This book is a meticulously researched and carefully written study of masculinity in the verse satires of four authors produced during the final decade of the Elizabethan period. The author draws on insights from contemporary sources, genre criticism, and sociohistorical research—no easy task to integrate when one considers the diversity of sources, the fluidity of satire, or the breadth of sociohistorical evidence. Nevertheless, the author handles the larger issues deftly while honing the focus of his inquiry on John Donne's satires, John Marston's Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie, Joseph Hall's Virgidemarium, and Everard Guilpin's Skialetheia. The examination of texts leads to a series of questions about the way patriarchal ideals and norms—such as self-control, violent aggression, moderation, and husbandry—contribute to an understanding of early modern masculinity. Particular attention is paid to the tension between patriarchal ideals and the flawed manhood of the satirists’ world, defined by abuse, overindulgence, and excess.
In the introduction, the author investigates the satire of the period as a “male art”—works by men that denounce the vices and decadence of other men. To elucidate the conceptions and images of manhood, the author uses a historicist approach to examine four aspects of Elizabethan society that impact young, literary men: the masculine spaces of inns of court and universities, rituals of male bonding and friendship (including hostility and rivalry), the representation of emotion in satire, and influential models of the classical tradition, especially the Roman tradition. The rich context demonstrates the “range of masculinities reflected in Elizabethan satire,” which “resists easy generalisations” (27). A lack of adequate terminology for defining this range is reflected in the categorization of manhood as either “patriarchal,” “anti-patriarchal,” or “subordinate” (8–9). Complexity also arises from the satirists’ attacks on the masculinity of others when they themselves are young men who have not attained full manhood either in temperament or social position. The disparities in representation among the four satirists indicates “that there were different manhoods that often existed in tension with each other” (7). This observation frames the author's method of inquiry in his description of the common elements as well as the divergences.
Four chapters demonstrate distinct emphases in the representation of masculinity: self-control, violence, husbandry, and age. What is consistent throughout is the inherent contradiction between the satirists’ voice of masculine authority and the persona's inability to achieve patriarchal ideals. Thus, the personae of the satirist in Donne's second and third satires might suggest “an alluring image of scepticism, thoughtfulness and manly intellectual rigor” (44); and yet the patriarchal virtues of moderation and self-control are never quite achieved by the persona, who has no means of personal advancement and no remedy for the abuses perceived. Marston's angry, reviling satirist, the polar opposite of Donne's, demonstrates violence as an important aspect of early modern manhood. However, the lack of self-control on display in the persona's aggressive taunts, as well as his pattern of self-reviling and self-castigation, emasculate the persona's martial posturing. Hall's satirist represents husbandry, an ideal of prosperity through hard, honest work and self-sufficiency, as the image of patriarchal masculinity.
Hall casts a wide net, his persona railing against those who fail to manage households and estates responsibly because of greed, neglect of procreation and family line, and an obsession with pedigrees. Of particular interest to Hall is the instability and unreliability of the patronage system, which renders poets “economically inept providers,” similar to prostitutes (98, 109). Finally, Guilpin demonstrates the role of age in the construction of manhood, by juxtaposing a young, aggressive persona of the epigrams and first three satires to a more emotionally distanced, Stoical, sententious persona of the last three satires.
This book should be of considerable interest to scholars engaged in early modern gender studies and literary criticism as well as genre and sociohistorical criticism. It is a probing book, a careful examination of well-grounded observations, associations, and distinctions rather than a theory-driven study. The author's refined coordination of primary sources and critical perspectives (there is a bibliography at the end of each chapter) challenges the more reductive view of the satirist's outrage and helps us to understand better the dynamics of masculinity which early modern authors invoke and manipulate.
