| Summary: | The thesis deals with the satire produced by the popular print culture in London during the Civil War, examining the satirical texts in the wider context of Renaissance literature as well as in their immediate political and religious setting. The thesis applies the work of historians of popular culture to literary forms of popular expression in order to assess the rôle of the satirical pamphlet in Civil War society and politics. The social function of satire in effecting change in the perception of reality and in public opinion accounts for the deliberate "popular" manner of satirical texts in the 1640s; the satires printed as single-sheet quarto pamphlets exploit the book market and provide a rhetorical vehicle for Parliamentary and Royalist writers. Part I introduces the principal themes examined in the thesis, and provides a methodological framework for the analysis of 1640s popular literature. Furthermore, Part I discusses John Milton's notions of satirical propriety and suggests that Milton's polemical prose has a place among the satires of the 1640s. Part II argues that the ancient understanding of satire as curse provides in the 1640s the basis for the use of anagrams and typographical characters in satirical, formal malediction; the verse satire of John Cleveland (1613-1658) receives particular attention. Part III sets the notion of particular satire in the context of "libel" and the iconological controversy of the seventeenth century: lampoons and "pasquils" are consciously iconoclastic, marring the image of the person attacked. No more clearly is this seen than in the pamphlets responding to Eikon Basilike (1649) which use satire to break the image of the king. Part IV demonstrates the influence of the Greek satirist, Lucian, upon the satire of the 1640s in which heaven and hell feature prominently; Lucian is a particularly interesting example of erudite allusion in popular texts. Part V suggests that the preoccupation with order and disorder is central to the seventeenth century; a study of the function of representations of order, the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos in particular, in satirical and non-satirical texts leads to an examination of the rôle of parody in subverting order. The Appendix consists of a short analysis of A Satyr Against Hypocrites (1655) by Milton's nephew, John Phillips (1631-1706), demonstrating the influence of Milton on popular forms of satirical expression; aspects of satire treated in the thesis coalesce in the examination of Phillips's A Satyr Against Hypocrites.
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