English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 by Harold Love (review)

201 century religious debates, or the role of the ‘‘dark authors,’’ though some of these topics are surveyed in the endnotes. None of this is to suggest that Mr. Ellis is ignorant of such matters, as these topics and others are addressed in his 1997 Eighteenth-Century Life essay, which is unfortunately not cited in this edition. These omissions suggest that Mr. Ellis did not intend for his edition to supersede Guthkelch and Nichol Smith. The ultimate value of this new edition rests on his annotations, which are often presented in support of two arguments: that Swift fashioned A Tale as a ‘‘mosaic’’ of other texts and that throughout the work Swift employs a satirical persona, ‘‘an authentic comic-pathetic character.’’ Using editorial annotations to advance an interpretive argument creates its own problems and usually denies the reader the opportunity to encounter contrary views. Thus the reader of this edition is not informed about the ‘‘anti-persona’’ theory, that the narrator is to some extent a projection of Swift himself, an argument advocated by, among others, Gardner D. Stout, Jr. and Claude Rawson. Nonetheless, I learned much from Mr. Ellis’s annotations. I did not know that Roger L’Estrange addresses ‘‘Posterity’’ in the third volume of his Observator. That discovery reveals another element of particular satire in the Dedication to Prince Posterity . Mr. Ellis also shows how Swift parodies Richard Blackmore in the opening of this Dedication. That Dryden’s edition of Virgil was in fact delivered unbound to subscribers reveals the amusing reference in Swift’s comment that it was ‘‘well bound.’’ Mr. Ellis also finds a new parody of Dryden in the Preface. These annotations and others support his mosaic theory, which deserves careful consideration. Mr. Ellis had a long and productive scholarly career, and he always approached intellectual tasks with exuberance and good fun; the dust jacket photo for this edition appropriately depicts him smiling while on a swing. Stephen Karian Marquette University HAROLD LOVE. English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702. Oxford: Oxford, 2004. Pp. 350. $192. Mr. Love’s English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 is the third volume in a loose trilogy of scholarly works that already includes two exceptional studies, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993) and Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2002). If the somewhat narrower focus of Clandestine Satire seems to promise less wide appeal than those earlier contributions, it is nevertheless their equal in erudition, in style, in intellectual rigor and generosity. Scribal Publication laid waste to the myth that by the end of the sixteenth century, print had become the natural medium for writers who wished to reach an audience. Mr. Love’s study not only detailed a significant traffic in manuscripts throughout the late Renaissance , but brought to light an astonishingly rich cultural hermeneutics of manuscript circulation. In the present volume, he offers wholly to revise our understanding of the Restoration lampoon, a genre of scribally published poetry as critically degraded as it has been thought degrading of its subjects. In these surreptitious litanies of ‘‘Bugg’ries, Rapes, and Incests,’’ he discovers ‘‘a vast secret history of the times.’’ 202 Better yet, he tells us how to read that history, how to decode Restoration lampoon’s arsenal of sexual insult and personal invective as political annal and party polemic. Mr. Love’s study conceptualizes what he calls the ‘‘pornopolitics’’ of the Restoration court lampoon, the literary crucible for the satires in the Poems on Affairs of State volumes. The court lampoon was ‘‘an instrument of factional warfare,’’ a discursive means of negotiating the powerful, indeed brutal rivalries for position and prestige that defined the court of Charles II. Mr. Love argues that sexual subjection in these often lurid and voyeuristic poems ‘‘stands as a metaphor for the subjections enforced at every level of court behavior by the assertion of absolute power.’’ Accusations of sexual perversion and physical deformity, likewise, seek to regulate, through textual violence and humiliation, power relations imagined as threatening or disordered. Thus Portsmouth’s sexual domination of Charles in Rochester’s ‘‘scepter lampoon’’ does not necessarily reflect any real and scandalous custom of the king’s bedchamber (though it well might); it revealed, however, a...