satire
satire,from the Latin satira, a later form of satura, which means ‘medley’, being elliptical for lanx satura, ‘a full dish, a hotch-potch’. The word has no connection with ‘satyr’, as was formerly often supposed. A ‘satire’ is a poem, or in modern use sometimes a prose composition, in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule [OED]. In English literature, satire may be held to have begun with Chaucer , who was followed by many 15th-cent. writers, including Dunbar . Skelton used the octosyllabic metre, and a rough manner which was to be paralleled in later times by Butler in Hudibras , and by Swift . Elizabethan satirists include Gascoigne , Lodge , and Marston , whereas J. Hall claimed to be the first to introduce satires based on Juvenal to England . The great age of English satire began with Dryden , who perfected the epigrammatic and...
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