The Scourge of Villainy, John Marston, Persius, late-Elizabethan, satirists

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Combative, provocative and confrontational, these satirists court such hostility towards themselves actively. They are particularly cognisant of their roles as provocateurs and of their consequent responsibility to fortify themselves against detraction. Marston, for instance, in a prefatory verse for The Scourge of Villainy (‘To Detraction I present my Poesie’), asserts boldly that his “spirit scornes Detractions spight” ¹²⁰ and Skelton declares in ‘Against Venemous Tongues’, “For though some be lidder, and list for to rayle,/ Yet to lie vpon me they can not preuayle”, ‘Laxent ergo antennam elationis suæ inflatum vento vanitatis. li. Ille, &c.’. The invulnerability they affect registers their indebtedness to the indefatigability of the classical satirists. Horace declares defiantly, “at ille,/ qui me commorit (melius non tangere, clamo),/ flebit et insignis tota cantabitur urbe”: “But if one stir me up (“Better not touch me!” I shout), he shall smart for it and have his name sung up and down the town” (Satires, II.i. ll.44-6). ¹²¹ Persius is also aware of being prone to detraction and begins his first satire by dispelling the censure of an imagined critic who accuses him of declaiming satires for which there is no demand. Juvenal, the principal classical model for the late-Elizabethan satirists, conceives of himself as engaging in an antipathetic dialectic with his fellow artists: “Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponan[?]” (“Must I be always a listener only, never hit back[?]”), he asks in his opening

¹²⁰ The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1961), p.95.

Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
¹²¹ Here Horace chooses retaliation in kind as an alternative to the litigious tendencies of his peers:

Cervius iratus leges minitatur et urnam,
Canidia Albuci quibus est inimica venenum,
grande malum Turius, si quid se iudice certes.

Cervius, when angry, threatens his foes with laws and the judge’s urn; Canidia with the poison of Albucius; Turius with a big fine, if you go to court when he is judge.

(II.i. ll.47-9)

Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, ed. G. P. Goold, LCL (London and Cambridge MA: HUP, 1999), pp.130-1. Satires I.iv. and I.x. are also written in retaliation

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