Satire

This chapter sets out the modal repertoire of satire and charts the different stylistic choices made by poets across the sixteenth century as they engage with Juvenal’s dictum that ‘it is hard not to write satire’. It begins with the multivocality of John Skelton’s early Tudor satire, with its medley of varied styles, and the responses to his Colin Clout in Reformist, avowedly Protestant satire. At the Henrician court, Sir Thomas Wyatt translated neoclassical satire into a distinctly English idiom. Vernacular moralising satire flourishes in the period before the 1590s, when poets, such as John Donne, Joseph Hall, and John Marston, turn to the Roman satirists transforming London into the Rome of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius