SOURCE: Corthell, Ronald J. “Beginning as a Satirist: Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum Sixe Bookes.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 23 (winter 1983): 47-60.

[In this essay, Corthell discusses how the Virgidemiarum reveals Hall's early conception of himself as a writer in the Elizabethan era. Further, the critic argues that Hall's first satire represents the work of a young poet attempting to establish an original mode of writing in the shadow of great poets such as Edmund Spenser.]

In his compelling studies of the Elizabethan idea of the literary career, Richard Helgerson has encouraged a reading of Elizabethan literary history which attends primarily to various career models followed by poets rather than to stylistic or generic distinctions between writers. In a recent essay which borrows cautiously from principles of modern linguistics, Helgerson has portrayed the late Elizabethan literary world as a “system” of signs within which we can interpret what he terms the “self-defining gestures” of individual writers.¹ In particular, Helgerson identifies three literary career types—the amateur, the professional, and the laureate, each of which entails a set of attitudes towards poetry, the poet, and the circulation of poetry; from the relations and oppositions between these attitudes Elizabethan poets fashioned poetic identities. Most important, Helgerson explains the process by which poets of laureate ambition differentiated themselves from the frivolous professionals (mostly dramatists) and amateurs to establish a “deliberately serious poetic … grounded on a serious, centered self.”²

Helgerson is careful to acknowledge the limitations of his linguistic paradigm, pointing out that Elizabethan writers were acutely conscious of their debts to the literary past, that for Renaissance writers, the “synchronic thus included an awareness of the diachronic.”³ But he notes that source studies and attention to generic precedents have sometimes blinded us to the contemporary literary circumstances against which Elizabethan writers presented themselves. Such a largely “diachronic” approach has, I believe, weakened criticism of late Elizabethan satire; searching for the literary roots of the cankered muse in classical and native models, we have paid too little attention to the literary pressures and anxieties experienced and expressed by the satirists of the 1590s.

These lively young poets displayed considerable uneasiness about their place in the Elizabethan literary system. As amateurs they adopted many of the typical amateur gestures described by Helgerson; indeed, the cultivation of the rough “Satyr” persona seems a particularly extreme example of the sort of “prodigal” behavior which typifies the poetic identity of the amateur.⁴ On the other hand, these satirists repeatedly claimed a seriousness and moral authority that we normally associate with laureate writers; they ridiculed many of the typical amateur genres, such as the sonnet and the pastoral, and argued, in prologues and postscripts, that their work had a moral purpose. The interplay of amateur and serious self-presentation was complicated by a generational division. They felt, for example, the pressure of Spenser's great achievement; satirists like Marston, Donne, and John Weever experimented with mythological themes and turned Spenser inside out.⁵ The satirists of the nineties were at a literary crossroads, and their sharply expressed awareness of their predicament comprises one of the chief attractions of their work.

Perhaps the most self-conscious of the late Elizabethan satirists was Joseph Hall, the self-proclaimed first “English Satirist.” In his Virgidemiarum Sixe Bookes Hall claimed to be making literary history by wedding a classical form to an English style. His self-consciousness has served him ill, however, for it has occasioned a narrowly generic criticism of his work which isolates Hall's use of classical conventions from the literary system within which he was operating. His grasp of generic conventions has been questioned since, in the heat of religious controversy, Milton accused him of confusion about the proper subjects and style of satire. Modern critics have generally followed Milton's line of argument; Annabel Patterson, for example, notes that Hall “failed to separate, even in intention, the two main streams of satire, the comic and Horatian from the tragic and Juvenalian.”⁶ This approach to Hall, is, I believe, mistaken in its emphasis on classical models; it ignores the experimental features of Hall's poems, particularly their assimilation of classical motives and methods into a late Elizabethan literary setting. As in his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) Hall shaped a classical form to purposes consistent with Elizabethan literary theory and practice. The product of this experiment was a new literary vehicle for ambitious young poets of the nineties.

Hall was certainly well-read in classical verse satire; Virgidemiae has been praised for its many skillful imitations of Juvenal.⁷ His awareness of Horatian and Juvenalian modes is evidenced in the innovative division into books of “Toothless” and “Biting” satires, but, as Edward and Lillian Bloom have recently noted, Hall's vehemence throughout Virgidemiae suggests that the “toothless” satirist had his tongue firmly in cheek.⁸ The young Cambridge fellow was more interested in “making it new” than in observing distinctions between Horatian and Juvenalian satire. “Ecce nouam Satyram,” proclaims the satirist in a prefatory poem “De suis Satyris”; and in his prologue to the first book, he issues a challenge: “I first aduenture: follow me who list, / And be the second English Satyrist.”⁹

These claims of originality, however, are circumscribed by a keen awareness of the situation of the beginning poet in the late 1590s. Hall attempts to relate this literary predicament to the moral and social problems of the times. He moves in a new direction by trying to create a persona capable of transforming literary anxiety and a concern for form and style into moral authority. This persona is hard to distinguish from Hall himself, the young Cambridge lecturer who almost certainly had a hand in the literary and topical “Parnassus plays” at St. John's (1598-1601):¹⁰ he is a beginning poet troubled by the challenge of a literary career at a time when art and life are, in his view, failing to measure up to the golden achievement and vision of the laureate Spenser.

In his comprehensive study of Elizabethan satire Louis Lecocq identifies the difficulty inherent in Hall's ambitious project when he questions Hall's authority to criticize literature and morals.¹¹ Hall's own uneasiness concerning this problem is expressed in the numerous prefaces, prologues, and the postscript which hedge his satires. The most important and influential of these pieces is “His Defiance to Enuie,” a misleadingly titled poem which has been virtually ignored by critics of Virgidemiae. A review of contemporary literature, the “Defiance” was no doubt inspired by the attacks on literature and taste with which Juvenal and Persius opened their books. Hall, however, has adapted the convention to his own ends. The “Defiance” is not primarily satiric; next to Juvenal's and Persius's ridicule of the bombast and servility of contemporary poets, Hall's complaints of “those Kestrels proud,” “Whose flightty wings are dew'd with weeter ayre,” appear restrained and lacking in satiric energy (lines 39-40). His archaic diction and use of the sixaine stanza are not conducive to expressions of satiric rage. Rather, the chief function of the “Defiance” is to establish Hall's persona as the troubled beginning poet, saturated with Elizabethan literature and searching for a subject and a voice of his own.

In the “Defiance” the satirist carefully places his satiric project in the Elizabethan literary scene. The options mentioned as available to a young writer are delimited by heroic and pastoral poetry. In particular, a check-list of poetic possibilities closely resembles in content and tone that of the “October” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender; it sees as equally unrewarding the inspired and divine strain of the vates (“Defiance,” 31-42), the panegyric (43-48), the heroic (49-54), and the pastoral (79-108). In addition to the archaisms, references to “Eluish knights,” to “misty morall Types,” and to Colin himself fill in the Spenserian backdrop.¹² More generally, Hall's sense of the dangers which attend the poetic career also seems to owe something to the example of Spenser. Hall rejects grand styles and subjects by arguing that high achievement attracts envy: “Then might vaine Enuy waft her duller wing, / To trace the aerie steps, she spiting sees” (“Defiance,” 61-62). As evidence he could have pointed to Spenser, who officially began his career by entrusting his Calender to Sidney for protection against Envy's barking, and who ended Book VI of The Fairie Queene on a satirical note, under attack by the Blatant Beast.¹³

Spenser's influence on Hall's “Defiance” is most evident, however, in the long passage devoted to pastoral. Hall carefully presents various stock pastoral scenes, such as the complaint and the singing match, and even hints that he has attempted pastoral (105), only to concede that Spenser has already set a standard that will endure. The beginning poet's interest in pastoral (it occupies him for nearly half the “Defiance”) is explained, of course, by the familiar Renaissance notion of starting a poetic career by playing “Pans seuenfold Pipe.” As a new poet, he must account for the fact that he is not writing pastorals. The reason given in the “Defiance” is simple. Colin has excelled in this kind, and those who imitate him cheapen his accomplishment; literary tact counsels against a challenge. But there is much more at stake here. As the rest of Virgidemiae makes clear, the satirist is troubled by the idea of the conventional literary career and by such related issues as the nature and function of poetry. Thus Hall opens his work with allusions to the most distinguished and, in his view, egregiously neglected poetic career available to him, and he will conclude his own Book VI by deciding not to become a poet. More immediately, it becomes clear that the beginning poet's decision not to write pastoral is based also upon his feeling that pastoral perspectives, while sharing some concerns with satire, must be skewed in order to contribute to a true image of the times. For example, he will appeal in Book III to one of the major pastoral myths, the idea of the Golden Age, only to expose the utter failure of men and society to respond to the power and beauty of that dream. In other words, Hall attempts to translate the literary judgment displayed in the “Defiance” into moral authority in the satires. Turning his attention from the golden world of pastoral to a declining one, Hall in the “Defiance” throws “At Colins feete … my yeelding reed” (107) and takes up the satirist's rod, the “virga” of his title.

About Spenser the great pastoral and heroic poet, then, Hall evidences considerable ambivalence. There is a defiant note in the beginning poet's vow: “neuer field nor groue shall here my song” (“Defiance,” 112). Similarly, Hall expresses (in Spenserian diction to be sure) a weariness with Spenserian motifs; he chooses not to “scoure the rusted swords of Eluish knights, / Bathed in Pagan blood: or sheath them new / In misty morall Types” (“Defiance,” 49-51). Spenser's misty method seems to have bothered Hall, for it could easily be used “to shadowe shamelesse vice” (“Defiance,” 68); contrarily, Hall promises to unmask “the ugly face of vice” (Virg[idemiae] I. Prologue, 20). Still, Hall will praise “Th'eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse” in his satire on heroic poetry, where he crowns Spenser poet laureate: “Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost, / Yeeld vp the Lawrell girlond ye haue lost” (I.iv.22, 25-26). And, as we have seen, respect must be shown to Colin before taking up the satirist's rod.

Hall thus announces his deviation from the Renaissance idea of the laureate career by directing our attention to the career of Spenser. This gesture modestly declares his originality and establishes a literary standard which measures his achievement. But satire, perhaps because it shares important conventions with the pastoral, is an equally appropriate vehicle for the beginning poet. Both types conventionally reject the heroic in favor of a low style befitting a rude speaker; the shepherd's “rural rimes” become the “refuse rimes” of the satyr-satirist (“Defiance,” 113). More important is the fact that pastoral and satire characteristically tease the knowledgeable reader into making connections between characters and events in the poems and “real life.” The effect of these poèmes à clef is to glamorize the poet by suggesting that he moves in important literary or political circles, that he knows and is known by people who matter; this self-importance, of course, balances the fiction of the rude speaker. Hall's persona, then, rejects pastoral, but he chooses a form which, in its emphases on a lowly style, a rude speaker, and “inside” literary or political references, resembles pastoral and suits the needs of the beginning poet; like pastoral, Elizabethan verse satire used the device of a humble or crude persona to “shadow” the poet, allowing him to express a young writer's idiosyncratic vision which could nonetheless claim a classical authority.

Hall is careful to preserve another pastoral convention in his satires by including in Virgidemiae a poem on the Golden Age. He found a satiric adaptation of the topos in Juvenal's sixth satire, but the details and tone of Hall's extended presentation have little in common with Juvenal's sarcastic attack on loose women. He devotes the longest of the “tooth-lesse” satires (III.i) to the idea, and the standard of a life in accord with nature, articulated in this poem, is implicit in all the satires. Hall's sober version of the reign of Saturn, derived mainly from Seneca, is not as beguiling as that of a Drayton, who emphasizes its sweetness and beauty in the eighth eclogue of Idea; it is at once true to the pastoral tradition of an age of moral and social simplicity, before “Men learn'd to bury the reuiuing graine,” and befitting the stern satirist of a post-pastoral age who reaps a “harvest of rods” (“virgidemiae”):

Time was, that whiles the Autumne fall did last,
Our hungry sires gap't for the falling mast
                                                  of the Dodonian okes.
Could no vnhusked Akorne leaue the tree,
But there was chalenge made whose it might bee.
And if some nice and licorous appetite,
Desir'd more daintie dish of rare delite,
They scal'd the stored Crab with clasped knee,
Till they had sated their delicious eye.

(III.i.5-13)

Hall can paint charming scenes:

The kings pauilion, was the grassy greene,
Under safe shelter of the shadie treene.
Vnder each banke men laide their lims along,
Not wishing any ease, not fearing wrong:
Clad with their owne, as they were made of olde,
Not fearing shame, not feeling any cold.

(III.i.28-33)

His chief intent, however, is to remind his readers of their separation from the golden world by emphasizing what, to sophisticated tastes, must seem unpleasant aspects of golden-age life. His vision of our “Grandsires,” whose “words sauord of thriftie Leekes, / Or manly Garlicke” (59-60), maintains a satiric edge.

Hall's shifting of pastoral perspectives is thus most evident in his focus on the dark side of the Golden Age myth—the decline of the world since the reign of Saturn. Pastoral poets had, of course, used the ideal past to criticize realities of the present, but Hall transforms this contrast into the paradoxical and exaggerated displacements of satire. Here was a sweeping expression of the idea that Earl Miner has identified as the source of all satiric power—“a vision of man, the state, arts, or the world degenerating before one's eyes.”¹⁴ This satiric approach is expressed in concise couplets at the midpoint and conclusion of the Golden Age poem: “Then farewell fayrest age, the worlds best daies, / Thriuing in ill, as it in age decaies” (III.i.40-41, 80-81).

Hall was evidently fond of the decline topos and noted for his use of the theme to generate paradoxes. Thomas Fuller relates that the young Hall won acclaim at Cambridge for “his ingenuous maintaining (be it truth or paradox) that mundus senescit (the world groweth old).”¹⁵ But Spenser may have pointed the way here too. He had forcibly expressed the idea of decline in the pessimistic prologue to Book V of The Fairie Queene, published the year before the “tooth-lesse” satires appeared; “the world is runne quite out of square”:

For from the golden age, that first was named,
It's now at earst become a stonie one;
.....For that which all men then did vertue call,
Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight
Is now hight vertue, and so vs'd of all.

(FQ V. Prologue, lines 10-30)

Roger Sale finds in this poem the first signs of an “impulse toward satire” in Spenser's later poetry.¹⁶ I do not wish to claim that Hall's inspiration for the satires came primarily from his reading of this poem, but only to note that his satiric approach to the pastoral topos of the Golden Age corresponds to a turn in the thought and feeling of his literary hero at the time Virgidemiae was published. Hall's identification of the satirist with Talus (Virg. IV.i.40), the groom left behind by Astrea when she fled from the world at the end of the Golden Age (FQ V.i.12), suggests that he responded to the satiric undertow of Spenser's prologue and fifth book; the age demanded not Colin's pipe but Talus's “flayle of lead.”

The “Defiance to Envie” and the Golden Age satire indicate that complex responses to Spenser and Elizabethan pastoral figured prominently in Hall's decision to begin his poetic career as a satirist. Book I of Virgidemiae, called the “Poeticall” satires, continues and broadens Hall's attempt to place himself in the late Elizabethan literary scene. Nine poems surveying (genre by genre) contemporary literature, the “poeticall” satires have been linked to most of the important literary quarrels of the period, including the Marprelate pamphlets, the Harvey-Nashe controversy, and the so-called Hall-Marston quarrel. Hallett Smith, for example, finds Hall defending, with Harvey, an academic literary province from encroachment by professional writers like Nashe.¹⁷ The possibility of connections of this sort is interesting, particularly in the light of Helgerson's work on the Elizabethan literary system; but, as his studies clearly demonstrate, literary parties and platforms must always be examined in the light of the individual writer's purpose as revealed in his self-presentation. Hall uses the poetical satires to consolidate the literary and moral position implied in the “Defiance.” In an effort to convert his literary dilemma into a source of moral authority, he insists on the relatedness of literary and moral decline, to the extent that literary criticism and moral indignation become interchangeable. This integration of literary and moral values—an attempt to coordinate what Alvin Kernan has termed the aesthetic and moral “poles” of satire¹⁸—informs the best of the satires in Virgidemiae.

The programmatic character of Hall's survey, combined with Spenserian parallels and allusions, indicates that Hall is again looking to Elizabethan as well as to classical sources for authority and direction. The language and subject matter of the poetical satires often recall the familiar complaints about contemporary culture expressed in Spenser's The Teares of the Muses (1591). A review of the contents of Spenser's nine complaints yields many parallels with Hall's nine poems on the literary scene. Both poets deplore the lack of appreciation shown learning and poetry (TM 61 ff.; Virg. II.ii); other common concerns are the popular stage (TM 175 ff.; Virg. I.iii), obscene poetry (TM 213, 379 ff.; Virg. I.ix), heroic poetry (TM 421 ff.; Virg. I.iv), excessive “fantasie” and heaping up of words (TM 553 ff.; Virg. II.i). There are clear echoes of The Teares in Satire I.ii which depicts the defilement of the muses and the sacred spring of Helicon. Hall's treatment of this commonplace subject opens on a Spenserian note—“Whilome the sisters nine were Vestall maides”—and repeats Spenser's phrasing at several points. Thus the poem introduces the theme of literary decline by recollecting the standard formula of complaint—formerly / now—as it had been applied by Spenser and other Elizabethans to contemporary literary conditions. The formerly chaste muses have “woxen Wantonnings” (I.ii.34); “Cytheron hill's become a Brothel-bed” (19), wherein are bred the “bastard Poets” (37) attacked in remaining poetical satires.¹⁹

Hall's condemnation of literary abuses of the day thus issues from an idealized picture of literary perfection which corresponds to the myth of moral perfection in the Golden Age satire. The poetical satires are not limited, however, to the generalized feelings of complaint. Hall reinforces his complaint by his satirical application of an implicit but clearly-defined set of literary principles; his attacks on tragicomedy (I.iii), heroic poetry (I.iv), the complaint (I.v), classical metrics (I.vi), “loue-sicke” poets (I.vii), and sacred poetry (I.viii) are informed by such critical precepts as genre, decorum, verisimilitude, and the unities. Hall draws upon Horace's ideas in the Ars Poetica to ridicule the “strange enchantments” of would-be heroic poets:

Their limits be their List, their reason will.
But if some painter in presuming skill
Should paint the stars in center of the earth,
Could ye forbeare some smiles, & taunting mirth?(20)

(I.iv.17-20)

He attacks sacred sonneteers who mingle profane vehicles with sacred tenors and sing indecorously of “the holy spouse of Christ: / Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest” (I.viii.10-11). And he derides the users of classical hexameters for yoking “Dull Spondees with the English Dactilets” to produce a grotesque literary language not used by men (I.vi.14).

A set of critical commonplaces grounded in principles of proportion and order is, of course, well-suited to the satirist's work of exposing deviations from moral and social norms. The poetical satires thus establish Hall's literary, and moral, credentials; his unfavorable representation of the Elizabethan literary scene opens into a satiric image of the times. Hall finds that Elizabethan society has become a stage for swaggering dandies like “Ruffio,” “Vaunting himselfe vpon his rising toes” (III.vii.2) much like the “high-aspiring swaine” of the Elizabethan playhouse, “the Turkish Tamberlaine” (I.iii.11-12). The “self-misformed” clown of the tragicomedy “iustles straight into the Princes place” (I.iii.34-36); similarly, “Hodge” leaves “the plough & waine” to turn his rough hand to the law—“Why mought not he aswell as others done, / Rise from his Festue to his Littleton?” (IV.ii.99-100); and “some hungry squire for hope of good / Matches the churles Sonne into gentle blood” (IV.ii.141-42).²¹ The satirist's bitter assault on Roman Catholicism focuses on the “Romish Pageants” and “shamelesse Legends” of that Church (IV.vii); these violations of good taste and verisimilitude epitomize for Hall the corrupt institutions and distorted spirituality of the Roman religion. In the “Poeticall” satires, then, Hall surveys the possibilities open to the young poet with a critical eye, and points toward the moral and social analogues of bad art; his mind filled with echoes of the sublime in the old sense, he sees only a disordered and enervated society incapable of responding to the true poet.

Hall's most impressive and complex attempt to tie his moral position to his poetic stance is Book VI, a dunciad of 305 lines which gathers the ethical and artistic issues treated throughout the satires into an ironic retraction of his satiric project and a mock-encomium of the poet-ape, Labeo. Hall will give up satire because the times call for praise, not blame. The true poet of the age is Labeo, whose education as an epic poet is recounted by Hall in the last portion of the satire.

Lecocq has argued that Book VI fails to relate literary to moral satire, that Hall's return to the concerns of Book I and his concluding portrait of Labeo's mistress evidence his lack of control over his material.²² Lecocq, however, neglects the connection between Hall's recantation and his ongoing concern with a literary career. Hall does not, as Lecocq claims, suddenly return to literary issues at line 149 of Book VI; rather, the entire poem is preoccupied with the question of a literary career “in so righteous age.” Borrowing an idea from Scaliger, Hall inverts the decline and fall topos: “Was neuer age I weene so pure as this” (VI.i.26), he admits, before enumerating all the sins of which the age is not guilty.²³ Observing that “Well might these checks haue fitted former times / And shouldred angry Skeltons breath-lesse rimes” (VI.i.75-76), Hall ironically employs the palinode, a device often used by his amateur contemporaries: “Then let me now repent mee of my rage, / For writing Satyres in so righteous age” (VI.i.21-22). The satirist turns his rods on himself in an attempt to recapture his innocence, but the world has predestined him to failure:

I would repent mee were it not too late,
Were not the angry world preiudicate:
If all the seuens penetentiall
Or thousand white wands might me ought auaile,
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.

(VI.i.121-27)

As we might expect, the moral integrity of the age is matched by the great achievements of the “fine wits” who “an hundreth thousand fold / Passeth our age what euer times of olde” (129-30). Thus the satirist is scolded by the “true Poet,” Labeo, for having failed to earn “a Poets name” (186). This leads the satirist to muse again on the prospects of becoming a poet. A litany of neglected geniuses recalls Cuddie's complaints of “October,” and a review of threadbare themes anticipates Milton's search for an epic subject:

No man his threshold better knowes, than I
Brutes first ariuall, and first victory,
Saint Georges Sorrell, or his crosse of blood,
Arthurs round Board, or Caledonian wood,
Or holy battels of bold Charlemaine,
What were his knights did Salems siege maintaine;
How the mad Riuall of fayre Angelice
Was Phisick't from the new-found Paradice.

(221-28)

In addition to voicing his frustration about the subjects available to the beginning poet, Hall expresses a weariness over the proliferation of authorship: “But so to fill vp bookes both backe and side / What needs it? Are there not enow beside?” (231-32). The satirist bemoans the democratization of poetry: “ech man hath a Muse appropriate, / And she like to some seruile eare-boar'd slaue / Must play and sing when, and what he would haue!” (234-36). Against such poetasters, Hall ironically upholds the model laureate career of Labeo, who first “in hy startups walk't the pastur'd plaines” as a pastoral poet (271), and now “reaches right … / The true straynes of Heroicke Poesie” (245-46). As usual, Hall provides a standard that exposes his satiric target: Labeo “names the spirit of Astrophel” and “knows the grace of that new elegance, / Which sweet Philisides fetch't of late from France” (263, 255-56). Sidney's eloquence “well beseem'd his high-stil'd Arcady, / Tho others [like Labeo] marre it with much liberty” (257-58). Hall exemplifies Labeo's perversion of the true ends of poetry by providing a mock-blazon of the laureate's mistress; she is indeed transformed into the defiled source of poetic inspiration which Hall had described in I.ii:

Her chin like Pindus or Pernassus hill
Where down descends th'oreflowing stream doth fil
The well of her fayre mouth. Ech hath his praise.
Who would not but wed Poets now a daies!

(VI.i.302-305)

With this bathetic tribute, Hall concludes his portrait of a frivolous and declining age which prefers to see itself in heroic terms—an age which deserves Labeo, not Spenser, as its poet laureate.

The beginning poet had set out on his satiric “aduenture” (I. Prologue) after yielding to Colin Clout; he concludes his career by ironically conceding Labeo's achievements. The two gestures epitomize the young satirist's troubled attitude toward the literary life. Hall's genuine ambivalence about a poetic career is evident in his “Post-script to the Reader.” Among the anticipated critics of the book is “one [who] thinkes it misbeseeming the Author, because a Poeme.” While Hall calls upon the “honoured Patrons” of poetry for his defense, he also (adapting a passage from Rabelais) downplays his commitment to the muse: “I thinke she [poetry] might be inoffensiuely serued with the broken Messes of our twelue-a-clocke houres, which homely seruice she only clamed & found of mee, for that short while of my attendance.”²⁴ Thus he takes his “solemne Farewell of her” after having “shaked handes with all her retinue” (pp. 97-98). Part of Hall's modest distinction as a satirist, then, derives from his use of this Elizabethan ambivalence about poetry and the literary life as a stratagem for attacking literary abuses in the poetical satires and, in the later books, the moral and social disorders underlying the literary decline. If Hall tends to disparage the literary life, he nonetheless expresses his moral values in literary terms. Spenser had begun his literary career by celebrating Elizabeth; in Virgidemiae “Th'eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse” (I.iv.22), not the Fairy Queen, evoke young Joseph Hall's warmest praise. His farewell to poetry is in fact a judgment on a society out of touch with Spenser's vision of nature, custom, and grace.

Hall did not abandon satire after Virgidemiae. His Mundus Alter et Idem, a Menippean satire, appeared in 1610, with a preface by Hall's friend William Knight clearing Hall of any responsibility for its publication.²⁵ And, of course, his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) initiated a different kind of satirical writing that others continued through the seventeenth century. But the Characters finds Hall apologizing should his style “seeme to some lesse grave, more Satyricall.”²⁶ The “first English satirist” has already begun to promote himself as the “English Seneca,” the title by which Fuller remembered him.²⁷ The younger Hall, a glittering Cambridge Fellow twice elected to the University Lectureship in Rhetoric, was “lesse grave,” but, as I have tried to show, even his debut betrays an uneasiness about the literary life. A graduate of Emmanuel College, and therefore educated in a strict Puritan regimen, Hall was alternately fascinated and dismayed by the challenge of a poetic career. Satire suggested one way of bridging the gap between poetry and morality; it was left to Dryden and Pope to perfect the union in other satiric kinds, long after Hall had abandoned the art of poetry for Neostoicism and The Arte of Divine Meditation (1606).²⁸ Still, the self-presentation of the first English satirist deserves notice as a compelling response to the powerful idea of the literary career, as conceived by an ambitious young man writing in the shadow of Spenser and struggling for a place in a crowded late Elizabethan literary scene.

Notes

1. Helgerson, “The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System,” ELH 46 (Summer 1979):196. See also, Helgerson, “The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career,” PMLA 93 (October 1978):893-911; and The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 1-15.

2. Helgerson, “The Elizabethan Laureate,” p. 209.

3. Helgerson, “The Elizabethan Laureate,” p. 198.

4. See Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 1-15. Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959) remains the best treatment of the Elizabethan satiric persona. For a recent attempt to relate the Elizabethan satiric persona to professional and social objectives, see R. B. Gill, “A Purchase of Glory: The Persona of Late Elizabethan Satire,” SP 72 (October 1975):408-18. Louis Lecocq devotes a chapter to Kernan's theory of the persona in La Satire en Angleterre de 1588 à 1603 (Paris: Didier, 1969).

5. See William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 219-32.

6. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 104. Milton ridiculed Hall's notion of “toothlesse” satires in An Apology against a Pamphlet (London, 1642), sect. vi., sigs. D₄^v-E₁^r. Milton's remarks on Hall are reprinted in Arnold Davenport, ed., The Poems of Joseph Hall (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1949), p. 159.

7. See Arnold Stein, “Joseph Hall's Imitation of Juvenal,” MLR 43 (July 1948):315-22. I have discussed Hall's creative approach to imitation of the classics in “Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices: A ‘Novum Repertum,’” SP 76 (Late Winter 1979):28-35.

8. Edward and Lillian Bloom, Satire's Persuasive Voice (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 46.

9. Davenport, ed., The Poems, pp. 10-11. Subsequent references to this edition of Hall's poems will appear in my text, cited by book, satire, and line number.

10. On Hall's contributions to the “Parnassus plays,” see Frank L. Huntley, “Joseph Hall, John Marston, and The Returne from Parnassus,” in Illustrious Evidence: Approaches to English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 3-22.

11. Lecocq, p. 406.

12. For Spenserian parallels, see Davenport, The Poems, pp. 160-61. Hall's interest in Spenser has been noted in passing by Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 228; Ejner J. Jensen, “Hall and Marston: The Role of the Satirist,” Satire Newsletter 4 (Spring 1967):81; and S. M. Salyer, “Hall's Satires and the Harvey-Nashe Controversy,” SP 25 (April 1928):150. On Hall's Spenserian diction, see Lecocq, p. 418.

13. See FQ VI.xii.41. Hall's sensitivity to Spenser's misfortunes is apparent in two occasional poems which cite Spenser as the great but unrewarded poet. In “To Camden” (Davenport, The Poems, p. 105) Hall laments that “want slew” Spenser before his time. Hall praises the pastorals of his friend William Bedell by comparing them to Spenser's; but he hopes Bedell's reward is not Spenser's: “Ah me! That after unbeseeming Care, / And secret Want, which bred his last misfare, / His Relicks dear obscurely tombed lien / Under unwritten Stones” (Davenport, The Poems, pp. 105, 123).

14. Earl Miner, “In Satire's Falling City,” in The Satirist's Art, ed. H. James Jensen and Malvin R. Zirker, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972), p. 19.

15. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. John Freeman (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952), p. 320. The paradox of thriving evil in the waning world is an instance of the self-defeating pattern of “progress” described by satire. See Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 102-103.

16. Roger Sale, Reading Spenser: An Introduction to the Fairie Queene (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 164-65. Spenser's (and Hall's) satiric treatment of the pastoral topos of the Golden Age signifies the breakdown of what Louis Adrian Montrose has called the Elizabethan “pastoral of power,” epitomized in the April eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender. See Montrose, “‘The perfecte paterne of a Poete’: The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,” TSLL 21 (Spring 1979):34-67; and “‘Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELR 10 (Spring, 1980):153-82.

17. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 228-34; see also Arnold Davenport, “The Quarrel of the Satirists,” MLR 37 (April 1942):123-30.

18. Kernan discusses “the two poles of satire,” its uncompromising moral judgments on the one hand, and its literary self-consciousness on the other, in The Plot of Satire, pp. 3-18.

19. For Spenserian parallels, see Davenport, The Poems, pp. 164-65. In the previous satire (I.i), Hall is also careful to link Spenser with the undefiled muses; he locates these chaste muses in a Spenserian setting: “what baser Muse can bide, / To sit and sing by Grantaes naked side. / They haunt the tyded Thames and salt Medway. / Ere since the fame of their late Bridall day” (I.i.27-30). These streams are replaced by the polluted fount of inspiration on Helicon, “turnd to a poysoned head / Of cole-blacke puddle” (I.ii.20-21). Spenser is a chaste and inspired poet, as opposed to the drunken “Apple-squires” who have deflowered the muses (I.ii.35-36).

20. See Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1929), p. 451, lines 1-13.

21. Madeleine Doran has discussed the tradition of social and artistic decorum behind such attacks on tragicomedy in Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 194-97.

22. Lecocq, pp. 409-10.

23. On the relationship to Scaliger, see Davenport, The Poems, p. 251.

24. See Rabelais, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 5.

25. See Huntington Brown, ed., The Discovery of a New World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), pp. 143-44.

26. Joseph Hall, Heaven upon Earth and Characters of Vertues and Vices, ed. Rudolph Kirk (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1948), p. 170.

27. Fuller, p. 320.

28. Johnson reports that Pope discovered Virgidemiae late in life and that “he wished that he had seen them sooner”; see The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1896), 3:141. Pope is also said to have particularly esteemed Hall's mock-heroic Book V1. “Bp Warburton told Mr. Warton that in a copy of Hall's satires, in the library of Mr Pope, the whole of the First Satire in the Sixth Book was either corrected in the margin, or interlined; and that Pope had written at the top, Optima Satira”; quoted in Frank L. Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall 1574-1656: A Biographical and Critical Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), p. 147.