University of Pennsylvania Press Huntington Library Quarterly

Epigrams and Political Satire in Early Stuart England
Author(s): James Doelman

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 31-46
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2006.69.1.31
Accessed: 22-09-2016 22:56 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Huntington Library Quarterly
This content downloaded from 128.163.2.206 on Thu, 22 Sep 2016 22:56:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Epigrams and Political Satire
in Early Stuart England
James Doelman
the historicist turn in literary studies over the past twenty-five

years has greatly increased our understanding of the political role of literature in the
early Stuart period. Considerations of genre, however, have often been overlooked,
and this has been the case even with epigrams and satire, the two genres that seem most
likely to engage political matters directly.1 In this article I explore the relationship of
epigram to satire, especially the specific ways in which the latter contributed to politi-
cal expression around the turn of the seventeenth century. Of the thousands of early
Stuart epigrams that survive, only a small percentage engage in political satire, but
these few were among the most widely known poems of the period.
The epigram, although frequently identified as “A Curter kind of Satyre” by
early Stuart poets and readers, and included along with satires in the Bishop’s Ban of
1599, was set apart from the broader genre in a number of significant ways.2 The classi-
cal epigram, particularly as practiced by Martial, was noted for its urbane detachment,
and hence was unlikely to be a railing rhyme, in the style of formal verse satire. Such
generic boundaries were far from clear or fixed, however, and epigrams were fre-
quently vehicles of satire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Epi-
grams had a dual face, at once formal and vernacular, detached and engaged, and while
this instability was occasionally problematic for practitioners, it was perhaps the most
important among the attributes that underwrote the genre’s active role in the political
discourse of the era.
What did the epigrammatist, working from Martial’s model, have to offer the
culture of political satire? With its classical pedigree, it would seem that epigrams might
The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
1. On the neglect of satire in new historicism, see Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire, and the Stuart
State (Cambridge, 2004), 3–4. I have attempted in “‘Born with Teeth’: Christopher Brooke’s Ghost of
Richard the Third (1614),”Seventeenth Century 14 (1999): 115–29, to consider the generic conventions of
satire at work in that highly political poem.
2.Thomas Bancroft, Two Bookes of Epigrammes (1639), sig. A3r.
h u n t i n g to n l i b r a ry qua rt e r ly | vol. 69, no. 1 31

Pp. 31–45. © 2006 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For per-
mission to reproduce, visit the University of California Rights and Permissions Web site, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
32 james d oelman
have contributed an elite perspective on the affairs of the day, but at the same time the
form was eminently suited to widespread distribution. The Martialian tradition valued
authorial identity, but the brevity of the form encouraged broad manuscript and oral
circulation, which made these verses seem almost a form of public property, a genre es-
pecially well suited to expressions of the common view. Ultimately, I will suggest that
the two essential formal qualities of epigrams, brevity and sharpness, readily lent
themselves to satirical application, and also facilitated public circulation and recep-
tion. Furthermore, the sub-genre of the satiric epitaph offers a particularly clear illus-
tration of the adaptability of the epigram for political satire.
Renaissance literary handbooks provide a neat but not very precise definition of
the epigram: a brief and pointed poem on a single subject.3 In common usage, further-
more, the terms “epigram,” “satire,” “libel,” “distich,” “squib,” and “pasquil” show
significant overlap and slippage. A libel, a publicly circulated attack on an individual,
usually in manuscript, could take a number of forms, and one of these was the distich,
a fairly neutral technical label identifying the poem as a single couplet—and many epi-
grams were distiches. A “squib” was literally a small firework that ended with a sharp ex-
plosion. In the literary context it was most often used in a dismissive sense, denoting a
short and relatively inconsequential attack and suggesting that the writer had fired off
a mere squib.“Squib” could also be used as a verb: “I doe not, nor I dare not squib the
State” writes Robert Hayman.”4 The term “Pasquil” (or “Pasquin”) refers to the public
posting of a short libel in a particular spot, rather than mere circulation. It derives
from a statue discovered in Rome in the early sixteenth century that became a posting
site for short verses mocking the current political or ecclesiastical situation. These were
usually in the “voice”of Pasquin—that is, the statue—a generalized speaker who is also
significant for the voice of epigrams, which I discuss further below. To pin a work upon
a “Pasquil,” as a representative citizen or subject, is to present it as what all men might
say—as if representing a consensus. Increasingly in the period, however, it came to
designate any short libel, regardless of whether it was publicly posted or circulated in
some other fashion. As M. Lindsay Kaplan has noted, these satirical forms not only
merged but also widened, sometimes extending to mean poetry itself.5 Anonymous
libelous distiches are at times called epigrams by letter writers and other “circulators.”
Any fixed literary definition of the epigram, then, is bound to oversimplify the reality
of early-seventeenth-century practice.6 Topical verses written on a wall or otherwise
publicly posted frequently came to be remembered and written down elsewhere—that
3.“Epigrammatis duae virtutes peculiares: brevitas & argutia,”Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices
(Stuttgart, 1987), 170. Cf. Jacobus Pontanus, Poeticum institutionem, in Johann Buchler, Sacrarum profa-
narumq[ue] phrasium poeticarum thesaurus (London, 1632), cap. 472.
4.“To the Reader of my reprehending generall Epigrams,”Quodlibets (1628), 2:1. (In this article,
published epigrams are identified by book and epigram number, unless otherwise noted.)
5. Kaplan comments,“Doggerel rhyme, ballads and satire became such popular expressions of de-
traction that defamation is increasingly associated with poetry. This connection is so strong by the be-
ginning of the seventeenth century that Chief Justice Edward Coke can define a libel as “an epigram,
rhyme, or other writings”; The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), 30.
6. For example,“graffiti are meant to be temporary, the epigram ...permanent”; Matthew Hodgart,
Satire (New York, 1969), 159.
epigrams and p olitical satire 33
is, circulated; that we know them at all shows how the ephemeral could become per-
manent. The Renaissance epigram was a chameleon. Perhaps most striking is the way
in which it transgressed social and intellectual boundaries, managing to be both a
classical, sophisticated, and self-conscious form and a vernacular, popular one that
circulated very widely among the public.

Unlike most classical forms, the epigram had chirographic roots: it was devised for in-
scription on gravestones for passers-by to see, and as such it was originally a fixed and
quintessentially public form. Also, more regularly than most genres, epigrams were
ventriloquized, or situated in the voice of another: it is typically the voice of the de-
ceased who “speaks,” or the gravestone that marks him:“Here lies...” This separability
from the author’s voice has implications for seventeenth-century satiric epigrams
that I will turn to later. Yet the authorial voice of Martial, the most influential classical
epigrammatist, is stridently manifest in many of his epigrams, and he vied to main-
tain control over them. He also strove to achieve a reputation specifically as an epi-
grammatist, and his “ownership” of the poems is a recurring theme. He gathered
individual epigrams into large books, as if to make the form more substantial and
prestigious through accumulation. That some English Renaissance epigrammatists
exhibit similar concerns has been aptly demonstrated by Jason Scott-Warren, writing
on Sir John Harington, and Joseph Loewenstein on Jonson.7 John Owen, for example,
put the stamp of ownership on his texts and his craft in his volumes of Neo-Latin epi-
grams. For early modern writers, Martial offered a legitimating precedent for what
often seemed an ephemeral and frivolous poetic form. These strategies worked against
the tendency of epigrams to become anonymous in public circulation.
The spirit of Martial hangs over most Renaissance epigrams in other, more the-
matic ways; his terse and flippant comments on the political culture of his time pro-
vided a political model for his imitators as well as a generic one. He also provided more
than a model of mockery: a significant number of his Epigrams are poems of praise,
but praise based on the same sense of restraint and sharpness found in the more satiric
examples. Epigrams of praise are especially prominent in the Neo-Latin collections of
sixteenth-century humanists, and make up a surprising proportion of the collections
of Jonson and Owen. Thus, both classical and Renaissance epigrams are supremely
epideictic, dispensing both praise and blame—unlike the more univocal satire. Robert
Hayman, much influenced by Owen’s collection, suggests that epigrams, like kings,
and like preachers, balance blame and praise: he offers both “reprehending Epigrams”
and “commending Epigrams.”8 This dual function is central to the value of epigrams
in the eyes of their defenders, and it was in this manner particularly that epigramma-
tists might participate in the humanist venture of improving conduct. (For another
discussion of the epideictic mode, see David Colclough’s essay in this volume.) The
7. Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001); Joseph Loewenstein,
Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002).
8. Quodlibets, 2:1, 3:1, 3:2.
34 james d oelman
balance gives the epigrammatist an authority often not ascribed to the satirist, whose
uncontrolled railing might be denigrated as merely his own spleen.
Humanist scholars identified a variety of categories within the libelous and
satiric use of epigrams; sharpness (or argutia) was not of one flavor. Scaliger distin-
guished, metaphorically, four varieties of the pointed epigram, typified by salt, vine-
gar, gall, and a “foul” substance that he forbore to identify.9 To these “honey” was
sometimes added for contrast, an element more closely associated with the epigrams
of the Greek Anthology and with epigrams of praise. Thus, a satiric epigram might
adopt one posture among a wide range—depending on the severity of the vice or folly
being mocked, and possibly the author’s own character as well.
The epigram tradition of the Renaissance was also fostered by the pedagogical
practice of assigning Neo-Latin epigram composition. Students would be set the task
of composing an epigram on a prescribed theme, often a proverb, motto, or biblical
text, and the majority of epigrammatists came from those schools, such as Westmin-
ster and Winchester, that required such composition. Owen describes his book as hav-
ing been “peppered” at Winchester and “salted” at Oxford,10 and he apparently
developed a permanent predilection for the form. The association of the epigram with
these institutions helped imbue it with a sophisticated, elite perspective, and it at-
tracted some illustrious authors: Sir Thomas More, George Buchanan, and Theodore
Beza were among the noted sixteenth-century practitioners.
Neo-Latin epigrams helped to maintain this status; however, their very use in
England was an offshoot of a pan-European phenomenon of widely circulating epi-
grams. The dissemination of such material could threaten its elite status: if lines were
“in every man’s mouth,” they might lose their polish and metrical soundness. Both in-
dividual epigrams and prefaces to epigram collections of the early seventeenth century
reflect authorial anxiety at the seeming debasement or dilution of the genre,11 and self-
conscious practitioners of the classical epigram fought against the tendency to call any
short poem an epigram. Many epigrams, in both manuscript and print, were certainly
stylistically and rhetorically crude, unreflective of the genre’s illustrious history,
aspiring to little beyond abuse on some current controversial topic or figure. The
“polished point,” in particular, which was supposed to distinguish the epigram from
the roughness of satire, was frequently lost. However, criticism of the epigram based
on its violation of literary decorum might have had another agenda. Thomas Freeman,
for example, in his preface to his A Rubbe and a Great Cast (1614), suggests that hostility
to the epigram based on its crudeness was a mere ruse—that the real reason was its
unswerving commitment to revealing vice:
9. Scaliger, Poetices, 170.

10. Ioannia Audoeni Epigrammatum, ed. John R. C. Martyn, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1976), 2:83; book 7,
epigram 64.
11. See Lawrence Manley,“Proverbs, Epigrams, and Urbanity in Renaissance London,”English Liter-
ary Renaissance 15 (1985): 247–76. Kathryn Perry traces this concern particularly in regard to the epi-
gram’s position in the marketplace;“‘I do it onely for the Printers sake:’ Commercial Imperatives and
Epigrams in the Early Seventeenth Century,”EnterText 3 (2003): 204–26.
[T]he very name sticks to him like an Inustum stigma. But how the
Comonest? in it selfe; why there, being good (as it is no lesse) it shold be
Melius quo communius [better because more common] Is it in the Pro-
fessor? yea there is the misery, it is gone, ab Equis ad Asinos, Notum Lippis
& Tonsoribus, [from the horse to the ass, familiar to the bleary-eyed and
barbers] & Plaid the Pithagorean pittifully, induring most brutish trans-
migration, and traveld in as durty wits as the way between Hogsdon and
Hounsditch, Turpe & miserabile [foul and miserable]: Yet that this shold
impeach the ingenuous is meere injustice. But indeed the true cause for
which the Epigram suffers, is his liberty and sincere honesty in the search
and unmasking vice. (Sig. A2v)12
Thus, for Freeman the worthy origins of the epigram coincided with its social purpose,
and in that respect it frequently intersected with satire, but as we will see below, Free-
man found himself falling short of this loftier role. His observation about the unjust
criticism of epigrams was echoed by contemporary practitioners.13
The spirit of Martial was frequently invoked as a bulwark against the decline of
the genre. Abraham Holland writes:
Each driveling Lozel now

That hath but seene a Colledge, and knows how
To put a number to Iohn Setons Prose,
Starts up a sudden Muse-man, and streight throws
A Packe of Epigrams into the light,
Whose undigested mish-mash would affright
The very Ghost of Martiall, and make
Th’Authors of th’Anthologie to quake.14
The “pack” of epigrams suggests the relegation of epigrams to mere wares sold by a
peddler, like the ballad seller epitomized by Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Such sully-
ing threatens the classical inheritance, eroding the epigrammatist’s connection to
Martial and to the Greek Anthology.
Defenders of the epigram distinguished it from the ballad on the one hand and
the verse satire on the other: one was too popular in origin, the other too dark in tone.
Like ballads, epigrams occupied a hinterland between popular and literate culture.
Both were textually and formally unstable, which suggests oral circulation, and the
greater brevity of the epigram made such circulation even likelier. But the ballad
brought with it assumptions of folk origin and anonymous authorship,15 and, while
12. Unless stated otherwise, translations from Latin are my own.

13. See Manley,“Proverbs, Epigrams, and Urbanity,” 265.
14. “A Continued Inquisition against Paper-Persecutors by A. H.,”in John Davies of Hereford,
A scourge for paper-persecutors (1625), sig. A1v.
15. See Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the
Overbury Affair 1603–1666 (Cambridge, 2002), 112–13.
36 james d oelman
ballads might be posted, political ballads were more frequently sung, at taverns or
other social venues. Epigrammatists of the period sensed that their genre was becoming
like the ballad—of popular origin and therefore debased. Surviving copies could in-
deed be confused and fragmented—manifest rewordings, inversions, badly fractured
rhythms, lost or changed lemmas, and even gibberish at times. Parts of works were
frequently separated. Joseph Mede describes an entertainment at Cambridge where
“Dr. Richardson [probably John Richardson] brought before the king a paper of
verses, in manner of an epigram, which Bishop Neil read, and others. A friend of
mine, over the bishop’s shoulder, got two of them by heart.”16 In the public turmoil
of the summer of 1613 John Chamberlain reports on “two lame hexameter verses,
without head or foot to my understanding, for I know not what construction to make
of them, and they go thus as I could carie them away at one hearing. Curans, Lord
Compton, Whitlocke, Overberie, Mansfeld: Nevill, Starchamber, Sutton, Scot, Baylie,
divorcement.”17
Form also played a role in exempting the epigram from the temperamental
foibles of verse satire. While both may comment from an ethical stance on topical con-
cerns, epigrams are restrained by their length: it is difficult to “rail” in two or four lines,
although one might indeed launch a “squib.” The mounting criticism of satire, based on
its disdain and vituperation accomplished through a catologuing of errors (of the sort
that bursts into Wyatt’s “I cannot, I: no, no, it will not be”18), was irrelevant to the epi-
gram. The voice is most often quiet or neutral, with the detachment of mere observa-
tion, or even wryly quiescent: Freeman suggests that in spite of their invective, his
epigrams are not satires, because they “in th’end [do] smile”19—and the smile was a
wry, uncommitted one. According to John Stradling, who wrote a significant volume
of Neo-Latin epigrams, the genre ought to adopt a distinctive tone: “Dente licet mor-
dent epigrammata, felle carebunt / Spurcities absit, sint sale sparsa levi” [though epi-
grams bite with a tooth, they will lack spleen. Let filth be absent, let them be lightly
sprinkled with salt].20
Most epigrams were not couched in a particularized voice, except it if was no-
tably detached. Nonetheless, epigrams offered the insider’s perspective, penetrating
the vice and folly of the court, church, or society from the point of view of one who had
seen such corrupt bodies at close range from within: they were worldly-wise and
world-weary in perspective. Possibly the best-known example from the period,
16. Mede to Martin Stuteville, 15 March 1622/23, in Thomas Birch, ed., Court and Times of King
James I, 2 vols. (1849; reprint ed., New York, 1973), 2:375.
17. Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 10 June 1613, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1939), 1:459. Bellany (Politics of Court Scandal, 102–3), recounts a number of similar
examples.
18.“Mine Owne John Poins,”line 76.
19. A Rubbe and a Great Cast (1614), 2:34.
20. Epigrammatum libri quattuor (1607), 62. Trans. Dana Sutton,“The Philological Museum,”
http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/stradling
Harington’s “Of Treason,” conveys this spirit well: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s
the reason? / If it prosper, none dare call it treason.”21
The distinctive voice of the epigram should not be overemphasized, however.
Even one of its practitioners, Everard Guilpin, conflated his own posture with that of
the satirist: he is “A plaine dealing lad, that is not afraid / To speake the truth, but calls a
jade, a jade.”22 Guilpin seems to supplant the urbane Martialian epigrammatist with
the plain-spoken satirist of the English tradition—a Piers Plowman sort of figure. But
Guilpin still points to a difference: the epigram is more limited, both in scope and
severity. The satire is a “strappado” and “rack,” but “the Epigram’s Bridewell, / Some
whipping cheere: but this [satire] is follies hell” (lines 82–83). One of John Owen’s
epigrams offers insight into the differing stances of epigram and satire:
Nil aliud satyrae quam sunt epigrammata longa.

Est, praeter satyram nil, epigramma, brevem.
Nil satyrae si non sapiant epigrammata pungunt,
Nil satyram sapiat, nil epigramma iuvat.
[Satyres are but long Epigrams; and these
Are but short Satyres, to displease, or please:
Satyres avail not, if they be not tart;
Nor Epigrams, unless like Satyres, smart.]23
The comparison apparently urges a blurring of the two forms, but at the same time re-
lies on the essential difference: epigrams are “tart,” and satires should be like that,
satires “smart,”and epigrams ought as well.
The premium on brevity led epigrammatists to various rhetorical efficiencies,
especially ironic comparisons. Thus, the (un)happy coincidence of a man’s name and
his situation or fate would often elicit an epigram, as would the parallel circumstances
of an individual’s life and death. A widely circulated example from the period is the
epitaph on the bellows maker, frequently attributed to John Hoskyns:
Here lyes Tom short ye king of good fellowes

Who in his time was a mender of bellowes
But when he came to y e howre of his death
Hee that made bellowes could not make breath.24
The irony was here for the taking, and the epigrammatist deserves credit only for rec-
ognizing it and presenting it in a polished form. The same technique is at work in many
epigrams of political satire, and in the mock epitaph on Sir Walter Pye, the attorney of
21. Epigrams (1618), 4:5.

22. Skialetheia, ed. D. Allen Carroll (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974), lines 75–76.
23. 2:181, trans. Thomas Harvey, John Owen’s Latine epigrams ( 1677).
24. Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638 (New York, 1973), 170.
38 james d oelman
the Court of Wards who died on Christmas day 1635, name and occasion provide the
inherently ironic situation:
If any aske, who heere doth lie;

Say ’tis the divells Christmas Pye.
Death was the Cooke, the divell the urne,
Noe ward will serve, the Pie will burne.
Yet serve it in; for many did wish,
That the divell long since had had this dish.25
The point is more developed than in the bellows maker epigram: the poem could have
ended after the first two lines but the last four tip it into political commentary, with the
bald assertion that many had wished for Pye’s death well before.26 As noted, the poem
was widely circulated, but we might ask whether its popularity most reflected wide-
spread hostility toward Pye or delight in the irony of the poem. Similarly, the reputa-
tions of Sir Edward Coke and Francis Bacon cannot be measured by the number of
epigrams that played with the culinary associations of their names.
The brevity of the epigram also enabled an enigmatic ambiguity at times: a
single point with a double meaning, couched in an uncommitted tone, creates a kind
of riddle that could never be sustained in a longer work. 27 One example is George
Herbert’s poem on King James’s visit to Cambridge in 1623, which took place while
Prince Charles was in Spain courting the Infanta:
Dum petit Infantem Princeps, Grantamque Iacobus,

Quisnam horum maior sit, dubitatur, amor.
Vincit more suo Noster: nam millibus Infans
Non tot abest, quot nos Regis ab ingenio.
[While Prince to Spaine, and King to Cambridge goes,
The question is, whose love the greater showes:
Ours (like himselfe) o’recomes; for his wit’s more
Remote from ours, then Spaine from Britains shoare.]28
Although this poem has always been read, as far as I know, as extolling James’s wisdom
and love, the text in fact sustains the opposite reading just as well. All the poem explicitly
25. Bodleian, MS. Tanner 465, fol. 62r; the poem is also found in many other manuscripts. It is
ascribed to Hoskyns based on a reference in Aubrey’s Brief Lives; see Osborn, Life, Letters, and Writings,
295. This ascription may be a reflection of a tendency to credit Hoskyns with any anonymous witty
epigram.
26. Pye was the target of at least one grievance, noted by H. E. Bell, An Introduction to the History
and Records of the Court of Wards & Liveries (Cambridge, 1953), 136. He cites CSP. Dom. Addenda,
1625–1649, 496. However, the epitaph may reflect popular discontent with the Court of Wards as an
institution.
27. John Taylor refers to “Aenigmaticall Epigrammatists”in Water-workes (1614), sig. A2r.
28. Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), 438–39.
says is that there is a great distance between the wisdom of the king and that of Cam-
bridge: it does not say which is greater. I suspect that the poem’s popularity at the time
stemmed partly from this clever ambiguity: the poet, as orator of Cambridge, had pro-
duced a work that, in one of its readings, fully conveyed popular sentiment at Charles’s
and Buckingham’s quixotic journey into Spain: the king was a fool for having allowed it.
There are also indications that James was willing to tolerate such jesting critique when
cleverly conveyed: from the same political crisis comes the story of Archie Armstrong,
the king’s fool, who suggested that the event showed that he and James ought to ex-
change hats.29 This poem and others like it combine the two halves of the epigram’s epi-
deictic project into a single short poem, which might be read as either praise or blame.
An epigram by Henry Parrot that reworks a well-known political jest may
demonstrate how the epigram’s formal qualities shaped material. Early in his English
reign James’s prolific knightings prompted a widely circulated quip that it was now
more illustrious to be a gentleman than a knight:“two walking espyed one a farr of, the
one demanded what he sholde be, the other answered he seamed to be a gentleman, no
I warrant you, sayes the other I thinke he is but a knight.”30 Parrrot’s epigram, written a
few years later, developed this idea:
Battus beleeved for a simple truth,

That yonder gilt-spur spruce and velvet youth
Was some great personage or worthy wight,
Untill one told him he was but a knight,
A knight (quoth Battus) vaith I chud a zworne,
He had at least been zum gud gen-man borne.31
Unlike the original quip or jest, however, this text points in more than one direction,
mocking the proliferation of knighthoods and the excessive finery of the new young
knight as well as the southwest dialect of Battus, the observer of the situation, whose
provincial naivety is ridiculed by the more urbane author.32 Such reworking of quips
and jests was common in the epigram tradition.
Directly political epigrams, like the two just discussed, were relatively infre-
quent in the early Stuart period, particularly in printed books of epigrams. The chief
subject of epigrammatic ridicule is individual folly, especially of a sexual type—one
reason for the form’s reputation as trivial. In comparison, its use for political comment
or controversy was minimal. Even those who wanted to use the epigram for political
comment apparently found themselves stymied, both by the prevailing publishing
climate and the expectations associated with the genre. With regard to his 1614 collec-
tion, Thomas Freeman ponders the challenge of maintaining a political focus:
29. R. Malcolm Smuts,“Archibald Armstrong,”ODNB.

30. See The Letters of Philip Gawdy, 1579–1616, ed. I. H. Jeayes (London, 1906), 138 (early August 1603).
31. Epigrams (1608), sig. B2v.
32. In Parrot’s later volume, Cures for the Itch (1625), Battus is mocked for his habit of breaking jests
that are already broken (sig. C2r).
40 james d oelman
But when I would this indigested heape

Reduce (more seemely) into severall;
In steed of one; in, All together step.
That when I would tell Sylla’s tyranny,
Or Nero’s cruelty, and Caesars stabing,
Straight interrupts me Druso’s letchery,
Lucullus drudging, or Lucilla’s drabbing.33
Here, the intent to produce and gather political epigrams is represented as overcome
by the proliferation of sexual wrongs that are the epigram’s more usual subject. The
sorting process that Freeman alludes to so self-consciously is evident in a surviving
manuscript collection of his epigrams, which shows a numbering and renumbering
different from that of the 1614 publication and includes some ninety poems that were
not printed there: most of these are more scandalous than their printed counterparts,
frequently mocking Puritan elements.34 Thus, Freeman’s implication here is some-
what disingenuous, masking a process of self-censorship. It is clear that it was not only
the prevalence of sexual immorality that attracted his ire but also the obstacles to pub-
lishing more politically contentious poems. Like any satire, epigrams might easily
cross the line into libel or sedition.

Of the varieties and subgenres of the epigram, that of the mock epitaph was the one
most frequently used for political satire. Like laudatory epitaphs, these typically begin
with “Here lies” or “Hic iacet,” and partake of the convention that the gravestone itself
is the speaker. In his memoirs Francis Osborne noted that it was “the fashion of the
Poets all my days, to sum up great mens Vertues or Vices upon their Graves.”35 While
the majority of printed early Stuart epitaphs were laudatory, jesting ones prevailed in
manuscript and oral circulation. Many of these, like that on the bellows maker dis-
cussed above, portrayed inconsequential figures or acquaintances, but those on public
figures might produce compressed and therefore especially potent political satire. The
chief technique of these satiric epitaphs was to overthrow expectations: even in death
(real or imagined) the nasty truth about the individual must be expressed. Few public
figures escaped such retribution after death: mock epitaphs on Robert Cecil were
legion, the best known of which begins,“Heere lies Hobbinoll our Shepheard while ere
/ Who once a yeere duely our fleeces did sheere.”36
The circumstances of death often provided the central focus of the poem. Such
was the case with the epigram on Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, who died in the midst of a
case at Whitehall:
33. A Rubbe and a Great Cast, sig. F4r.

34. BL, MS. Sloane 1889.
35. Traditional Memorials of King James, in The Works of Francis Osborn, 8th ed. (1682), 537.
36.“Early Stuart Libels,”D1. McRae and Bellany offer a list of many of the places where this poem is
found. For a detailed analysis of the placing of a pasquil (though not technically an epitaph) on the
Discourteous Death that wouldst not once confer,

Or daign to parly with our Treasurer:
Had he been Thee, or of thy fatal Tribe,
He would have spar’d a life to gain a bribe.37
The exceptional circumstances of his death allowed for a witty comment that summed
up the whole of his public life. This particular example is also nicely honed, all leading
to the balanced phrases of the last line and the final point on the rhyme word “bribe.”
At times, such mock epitaphs provoked a response defending the deceased.
Among satires and mock epitaphs directed against the dead Buckingham, one manu-
script (BL, Add. MS. 15227) includes a poem beginning,“Yee snarling Satyrs cease your
horrid yells / On this sad hearse, all such p[ro]digious knells.”38 Such a rejoinder, I
argue, is typical of what we might call epigram culture. Whereas a political ballad
might frequently have verses added to it, the epigram, partly because of its curtailed
form, partly because of its specificity, elicited counterpoint. We see these sorts of ex-
changes particularly in the Neo-Latin epigrams of religious controversy and in epi-
taphs on famous figures. Such debates might be carried on for a long time, circulated in
manuscript as well as in print, and are consequently difficult to untangle.39 The com-
peting epitaphs and satiric epitaphs responding to Owen’s death offer a particularly
rich example of this tradition.
While scholars today may be most familiar with the English epigrams of Haring-
ton and Jonson, readers of the early seventeenth century saw Owen as the English heir of
Martial, and he was the most noteworthy influence on other epigrammatists.40 His col-
lections of epigrams expressed lofty ambition: they were dedicated to various members
of the royal family (Arabella Stuart, Prince Henry, Prince Charles), and they became
famous across Europe. His own death in late 1622 prompted a host of self-conscious
epitaphs and epigrams—of both the reprehending and commending sort.
In late 1622 John Chamberlain records that “Little Owen, the maker of epigrams,
died not long since of a cold, and was buried in Paul’s; whereupon divers poets, his
countrymen, have made epitaphs in his commendation.”41 First off the mark were
laudatory epitaphs, which ripple through collections of the 1620s and 1630s, wittily
making connections among Owen’s small stature, the brevity of the poetic form for
hearse of Archbishop Whitgift, see Bellany,“A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse: Puritanism, Libel, and
Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference,”Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 137–64.
37. Osborne, Traditional Memorials, 536–37; cf.“Early Stuart Libels,”B16. Osborne wryly notes that
he was “called to answer at a higher Tribunal.”
38.“Thalassiarche Manium Vindiciae,”fol. 21r. The poem also appears in MS. Malone 23, another
great storehouse of anti-Buckingham satires; see “Early Stuart Libels,”Piii6.
39. See James Doelman,“The Contexts of George Herbert’s Musae Responsoriae,”George Herbert
Journal 2 (1992): 42–54, for a discussion of one such long-running conflict.
40. See, for example, Freeman, Rubbe and a Great Cast, 2:74. Ironically, although there is a book on
Owen’s influence on German epigrams, his role in English literature has largely been neglected.
41. Chamberlain to Carleton, 21 December 1622; Letters of Chamberlain, 2:469.
42 james d oelman
which he was known, and the subsequent brevity of the poems celebrating him.42 The
most notable one was contributed by John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and Lord
Keeper, and it appeared on Owen’s tomb.
Parva tibi Statua est quia parva statura supellex,
Parva volat parvas magna per ora liber:
Sed non parvus honos non parva est gloria quippe
Ingenio haud quicquam est maius in orbe tuo.
Parva domus texit Templum sed grande poetae
Tum vere vitam quum moritura agunt.43
[Small was thy state and stature, which doe claime
Small statue, through great lands thy small Booke flies,
But small thine honour is not, nor thy fame,
For greater wit then thine the world denies:
Whom a small house, a great Church shelter gives,
A Poet when he dies then truly lives.]44
Williams, who had acted in the role of patron to Owen for a number of years, was re-
sponsible for both the ornate effigy and the epitaph that graced the poet’s tomb. That
the tomb and epitaph were established by one of the most powerful churchmen and
statesmen of the time points to Owen’s stature.45 An epigram that directly echoes
Williams survives in the manuscript collection of John Russell. It takes the tomb as a
place of veneration:
Te quoties, sortemq[ue] tuam contemplor Owene,
Qui faelix volitas docta per ora virum:
AEmula conflagrant et viscera, cordaq[ue] flammis:
Aut tibi par, similis vel tibi Owene forem.
Quae si non potui; magnis sic exridit ausis,
Efflebunt tumuli marmora nigra mei.
[Owen, how often I contemplate your Fate, you who happily fly through
the learned mouths of men: and their envious hearts and bowels burn in
flames, either to be your equal, or similar to you, Owen. Who, if I were
not able, so he would laugh at these attempts, they would blow out the
black marble of my tombs.]46
42. See, for example, John Russell, 1:93,“In Joannem Owen epigrammaticum”:“Es brevitatis amans
Owen argute poeta: / Laudarem te, sed sum brevitatis amans”(BL, Add. MS. 73542, fol. 12v).
43. Henry Holland, Monumenta sepulchraria Sancti Pauli (1633), sig. G2r. William Dugdale, in
History of St. Pauls Cathedral (1658), also reproduces the epitaph, with this location description (p. 55):
“Adhuc in navi Ecclesiae, Super columnam, gradibus Consistorii proximam, occidentem versus”
(a verse still in the nave of the church, on the western column near the consistory steps).
44. John Penkethman, The epigrams of P. Virgilius Maro (1624), sig. D3v.
45. Common roots or family connections may have led to Williams’s recognition of Owen. They both
came from Caernarvonshire, but I have been unable to discover any closer link.
46.“De Joanne Owen Cambrobritanno epigrammatico celeberrimo.”John Russell,“Epigrammata”
(BL, Add. MS. 73542, fol. 15v).
In the year following his death, however, Owen’s tomb became a flashpoint for a very
different sort of verse, as satiric epitaphs challenged both Owen and his patron
Williams:
The poet Owens monument in Powles begins to serve for a Pasquin to

any merrie or malicious companion that fasten daylie some odde rime or
other foolish paper upon yt, and yt is doubted there wilbe some further
disgrace don yt in time, for yt is much maligned as an honor far beyond
the mans merit; among many other bald rimes I send you here one that
was thought to be the cause that the Lord Kepers name was blotted out
the last weeke from under an epitaph Parva tibi statua est which you had
from me almost a yeare since.47
A few weeks later, Chamberlain wrote again to pass along another poem mocking
Owen: “The verses upon Owen paint out his blacke brasen face somwhat handsomly,
and the elegie upon Washingtons death is not behind hand with Spaine.”48
At least some of these pasquils, or satiric epitaphs, posted on Owen’s tomb sur-
vive in manuscript collections.49 One is found in Rosenbach, MS. 187, with the lemma,
“Uppon poor Poet Owen whose effigies & Epitaph was set up in Paules wth verses by ye
By:[sic] of Lincoln, & Lord keep of &c”:
Heer have I many tymes lost my dinner

walking by this bawdy court like such a sinner
but out of this pillar now I am a peeper
& my Epitaph was made by ye Divine Lo: Keeper.50
This example seems to find its irony in the contrast between Owen as a walker of Paul’s
and the inappropriately dignified position of his tomb. The compiler of the manuscript
notes that “ye Lo: Keeper heer upon caused his verses to be defaced.”Whatever blotting
out took place was obviously not permanent, as both Henry Holland and William
Dugdale recorded the epitaph in their later descriptions of St. Paul’s.
The other pasquil on Owen is a much longer Latin poem, preserved in Hunting-
ton, MS. 172,“In dissimilimam Oweno Owen statuam. In aede D: Pauli London”[On the
statue of Owen, most unlike Owen, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London] (fols. 3v–4r). It takes
the effigy of Owen as its starting point, finding it incongruously large and dark:“Territat
infantes facies monstrosa”[The hideous face frightens the children], and it is mocked for
47. Chamberlain to Carleton, 25 October 16[2]3; Letters of Chamberlain, 1:518. The letter is misdated
as 1613 in McClure’s edition of the Letters.
48. Chamberlain to Carleton, 6 December 1623; Letters of Chamberlain, 2:532.
49. In addition to those discussed here, see also Sir John Roe’s “Viator, hic situs est”and Hoskyns’
response to Roe, both found in BL, MS. Harley 3910, fol. 57r.
50. James Sanderson,“An Edition of an Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Collection of
Poems (Rosenbach, MS. 186)”(PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1960), 198. In the margin adjacent
to the poem are Williams’s original verses.
44 james d oelman
being like the brazen head of Friar Bacon. Also relevant is a printed poem by Abraham
Holland in which he defends himself against those who “did falsely accuse him, to the
late Lord Keeper, of a Libell against John Owens Monument in Pauls.”51 In this vigorous
defense he denies that he could have posted such verses, as he was in Coventry:
strange that I
Should stretch a Line from Coventry
And make it reach to Pauls, and place
It under owens brazen face:
He suggests that whoever “fathered” the verses upon him was in fact the culprit, and
the references point clearly to John Taylor the Water Poet.
This complex scenario of an epitaph and responding mock epitaphs illustrates
some of the dynamics of epigrammatic satire. First, Owen’s tomb itself, seen as an ap-
propriate venue for pasquils, provided a common ground for the differing cultures of
the popular pasquil and the more elite Martialian epigram. There was clearly some de-
sire to bring Owen down to a mere epigrammatist. However, at least in this case, the
deceased is not the chief target of the satire: that is reserved for Bishop Williams, who
in attempting to commemorate the poet has prompted the reaction. Chamberlain’s
letter clearly points to the incongruity of a major churchman’s penning lines on a mere
poet and schoolmaster: it is “an honor far beyond the mans merit.”52 In the same year
Donne was criticized by some for composing lines on the far more illustrious Mar-
quess of Hamilton.
It is possible that the merry attacks on Owen’s tomb and Williams’s epitaph
mask hostility toward the Lord Keeper for other, more political reasons. Opposition to
Williams’s support of the king’s policy of peace toward Spain was very strong, and
Chamberlain’s December 1623 reference is followed immediately by one to the widely
circulating elegy on Thomas Washington, page to Prince Charles. Washington had
died in Spain in 1623 and reportedly was denied a tomb by the Spanish.53 For some it
may have been irresitibly ironic that a faithful Englishman was denied a tomb by the
Spanish, while an epigram-writing schoolmaster was so celebrated by the Lord Keeper.

The brevity and sharpness of epigrams rendered them very well suited to oral and
loose-sheet circulation, even while such circulation challenged the author-based
legacy established by Martial. While the boundaries of the epigram as a genre were
51.“Holland his Hornet To sting a Varlet,” Hollandi post-huma (1626), sig. G2r.
52. It is worth recalling the snide dismissal of Owen by Jonson:“Owen is a pure pedantic school-
master, sweeping his living from the posteriors of little childrem, and hath nothing good in him, his
epigrams being bare narrations”; Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford, 1985), 600.
53. In some manuscripts the elegy concludes with an epitaph:“Knew’st thou, whose these ashes
were”(e.g., Bodleian, MS. Rawl. Poet. 26, fol. 76v).
permeable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the genre continued to
be marked by fundamental characteristics that set it apart from other kinds of verse
and that also influenced the way in which it was used satirically. Its detached discrimi-
nation between virtue and vice was chief among these characteristics, and this posture
made available to its skillful practitioners an effective alternative to the raging and
railing of the conventional satirist.
brescia university college,

university of western ontario
abstract
The Renaissance epigram was distinguished from satire by its brevity and sharpness, features that
influenced how the form was used for political commentary. Its classical legacy promised an elite sta-
tus and authorial control, but its brevity and wit encouraged widespread oral, manuscript, and print
circulation, and epigrammatists therefore struggled to distinguish their work from various popular
forms, such as the ballad. The sub-genre of the epitaph was often used for satiric purposes, and exam-
ples prompted by the death of the epigrammatist John Owen provide a case study in the dynamics of
poetic and political exchange.

University of Pennsylvania Press Huntington Library Quarterly

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

University of Pennsylvania Press Huntington Library Quarterly

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Epigrams and Political Satire in Early Stuart England

Author(s): James Doelman

the historicist turn in literary studies over the past twenty-ﬁve

h u n t i n g to n l i b r a ry qua rt e r ly | vol. 69, no. 1 31

9. Scaliger, Poetices, 170.

Each driveling Lozel now

12. Unless stated otherwise, translations from Latin are my own.

Nil aliud satyrae quam sunt epigrammata longa.

Here lyes Tom short ye king of good fellowes

21. Epigrams (1618), 4:5.

If any aske, who heere doth lie;

Dum petit Infantem Princeps, Grantamque Iacobus,

Battus beleeved for a simple truth,

29. R. Malcolm Smuts,“Archibald Armstrong,”ODNB.

But when I would this indigested heape

33. A Rubbe and a Great Cast, sig. F4r.

Discourteous Death that wouldst not once confer,

The poet Owens monument in Powles begins to serve for a Pasquin to

Heer have I many tymes lost my dinner

brescia university college,

Anda mungkin juga menyukai