Anyone who has had the misfortune to read my work on the met board can see that I'm in an "Epistle" and "Satire" groove. Part of this is a long-time coming, and part of this is because, in studying to take the MTEL (Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure) Latin exam, I worked my way through a bunch of Horace. Horatian satire--better, I think,
satura--peaked my interest, and I'm into Perseus and Juvenal, etc. But then I started looking for an English tradition, knowing only, really, Pope in the history of English verse satire.
The first to write satire in English--at least satire that is in the older tradition with a first person speaker commenting on the world--is Wyatt, but he doesn't really commit to it like Joseph Hall does in his 1597-99
Virgidemiarum. For anyone who enjoys Renaissance verse, or the Classical tradition of satire, they're lots of fun, and clearly an influence on Pope. Some of his lines have inspired my own. Here he is in "Satire III" which is on Drunkenness (modernized by me):
With some pot-fury, ravished from their wit
They sit and muse on some no-vulgar writ:
As frozen dung-hills in a winter's morn,
That void of vapors seemèd all beforn,
Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams,
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking steams;
So doth the base, and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.
Since we're so used to a standard history of literature that glorifies Shakespeare, it's fun to see something like "Satire V," in which Hall complains of tragic verse:
Too popular is tragic poesy,
Straining his tip-toes for a farthing fee,
And doth besides on rhymeless numbers tread,
Unbid iambics flow from careless head.
Some braver brain in high heroic rimes
Compileth worm-ate stories of old times;
And he, like some imperious Maronist,
Conjures the Muses that they him assist.
And so it goes another 30 lines of misdirected frustration. Anyway, Hall is no genius. He's certainly not a luminary in an age of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Marlowe. But I've been thinking our literary histories too frequently focus on lyrics and drama--letting in something like
The Faerie Queene only because they must.
Hall is not in their league, but he has wit, his prose influenced Milton (in that they were fodder for Milton's ire), and his satire provoked enough pushback by other poets to create a brief flurry of satire that was then stamped out by Queen Elizabeth because she thought it too dangerous.