire. Yet, Erasmus had written at length elsewhere on the Silenus in his Adages as part of an equally excoriating attack on the failings of the Church.15 Much of this material also appears in the mouth of Folly. However, there is a crucial difference in the contexts in which these sentiments appear that is crucial to understanding the satiric practice of the Praise of Folly. In his commentary on the Silenus in the Adages, Erasmus shows that we are deceived by appearances and prefer illusion to reality. The solution is to reverse our normal habits of perception and to concentrate on interior essences. In contrast, in the Praise of Folly, such clarity of vision is much harder to sustain. Erasmus adopts a set of satirical techniques that are far more intricate and self-qualifying than simply expressing indignation. In short, the most ferocious sentiments are embedded in a work that destabilizes assurance over its wider purposes and it is in this respect that the work’s sceptical commitment becomes most pronounced. The Praise of Folly does not simply observe the world as theatrical or play-like, it is an instance of ‘serious play’ itself.
This particular form of satire, as a number of commentators have shown, was adopted both by Erasmus and by his great friend, Thomas More, in his Utopia.16 In this respect, both writers were attempting to revive the serio-comic art of satire developed by the Greek writer Menippus. His writings were lost, but they shaped profoundly the practice of his successor, Lucian, whose works were translated and greatly admired by More and Erasmus. Lucian’s conception of satire stressed its ludic or playful capacities by mixing serious points with the absurd and by provoking laughter whilst revealing the truth. The intention was that ‘the writer not only displays his own wit but also tests and invigorates the wit of his readers’ by making the distinction between the true and the false difficult to identify.17 The speakers of these satires were usually foolish or unreliable and they viewed the world ‘upside-down’, questioning common-sense assumptions and exposing the contingent quality of the conventions that structure our social lives. In particular, this mode allowed satirists to become ‘critical investigators of authority and its constitution in both ancient texts and contemporary institutions’.18 In this conception of its function, satire is highly mobile and highly sceptical. It will not settle into a uniform pattern or allow a systematic identification of a higher form of truth; indeed, it undermines the possibility of certain judgement itself.
The most obvious of these destabilizing techniques is the simple fact that the work is not directly attributable to Erasmus’s own views, but to Folly, who busily condemns folly. This means that the text is constantly beset by contradictions and uncertainty over its coherence because Folly’s voice is so prone to wild fluctuations of register and perspective. Her tone shifts from ribald humour, sympathetic accommodation of human weakness, outrage at inequity, and anguish at corruption to spiritual rapture. Consequently, the reader’s attitude to her is equally fluctuating and playful. For example, in her out-pouring of anger at the papacy, she stresses its propensity to act like an acquisitive territorial prince. The papacy seeks constantly to expand its worldly influence by augmenting its possessions through statecraft, violence, and ultimately war, which is ‘so cruell and despiteous a thing, as rather it becometh wilde beasts, than men’ (sig. P2v). So far, so clear. Yet earlier, Folly had praised ‘warre, the verie head and springe of all great enterprises’ (sig. D3r) as part of her attack on bloodless and impractical humanists like Erasmus, whose company one would do well to avoid: ‘For bidde ones one of these sages to diner, and either with his silent glommyng, or his darke and elvisshe problemes he will trouble all the bourde’ (sig. E1r). The world needs a healthy quotient of self-love, Folly argues, to produce sociability, courage, industry, prudence, and other virtues. If one did not have a healthy amount of self-regard, it would be impossible to achieve any purposeful goal. Who would go to war if they did not wish for fame and reputation? Who would fight if they were hampered by scruples and cavils over the justice of the cause? What use would a philosopher be in war: ‘who soked vp with longe studie, leane, and colde of bloudde, maie scantly draw theyr wynde? Naie than must fatte and lustie bloudds doe the feate’ (sig. D3r).
In these frequent moments of reversal and self-contradiction we learn that Folly is both the exponent and target of the work’s satire. The adoption of her voice as the narrator (or perhaps performer) of the work makes it metamorphic in conception.19 The ironies in the work are multi-layered. Folly does acquire a kind of authority as we begin to see the truth and power of her propositions about the theatricality of our social lives, for example, and the necessity to perpetuate illusions to maintain this. However, the satirical spirit of the work is mercurial and its mockery soon bends against her as we also learn that she too is implicated in what she satirizes. In this respect, Folly’s inconsistent attitudes and tonal registers are typical of Menippean satire. The different sections of the Praise of Folly complement and qualify each other, and this further intensifies its riddling and paradoxical qualities.
This technique also affects Erasmus’s authority as a satirist who passes judgement upon the world. Given that his beliefs are also ridiculed as a further instance of folly, we cannot appeal to an author outside the text as a stable point of reference that will help us adjudicate the confusions and uncertainties we encounter. His vocation as a humanist would be negated by the Christian simplicity commended by Folly at the conclusion, a simplicity that would also disable the composition of the work we have just read. Throughout, the Praise of Folly suggests not only ‘that good and evil are inextricably mixed in this life’, but that we should acknowledge that truth can be found even in those contrary features of ourselves or others that we would wish to reject or deny.20 Significantly, this resistance to polemical self-assurance was identified by its first translator into English, the diplomat and humanist, Thomas Chaloner. In his prefatory address ‘To the reader’, Chaloner acknowledges how adroitly Erasmus moves ‘betweene game and ernest’ (sig. A3r) and this reveals how folly is commingled amongst all our thought and activities:
how so ever a certaine secte of faulte finders condemne all things, that fully square not with theyr owne rules, yea twyce blinde in this, that amongst the commen errours and infyrmitees of mortall men, they will beare nothyng with their bretherne, as who saieth, they were demigodds, and not more than one or two waies lynked in folies bands. (sig. A2r)
Satire in this mode embraces a sceptical recognition of shared human limitation without surrendering the capacity to think critically about the world. Chaloner recognizes fully the work’s large-minded resistance to oppositional thinking because we all share qualities with what we condemn.
In The Schoole of Abuse (1579), Stephen Gosson shares Erasmus’s indignation at the follies of the world and he also recognizes the possibility, at least, of possessing something in common with behaviour that should rightfully appal us. He does so from a radically different perspective, however, that explores the potential of satire in a distinct way. Lorna Huston has illuminated how Gosson’s text shares the concern with reforming social morality and reviving indigenous economic enterprise that dominated similar mid-sixteenth-century works.21 These satires targeted decadent habits of consumption that threatened not only personal, but national well-being. They sought to impress on the reader that apparently incidental or marginal indulgences have potentially drastic repercussions. The Schoole of Abuse warns that in ‘those thinges, that we least mistrust, the greatest daunger doth often lurke’ and that there is more threat from ‘undermining than plaine assaulting; in friendes than foes’.22
The great utility of satirical writing for Gosson was its capacity to reveal these submerged dangers both to the individual and to the body politic. The Schoole of Abuse is not purely satirical, of course, and it is dominated by a didactic concern to reform unregenerate habits of indulgence and consumption. Yet, as Alvin Kernan has noted, the vividness and realism of Gosson’s writing makes it one of the major examples of prose satire prior to the emergence of Thomas Nashe.23 One strain of antipathy in Gosson’s text is directed towards the idea of play itself and to the delight that derives from game-playing, recreation, and imaginative exercise. This is the principle, of course, upon which Erasmus’s protean mode of satire depends. In contrast, The Schoole of Abuse argues that all the multiple and alluring forms of play present a drastic risk to integrity. For instance, succumbing to a taste for poetry and drama is to invite, as Gosson puts it, liberty to loosen the reins and to initiate a process of moral degeneration: ‘from Pyping to playing, from play to pleasure, from pleasure to sloth, from sloth too sleepe, from sleepe to sinne, from sinne to death, from death to the devill’ (sig. B3r). This hostility is most notable in the work’s notoriously strident anti-theatricality, but also in the mode of satirical writing that Gosson adopts. The latter possesses its own rhetorical artfulness but it is dedicated to very different ends to those of Erasmus. The latter loved to qualify oppositions and undermine moral certainty. Gosson’s text reminds us that satire could also be militantly partisan. As Jesse M. Lander has demonstrated, polemical and controversial compositions were at the centre of the period’s literary culture in the wake of the Reformation. Such texts are, in many respects, antithetical to the dialogic literary writing that has come to be valued most in the study of the period’s canonical works. In contrast, polemical literature conceived of itself ‘as a weapon, wielded by one camp against another in an effort to defend and solidify a collective identity’.24 Satire was a significant medium for writers who sought to create and sustain oppositions, rather than break them down. Gosson certainly recognized its power for those, like himself, who were determined to advance the godly values of the Reformation. Satire provided a way to establish the writer’s authority as he revealed ‘the world as a battlefield between a definite, clearly understood good, which he represents, and an equally clear-cut evil’.25
In this respect, Gosson used his experience as an example of the dangers that play could present. The Schoole of Abuse acknowledges his shameful error of judgement in becoming a playwright. This leads him to concede, embarrassingly, that his plays are still performed. Such admissions lend considerable rhetorical power to the work as it resorts continually to a confessional mode, an authorial ‘I’ who testifies to his own lapses and delusions. Gosson wonders how can ‘I take upon mee to drive you from Playes, when mine owne workes are daily to bee seene upon stages, as sufficient witnesses of mine own folly’ (sig. A4v). The answer is simple: he has reformed and is now able to see his experience whole and with the clarity of one who ‘hath beene shooke with a fierce ague’ and who can now ‘giveth good counsell to his friends when he is wel’ (sig. A3r). This constitutes the basis of his authority to mobilize satire at the expense of those who remain immersed in the illusory world of play.
Gosson’s attack on the latter is predicated on a reversal of the Silenus principle inasmuch as it is the beautiful and alluring surfaces of the aesthetic that distracts us from its contaminating interior. Poets exploit and refine their techniques ‘as ornamentes to beautife their workes, and sette their trumperie to sale without suspect’ (sig. A6v). Their compositions undoubtedly enthral us: they can excite desires and make vivid a range of experiences. However, in neither of these respects is there any necessary concern with the moral character or effects of their productions. For example, Virgil presents compellingly the ‘lust of Dido’ and Ovid instructs us bewitchingly in ‘the Craft of Love’ (sigs. A6r–v). Consequently, writers are ‘enimies to vertue’ because they indulge and ‘effeminate the minde’ (sigs. A7r; B7r), dilating, rather than regulating, its imaginative scope. Literary and theatrical compositions attempt to satisfy the appetite for sensation, rather than seeking to ‘procure amendement of manners, as spurres to vertue’ (sig. B7r). Satire has real value because it can distinguish what is truly serious from the unruly incitements of play. Gosson’s text aims to provide a rhetorical ‘school’ in which the author’s own understanding of what a disciplined and virtuous life consists of can be experienced. At the same time, others can be taught how to diagnose and purge themselves of the symptoms that once afflicted the author.
As this phrasing indicates, Gosson is fond of medical metaphors, but he is equally drawn to dietary analogies. Indeed, it is as if he has understood the true etymology of the term satire as a medley and its frequent association with a variety of dishes. As Arthur Kinney notes, The Schoole of Abuse explores a wide spectrum of rhetorical modes and techniques with a subtle and shifting use of personae and registers.26 However, Gosson wishes to introduce a strict principle of selectivity and discrimination into our habits of consumption. Consequently, he commends the ‘wisedome, which in banqueting feedes most upon that, that doth nourish best’ (sig. A6r). The Schoole of Abuse laments the decline of ‘the olde discipline of Englande’ marked by the hardiness of the country’s ancestors who ‘fed uppon rootes and barkes of trees’ and who, from necessity, consumed resources sparingly to draw the maximum of nourishment from them: ‘if they had taken but the quantitie of a beane … they did neither gape after meate, nor long for the cuppe, a great while after’ (sigs. C4r–v). This admirably austere quality of life is contrasted with Gosson’s pungent mockery of contemporary excess: ‘the exercise that is nowe amonge us … banqueting playing, pipyng, and dauncing, and all such delightes as may win us to pleasure, or rocke us a sleepe’ (sig. C4v). Theatre-going itself is a form of surfeiting on spectacle and sensation, but it carries an additional and mortal risk because an audience who have ‘nigh burst their gutts with over feeding’ can at least resort to a purge: ‘but the surfite of the soule is hardly cured’ (sigs. B8v–C1r).
Gosson’s text shows the reader how easily one becomes addicted to pleasures that glut the body and overcharge the soul. Its anger is directed towards the many audience-pleasing forms of composition and performance that pervade the world. These show no concern to sift health-giving from adulterated content for the benefit of the reader or audience: ‘[T]he Corne which they sell, is full of Cockle,’ observes Gosson of playmakers, ‘and the drinke they draw, uttercharged with dregges’ (sig. C8r). Theatre is a cardinal example of the dangers of play because it indulges an unrestricted range of tastes which are intended only to please the sensual appetite: ‘There set they abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare: costly apparell, to flatter the sight: effeminate gesture, to ravishe the sense: and wantone speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust’ (sig. C2v). Playmakers are more insidious than indulgent cooks who only desire to please the tongue, rather than nourish the whole body, because theatre is able to breach our outward senses and contaminate our most inward faculties: ‘But these by the privy entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and virtue should rule the roste’ (sig. C3r). In a series of sketches of the audience behaviour he had witnessed, The Schoole of Abuse exposes how the contagion of ‘bawdrie’ spread during theatrical performances, presenting a particular threat to the moral continence of women: ‘Such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them [i.e. women] home’ (sig. C5v).
Gosson understands his responsibility to preserve the health of society from those forces that threaten it. Once the appetite of the citizenry has become well-regulated, the sober members of a reformed commonwealth will be enabled to resist decadent and, ultimately, enervating forms of indulgence. The Schoole of Abuse recounts with delight the instructive tale of Mithecus, the outstanding cook of classical Greece, whose talents met with incomprehension when he travelled to Sparta: ‘thinking there for his cunning to be accounted a God, the good lawes of Licurgus and custome of the country were to hot for his diet’ (sig. A8v). Gosson aspires to instil a similarly Spartan distaste for pleasure by creating a text that is rhetorically compelling, but edifying as well: ‘Plutarch likeneth the recreation that is gotte by conference, too a pleasaunt banquet: the sweet pappe of the one sustaineth the body, the savery doctrine of the other doth norish the minde: and as in banquetting, the wayter standes ready to fill the Cuppe’ (sig. C2r). Good composition, like the text we are reading, has this instructive and satisfying function: it elicits our fascination with the phenomena it excoriates, but then shows how we can move beyond this prurient interest towards more responsible concerns.
It is easy to contrast Gosson in invidious terms to the principled tolerance represented by Erasmus and to characterize the satirical venom of The Schoole of Abuse in negative terms. However, it is equally important to remember that controversial works produce ‘arguments and identities: early modern polemic is not only polarizing but also pluralizing’.27 The other side of Gosson’s argument derives from his passionate concern for the well-being of the commonwealth. His argument acclaims ‘The politike Lawes, in well governed common wealthes, that treade downe the proude, and upholde the meeke’ (sig. B4v). For Gosson, the real vocation of the citizen should be the fashioning of a virtuous and godly society; this is the most rewarding field within which to exercise creative energy and to refine one’s power of judgement. The satirical technique of The Schoole of Abuse can appear to be grounded on a simplistic contrast between a vanished age of disciplined achievement and a degraded present. His work certainly acclaims the ‘Trophes and Triumphes of our auncestours, which pursued vertue at the harde heeles, and shunned vyce as a rocke for feare of shipwracke’ (sig. B4v). Yet, this example is cited to confront the task that now faces English society: to build a more just and fulfilling commonwealth. Past glories ‘are excellent maisters to shewe you that this is right Musicke, this perfecte harmony’ (sig. B4v), rather than being distracted by the clamour of commercial theatrical entertainment. Admittedly, Gosson’s understanding of the commonwealth is strongly hierarchical. It centres on the rightful obligations that should bind the distinct social ranks and estates to each other and hold them all within their appropriate place (see sig. E5r). Yet, it is also marked by an emotive appeal to those in authority, including the Queen, to uphold the principles of justice that should apply to and govern the conduct of all members of the body politic, or else we ‘lye wallowing like Lubbers in the Ship of the common wealth, crying Lord, Lord, when wee see the vessel toyle, but joyntly lay our handes and heades, and helpes together, to avoyd the danger, and save that which must be the suretie of us all’ (sigs. E4v–E5r). At a time of such peril, when crucial choices need to be made about the character and destiny of the commonwealth, scepticism is another form of luxury that satire cannot afford to indulge.
Gosson’s text stands on the cusp of a major new movement in satire initiated primarily by the controversial Marprelate pamphlets of 1588–9.28 These unlicensed texts attacked episcopacy and advanced puritan ideas with an outrageous degree of scurrility. They provoked, in turn, equally forceful counterblasts and this facilitated the rise of the ‘satirical journalism’ of the 1590s, which absorbed readily ‘the imagery and idioms of everyday life, along with its more sordid aspects’ and embraced ‘a new and dazzling kind of speed in colloquial prose’.29 At the pinnacle of this movement was the satirist Thomas Nashe, who intervened energetically against the Marprelate tracts and wrote in a cornucopian variety of idioms primarily, but not exclusively, in prose.
Despite his forceful attacks on Marprelate, Nashe’s viewpoint is notoriously difficult to identify. The texts he composed display a bewildering variety of registers and perspectives. For example, the author’s anti-puritanism stands in an odd relationship to his forbiddingly penitential work, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1594).30 The latter outdoes Gosson in its rigorous forswearing of worldly indulgences. This includes even the cherished mode of satire which Nashe renounces, it seems, with some regret: ‘A hundred unfortunate farewels to fantasticall Satirisme. In those vaines heere-to-fore have I misspent my spirite, and prodigally conspir’d against good houres.’31 Yet, his contemporaneous work of prose fiction, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), is written in a very different spirit. From the outset, Nashe makes clear that this work will be dedicated to the art of play: ‘Gallant Squires, have amongst you’, he begins, in an attempt to distract his readers from their card and dice games. Instead, he will now present the sensational account of Jack Wilton’s travels and adventures, a text he claims to have recovered from a discarded bundle of ‘wast paper’.32 As the work proceeds, its implications also involve a form of ‘serious play’, although not quite as envisaged by Erasmus. Indeed, The Unfortunate Traveller includes a hostile caricature of the latter that reveals much of its unstable temper, as well as the manner in which Nashe explored the potential of satire.
When he arrives in Rotterdam in the service of the Earl of Surrey, Nashe’s amoral protagonist and narrator, the wily page Jack Wilton, meets both Thomas More and ‘aged learnings chief ornament, that abundant and superingenious Clarke, Erasmus’. After this barbed compliment, Jack deems it ‘superfluous’ to record any of the conversations he enjoyed with these illustrious humanists, but he deciphers the motivations that underlay the Praise of Folly: ‘Erasmus in all his speeches seemed so much to mislike the indiscretion of Princes in preferring of parasites and fooles, that he decreed with himselfe to swim with the stream, and write a booke forthwith in commendation of follie’ (245). Subsequently, Jack observes Erasmus’s own credulity. When the latter meets Cornelius Agrippa, portrayed as a conjuror, he requests the recreation of a famous episode from the life of the great Roman rhetorician and statesman Cicero: his defence of the alleged parricide Sextus Roscius.33 Erasmus affirms ‘that til in person he beheld his importunitie of pleading, hee woulde in no wise bee perswaded that anie man coulde carrie awaye a manifest case with rhetorike so strangely’. Agrippa then purports to resurrect Cicero in the act of making his great oration and this spectacle is so convincing ‘that all his auditours were readie to install his guiltie client for a God’ (252).
This is one of many instances where The Unfortunate Traveller exposes the self-interest and obtuseness of its protagonists. In that sense, the satirical temper of the work is polemical as Jack’s travels reveal pompous humanists, Italianate villainy, and the massacre of the deluded and defenceless Anabaptists at Munster. Closer to home, Jack encounters ludicrous aristocrats like the Earl of Surrey and the time-serving camp-followers that populate Henry VIII’s army in its largely pointless campaign in France. The work reveals a world where social status has no relationship to virtue and reality is theatrical, a matter of play and imposture. The sinister powers that dominate this context are revealed as cruel and absurd. As an aspiring mercenary in the imperial wars that devastate Europe, Jack witnesses the clash between ‘the King of France and the Switzers’ that leaves the French soldiers ‘sprawling and turning on the stained grasse, like a Roach new taken out of the streame’. The identities of these warring soldiers soon becomes blurred; they are simply the dead, or worse, the half-dead, like the ‘bundell of bodies fettered together in their owne bowells’ that remind Jack, in a classical parallel, of the punishments inflicted by tyrannical Roman emperors who tied the living bodies of the condemned to corpses: ‘so were the halfe living here mixt with squeazed caracases long putrifide’ (231).
Yet, these powerful observations, with their strong current of moral outrage, do not derive from a stable commitment to the interests of the commonwealth like Gosson’s. Jack Wilton is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator. This functions in a very different sense to Erasmus’s Folly who is, by her nature, implicated in the absurdities she exposes, but innocent of any attempt to manipulate others, including the reader, to her own advantage. However, the reader’s relationship to Jack is much more wary: the narrator’s motivations in The Unfortunate Traveller are called into question because he is compromised so deeply by the world he also reveals. For example, in his derogatory sketch of Erasmus’s prince-pleasing career (and also Cicero’s audacious handling of a ‘manifest case’), Jack notes how the art of rhetorical eloquence serves the interests of its exponents, rather than the truth of the case. Yet, Cicero’s defence of Sextus Roscius was a famous example of how unjust accusations could be overturned and powerful interests defied. Nashe’s protagonist shows himself, in contrast, to be a highly skilled manipulator of language for his own specious purposes.
At the beginning of his scandalous account of his travels, Jack is a ‘certain kind of an appendix or page’ attached to Henry VIII’s encampment at Tournai and Térouanne in 1513 (209). There he dedicates himself to a career of trickery and deception at the expense of a variety of authority figures who hold a position in the hierarchy of the camp, but without, in his eyes, any entitlement to respect. Jack singles out the cider merchant for his first attempt at a ‘lewd monilesse device’ and proves to be a virtuoso in the art of linguistic deceit. Jack convinces this ‘old servitor, a cavelier of an ancient house’ of the esteem in which he holds him: ‘partly for the high descent and linage from whence hee sprong, and partly for the tender care and provident respect he had of pore souldiers’ (210; 211). Once he has ensnared his sympathy with this disarming use of the language of compliment and social deference, Jack insinuates that the victualler is in great danger and that his case has been discussed by the King’s council. The conviction of this ‘dronken Lord’, that Jack’s status as a page means he has access to counsels of, drives him into a paroxysm of ‘unspeakable tormenting uncertaintie’ (213), which he resolves by bribing Jack to disclose all he knows. The latter convinces the cider merchant that he is suspected of being an enemy agent and is on the verge of denunciation and death: ‘the King saies flatly you are a myser and a snudge [skinflint]’ (215). There is only one way to redeem his reputation, of course, which is to distribute his cider freely amid the soldiers of the camp. The ‘welbeloved Baron of double beere’ also resigns his estate to the King, which leads to the latter’s discovery and punishment of Jack’s trickery (216).
Described in this way, it is tempting to perceive Nashe’s protagonist as an anti-hero whose carnivalesque exploits retaliate upon the unjust privileges and exclusions imposed by an oppressively hierarchical society. There is certainly much in his behaviour that conforms to this picture and, on occasion, Jack sees himself in this way. As he plots his revenge upon the clerks responsible for the camp’s finances he exclaims ‘I thinke confidently I was ordained Gods scourge from above for their daintie finicalitie’ (226). Yet, only moments later, he confesses how energetically he preserved the hierarchy of the English court on his return to it by acting as a kind of physical censor who stamped approval on the bodies of any ‘stranger or out-dweller’ who sought admission to the precincts of the King’s Great Chamber: ‘we set a red marke on their eares, and so let them walke as authenticall’ (228). Jack’s presence as a satirist within the work allows him, on the one hand, to debunk the conventions by which status and authority are maintained; on the other, he demonstrates a chilling facility to inhabit the idioms and roles that he disparages. Equally troubling, is the growing awareness that the playful energy of the text also involves a shaping of others to one’s will that is both demeaned and relished by it. In this sense, Margaret Ferguson is surely correct to suggest that The Unfortunate Traveller ‘creates a space of play in which the human artist’s power can be exercised and analyzed at once’.34
For example, Jack deploys the arts of language in a way that both satirizes their artificiality and that allows him to exploit their utility in instrumental ways. For all his disdain for Erasmus, Jack’s rhetorical fluency involves the dexterous use of the copiousness that the former commended to help expand and vary the figurative use of language. This involved reformulating the same expression in a plurality of ways. ‘I have wepte so immoderatly and lavishly’, Jack confesses as he describes to the cider merchant his immoderate grief at the suspicions that threaten the latter’s life: ‘that I thought verily my palat had bin turned to pissing Conduit in London. My eyes have bin dronke, outragiously dronke, wyth giving but ordinarie entercourse through their sea-circled Islands to my distilling dreriment’ (213). Later, we see him persuading his gull to disburse his wares freely with another rhetorical device, a preposterous exemplary proof drawn from nature: ‘The hunter pursuing the Beaver for his stones, hee bites them off, and leaves them behinde for him to gather up’ (215). In his private reflections on the imbecility of his prey we are left in no doubt as to Jack’s growing awareness of his talent for eloquence and how words can establish identities, shape expectations, and confirm beliefs. This is one of the central effects of the satire Nashe develops throughout The Unfortunate Traveller, as the narrator learns the full extent of the theatrical imposture that passes for reality in the world around him and that sustains the appearance of authority.
In one respect, therefore, Nashe’s work demonstrates the tremendous polemical force satire could command and that we have considered in this chapter. Jack skewers the crimes, follies, and pretensions of those around him who play deceptive or self-deceiving roles. Yet, The Unfortunate Traveller is equally adept in exploring the duality of the mode. Nashe understood the Menippean tradition as thoroughly as Erasmus, especially its capacity to break down fixed moral and political oppositions.35 The Earl of Surrey worships his Italian mistress as extravagantly as any member of the idolatrous Catholic faith that he and Jack encounter in Italy and the violent punishments and executions that conclude the text are as grotesque as the crimes they punish. It is not possible to take a ‘side’ in The Unfortunate Traveller or to adopt a uniform perspective. Furthermore, Nashe destabilizes his narrator’s moral authority in a much more disturbing way than Erasmus: Jack’s own interests and motivations are increasingly shown to be complicit with the world he both debunks and exploits.
Appropriately enough, the legacy of Nashe’s work is itself a divided one that demonstrates the openness and volatility of satire. As Graham Roebuck points out, Nashe’s use of the term ‘cavalier’ as a heroic epithet for those brave and patriotic spirits who defied the puritan sedition of the Marprelate pamphlets added lustre to its usage in royalist discourse in the seventeenth century.36 Yet, Nashe’s work was also claimed by alternative traditions. As was noted above, the term ‘cavalier’ appears in The Unfortunate Traveller to capture the decrepit boorishness of the cider merchant and it has similarly derogatory implications elsewhere (220). This semantic legacy was also recollected and explored in puritan satirical works such as John Goodwin’s Anti-Cavalierism (1642).37 Nashe’s legacy was as complex and divided as his own exploration of the resources of satire.
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Elliott, R. C. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
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Kinney, Arthur. Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1974).
McConica, James. Erasmus (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1991.
McRae, Andrew. Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Peter, J. D. Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).
Quintero, Ruben, ed. A Companion to Satire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Rummel, Erika. Erasmus (London: Continuum, 2004).
Scott-Warren, Jason. Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), esp. chap. 3.
Smet, Ingrid A. R. de. Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655 (Geneva: Droz, 1996).