Art to Cheat the Common-Weale: Inventors, Projectors, and Patentees in English Satire, ca.1630–70

This paper explores early modern ideas about invention and progress by examining the satirical projector character in English literature from the 1630s to the 1670s. It focuses on Simon Sturtevant’s treatise on invention, Metallica (1612), and two satires based on it: Thomas Brugis’s pamphlet Discovery of a Projector (1641), and John Wilson’s stage comedy The Projectors (1665). These satires offered a common critique that was not based on, or even expressed in terms of, scholasticism or the “reverence of antiquity” that Bacon had accused his critics of. Rather, they called out hypocrisy on the rhetoric and politics of what Sturtevant had termed “inventional progression.” Just as royal patronage through patents and monopolies was seen as abusive, projects, too, were depicted not as a force of progress but simply as another means to further enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. Because poets and playwrights were themselves inventors and patentees dependent upon royal favor, their satires were sometimes duplicitous and self-serving.