Forms of Dissent

Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State by Andrew McRae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 250. $65.00 cloth.

The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 by Nicholas McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 219. $72.00 cloth.

Since the heyday of revisionism, historians and literary critics alike have sought to identify those neglected traditions of radical political thought that preceded the revolutionary events of the 1640s. Literary analysis has proved important here, not least because it reveals the different discursive forms that political consciousness might take. This in turn has helped to extend understanding of the "public sphere" that developed outside parliament. Both of the books under consideration contribute to this endeavor by broadening our sense of political discourse, its key concerns and its influences. Andrew McRae explores how satire in the early seventeenth century helped to create positions of political "opposition"; Nicholas McDowell considers how the humanist curriculum of the 1630s shaped radical belief in the next decade, redefining our understanding of elite and popular religious cultures. Both books offer lively, subtle readings of complex texts; they reach well beyond the traditional literary canon to remind us of the ways in which the production and circulation of texts in manuscript and print were so integral in this period to the formation of political identities.

Andrew McRae's Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State sets out to understand how "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). Its interest is the libels and verse satires that circulated in the 1620s and 1630s, during a period when there was widespread disaffection with humanist models of political counsel. McRae begins by clarifying the differences between libel and satire. Libel stems from popular tradition, whereas the models for early modern satire are classical; libel attacks individuals rather than moral types; libel circulates in manuscript rather than print. Yet, McRae also complicates this dichotomy. Of the two modes, for example, it is libel that attracted a mostly elite readership. The main concern of this book, however, is to explore how these two modes fashioned new political identities and alliances and, in the process, how they shaped new discourses of discord and dissent. McRae aims to uncover the source of the polemical writing released by the breakdown of censorship in the 1640s.

It is not hard to see how libels and satires might foster conflict, for they offer mostly vitriolic attacks on individuals or vices. Nonetheless, the insight of this thorough, carefully written and original book is that Stuart satires are not simply polarizing; rather, their significance rests on a "commitment to stretching the bounds of commentary and reflection" (49). McRae adapts Habermas's model of the public sphere to the early seventeenth century; this helps to explain and to accommodate the political aspirations of a body of writing that is not always lucid or reasonable. Satires helped to sustain a new spirit and style of contestation, he argues, increasing awareness of individual freedom. Adapting Patrick Collinson's memorable depiction of the Elizabethans as citizens concealed within subjects, McRae explores how satire helped early modern subjects to become more articulate citizens. One way he establishes the emergence of this is by contrasting George Wither's A Satyre: Dedicated to His Most Excellent Majestie, written from prison in 1614, with the more forthright satires of the 1620s. Wither's early poem understands satire as a vehicle for loyal counsel that avoids the constraints of courtly discourse. By the 1620s, however, Wither's Motto, like other satires of this decade, gives expression to the limits of the people's patience with both king and courtiers.

This book works hard to show us how personal invective can be meaningful, rather than opportunistic, and that it can contribute to a discourse of liberty. For example, attacks on individuals helped to shape the development of a powerful critique of government. The Duke of Buckingham...