saturnalian, festival, permissive, immorality, satire, sins, holiday, Roman, saturnalia
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67
immorality, their infection by the sins they castigate and their salacious language.
123
The saturnalian festival was a time of permissiveness, of freedom from moral and legal restraints and responsibilities, and the temporary license afforded to the plebian classes allowed both the opportunity to castigate the vices of others and to indulge in vice oneself. The only saturnalian element that the satirists lack is the official sanction of a state holiday.
The indebtedness of the late-Elizabethan satirists to Roman satire and the saturnalia would seem to indicate that the personas they adopt are contrived out of their interpretation of the behaviour appropriate to such activities. Alvin Kernan puts forward a similar case. He argues that the outraged, combative temperament of satirists’ personas is distinct from the personalities of the authors themselves, and that in their satires they adopt satirical masks or personas that should not be confused with their personal identities.
124
This theory of satire is true to the extent that the satirists assume those character traits most likely to lead them into dispute, but it also rests uneasily with the animosity that they cultivate through the personal abuse that permeates their work. They provoke attacks against themselves quite deliberately and to this extent their personas must be identifiable with their personal identities since they are writers seeking to achieve fame through controversy. As R. B. Gill comments, one valid interpretation of the work of the late-Elizabethan satirists is that “the literary quarrels and student contentiousness in […] satires written by
123 Alvin Kernan, who is one critic that raises all these points, writes,
There is an old saying that “he who sups with the devil needs a long spoon”, and it appears that the satirist has never had a long enough spoon. Inevitably when he dips into the devil’s broth in order, he says, to show us how filthy it really is, he gets splattered.
The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1959), p.24. See also Dryden’s appraisal of Horace, Watson ed. (1968), p.135.
124 Kernan (1959), p.16, pp.38-9 and p.57.
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