Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (review)

This study focuses on "a wealth of relatively untouched material" that relates to politics in the early Stuart period (vi). It explores matters of literary history by asking "what happened to satire in the decades after the Bishops' Ban of 1599," which ended the "outpouring of verse satire" by such writers as Donne, Marston, and Hall; and it examines issues in political history by investigating "changes in the language of politics, which enabled the articulation of radical new notions of ideological difference and political confrontation" (1).

Suggesting that early Stuart satire has "somehow faded into the background" in recent decades, leaving readers "heavily reliant on formalist and New Critical studies" produced before New Historicism became the fashion, McRae "sets aside the concern with textual form" that has been the focus of "many studies of literary genre" and presents "a historicized study" of satire "not in accordance with neoclassical standards and conventions, but rather as a 'mode'" or "an attitude or an inflection" that pervaded many different kinds of works (2–4).

Throughout his historicized study of satire, McRae makes generalizations about the development of satire in the early Stuart period that are tied closely to a particular narrative of changes in the political culture of the era that this study privileges. "Like many recent historical studies of the early seventeenth century," it is "concerned with the ways in which an orthodox Tudor commitment to consensus and harmony gave way by the 1640s to some of the most devastating political ruptures of English history" (1). Unlike some revisionist historians, however, McRae does not find the same commitment to consensus in the early Stuart era as he assumes there was among the Elizabethans. In examining the unauthorized texts that the early Stuarts produced, McRae locates a range of writing "that rejects the dominant assumption" that "all authority to speak was derived from the monarch" and identifies "many" writers who "rejected the system's constraints, and constructed new modes of illicit expression" (2). On the basis of these findings, McRae concludes that much of satire in early Stuart era was an intervention in the political discourse of the period. While not inclined to say that "satire was necessarily 'oppositional,'" he maintains that it "provided a vehicle through which existing political discourse could be fractured and reset." By way of its "establishment of differences and the imagination of alternatives" early Stuart satire made the turmoil of the 1640s possible (2).

Just as McRae's narrative of political change is intent on modifying certain revisionist accounts of early Stuart consensus, so is he uneasy about recent views on censorship that are indebted to such accounts. In particular, he quarrels with Cynthia Clegg's emphasis on the importance of "local conditions, individual personalities and sheer chance" in describing the early Stuart scene of writing because her account "tends to underestimate the undeniable fear of repression which informs writing throughout the period." Because a work produced in these fearful "circumstances exists in a dialectical relationship" with its context, "is informed by the prevailing conditions, and in turn help[s] to give definition to them," McRae emphasizes that for his study "the consciousness of censorship in the minds of writers is in most respects more significant than its actual achievements" and thus a crucial element in appreciating the kinds of satire this era produced (7).

This study's investment in the idea that the early Stuart era was an age of anxious writing becomes most visible in its account of "distinctly new kinds of satiric writing" produced in this period, and "most notably, the libel, a form" that "flourished in the reign of James, providing perhaps the single most important textual site for interaction between political and literary cultures" (8). In their display of "radical scepticism about discourses of authority," these libels "participate in rhetorical excess and violent contestation" and thus represent "an intensification of a trend" toward the politicization of poetry (53). Unlike Elizabethan...