Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (review)

To this reviewer, the prospect of a study based largely on material found only in manuscript, as Andrew McRae's is, was exciting. Even more so was McRae's reference in the preliminaries to a forthcoming edition of these inaccessible works in Early Modern Literary Studies. Co-edited with Alistair Bellany, 'Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Political Poems from Manuscript Sources' is said to be available at <http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html>. Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State was published in January 2004, so it is disappointing that the online edition has not yet appeared; the EMLS editor has kindly told me that the estimated publication date is early 2005.

There was also the attraction of a study that promised to investigate satire during a relatively unexamined period. It was Mary, Scotland's queen from 1542 (but who in 1558 became wife of the Dauphin Francis, and his queen, 1559-60), who adopted the French version of the family name, 'Stuart' (as opposed to 'Stewart'), after her return from France in 1561. Thus a book alluding to the 'Early Stuart' State, yet dealing with the years c.1590 to c.1640, was a surprise. Terminology understood, there is much of value in this study in a later period of what McRae calls 'unauthorized texts', or the libels, prose pamphlets, sermons and dramas that were the varied satiric responses to the censorship that was a feature of that time.

In his Introduction McRae notes that he is 'committed to challenging the residual influence of John Dryden's Restoration definition of the mode, which works so hard to establish clear boundaries between the native and the neoclassical, the scurrilous and the moral, the libellous and the properly satiric' (p. 8). His discussion on satire and its major critics is excellent and his own position well put. Debates over whether satire is radical or conservative are reductive, McRae argues, but he also claims that 'early Stuart satire had distinctly radical effects on political discourse', and even helped to delineate 'entirely new discourses of politics' (p. 9). As a whole the book is a worthy attempt to prove this, although there is a tendency to re-state rather than demonstrate, as, for instance, when McRae says that Corbett's poetry may 'expose itself to charges of self-interest and naivety, [but] I intend to consider it more seriously' (rather than, 'but it deserves more serious consideration because…) (p. 155).

The book is divided into three main sections, 'Personal Politics' (which 'seeks to contextualize early Stuart libelling, considering the literary origins of the form, its growth in the seventeenth century and its construction as a licensed mode', then 'the culture of the verse miscellanies' that were the main sources and, finally 'the principal generic qualities of the libel', p. 25); 'Public Politics' (concerned with 'the interactions between a literary mode [of satire] and emergent political discourses', p. 85), and 'The Politics of Division' (which, accepting that at this time 'discourses of politics and religion were almost inseparably intertwined', p. 171, considers the work of Richard Corbett, Thomas Carew, William Prynne and others, arguing that the 'contrary assumptions of subversion and division', were used to refine the 'poetry of "opposition"' of the period, p. 187.)

McRae draws on an impressive number of manuscript and early printed sources. For instance, in the first section (wherein are also perceptive discussions of libels on Cecil and Buckingham), he comments on an anonymous tetrastich, ably charting the differences between several versions of this short work, and assessing in detail what impact the small changes had on the poem's reception. Overall McRae pays attention to the tone and precise implications of the chosen libels, some of which, such as Corbett's 'Against the Opposing of the Duke', must have presented real challenges. As McRae points out, this latter combines 'the topicality of news' with Corbett's 'familiar spectre of socio-political inversion' to provide 'subtle commentary on the intertwined...