The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (review)

If William Gifford's legendary tales of the Mermaid Tavern have proven fictitious, Michelle O'Callaghan's English Wits sets out to offer a more plausible account. To that end, O'Callaghan undertakes an extensive survey of the new forms of wit that developed in early modern London. No small task, it turns out. As her second chapter states, "It is in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that the term takes on specialized meaning to denote a distinct speech community inhabiting a particular geographical and social space —the West End of London, around the Inns of Court, St Paul's and Blackfriars, with their fashionable taverns and other meeting places" (44–45). But as she shows more broadly, that community was marked by widespread experimentation and conflict. If the term became specialized, the wits themselves were at odds over what their new status entailed.

O'Callaghan examines specific, if elusive, social arrangements, which ranged from Inns of Court Revels to ritualized drinking and dining societies, to literary coteries and collaborative literary productions, to the aggressive "clubbing and communing" groups where joking could give way to physical violence. Available patterns of association underwent constant scrutiny, criticism, and revaluation. They were as codified as they were fluid, as her phrase, "laws of drinking," certainly suggests (61). In like fashion, she traces the various public roles that new figures embodied, often revealing their instabilities as much as their precision. Various types appear, including gentleman-lawyer, poet-satirist, public railer, urbane gallant, professional buffoon, scurra, even, in the case of Thomas Coryate, virtuoso traveler.

In many respects, it is Coryate who demonstrates just how complex the professional wit had become. Though easily forgotten by his own peers, not to mention contemporary critics, O'Callaghan devotes two chapters to the Crudities, which address, respectively, his perplexing decision to publish his "Panegyricke Verses" and his equally fascinating career as a professional traveler. As her analysis shows, distinct does not imply narrow.

O'Callaghan carefully examines the different speech and writing activities that early modern wits participated in, with particular concern over the public functions that wit might serve. In what respect, for instance, might public figures, including statesmen benefit from the classical mode of parrhesia (which she attributes, understandably enough, to Erasmus)? In what manner did satire, railing, public ridicule and anonymous libeling, prove "necessary to ensure the health of the commonwealth"? How did ritualized forms of play, the Lucianic tradition of lusus, even nonsense, contribute to the formation of civic, or Utopian communities? From satire and nonsense, it is a short journey to Jonsonian "games of vapours" and scurrility. In a book largely concerned with drinking and dining societies, it is perhaps not surprising that English Wits turns to poems about farting. Indeed, the collaborative "Parliament Fart" looms large, enjoying well more than an entire chapter, in which O'Callaghan analyses the famous prank with respect to prevailing political discourses at the said institution.

At other moments, however, textual analysis runs light. A case in point is her references to the court factionalism of the 1590s. While pointing out that the Inns of Court figures began to develop their codes of wit in tandem with the Essex-Cecil rivalry, she offers little by way of precise explanation as to how. In her final chapter, she points out that tavern societies gave rise to the public debates and news culture, which emerged in response to high profile scandals (e.g., the Overbury affair, the invasion of the Palatinate, the Spanish Match); but all this ultimately to assert that James's court proved generous in supplying occasions for lampoon. Very brief readings of well-known texts, including Donne's "Satire I" and Jonson's plays, make for frustrating moments.

Throughout the course of the book, O'Callaghan suggests the ways that literary and social activities, in her words, "open a conceptual space for imagining" for various...