Just read Juvenal's 6th satire. It's really pretty atrocious. I didn't know I had much capability for offense left, but I guess I do. I 'm looking forward to seeing how it gets translated in the 17th century--see what stays in it and what comes out. I don't have all that much hope, but it's interesting.
Love claims, a couple of times, that Restoration satire has almost nothing to do with what he calls the Jacobean satire of Marston and Hall. I haven't found a source for it yet. As far as I can reconstruct his argument, he believes the Restoration satire develops out of the 17th-century lyric and various traditions of scorn poetry. And, I suppose, the Roman tradition.
His evidence, though, often seems contaminated by data from another period--he describes the local satirical tradition, for instance, with reference to Philaster, which quite possibly was influenced by Marston/Hall. (That's actually an interesting question itself. I bet someone has worked on it.)
Most of my brain, though, is going into German now. Outside of my morning Juvenal and evening book, I'm studying most of the rest of the time. Which is good, I suppose. But man am I getting tired this morning.
It turns out that alcohol changes my comfort level getting up. I need to drink less at night before I head to bed, and get to sleep faster when I do. I mean, it'll be fine, but just as a general rule, why sell tomorrow's time against today.
Anyway, Love (or Lowe?) finds in the earliest Restoration satires an attempt to take skilled craftsmanship and sprezzatura of the lyric and make it public and filthy, in order to offend moralists. This move isn't far off the bad and satirical sonnets that get written--Greene's Funeral, Harvey's sonnets. Maybe it is--the Greene's funeral sonnets are REALLY awful. I want to look to the publication history of that, to see if there's maybe not much evidence they sold many copies. I understand their relevance to Harvey/Nashe/Barnfield, etc, but they're so bad. It's not a master of craft, so much as a screwing up.
Marston and Hall, to some extent, seem more oriented towards the stage than the sonnet. I'll have to think about that, of course. Or the bitterness of the epigram? (Which, as Rosalie Colie points out, Shakespeare pulls into the sonnet.) Are Shakespeare's sonnets so belated that he struggles with anxiety of influence--of course he does--the RIVAL POET. hmmm
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