Satire: horrible, surreal, humiliating, hawkish, and hilarious. For all its imaginative peculiarity and investment in low provocation, it has made of itself a great art of public aggression. It has attracted canonical intellectual authorities and verminous minor writers alike. It has behaved as a parasite, thieving from greater literatures so that it can turn them into something ludicrous or stupid. It has also played host to more respectable forms of moral philosophy and various branches of serious political speculation. Napoleon said it was more terrifying than the British navy. The Roman emperors killed people for writing it. What are we to make of a literature which has been so openly cultivated and weaponised in public, and which has found such a comfortable place for itself both at the highest reaches of the polymathic intellect and the lowest rungs of sulphurous hell?
There are lots of different theories in circulation about what satire is and what it is for. The question is this: precisely what combination of social and political forces could possibly have come together in the long history of human evolution to produce this highly developed form of aggressive written literature? When did that happen, why did it happen, and what has its fate been in the long term? It has no clear origin story, no comprehensively collated and established history to speak of, and no clear future. This is a written literature which still has the power to embarrass, humiliate, appal, excruciate, and amuse its many different audiences, but what has its history been?
Some people have tried to trace the origins of satire back to the very earliest human societies. The idea is that somewhere in the dark, hostile, dangerous world of early man, incantations and magic spells were created by shamans or magi with the explicit intention of doing harm to others. Their words would have been targeted at evil spirits or malicious mortal enemies in order to ward them off or cause them physical pain. In other words, ‘satire’ would have worked as some kind of societal defence mechanism or a branch of aggressive magic, weaponised by a clerical elite. Another possibility is that satire may derive from a much deeper recess of panicked animal psychology, which would have driven early man to similar activities in which it would taboo threatening persons or express its natural aggression and hostility.
Of course any such narratives about the origins of satire are always inconclusive and often say more about the people who created them, but they offer some intriguing starting points. Incidentally, it has also been suggested that the modern arts of graphic satire may well derive, in however distant a fashion, from early cave paintings. It is thought that, like a modern satirist, early man externalised and commemorated phantom projections of known predators and natural disasters. Why? Perhaps to contend with them in a visual form and protect against them, or to warn others about the dangers such things represent.
However we want to define—and wherever we want to look for—the beginnings of satire, we are on much safer ground if we start looking at textual records and hard evidence. Literary satire with political subject matter can be found in some of the earliest writings of the Ancient Greek world. We can see very clearly that the Comedian Aristophanes used political satire to articulate arguments for peace under Pericles during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). We have all sorts of fragments and offcuts of a much wider corpus of verse satire dating from the Hellenistic period. These are probably little pieces of a literature with longstanding oral traditions and performance histories which were only written down at a later stage or in local circumstances.
A major corpus of political satire survives from Roman antiquity. Romans, from the earliest composers of state epic onwards, finessed and cultivated satirical arts in opposition to abuses of public office and collapses of civic virtue. They did so against a background of perpetual war and revolution for several centuries, beginning with the decline of the republic into warlord dictatorship. The great period of the triumvirate civil wars, culminating at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE) and the emergence of the Augustan principate, set the political conditions for a canon of written satire which always drew upon (and sometimes mocked) various intellectual traditions of moral philosophy and political theory passed down through rhetorical training. After Augustus, we have scattered clusters of satire reflecting on the grand and appalling vices of the Silver Age. The notorious depravities and excesses of the Silver Age elite are described in alarming and hilarious detail by satirists living in the shadow of execution.
This book is about British satire. However, the crucial argument of the book is that Britain was never truly post-Roman. The practical elements of Roman administration may have been lost with the collapse of the empire, and replaced in various ways during the colonisation period under the ethnic groups we refer to collectively as the Anglo-Saxons. However, English literary satire emerged within the overlapping shadows of two very different Romes: pagan imperial Rome, which had developed Britannia under various emperors from Claudius to Constantine, and papal or early Christian Rome, which established both the physical and metaphysical frontiers of European Christendom. Literary satire was the outcome of Rome splitting into civilisational spheres, real and imagined, across its former imperial territories.
Satire often interlocks sceptical political speculation with strategically weaponised creative disciplines. This can be observed very clearly in the early Anglo-Norman period (after 1066). It became an even more prominent literature with the emergence and development of parliament later in the Middle Ages. The creation of elective institutions within the English state apparatus brought different kinds of sectarianism, intellectual conflict, and ideological system-building: key factors in the development of literary satire, which has always found its place at the centre of political speculation in Britain and has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of offering unexpected and productive forms of sanity at times of collective political self-estrangement. This is not to say that satire has ever been natively or exclusively ‘English’. On the contrary, satire has always been an essentially neoclassical literature shaped by strong continental crosscurrents. Some of those crosscurrents have been generated by geopolitics. This is a literature which has always been defined by international vectors, and it has always been responsive to an unusually extended and perpetually active antiquity.
Another argument of this book is that satire in English literature has offered a perpetual critique of British state contingencies: without ever losing its crucial edge of modernity or devolving its critical mass of sanity in response to changes of public law. This has never been a literature for antiquarians, vague moral philosophers, or absent-minded academics. State of Ridicule, by extension, is for people who want to examine Britain’s self-perception as an active power project across approximately one thousand years of political history.
What separates satire from other types of literature? Tragedy, for example, or epic? To begin with, it has never really been willing to form (even temporary) canons for itself. It has also never been controlled in its entirety by norm-setting authorities, influential though some of its major practitioners have been. What this means it that it has never had an all-encompassing ‘tradition’ that can be redirected for ideological purposes or drafted into sectarian projects. To be a bit polemical and provocative, literary satire provides quite the antithesis to British Romanticism, which was actively redirected into class ideology and poorly managed psychological subjectivity by the untrained pastoral poets of the famous Lake School. Satire is an essentially baroque literature which has thoroughly internalised public questions, and much of its history has been characterised by the strategic weaponizing of high-functioning intellectual fluencies. This is why no-one from a ‘school’ or an insulated creative arts establishment is in a position to relativise satire for their own gain, and why it remains such an important tool for critiquing the most egregious, damaging, and irritating kinds of political behaviour. What we refer to as ‘satire’ is in fact a whole series of overlapping and discontinuous genealogies.
State of Ridicule is a largescale history of this most elusive and complicated of political literatures. Because it is an unusual book about an unusual subject, it is perhaps worth saying something about its intellectual background. First of all, it has emerged from the Cambridge school of political history in the UK, in which authors are treated as rational agents intervening in public discussions. The most important figure, here, is the great Quentin Skinner, whose writings inform the whole book. Within the study of English literature more specifically, the book has emerged from two very different intellectual traditions. First, a particular kind of historicism which has always cultivated skills in textual editing and biography and is not at all interested in continental Theory. Second, a particular kind of forensic ‘close-reading’ associated with postwar Cambridge which has roots in high Modernist formalism and the classical ars rhetorica. It has nothing, however, to do with the parallel school of Cambridge close-reading which was always really about pedagogical cults and untrained moral philosophy, which often came with low journalistic sensibilities and opposed the idea of serious professional publication. None of these intellectual backgrounds has been committed to doctrinally, but all vaguely played a part in the composition of the book and can be traced throughout. Satire always requires a very strange combination of approaches and rewards none of them consistently.
Most importantly, the book has been influenced by a lifelong study of grotesque, extreme, and aggressive arts. In literary terms, this is the largely metropolitan territory which includes Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Swift, and others like them. However, I am also interested in the graphic satires of Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, as well as the large space within alternative heavy metal that includes the albums of Primus, System of a Down, and Slipknot. By far the most important creative influence on the book has been a pair of albums played routinely throughout the writing process: Metallica’s Ride the Lightning (1984) and Master of Puppets (1986).
Dan Sperrin is research fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, who specialises in literary and graphic satire of the long eighteenth century. He is also a political cartoonist at The London Magazine and elsewhere.