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Knowledge and Satire from Skelton to Shakespeare

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Knowledge and Satire from Skelton to Shakespeare The Art of Railing: Knowledge and Satire from Skelton to Shakespeare by Tristan Alexander Samuk A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Tristan Alexander Samuk 2017 The Art of Railing: Knowledge and Satire from Skelton to Shakespeare Tristan Alexander Samuk Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This dissertation argues that satire, or more specifically “railing,” provided the writers of the English Renaissance with a means of making epistemological change perceptible through poetry. Chapter 1 traces the beginnings of railing in John Skelton’s satiric attacks on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, arguing that the paradoxes and inconsistencies of Skelton’s poems are an attempt to explore how the centralized Tudor state was turning reason into a decentralized political force that could both legitimize and resist the truth claims of the ruler. Chapter 2 examines the verse satires of John Donne, in which Christian figuralism allows Donne to see individual morality as something involved in larger social and economic forces. In “Satyre 3,” railing becomes a way to articulate a problem that arises from the Christian-figural viewpoint: how can you discern the true religion if historical forces emanate from everything and everyone? Next I turn to Edmund Spenser, whose satiric poetry in The Shepheardes Calender, Mother Hubberds Tale, and The Faerie Queene interrogates the emerging gap between human thought and the natural world. Spenser uses the limitations of satire and complaint, with their focus on the world as it is, to gesture at a higher possibility for poetry that imagines how the world could or should be. The final chapter examines how Shakespeare’s As You Like It expands on the socially transformative promise of art that Spenser depicts in The Faerie Queene. Jaques, the play’s satirist, tries to use ii the descriptive methods of natural philosophy as a model for curing the corruption of the world, but this approach ends up preventing him from imagining any alternative. Jaques, however, is a poet as well as a natural philosopher, and the poetry of his railing gestures at another form of truth that he himself is not entirely conscious of. This truth turns out to be the conditional truth of the aesthetic, the virtue of “if” that Rosalind uses to imagine a new life for the exiles in the Forest of Arden. Satire may not be able to change the world, but it makes it possible to imagine a kind of art that can. iii Acknowledgments I couldn’t have made it through this project without the remarkable patience and intelligence of my advisor, Christopher Warley. I’m also extremely grateful to Deidre Shauna Lynch and Holger Schott-Syme, who were generous with both their time and insights. At the University of Toronto, I’d like to thank Jeremy Lopez, Mary Nyquist, Tanuja Persaud, Marguerite Perry, Sangeeta Panjwani, John Reibetanz, and Paul Stevens. My gratitude as well to all the people who read, listened to, or commented on early versions of these chapters, including Rebecca Bushnell, Hugh Grady, Timothy Harrison, Colleen Rosenfeld, Lauren Shohet, Rebecca Totaro, William West, and various audiences at NeMLA, RSA, SAA, and Scientiae. I’m thankful for the support of my brother Kieran and my father Igor, and, most of all, for Ariel Martin-Smith’s love and faith in me through some very difficult years. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Adrienne Samuk, and grandfather, William Bothwell. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Satire, Poetry, and Knowledge 1 Chapter 1: John Skelton’s Enlightenment 22 Chapter 2: The Ethical-Historical Subject of Donne’s Satyres 44 Chapter 3: Spenser’s Broken Idol 72 Chapter 4: Satire and the Aesthetic in As You Like It 97 v 1 Introduction Satire, Poetry, and Knowledge 1 Do We Still Care about Satire? For a few weeks in 2015, satire was front-page news. In January, two Islamist gunmen attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing many of its best-known cartoonists. The gunmen claimed to be avenging the honour of the Prophet Mohammed, whom the magazine had depicted in a number of controversial cartoons. One of the most interesting things about the response to the attack was the way the victims were described in the Western media. Almost universally, they were referred to as “satirists,” rather than simply cartoonists or humourists. In much of the reporting, the idea of satire became a means of arguing that Charlie Hebdo was something more than just provocative entertainment. When its cartoonists made fun of Mohammed, they were rejecting everything that Islam holds absolute and, at the same time, affirming their own absolute support for free expression. In the West, describing the slain cartoonists as satirists was a way to frame them as martyrs to secular, democratic truth. Nevertheless, in an editorial comic for The Guardian titled “On Satire,” the graphic novelist Joe Sacco didn’t hesitate to denounce Charlie Hebdo’s provocations as vapid and opportunistic. Turning the satire back onto the magazine itself, Sacco’s comic shows how easy it is to be pointlessly offensive: one panel depicts a black man falling out of a tree while holding a banana, and the next shows a Jew counting his money in the entrails of the working class. Sacco’s argument is that creating these kinds of images doesn’t require much intelligence or bravery. “Yes, I affirm our right to ‘take the piss,’” he insists, “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is.’”1 For Sacco, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo fell short of what satire is supposed to be about: knowledge, the question of how things got this way. In their case, that question would encompass, among other things, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria, and the endemic discrimination that Muslims continue to live with in modern France. A cartoon that asks such a question would be making an entire history perceptible. Satire figured prominently in the coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attacks because, as Sacco suggests, it has a strong association with the question of historical knowledge. That hasn’t 2 always been the case, however. Although satire originated in the ancient world, the kinds of questions that Sacco is talking about weren’t being asked until the early modern period. The sixteenth century is a key moment for satire because it’s the origin of many of our current ideas about what a satirist is supposed do. In the sixteenth century, satire became an aesthetic means of asking questions about the link between historical and epistemological change. When John Skelton attacked Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in Collyn Clout (1523), he wasn’t just adapting the conventions of medieval complaint to slander Wolsey as an irrational tyrant. He was also using satiric poetry to explore the effects of political and social change on the definition of reason. For Skelton and later poets of the English Renaissance, satire was a way to show that knowledge has a history, and that its history is still unfolding. 2 The Knower During the Renaissance, new cultural and religious movements profoundly altered what it mean to know something, and the satirists of the period responded by using poetry to make these epistemological changes perceptible. Satire, or more specifically “railing,” became a way to articulate the confusion of living in a world with multiple irreconcilable standards of theological, historical, and even natural truth. In the process of making knowledge change visible, satire participated in an early modern rethinking of poetic imagination as a special kind of knowledge distinct from what the observable world could provide. When we read sixteenth-century satire, we’re seeing the beginnings of our modern ideas of art. The view of poetic imagination that emerges from early modern satire in many ways resembles Jacques Rancière’s theory of the aesthetic. In Rancière’s work, the word “aesthetic” refers to two different things: a “regime” that he primarily associates with post-Romantic artists and writers, and a special kind of “experience” that isn’t necessarily limited to any one period in the history of art. These different versions of the aesthetic, the regime and the experience, are essentially two ways of thinking about the breakdown of the boundary between art and life. Rancière doesn’t think it’s useful to see art simply as an ideological mystification of elite power. Instead, he’s interested in how art imagines new ways of living and, as a result, creates an opportunity for actual change to occur.2 He argues that art offers a way to see that certain aspects of the world in which we live—inequality, exploitation, repression—are neither necessary nor eternal. Such an experience creates a momentary sense of “autonomy” that allows the viewer to critique and 3 historicize his own social experience. This is part of what Rancière terms a “politics of aesthetics,” or “metapolitics,” a revolutionary moment of self-education in which a work of art inspires a change in the real world that politics alone might not have been able to effect.3 Rancière’s idea of aesthetic experience is, in many ways, a more historically grounded version of what Immanuel Kant calls an “aesthetic idea.” In The Critique of Judgment, Kant says that aesthetic ideas are representations that have an ineffable quality to them and that, through imagination, seem to “strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience.”4 An aesthetic idea doesn’t just depict a thing; it expands or alters the viewer’s understanding of that thing by introducing new imaginative connections and provoking “much thought.”5 Poetry is the ultimate medium for aesthetic ideas because poetry is, in Kant’s words, “the art of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a task of the understanding.”6 Unlike rhetoric, which tries to control the reader’s thinking with persuasive language, poetry can use nonliteral or ambiguous language to open up new possibilities for thought.
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