Per Sivefors, Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590-1603: “A Kingdom for a Man.”

Abstract

Per Sivefors, in his robust study of Elizabethan verse satires, draws out the varying yet expansive treatment of masculinity and manhood. Through his historicist approach, Sivefors concentrates on texts that were considered as satire by Elizabethan writers and readers (3). By deftly close-reading them he argues that Elizabethan satires were more than just vituperative, Juvenalian, and ‘coterie writing’ produced by men for men’s consumption (4, 12). The satirical works in question refer to the following collections: John Donne’s five satires (c. 1593-98), John Hall’s Virgidemiarum, published in two installments in 1597 and 1598; John Marston’s Certaine Satyres (1598) and The Scourge of Villanie (1598); and finally, Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia (1598). These writers were all men in their early twenties who shared a sense of camaraderie in homosocial spaces of influences like the Inns of Court and Universities (12). Overtly misogynist and homophobic, these writers easily bonded over their economic precarity, objectives (mimicry of power, condemnation of vices), and common targets (proud women, effete men, male social climbers, gender-benders, and coney-catchers) (8-14).