Satire

I

Introduction

Satire, genre, traditionally in literature, drama, or art, and later also in live performance, television, and films, that employs wit in the form of irony, innuendo, or outright derision to expose human wickedness and folly. The term is derived from the Latin satura, meaning a “medley” or “mixture”, and is related to the Latin adjective satur, “replete”. In the Renaissance, as a result of false etymology, the word was confused with satyr, and so took on the connotation of lasciviousness and crude mockery. In ancient times, however, it was agreed that satires were intended to tax weaknesses and correct vice wherever found. In modern times, satire is recognized as a genre of humour, still rooted in oral and written traditions of literature, but now represented through a range of media on a global scale.

II

Satire in Antiquity

No strong tradition of satirical poetry existed in ancient Greece. Among the few satirists were Archilochus, whose vituperative verses date from the early 7th century bc, and Cercidas the Cynic. The archetypes of Greek satirical drama were the comedies of Aristophanes, written in the 5th century bc and still performed today. Satire as a distinct literary form was the creation of the Romans—starting with Gaius Lucilius. His 30 books of verse satires present savagely outspoken views on a wide variety of subjects.

The Roman poet Horace was the first great satirist whose works endured and served as models for later writers. A cool satirist, he preferred to “comment with a smile” on such follies as the tendency towards extremes, especially in sexual matters, or boorish behaviour. In contrast to the gentle pokes of Horace is the acidity in the 16 verse satires of his contemporary Juvenal, who ferociously exposed the vices of Roman society and contrasted them with the honesty and tranquility of small-town life. A Stoic, Juvenal viewed murder, certain sexual practices, forgery, perjury, theft, gluttony, luxury, avarice, and fawning over the rich as sins of equal magnitude. He railed against soldiers' brutality towards civilians. His misogyny prompted descriptions of the types of women he particularly disliked. Juvenal’s third satire, on the miseries of life in Rome, complains: “Our birthright now is lost”; it is the source of the poem “London” (1739), by the English writer Samuel Johnson. The solemn moralizing of Juvenal's tenth satire inspired another of Johnson's poems, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), a despairing commentary on the frailty of human reason.

Martial, a Spanish poet who lived most of his life in Rome, was a friend of Juvenal and a master of the epigram, which relies on insult as well as mockery. Martial produced a corpus of scathing comment on life in decadent Rome—15 books of verse epigrams—and introduced the satirist's practice of playing off friends against enemies. Another work from the 1st century ad is the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, which describes the adventures of two decadent characters, Encolpius and Asclytos, representatives of the society of the period. Most of the extant fragments of the book concern a feast in the home of Trimalchio, where the host's efforts to turn the bawdy conversation to philosophy and literature are in vain.

III

Medieval Satire

Satire was conspicuously present in many forms of medieval literature: the fabliau, goliardic verse (see Latin Literature), beast fables, and dream allegories such as the 13th-century Le Roman de la Rose and the 14th-century English poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, better known as Piers Plowman, which is attributed to William Langland. In the French allegory, satire is aimed at women, the clergy, impostors, and assorted professional types; in the later English work, it is directed principally at hypocrisy in the Church. The 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who translated part of Le Roman de la Rose, carried on its various satires. Chaucer’s own masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, also uses satire extensively; for example, in their respective tales, the Friar and the Summoner trade satirical stories insulting each other's religious beliefs.

IV

Renaissance Satire

With the Renaissance, satire came to be written more often in prose than verse. The great Renaissance masters of the genre included the German poet and humanist Sebastian Brant, the French writer François Rabelais, the Dutch writer Desiderius Erasmus, and the Spanish master Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Brant ridiculed a whole repertory of human types in Das Narrenschiff (1494, The Ship of Fools), which reappeared in English in 1508 in a version by the poet Alexander Barclay. Erasmus, speaking through the persona of Folly in his Praise of Folie (1509), still makes modern readers laugh at the customs, beliefs, and behaviour of the major social and professional types of his day. Illustrations for the original edition, by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, reinforce the message of the text. Rabelais's Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534) are robust extravaganzas nevertheless infused with the author's humanistic ideals. Cervantes's great satire on knight-errantry, Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615), arraigns society for an entire gamut of weaknesses, from blind idealism to narrow practicality.

Satire appeared on the 17th-century English stage in the plays of Ben Jonson, and later in two masterly verse satires: Hudibras (1663-1678), a burlesque of Puritanism by Samuel Butler, and the political satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681-1682) by John Dryden. In France, the dramas of Molière satirized many social and moral types: hypocrites, social climbers, cuckolds, Don Juans, and medical impostors; his characterizations are still meaningful for modern audiences. Molière's contemporary, the critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, wrote 12 verse Satires (begun in 1660) probing manners and matters both public and private.