The Originality of Donne's Satires

Abstract

Donne's Satires customarily receive little attention. In accounts of Donne the poet they tend to be regarded as apprentice works (with only Satire III a ttracling more than passing comment). In general accounts of Elizabethan satire they are seen to rank somewhat below the achievements of Hall and Marston. Their unevenness and brevity, when compared with the more sustained work of Donne's fellow satirists in the fifteen-nineties, has no doubt contributed much to their neglect in the field of English satire, while within the corpus of Donne's poetry it would be difficult to argue that they should compete for critical attention with the Songs and Sonnets and the Divine Poems. Yet the placing of them in either the general or the particular context has resulted in a degree of injustice. Donne's failure to observe all the conventions of the Elizabethan satirical tradition is seen to be compounded by a failure to develop fully the unique tone and voice that are heard in his own later work; or, put another way, the Satires are on the one hand too 'original,' and on the other hand not quite 'original' enough. Before exploring further the nature of the critical problem raised by the Satires, however, it is worth pointing out that Donne at no stage seems to have regretted writing them. His remark to Wotton in 1600 that 'to my satyrs there belongs some feare' was presumably occasioned by the recent ban on satires and the burning of works by Marston, Davies, and Guilpin. It is fear which attaches to them, not the 'shame' which, in the same letter, he finds occasioned by the Elegies and Paradoxes. In fact he valued them to the extent of considering them worthy of careful revision as late as 1607, when they were sent to the Countess of Bedford.

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