research

"Built of both extremes": satire and the city in 1590s London

A large amount of research has been produced on early modern city literature in recent years. This work has been supported by an increasingly sophisticated knowledge and interpretation of historical information and directed by theoretical borrowings from other disciplines. Foremost amongst these last have been accounts of the production of social space, as discussed by Lefebvre and others, political readings influenced by Foucauldian sociology and post-Marxist analyses of behaviour in London’s emerging market economy.

Such research has by and large concentrated on works such as play, sermon and pamphlet, whose very consumption was a social act. Yet by ignoring earlier verse satire, such interpretations are overlooking an important stage in the development of London’s literary self-examination and, moreover, underrepresenting an important section of society and its comments on contemporary urban life. My work is in part an extension of the sociological readings that have been applied to prose and drama. It is also an examination of the origins of self-referential city literature and an argument for the existence of a prototypical urban literary culture.

Chapters concern: prose satire, focusing especially on Nashe; the classical verse satire of Donne and Davies, exploring the social spaces of the Inns of Court writers; published verse satire and official censorship in the later 1590s (Guilpin, Marston, Middleton); satirists who wrote for both page; and the function of satire in the early modern city.