SOURCE: McCabe, Richard A. “The Virgidemiarum.” In Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation, pp. 29-72. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

[In this essay, McCabe maintains that Virgidemiarum is a seminal work in which Hall sets out to satirize Elizabethan social and moral attitudes from a Puritan perspective. The critic further demonstrates that Hall masterfully employed a strict classical form of satire to protest social injustice and moral turpitude.]

I First adventure, with fool-hardie might
To tread the steps of perilous despight:
I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English Satyrist.(1)

The publication of the Martin Marprelate tracts in the late 1580s marked the beginning of a new era in Elizabethan satire. Born of a deeply-rooted dissatisfaction with the Anglican Church, these tracts seriously damaged the fragile ‘Elizabethan compromise’, and precipitated the censoring of the Puritan press and the famous Star Chamber trials of 1591 to 1592.² Their literary consequences were equally striking. Anti-Martinist propaganda appeared almost immediately as savage invectives flowed from the pens of Lyly, Nashe, and Greene and the country was thrown into a state of religious and social turmoil.³ Late Elizabethan satire had a stormy birth.

The future Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, had uncovered what he claimed to be a vast Presbyterian plot to establish ‘presbytery within episcopacy’ thereby effectively ending episcopal Church government. As never before, Puritanism became suspect, and the opinions of moderates were discredited by the actions of fanatics. In Cheapside, even as the trials were still in progress, an illiterate simpleton named William Hacket was proclaimed the new Messiah and king of Europe by a pair of zealous gentlemen who had come to identify themselves with the two ‘witnesses’ of Revelation.⁴ But London was no Münster, and the Messiah ended up on the scaffold, to be followed soon after by the Separatists Barrow and Greenwood. That same year (1593) a similar fate overtook the Welsh Puritan John Penry. The charge was treason, but many believed him to be Martin Marprelate.⁵

Yet grave though the Marprelate issue undoubtedly was, it was only one of a number of pressing social problems. As the queen approached death without an heir, dangerous factions began to form around the most likely candidates. The Jesuit Robert Parsons, urged the claims of the Spanish Infanta and the threat of invasion was again a reality. Another Armada was prepared after the raid on Cadiz in 1596, and the country was again fortified against the expected invasion.⁶ Everything seemed to be going wrong, and unpredictably bad winters and harvests worsened an already dangerous situation. The price of corn soared, and the authorities were forced to take action against illegal enclosures and corn ‘engrossings’. Despite their initiative, Oxfordshire was thrown into uproar by the sudden outbreak of a minor uprising late in 1596—just a few months before the publication of Hall's Virgidemiarum, the title of which (in the genitive plural governed by Sixe Bookes) means bundle or harvest of rods, apparently with reference to the rods of the Roman lictors, symbols of authority and discipline. Only the first three books comprising the Tooth-lesse Satyrs: Poeticall, Academicall, Morall appeared in 1597, the much harder-hitting Byting Satyres were published the following year. Both were enthusiastically received, for Hall had assessed the literary climate with remarkable acumen. A classical scholar intimately acquainted with the works of the Roman satirists, he recognized a need he was himself well qualified to satisfy, but soon found he had become the leader of a new fashion—Marston, Guilpin, Tourneur, and Rowlands followed hard in his wake.⁷ Moreover, as a fellow of Emmanuel College, the Puritan stronghold of a predominantly Puritan university, he moved close to the fountain-head of popular discontent. The note of challenge in his satire upon Roman ritual (IV.7) is unfeigned,

Who say's these Romish Pageants bene too hy
To be the scorne of sportfull Poesy?
Certes not all the world such matter wist,
As are the seven hils, for a Satiryst.

(p. 72)

for given the prevailing circumstances the work could easily be interpreted as an oblique attack upon Anglican ritual also, especially when written by a native of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Hall's childhood was passed in an atmosphere of unremitting Puritan complaint. Anthony Gilby, one remembers, was the author of A Pleasaunt Dialogue betweene a Souldier of Barwicke and an English Chaplaine, a work which Hall is known to have read and which has been described as a satire ‘remarkable for its humour and spirit’ belonging ‘with the works of Turner, Bale, and Martin Marprelate in the first rank of Puritan controversial productions’.⁸ But ecclesiastical controversy formed only one aspect of Puritan complaint. It extended outwards to challenge the whole temper of Elizabethan life, its materialism, its extravagance, its injustice. Not without reason was the term ‘Puritan’ applied both to a public policy and a private attitude. There were ‘Puritans’ who were never Presbyterians or Separatists and Hall was of their number. Witness his relentlessly moral interpretation of human experience and his boundless sympathy for all victims of social or economic distress. In his satires and sermons he willingly lent his voice to the popular outcry. Despite what has been said in the past—and indeed what continues to be said by present-day critics—about the ‘conventional’ nature of his complaints, his Byting Satyres are works of uncompromising social criticism and protest.⁹ In every sense they represent his reaction against ‘the world, that did my thoughts offend’ (p. 10).

Despite the provocative tone of the lines placed at the head of this chapter, Hall was well aware that he was not, in any absolute sense, the ‘first’ English satirist. Even in the Virgidemiarum themselves he refers to such predecessors as Chaucer (p. 65), Collingborn (p. 62), and Skelton (p. 89). What he could justly claim, however, was a primacy of form, for no one before him had published a book of short, separate satires so closely modelled upon the works of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, and no one had pressed the classical form into the service of such pointed social attack. The three rather unexciting satires included in Thomas Lodge's A Fig for Momus (1595) made no impression upon his contemporaries and his plan to produce a whole ‘centon of them should the samples ‘passe well’ was consequently abandoned.¹⁰ As far as the work of Donne is concerned, there is no evidence whatsoever that Hall had any knowledge of the verse satires then circulating in manuscript. As we have seen, the intimacy between the two men dates from a much later period.¹¹

Hall's attitude to literature was entirely pervaded by the ideals of Christian morality and didacticism. A candidate for the ministry, he viewed his satires as part of the long homiletic tradition stretching back to the times of the Bible. Perhaps more than anything else it is this attitude of affronted righteousness, this passion to ‘bear witness’ that constitutes his greatest literary debt to his Puritan background. He remained imbued with the spirit long after he had rejected the polity. For him, as Paul Welsby has put it, ‘the Christian preacher is the direct heir of the Hebrew prophet, for the latter, when he declared the Word of God as revealed in the events of his day, passed judgement upon contemporary society.’¹² The relationship between prophets and satirists had been expressly established in 1566 when a godly Puritan named Thomas Drant produced the first English translation of a carefully Christianized Horace. For Drant, as the very title of his work suggests, satire was a valuable weapon in the unending battle against vanity, a battle in which the classical authors take their place alongside the prophets of the Old Testament: A Medicinable Morall, that is the two Bookes of Horace his Satyres, Englyshed accordying to the prescription of Saint Jerome … Quod Malum est, muta / Quod bonum est, prode. The Wailyngs of the Prophet Hieremiah, done into Englyshe verse, Also Epigrammes. Drant justifies the association by pointing to what he sees as the complementary nature of the authors thus so boldly juxtaposed. Horace, he informs us, was ‘a muche zelous controller of sinne’, one that ‘with sharpe satyres and cutting quippies, coulde wel displaie and disease a gloser’, while Jeremiah ‘rufully and waylingly’ lamented ‘the deepe and massie enormities of his tymes’ and foretold divine retribution. It was therefore ‘mete’ that while the ‘man of God’ wept for sin, the ‘prophane’ poet, the decorum of whose work allowed of such humour, should laugh at it.¹³ This was also Hall's view of the matter, although he went somewhat further in finding and justifying, ‘scornes and taunts’ and ‘disdainfull scoffes’ in the prophets as well.¹⁴ As a result, his adoption of the neoclassical form by no means diminished the moral justification of his satiric attacks, nor in any way isolated them from the Hebrew tradition. Satire was a moral duty, and he spoke. He tells us in one of his sermons that the just man must denounce the sins of God's people and the ‘guilt of the great’ even though this may imperil his own life.¹⁵ Or, as the satires put it:

What ever brest doth freeze for such false dread,
Beshrow his base white liver for his meede.
Fond were that pitie, and that feare were sin,
To spare wast leaves that so deserved bin.

(p. 51)

As my discussion of the Byting Satyres will demonstrate, the sermons echo, restate, and develop the complaints of the Virgidemiarum repeatedly—indeed it would require a whole chapter simply to list the corresponding passages. I mention the matter here because it seems to me to provide the essential context in which to consider Hall's attitude to these apparently very different satires of his early, ‘secular’ days. Once the relationship between satirist and preacher has been firmly established, it becomes far less surprising—and a good deal more significant—to learn that the Virgidemiarum were born of ‘Trueth and Holy Rage’ (p. 47), or to hear them referred to as ‘sacred Semones’ (satyrs, with a possible pun on Horace's Sermones, p. 51) designed to ‘check the mis-ordered world, and lawlesse times, (p. 12) by unmasking the ‘ugly face of vice’ (p. 11). It also becomes easier to appreciate how their frequent bitterness of tone is directly attributable to a sincere sense of moral indignation against the sins of which they treat. As Hall himself put it in his first Paul's Cross sermon (1608): ‘These things I vowed in my selfe to reprove, if too bitterly, (as you thinke) pardon (I beseech you) this holy impatience: and blame the foulnesse of these vices, not my just vehemency.’¹⁶ Many years later when the satires became the target of Milton's abuse, one of Hall's supporters (possibly his son Robert) strongly reaffirmed their moral and didactic intention, assigning them a function almost indistinguishable from that of the sermons. The bishop, we are told,

no sooner came to be capable of the more violent impressions of sin, but his nature and it fell foul; and because he had overcome vices in himself, he took liberty to whip them in others. Which timely zeal, as it did not mis-become his youth, so can it not disparage his Prelacy; no, not as Poesie, not as Satyr.¹⁷

The passage was written in 1641, but it has become necessary to labour the point just as strongly today when the widely accepted views of Alvin Kernan, as developed in The Cankered Muse (1959), have done incalculable damage to the understanding of the Virgidemiarum, and, I suspect, to a great many other Renaissance satires as well.

It seems to me that the fundamental error of Kernan's approach lies in assuming that the work of Marston, which is to a large extent sui generis, is typical of that of his contemporaries, even of such earlier writers as Lodge and Hall. Furthermore, in seeking to prove that such fictional ‘satirists’ as Tourneur's Vindice, and Shakespeare's Jacques, are directly descended from the speakers or ‘personae’ of formal verse satire, he is led to postulate the existence of a completely conventionalized ‘satyr persona’, at once self-centred, immoral, malcontented, and melancholic. While never to be identified with the author, nor in any way related to his social background, this ‘persona’ may be regarded as the inevitable product of contemporary attitudes to the satiric genre.¹⁸ Obliged to satisfy extreme expectations of ‘savagery, despair, hate, pride, intransigence, prurience, and sadism’, the satiric ‘persona’ becomes of necessity ‘strange, twisted, contradictory’, and the motivation of his complaints remains at best problematic.¹⁹ In effect, in keeping with the allegedly universal acceptance of the derivation of ‘satire’ from ‘satyr’, he was himself a satyr, a shaggy woodland god of ambivalent moral standing. ‘Envy, sadism, and discontentedness’ subtract from his moral stature, and ‘a constant interest in sins of the flesh and near obsession with disease and bodily functions suggest his prurience.’ His ‘stuttering style’ betrays ‘an unhealthy state of frenzy’.²⁰ To its overriding concern with the presentation of such a persona, Kernan traces what he sees as the structural weakness of Renaissance satire. In most cases the satires exist solely to portray the speaker.²¹

The objections to such an approach are many. For a start, the work of Mary Claire Randolph has demonstrated that Renaissance satire is far from lacking in structure—however this may be obscured by Kernan's preoccupation with abstracting ‘personae’ from poems never intended to bear such analysis.²² Indeed the very perceptive discussion of the nature of satiric ‘plot’ with its rejection of the Aristotelian formula of beginning, middle, and end, in his own excellent study, The Plot of Satire (1965), seems to me to necessitate a modification of the rather extreme position adopted in his earlier work.²³ Furthermore, to attribute to ‘convention’ an influence almost totally independent of social background and authorial intention is to render satire completely mechanical and, what is worse, completely predictable. The successful satirist moulds and adapts the more traditional devices of his genre to suit his own particular requirements. As Gilbert Highet remarks, ‘in the work of the finest satirists there is the minimum of convention, the maximum of reality.’²⁴ That he has chosen to write in what may at first appear a purely ‘conventional’ manner cannot absolve us from the duty of examining how he has used it, and why he adopted it in the first place. In Hall's case, it is quite clear that, all theories of ‘satyrs’ notwithstanding, the work is modelled squarely upon the example of the classical satirists, and Ariosto, in whom the satyr notion is completely unheard of (p. 99). In point of fact, there seems little evidence to suggest that his contemporaries had any universally accepted view of satire at all.

The etymology of the Latin word ‘satura’ had become confused as early as the fourth century ad when the grammarian Diomedes was reduced to listing several conflicting derivations.²⁵ The matter was still unresolved in the sixteenth century when Drant offered four possible etymologies none of which could apparently be preferred before any other.²⁶ This being the case, we can be quite sure that all educated people were well aware of the contentious nature of the issue, and when the ‘satyr’ hypothesis was finally exploded by Isaac Casaubon in 1605 the effect must have been a good deal less surprising than we have often been led to imagine.²⁷ It is well to remember too that even Donatus, one of the most ardent spokesmen for the ‘satyr’ school, was forced to admit that his ideas were not universally received.²⁸ Nor did he ever assert that satyrs ‘spoke’ in classical satire, only that such writings were descended, as was New Comedy, from the Greek satyr play; Lucilius, he points out, wrote in a new form (‘novo conscripsit modo’).²⁹ Among Renaissance critics there is no suggestion that ambivalence of moral stance was considered a hallmark of the satiric genre. Sidney strongly defended the moral purpose of satire, while Webbe, following Horace, banished lasciviousness even from the original satyr plays. Similarly Puttenham, who himself supported the satyr derivation, pointed to the relationship between satire and preaching, while Harington found satire ‘free’ from wantonness and ‘wholly occupied in mannerly and covertly reproving of all vices’.³⁰ Even William Rankins, the only contemporary satirist actually to assign all his complaints to the mouths of satyrs,³¹ represents them as idyllic examples of unspoilt nature whose attacks are directed solely against the evil, and Drant, one of whose four possible etymologies includes the satyr suggestion, explains in conclusion that whatever his origin,

The Satyrist loves Truthe, none more then he,
An utter foe to fraude in eache degree.(32)

Hall, of course, was in complete agreement: ‘Truth be thy speed, and Truth thy Patron bee’ (p. 11). The furthest influence of the ‘satyr’ derivation upon his own work was its suggestion of three witty puns whose effect, as in all such cases, depends on the reader's ability to distinguish between the terms humorously confused.³³ This is pointed out fully by the author of A Modest Confutation in his reply to Milton's quibble against ‘toothlesse’ satyrs. ‘Satyra’, he explains,

signified anciently any kind of miscellaneous writing, which we now term Essayes; whence Varro entituled many of his books of divers subjects, Satyras suas: Whence there was also a Law called metaphorically Lex Satyra, when by one and the same Vote, divers things were enacted. Last of all, it came to be restrained to such kind of writings, as contained the vices of the times, whether in verse or prose; more commonly now of later terms in verse.³⁴

When Hall spoke of ‘tooth-lesse’ and ‘byting’ satires he used the terms metaphorically to signify various degrees of strength. He had no intention of applying them ‘as we say it of a child, after its teeth are grown, or before’. Had Milton but ‘so much life or quicknesse’ in his ‘pallade’ as to have ‘tasted an Epigram’ he would have found his own ridiculously literal interpretation wittily pre-empted by Hall himself in the lines:

Euge novam Satyram, Satyrum sine cornibus euge!
Monstra, novi monstri, haec; et Satyri et Satyrae!(35)

For Hall, the ‘satyr’ derivation is a joke.

Perhaps more important than any of this is Kernan's misrepresentation of the problem of envy—ironically one of the oldest ‘conventions’ of the genre. As Horace pointed out, far from being motivated by envy, the satirist is its victim. Reviled for speaking the truth, he finds his writings attributed by the guilty to malice and sadism: ‘laedere gaudes’ / inquit, ‘et hoc studio pravus facis’ (‘You like to give pain’, says one, ‘and you do so with spiteful intent’).³⁶ In exactly the same way Hall is assailed by an imaginary interlocutor seeking to cast grave doubt on his moral integrity:

Envie belike incites his pining heart,
And bids it sate it selfe with others smart.

(p. 21)

As in Horace, the suggestion is immediately denied:

Nay, no dispight: but angry Nemesis,
Whose scourge doth follow all that done amisse.

(p. 21)

Such conjuring up of an imaginary opponent is one of the satirist's most time-honoured devices of self-defence, yet Kernan represents the passage as an open confession of perversion!³⁷

The point is made even more explicitly in the introduction to the Byting Satyres where Hall recognizes that his work can achieve only a posthumous fame,

For when I die, shall Envie die with mee
And lye deepe smothered with my Marble-stone,
Which while I live cannot be done to die.

(p. 47)

What he hopes future generations will particularly remember is the moral foundation of all he has written, as important in its own way as an act of overt devotion:

                              sufficeth mee, the world may say
That I these vices loath'd another day,
Which I have done with as devout a cheere
As he that rounds Poules pillers in the eare,
Or bends his ham downe in the naked Queare.

(p. 84)

The evidence for the opposing viewpoint rests upon a case of textual misinterpretation. Hall, says Kernan, ‘describes his satiric efforts in this way’:³⁸

Envie waits on my backe, Truth on my side:
Envie will be my Page, and Truth my Guide:
Envie the margent holds, and Truth the line:
Truth doth approve, but Envy doth repine.

(p. 11)

As must by now be apparent, envy waits on the poet's back because he will always have detractors. Hence the image of the ‘page’ who will trail him until death. Truth, on the other hand, is his ‘guide’ because it shows him the way ahead.³⁹ Envy holds the margin since it is here that his detractors will place their black marks to indicate his alleged faults. Labeo is shown in the act in the final book:

Labeo reserves a long nayle for the nonce
To would my Margent through ten leaves at once

(p. 87)

Truth holds the ‘line’ for the obvious reason that the message of Hall's ‘lines’ is itself true. The result, quite naturally, is that while envy repines at his effort, truth applauds it. Quite appropriately, therefore, Hall opens the Virgidemiarum with a long poem entitled ‘His Defiance to Envie’. The matter could scarcely be more clear.

The treatment of envy was a satiric convention fulfilling the essential function of keeping the audience on the complainant's side—a need Hall felt keenly throughout his long career as a satirist, both poet and preacher. Just as in the second prologue he attempts to defend himself against a possible charge of envious cynicism, in his sermons he is constantly alert lest anyone ‘miscontrue’ him ‘as if in a Timon-like, or Cynick humor, I were fallen out with our creation’.⁴⁰ Complacency was never to become the note of his attacks, for his sense of ‘elect’ isolation in a world of vice and folly alerted him to the need to defend his methods. Like Hamlet he was at pains to show that it was the world's trespass and not his madness that spoke. In ‘The Character of Man’, a court sermon of 1634, for example, he launches into a full-scale defence of his satiric practices in the light of their moral and didactic purpose. This I shall examine in the appropriate chapter. Here we must concentrate on the equally forthright ‘Post-script to the Reader’ appended to the Byting Satyres.

The ‘Post-script’ takes the form of a frank discussion of the manner and matter appropriate to satire with particular reference, of course, to Hall's own compositions (pp. 97-9). Concerning the manner, we hear first of all of the impossibility of suiting all points of view—a good indication of the confusion surrounding the theoretical issues involved. Far from submitting to the allegedly universal view that satire should be abrupt and obscure, however, Hall points out that the combination of rhyme (absent from Latin but required in the vernacular) and abrupt syntax can only produce a ‘loathsome kinde of harshnes and discordance’ (p. 99). Let those who doubt this attempt a verse translation of Persius and then decide. His own practice has been to avoid the abruptness and difficulty advocated by such authorities as Julius Caesar Scaliger. In one satire only (IV.1) has he attempted to reproduce the ‘soure and crabbed face of Iuvenals’, an attempt ‘determinately’ omitted in the rest (p. 99). His theories are amply supported by his practice, for while making the traditional admission in ‘His Defiance to Envie’ that satire tends to be more pedestrian than other forms of poetry (p. 9), he soon makes it clear that his own satires may well breach this decorum. If his muse cannot sufficiently ‘remit’ her ‘high flight’ in order to suit ‘a lowly Satyre’, then ‘lowly Satyres’ must ‘rise aloft’ to her (p. 11). Hence such features as the sophisticated use of the Virgilian half-line usually associated with epic,⁴¹ the moving elegiac pathos of the deserted village sections (p. 78), and the smooth, sonorous description of the Golden Age:

Time was, and that was term'd the time of Gold,
When world and time were young, that now are old.
(When quiet Saturne swaid the mace of lead,
And Pride was yet unborne, and yet unbred.)
Time was, that whiles the Autumne fall did last,
Our hungry sires gap't for the falling mast
                                                                                of the Dodonian okes.
Could no unhusked Akorne Leave the tree,
But there was chalenge made whose it might bee.

(p. 33)

Roughness of metre and abrupt riddling couplets are reserved for special effect. For example, the deliberately ‘crabbed’ style and rhythms of IV.1 may be contrasted with the easy, flowing eloquence of VI.1. Special effects in IV.1 include the highly appropriate disruption of the decasyllabic metre in a line such as ‘While now my rimes relish of the Ferule still’ (p. 54). Yet this is the exception not the rule; in the eyes of many, Hall reminds us, his satires ‘over-loosely flow’ (p. 33).⁴² For this, however, he will make no apology, for such stylistic criticisms are easily silenced by far weightier considerations.

The ‘Post-script’ is not merely a personal statement of artistic intentions, but an apology for satire itself. Since Hall will admit of no purely aesthetic approach to literature his choice of style is inextricably connected with what he conceives to be the moral purpose of his writings. From this point of view the cultivation of deliberate obscurity would of necessity diminish their moral impact: ‘that which is unseene is almost undone’. ‘The end of this paines’, he declares, ‘was a Satyre, but the end of my Satyre [was] a further good, which whether I attaine or no I know not, but let me be plaine, with a hope of profit, rather than purposely obscure onely for a bare names sake’ (p. 99). Much affected by the Genevan ideal of ‘fraternal’ castigation—such mutual examinations formed part of Gilby's ‘prophesyings’ at Ashby—Hall could scarcely conceive of justified satire as other than a moral duty.⁴³ As he wrote in a letter of 1608 to an unidentified correspondent:

Whiles I accused the Times, you undertook their patronage. I commend your charity, not your cause. It is true: There was never any Age not complained of; never any that was not censured, as worst … But loe, that Ancient of dayes, to whom all times are present, hath told us, that these last shall be worst: Our experience justifies him, with all but the wilfull.⁴⁴

His complaints, he contends, were fully justified, and were principally aimed at the conscience of the individual: ‘Redresse stands not in words. Let every man pull but one brand out of this fire, and the flame will goe out alone. What is a multitude, but an heap of unities?’ Yet, although the duty of setting one's own house in order naturally takes precedence, ‘who but a Caine is not his brothers keeper?’, secular authority must uphold moral standards and preachers must vociferously ‘cry downe sinne in earnest’, but by no means ‘may the common Christian sit still and look on in silence’. In this work God will allow no man to be ‘private’; ‘discreet admonitions’ and ‘seasonable reproofes’ are the duty of all.⁴⁵ ‘Fraternal’ castigation was a Christian duty. Yet at the same time Hall was careful to dissociate himself from such malcontents as spoke ‘nothing but Satyrs and Libels’ (my emphasis).⁴⁶ ‘It is the peevish humour of a factious eloquence’, he told Parliament,

to aggravate the evills of the times; which, were they better then they are, would be therefore cryed downe in the ordinary language of malecontented spirits, because present; But it is the warrantable and necessary duty of S. Peter, and all his true Evangelicall successors, when they meet with a froward generation to call it so … Who should tell the times of their sinnes, if we be silent? Pardon me, I beseech you … necessity is laid upon me … I may not be as a man in whose mouth is no reproofes.⁴⁷

Much of the fascination of the Virgidemiarum is born of its author's struggle with these same problems of moral complaint and audience reaction. But here the solution was far more difficult, for if the work was to be anything more than a diatribe after Philip Stubbes's fashion, the moral dilemma had to find an aesthetic solution. Much of the strenuousness and tension of these satires derives, I believe, from the unremitting attempt to woo the reader to the satirist's side by rendering the complaints aesthetically pleasing. Denied the licence of the preacher, Hall aims at the neoclassical goal of ‘utile dulce’. Hence his complete break with English satiric tradition and the adoption of the classical form.

In the Tooth-lesse Satyrs, where the models are normally Horace and Persius, direct borrowing plays little part. The significance of the influence lies in tone and treatment. Hall's attitude to literature, for example, in the first book of ‘Poeticall’ satires is entirely informed by the standards of neoclassical criticism, though this is combined, as it was in most contemporary critics, with strict standards of Christian propriety. His attack upon contemporary religious verse (p. 19), for instance, is motivated both by its flagrant breach of decorum, and the indecency of mingling human fictions with sacred truths. In effect the two become one, for if Solomon is to sound like ‘a newfound Sonetist’, the lady of Canticles, ‘the holy spouse of Christ’, must necessarily be reduced, if only by implication, to the level of common ‘light-skirts’. Yet the poem ends not in thundering imprecation, but with a witty, scornful pun wishing that such authors may be ‘transported from Ierusalem, / Unto the holy house of Betleem’ (Bedlam).⁴⁸

Whenever Hall feels the need to make his condemnation more forceful he tends to promote a sharp, fable-style break between his satiric description and his ‘moral’. The irony and sense of paradox in the satire on costly funerals, for example, leads suddenly to an outspoken denunciation of vanity complete with ponderous biblical allusions to the fate of Jezebel:

Greet Osmond knows not how he shalbe knowne
When once great Osmond shalbe dead and gone:
Unlesse he reare up some ritch monument,
Ten furlongs neerer to the firmament.
Some stately tombe he builds, Egyptian wise,
Rex Regum written on the Pyramis …
Deserv'dst thou ill? well were thy name and thee
Wert thou inditched in great secrecie,
Where as no passenger might curse thy dust,
Nor dogs sepulchrall sate their gnawing lust.

(p. 36)

A similar method is employed in the homilies. In The Righteous Mammon (1618), for instance, an excellent, and in its own time famous, satiric passage on female vanity is quickly followed by a fiery address to all such ‘plaister-faced Iezabels’.⁴⁹ But in the Tooth-lesse Satyrs this is not the general note. More typical is the amused ridicule of the newest manifestation of vanity, the periwig. As the false hair blows off in a gust of ill-timed wind the satirist can only stand and laugh:

He lights, and runs, and quickly hath him sped,
To overtake his overruning hed.
The sportfull wind, to mocke the Headlesse man,
Tosses apace his pitch'd Gregorian:
And straight it to a deeper ditch hath blowne:
There must my yonker fetch his waxen crowne.
I lookt, and laught, whiles in his raging minde,
He curst all courtesie, and unrulie winde.
I lookt, and laught, and much I marvailed,
To see so large a Caus-way in his head.

(p. 39)

The anecdote is so ridiculous, and the speaker, like Horace, so genial that the reader has little choice but to support his conclusion that ‘waxen crowns well gree with borrowed haires.’

But perhaps the happiest device Hall hit upon was that of the dramatic monologue. In Virgidemiarum II.2, for example, the case of the universities is put best, if unwittingly, by a wealthy, boorish squire in one superb speech encapsulating the dangerous prejudices of a whole class, and the myriad of social problems which stem from them:

What needs me care for any bookish skill,
To blot white papers with my restlesse quill …
Let them that meane by bookish businesse
To earne their bread: or hopen to professe
Their hard got skill: let them alone for mee,
Busie their braines with deeper bookerie …
Have not I lands of faire inheritance,
Deriv'd by right of long continuance,
To first-borne males, so list the law to grace,
Natures first fruits in eviternall race?
Let second brothers, and poore nestlings,
Whom more iniurious Nature later brings
Into the naked world: let them assaine
To get hard peny-worths with bootlesse paine.
Tush? what care I to be Arcesilas,
Or some sowre Solon …

(pp. 24-5)

There is nothing obscure or Scaliger-like here. The irony is sharp; clear, and cutting, the versification smooth. One wonders whether Jonson had the passage in mind in composing the very similar lines in ‘A speech according to Horace’.⁵⁰ Without realizing it, the speaker engages in an exercise of complete self-betrayal. His emphasis on ‘need’ bespeaks his narrow, mercenary outlook—‘allow not nature more than nature needs’, argues King Lear, ‘Man's life is cheap as beast's.’ Too ignorant himself to recognize the intrinsic worth of learning, he regards scholarship as a lower-class trade. Possessing ‘lands of faire inheritance’ he ‘needs’ not ‘busie his braine’ in such a fashion. He is a gentleman, and gentility means wealth. All sense of inner cultivation is foreign to his social outlook. ‘Nature’ and ‘law’ confer gentility quite gratuitously from without. Why then need he distract himself with the ‘brain-sicke Paradoxes’ of ‘Parmenides, or of darke Heraclite’?,

Long would it be, ere thou had'st purchase bought
Or wealthier wexen by such idle thought.

(p. 25)

A telling point is scored by the clever use of classical allusion, for ‘Arcesilas’ and ‘Solon’ are obviously intended as mnemonic links to the source of the passage immediately following: the speech of an uncouth, shaggy (‘hircosa’) centurion in the third satire of Persius (ll. 77-87). The easy adaptability of his views to those of the English squire puts the finishing touches to an already embarrassing portrait. The voice of the satirist is submerged in that of his ‘victim’, all of whose normally unspoken, but guiding, prejudices are brought into clear focus in a monologue of arrogant self-betrayal. By so dramatizing the causes of the decline in scholarly patronage, Hall invites his readers to see in the contemporary social situation as great a self-betrayal on the part of the squirearchy as is evident in the opinions of their loquacious representative. In effect, the situation is the embodiment of those opinions. They are made to satirize themselves.

Always aware of a possible reaction against his complaints, Hall is constantly experimenting with subtle, rhetorical devices designed to involve the reader directly in the act of moral condemnation. In the satire against physicians (II.4), for example, the point hinges upon the interpretation of the ambiguous word ‘leech’ (‘Were I a leech, as who knowes what may bee’) and the reader is invited to ‘discover’ the ironies of the monologue for himself. Almost imperceptibly, of course, this act of ‘discovery’ becomes an act of moral criticism. As he watches the progress from apparently justified, professional complaint to the worst excesses of charlatan and mountebank, the reader himself takes on the role of probing satirist.

Fees never lesse, never so little gaine,
Men give a groat, and aske the rest againe.
Groats-worth of health, can any leech allot?
Yet should he have no more that gives a grote.
Should I on each sicke pillow leane my brest,
And grope the pulse of everie mangie wrest …
All for so leane reward of Art and mee?
No Hors-leach but will looke for larger fee …
Were I a leech, as who knowes what may bee,
The liberall man should live, and carle should die.
The sickly Ladie, and the goutie Peere
Still would I haunt, that love their life so deere …
Or would coniure the Chymick Mercurie,
Rise from his hors-dung bed, and upwards flie …
And bring Quintessence of Elixir pale,
Out of sublimed spirits minerall.
Each poudred graine ransometh captive Kings,
Purchaseth Realmes, and life prolonged brings.

(pp. 27-8)

Similarly in II.7 the bogus art of astrology is disposed of not through headlong moral denunciation but through the creation of an elaborate, amusing travesty, modelled on a passage in Rabelais, which efficiently reduces it to the level of the trivial and absurd. Milton criticized the work for declining from the majesty of the ‘heavens universall Alphabet’ to the ‘wretched pooreness and frigidity as to talke of Bridge street in heav'n, and the Ostler of heav'n’, but in this case Hall was the surer satirist.⁵¹ Like Juvenal he realized that such declension was the very stuff of successful satire.

In the Byting Satyres such methods become far more sophisticated. Here, intent upon dealing with pressing social problems, Hall shrewdly abandons Horace for Juvenal. The distinction between their respective styles is a commonplace of classical criticism. They stand at opposite ends of the satiric spectrum, and Hall's division of the Virgidemiarum into ‘tooth-lesse’ and ‘byting’ satires was obviously intended to reflect this dichotomy. Consequently, his shift to new models is accompanied not only by a change in subject matter, but also by a change in style. Under the Juvenalian influence he begins to work on an increasingly crowded canvas, thronging, like those of Bosch or Bruegel, with scores upon scores of vicious little men acting out their sinful obsessions in a distorted, unnatural landscape. The extreme example of this is Virgidemiarum IV.1 with its panoramic sweep of seedy iniquity after the fashion of Juvenal I, III, and VI. But even outside this deliberately imitative exercise the same effect is ensured by the plentiful use of the characteristically Juvenalian device of ‘incidental’ satire, in which even the illustrations and similes are themselves satiric.⁵² The world has become so corrupt that vice can be described only in its own terms. Seeking the ‘norm’ for comparison, we find ourselves gazing down endless vistas of unrelieved lewdness. In IV.5, for example, the blushing of an usurer, is illustrated with reference to sodomy and extortion:

So Cyned's dusky cheeke and fiery eye,
And hayre-les brow, tels where he last did lye;
So Matho doth bewray his guilty thought,
While his pale face doth say, his cause is nought.

(p. 67)

The device is taken almost as far as it can go in IV.4 where the supposed ‘principal’ subject, the effeminate Gallio, is little more than a peg upon which Hall hangs a loose general satire the objects of which, though introduced as contrasts or comparisons, are only tangentially related to the original theme. As well as this, the Byting Satyres are full of the imagery of disease and corruption. We hear, for instance, of ‘morphew'd skin’, ‘thick vomiture’, ‘poysonous fire’, ‘steaming stewes’, and ‘dung-clad skin’. We sense a determination to meet vice on its own terms:

The close adultresse, where her name is red
Coms crauling from her husbands lukewarme bed,
Her carrion skin bedaub'd with odours sweete,
Groping the postern with her bared feet.

(p. 53)

But it was exactly such material that called the whole nature of satire into question, and it is therefore significant that it is at this stage that Hall introduces the subject of satire itself as a major theme into his poems. He shows himself fully aware of the objection, soon to be raised in the Whipper Pamphlets, that,

Silence is safe, when saying stirreth sore
And makes the stirred puddle stinke the more.

(p. 92)⁵³

There is at least as much discussion of the genre in the last three books as there is in the ‘Post-script’, and it covers all aspects of the problem we have been discussing. In particular, we are constantly reminded of the difficulty of the satirist's position.

In Virgidemiarum IV.1, the most difficult Juvenalian satire he ever wrote—in order he says to ‘stoppe the mouth of every accuser’—Hall professes himself opposed to obscurity on the grounds that it diminishes a satire's didactic effect. As a result the laboured perplexities of the opening sections, which have caused commentators such difficulty, and which have as their theme the effect of over-obscure satires on unprepared readers, constitute a sharp rebuff to the school of Scaliger whose ‘rough-hew'ne Teretismes’ were ‘writ in th'antique vain’ (p. 49). Hall is replying to those who considered the Tooth-lesse Satyrs too simple, while at the same time cleverly retreating from his promise—having apparently made the attempt to fulfil it—to write henceforth in ‘crabbed oke-tree rinde’ (p. 43). In order to demonstrate its futility, he turns the art of contrived obscurity against itself. Satire, he asserts, should affect the conscience thereby producing a moral reaction, but this is possible only if it can be clearly understood.

One of the most interesting features of Hall's self-defence is the flat denial that he is too young to write, or that his complaints are born of the immature idealism of a young zealot:

So let them taxe mee for my hote-bloodes rage,
Rather than say I doted in my age.

(p. 54)

The point is timely. Hall was only twenty-four, and despite the supposed anonymity of the collections his identity was well known.⁵⁴ It has been the trend of even twentieth-century criticism to seek explanations for the alleged ‘excesses’ of Renaissance satire (Hall's included) in the youthfulness of its authors.⁵⁵ All in all, therefore, the poem is as much concerned with the writing of satire as with anything else. It serves as a vindication of such brilliantly effective, but ‘simple’ passages as the portrait of the foppish Gallio, a portrait which points forward to Hall's adoption of the character genre:

Gallio may pull me roses ere they fall,
Or in his net entrap the Tennis-ball:
Or tend his Spar-hauke mantling in her mew,
Or yelping Begles busy heeles persue,
Or watch a sinking corke upon the shore,
Or halter Finches through a privie doore …

(p. 64)

Experimentation with ‘personae’ continues throughout Book IV. In IV.5, for example, the position of satirist is offered to a corrupt lawyer named Matho. His major qualifications are his knowledge of usury and his ability to make the guilty pay for their sins in a very literal sense. Again in IV.7, Roman Catholic ritual, one of the most dangerous subjects of all, is seen through the eyes of a resurrected Juvenal, and the personal voice discreetly vanishes. Its disappearance is all the more striking following the highly personal ending of the preceding satire where Hall suddenly steps back from his global survey of human vanity to speak in propria persona of his own outlook:

Mong'st all these sturs of discontented strife,
Oh let me lead an Academicke life,
To know much, and to thinke we nothing know;
Nothing to have, yet thinke we have enough,
In skill to want, and wanting seeke for more,
In weale nor want, nor wish for greater store;
Envye ye Monarchs with your proud excesse
At our low Sayle, and our hye Happinesse.

(pp. 71-2)

There is a simplicity and calmness about the lines which indicate that we have reached the eye of the storm. The language is plain and forthright, the balance of the clauses (‘know much … nothing know’; ‘skill to want … wanting seeke’ etc.) suggesting the equanimity of the contented mind. The cacophonous ‘sturs of discontented strife’ with their harsh ‘s’, ‘t’, and ‘r’ sounds give way to the soft, euphonic alliteration of the personal message: ‘skill to want, and wanting seeke’; ‘weale nor want, nor wish’. Although fully aware of the usefulness of fictional ‘personae’, Hall was not one to forget the potent force of occasional personal statement. He heightens its effectiveness by using it so sparingly.

Despite Hall's tongue-in-cheek promise in IV.4 to tone down the acerbity of his attacks in view of the dangers he may incur, he opens Book V with a renewed avowal of allegiance to Juvenal. Indeed he intends to surpass his mentor by attacking the living instead of the dead. Commentators disagree as to the presence of specific, personal allusions, but there can be no doubt that contemporary issues are the subject of attack.⁵⁶ A major concern of these satires, for example, is the enclosure movement, about which Hall would speak even should his mouth be ‘enclosed’ with ‘brazen wals’ as thick as ‘wealthy Scrobioes quicke-set rowes / In the wide Common’ (p. 75). What follows is indeed, in Shakespeare's words, ‘keen and critical’, but Hall constantly retreats behind declarations of feigned inability. According to himself he is far too mild. Satire should be,

                                                                                like the Porcupine,
That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,
And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.

(p. 83)

Needless to remark, the lines serve merely as the prologue to one of the most scathing attacks of the whole series; the satirist is playing hide-and-seek.

A striking feature of these poems is their use of shifting perspectives, aided by a new awareness of the importance of form. Being upon average three times as long as their counterparts, the Byting Satyres admit of a sense of movement absent from the earlier work. In the satire upon the decline of hospitality (V.2), for example, we approach the great inhospitable house in the company of the parasite Saturio (from the Persa of Plautus). Allured by the grand exterior, he eagerly responds to the speaker's invitation to approach. Yet ‘all is not so that seemes’:

Beat the broad gates, a goodly hollow sound
With doubled Ecchoes doth againe rebound,
But not a Dog doth barke to welcome thee,
Nor churlish Porter canst thou chafing see.

(p. 80)

As the befooled scavenger walks sadly away, the perspective suddenly shifts to something less amusing. At least he can walk away, the poverty-stricken tenants cannot. Denied the charity which it is traditionally the function of the great house to provide, they are abandoned to despair. The ‘humour’ has grown grim and black:

Grim Famine sits in their forepined face
All full of angles of unequall space,
Like to the plaine of many-sided squares,
That wont bee drawne out by Geometars.

(p. 81)

Then, just as the satire seems on the point of ending with the conventional note of moral exhortation, the scene shifts again to the house of Virro, and the experiences of another hungry guest, Trebius (from Juvenal V). Here is charity with a vengeance—though not at Christmas or ‘the wakeday-feast’ (p. 82). Juvenal's celebrated banquet scene is borrowed to provide the substructure for the portrait of a contemporary social tyrant, an arrogant, haughty skinflint who makes the little charity he gives the occasion for emphasizing the social inferiority of its recipients:

Hold thy knife uprights in thy griped fist,
Or sittest double on thy back-ward seat,
Or with thine elbow shad'st thy shared meat;
Hee laughs thee in his fellowes eare to scorne,
And asks aloud, where Trebius was borne …
What of all this? Is't not inough to say,
I din'd at Virro his owne boord to day?

(p. 83)

We begin and end with a ‘great’ house. Crushed between the two are the poor and indigent; the structure bespeaks the theme.⁵⁷

The deepening sense of irony reaches its fullest development in the elaborate and long-promised retraction of the single three hundred-line satire of Book VI. This provided the perfect answer to the problem of the satiric ‘persona’, and won the appreciation of no less a connoisseur than Alexander Pope who termed it ‘optima satira’. Apparently he intended to produce an updated version of it himself and even went so far as to annotate its margin with projected modernizations.⁵⁸ Augustan satire is usually held to have had little in common with the ‘rough’, ‘unstable’ satire of the 1590s, but Pope's recognition of a kindred spirit in Joseph Hall should serve as a reminder that the work of this period cannot easily be so dismissed. Hall's recantation is a model of satiric irony and structure which more than justifies Pope's praise.⁵⁹ Surprise is the keynote of its opening. Some fifteen lines have passed before there is any hint of retraction. Then suddenly the satirist confesses:

                    let me now repent mee of my rage,
For writing Satyres in so righteous age:
Whereas I should have strok't her towardly head,
And cry'd Evaee in my Satyres stead,
Sith now not one of thousand does amisse,
Was never age I weene so pure as this.

(p. 87)

In this way the attack upon satire is itself rendered ridiculous. Whereas the satirist suffers from the charge of seeing only the bad side of life, his opponents are now presented as either naïve innocents or hypocrites. The age is excellent; social development has reached its zenith; man's progress is upwards and onwards to perfection. The great panoramic sweep of Juvenal X (‘Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque / Auroram’) is totally reversed:

Seeke over all the world, and tell mee where
Thou find'st a proud man, or a flatterer:
A thiefe, a drunkard, or a parricide,
A lechor, lyer, or what vice beside?
Merchants are no whit covetous of late,
Nor make no mart of Time, gaine of Deceipt.

(p. 88)

As for Hall's previous criticisms, they are simply outdated. They might have ‘fitted former times / And shouldred angry Skeltons breath-lesse rimes’ (p. 89). It is amazing that he did not see this before, but now the ‘wrong’ is done:

I would repent mee were it not too late,
Were not the angry world preiudicate:
If all the sevens penitentiall
Or thousand white wands might me ought availe,
If Trent or Thames could scoure my foule offence
And set me in my former innocence,
I would at last repent me of my rage:

(pp. 90-1)

It was this superb control of irony, this creation of a ‘world turned upside down’ which was to produce the Mundus Alter et Idem. Everything is seen at a second remove. Even the anti-satiric attacks which were soon to follow upon the Bishops' Ban of 1599 are cleverly forestalled by their attribution to the archetypal bad poet, Labeo (p. 92). And should Labeo take the ultimate revenge of denying Hall a poet's status, what of it? Circumstances being what they are, poets either starve or write sloppy love poetry: ‘Who would not but wed Poets now a daies!’ (p. 96).

Structurally too the satire is quite excellent, for in order to render the ‘retraction’ complete, Hall traverses the entire range of his former complaints: moral and social (ll. 25-128), academic (ll. 129-62), and poetic (ll. 163-305). The neat reverse order lends to the exercise an air of urbane detachment. Wrapping himself round in layers of irony the satirist at last becomes impenetrable: ‘if the iniurious Reader shall wrest [my satires] to his owne spight, and disparraging of others, it is a short answere: Art thou guiltie? complaine not, thou art not wronged: art thou guiltles? complaine not, thou art not touched’ (p. 98).

In order to understand who was ‘touched’ and why, we must examine the themes of the Byting Satyres. The discussion, I believe, will totally dispel the widely held belief that the Virgidemiarum ‘exhibit an experience of a wholly bookish kind’,⁶⁰ and that Marston's Scourge of Villanie was ‘the first verse that was obviously written to reach the public as serious, castigating satire, the first verse satire of the times not wholly the vehicle of youthful self-exhibition’.⁶¹

Notes

1. The Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 11. All references given in the text are to this edition.

2. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 417-31.

3. A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 2nd edn., 4 vols. (London, 1967), ii, 437-8.

4. Collinson, p. 424. See Also Richard Hooker, Works, ed. John Keble, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1888), ii, 4-5.

5. For the identification of Penry as Marprelate see Donald J. McGinn, John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1966).

6. The Elizabethan Journals, ed. G. B. Harrison (Ann Arbor, 1955), Part II, pp. 147, 148, 150, 154-5.

7. For an interesting social and literary survey see Oscar James Campbell Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (San Marino, California, 1938), pp. 15-24.

8. M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), p. 200. In later years, during the Smectymnuan controversy, Hall was to recall the work as ‘that bitter Dialogue betwixt Miles Monopodius, and Bernard Blinkard’ written by ‘one of the hotest and busiest sticklers in these quarrels at Frankfurt’. Episcopacie by Divine Right (1640), Part III, p. 39.

9. Raman Selden, English Verse Satire, 1590-1765 (London, 1978), p. 68.

10. A Fig for Momus, sig. A3^v.

11. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970), p. 240.

12. Sermons and Society, ed. Paul Welsby (London, 1970), p. 12. For an account of the ancient and traditional relationship between sermons and satire see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 210-470.

13. Drant, sigs. aii^v-aiii^r.

14. Contemplations upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Storie, vol. vii (1623) in Works, i, 1196. (located here in vol. vi).

15. Saint Pauls Combat II (1627?) in Works, ii, 448: ‘It is the charge of God, Crie aloud, spare not, life up thy voyce like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions, and the house of Iacob their sins. Es. 58. 1 The words are Emphaticall, whereof the first signifies a straining of the throat with crying; and the next (the trumpet) implies a sound of warre; this same (bellum cum vitiis) war with sins must be … uncapable of so much as a truce, yea as a respiration.’

16. Pharisaisme and Christianitie (1608) in Works, i, 376.

17. Robert Hall (?), A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, Entituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus (London, 1643), pp. 8-9.

18. Kernan, pp. 14-30; Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), p. xiii.

19. Kernan, p. 28.

20. Ibid., p. 114; For a more balanced view see Campbell, pp. 24-34.

21. Kernan, p. 89.

22. Mary Claire Randolph, ‘The Structural Design of Formal Verse Satire’, Philological Quarterly, 21 (1942), 368-84.

23. The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965), pp. 95-104.

24. The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, New Jersey, 1962), p. 3.

25. Grammatici Latini, ed. Heinrich Keil, 7 vols. and supplement (Leipzig, 1857-78), i (1857), 485-6.

26. Mary Claire Randolph, ‘Thomas Drant's Definition of Satire, 1566’, Notes and Queries, 180 (1941), 416-18.

27. On the divergence of opinions in the 1590s see John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), pp. 301-3.

28. P. Terentii Carthagiensis Afri Comoediae sex ex recensione Frid. Lindenbrogii cum ejusdem mstorum lectionibus et observationibus atque Aelii Donati, Eugraphii et Calpurnii commentariis integris. His accesserunt Bentleii et Faerni lectiones ac conjecturae … necnon selectissimae virorum doctorum annotationes, 2 vols. (Londini, 1820), i, p. xxvi.

29. Ibid., p. xxvi.

30. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), i, 176, 294; ii, 32-3, 209.

31. Seven Satires, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1948), pp. 6, 8, 13, etc.

32. Drant, sig, aiv^v.

33. Poems, pp. 9, 10, 51.

34. A Modest Confutation, p. 9.

35. The Confuter quotes loosely from memory. See Poems, p. 10. The Confuter's assertion that Hall employed the terms ‘tooth-lesse’ and ‘byting’ metaphorically is undoubtedly correct. In a discussion of usury in Heaven upon Earth (1606), for example, he refers to a ‘nice distinction’ between ‘toothlesse, and biting Interest’ whereas in reality ‘Iustice pleads even the most toothlesse usury to have sharp gummes.’ Works, i, 84.

36. Satires, I. iv. 78-9, Loeb edn., pp. 54-5. Drant makes the same point: ‘Who bites his lip, when his folly is bitten, hath either envy in his heart, or suspition in his head.’ Seven Satires, p. 3.

37. Highet, [Anatomy of Satire (Princeton) 1962] pp. 63-4.

38. Kernan, p. 10.

39. Was Hall remembering Everyman?: ‘Everyman, I wyll go with the and be thy gyde, / In thy moost nede to go by thy syde.’ Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1961), p. 16.

40. ‘God never made man such as he is; It is our sin that made our soule to grovell.’ Saint Pauls Combat, I, in Works, ii, 434.

41. For half-lines see Davenport, pp. 13, 16, 33, 59, 80, 82, 87. Marston imitated Hall in this. See The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), pp. 144, 145, 146 etc. For the appropriateness of the half-line to the epic see Torquato Tasso, Discourses, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, 1973), p. 143.

42. The 18th century responded favourably to this aspect of Hall's satires. Gray said, ‘they are full of spirit and poetry; as much of the first, as Dr. Donne, and far more of the latter.’ Peter Whalley asserted that ‘the Verses of Bishop Hall are in general extremely musical and flowing, and are greatly preferable to Dr. Donne's, as being of a much smoother Cadence.’ The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. Edmund Gosse, 4 vols. (London, 1884), ii, 233; An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (London, 1748), p. 42.

43. ‘As a true friend is the sweetest contentment in the world: so in his qualities he well resembleth hony, the sweetest of all liquors. Nothing is more sweet to the taste nothing more sharpe and cleansing, when it meets with an exulcerate sore. For my selfe, I know I must have faults; and therefore I care not for that friend, that I shall never smart by. For my friends, I know they cannot be faultlesse; and therefore as they shall finde me sweet in their praises and encouragements, so sharpe also in their censure. Either let them abide me no friend to their faults, or no friend to themselves.’ Meditations and Vowes (1605-6) in Works, i, 46. See also ibid., p. 48 and Collinson, pp. 172-3, 215.

44. Works, i, 320-1.

45. Ibid., pp. 321-2.

46. Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) in Works, i, 172.

47. One of the Sermons Preacht to The Lords of the High Court of Parliament, in their solemne Fast on Ashwednesday, Febr. 18. (1628), in Works, ii, 341-2.

48. For Hall as a literary critic see Davenport, pp. xxxv-lx, and J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London, 1947), pp. 210-12.

49. Works, i, 670.

50. See esp. 11, 66-86. Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 189.

51. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953-), i (1953), p. 915.

52. Arnold Stein, ‘Joseph Hall's Imitation of Juvenal’, MLR 43 (1948), 315-22 (p. 321). On the general question of Hall's debt to the classics see Raymond MacDonald Alden, The Rise of Formal Satire in England under Classical Influence (Philadelphia, 1899), pp. 117-23.

53. The Whipper Pamphlets, Part I, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1951), pp. 36, 38.

54. ‘Hall of Imanuel Colledge in Cambridge’ is singled out as one of the foremost English satirists in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598)—the year the Byting Satyres first appeared. Smith, ii, 320.

55. John Wilcox explains the satires in terms of their young authors' desire to attract court attention. ‘Informal Publication of Late Sixteenth-Century Verse Satire’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13 (1949-50), 191-200; See also James Sutherland English Satire (Cambridge, 1958), p. 31.

56. Davenport supplies notes to all the supposed or alleged personal allusions but it is interesting to note in this connection that there was a rule of Emmanuel College to the effect that ‘no fellow nor Pensioner, upon anie cause or private occasion, shall either in sermon, commonplace, or probleme in the Chappell, use any speech or speeches which tend to the disgraceinge of any particular person, or noting private faults disgracefullie, which can have no sound spirituall use of edification, or at least not any good use without that ill. And besides our agreement we doe promise before God that we will never use [nor] intend to use any such in our exercises hereafter.’ Hall denies that his satires make personal allusions, and his thinking may well have been influenced by this rule. E. S. Shuckburgh Emmanuel College (London, 1904), p. 33.

57. For the relationship between this satire and the whole genre of country house poetry—the genre to which belongs Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’—see William Alexander McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (London, 1977), pp. 42-5.

58. See Works, ed. P. Hall, xii, p. 137.

59. Davenport points out that Hall's immediate source was Scaliger's Teretismata, ‘Satyra’ (p. 251).

60. Bernard Harris, ‘Men like Satyrs’, in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 2 (London, 1960), p. 193.

61. Wilcox, p. 199.