Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England: Penetrating Wit (review)

Gabriel Rieger argues that a ban on sexual verse satire in 1599 encouraged young intellectuals to explore sexual language and symbolism through drama. Sexual experience provided common ground for the diversity of the theatrical audience; but similarly, satiric castigation, could become partially reflexive. Rieger discusses Hamlet and gender; The Duchess of Malfi and The Revenger's Tragedy and sexual disease; The Changeling and the theology of sin; and Othello on sex and service. In each play, he identifies a specific satiric type, an alienated character, or a frustrated aspirant aware of the corruptions around him. It is a helpful distinction taken to a fascinatingly difficult topic, with the spectre of syphilis being well handled (pp. 53-60).

Insight notwithstanding, the text is burdened by lumbering repetition of argument and vocabulary. Six times in one short paragraph we are told that satire is 'aggressive' (p. 20-21); five times in another that the satirist assumes a 'posture' (p. 9). There is no grasp of anaphora. Neither was satire, as we are sometimes told, restricted to attacking 'crime'; the meaning of reflexivity is distorted if it embraces the satirist's audience (p. 19). If the situation with the impending death of Elizabeth was familiar, it was not also unique (p. 29). The relationships between stoicism and satire are forced, and the sense of inference throughout uncertain; but then 'logical' (p. 33) appears to mean what can be expected. Lear was not 'deposed' (p. 6), the meaning of 'morally normative' (p. 32) eludes me. Characters are 'conflicted', Marston creates 'a disconnect' (p. 24).

The eradication of such infelicities might have converted a short book into more readable articles. But they are additionally indicative of the systemic anachronism that artlessly conflates modern terms and concepts with the intentions putatively informing the evidence, while largely ignoring the categories through which writers did organize their work. In what sense were playwrights secular intellectuals, bishops critics of pornography, or any of them concerned to construct ideologies? The designation of satire per se as a genre is incoherent. The image of Elizabethan society is both sketchy and historiographically outmoded (declining aristocracy, unprecedented social mobility, gender anxiety etc.). It is a significant problem in a work insisting that historical reality helps explain satire. A more thorough historical awareness of sexual imagery in satire might also have acted as a prophylactic against over-stated claims. Erasmus (on satiric reflexivity) and Aristophanes (on the obvious) are unmentioned.