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Chapter 2 - Pierce’s Heirs

Satire at the Inns of Court and in the City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2023

Christopher D'Addario
Affiliation:
Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

This chapter traces the precise urban realities that encouraged the Inns of Court satirists to turn to Thomas Nashe’s urban metaphysical style as they constructed the satires and epigrams that poured from the Inns. In doing so, I aim to clarify both Nashe’s and the city’s central place in the development of this poetic mode, a centrality that has been underrecognized in our literary genealogies. In this confluence of authors writing and reading amidst the city’s various spaces in the last decade of the century, we can see more clearly an urban metaphysical aesthetic, at once plenist, obscure, digressive, and visceral, being put into practice. The first part of this chapter explores the vogue for verse satire in the last years of the century, linking it both to the precise urban conditions out of which its authors wrote and to Nashe’s own skeptical impulses. The latter half examines the satires’ and epigrams’ formal features to show how these poems, just as Nashe’s prose before them, self-consciously reorganized and reprocessed the urban experience in ways that we now associate with the metaphysical style.

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Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
The Invention of the Metaphysical
, pp. 92 - 143
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Pierce’s Heirs
  • Christopher D'Addario, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
  • Online publication: 07 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009110884.003
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  • Pierce’s Heirs
  • Christopher D'Addario, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
  • Online publication: 07 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009110884.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Pierce’s Heirs
  • Christopher D'Addario, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
  • Online publication: 07 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009110884.003
Available formats
×