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with the ease with which they came to hand, and interpreted that as a good omen for Queen and people. He speaks of these being his first two solutions among five hundred tries. 5 Clearly, anagrams was a game for the leisure class. Another indicator of the popularity of anagrams can be found in The Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden ( 1711 ). A Scots poet and essayist
Nashe was very much a man-about-London; he hadn’t yet written his share of The Isle of Dogges – perhaps a sortie into class warfare which dispatched him into self-imposed internal exile. Furthermore – and this is the heart of the matter – Nashe was a friend of Shakespeare and Harvey not. Scholars now generally accept Thom as the model for Moth, and should recognize Harvey
joints, that ‘a Badger hath the Legs of one side shorter than the other’, and that ‘Jews stinke’. Pseudodoxia was a popular book that ran through six editions between 1646 and 1672; it provides a veritable gazetteer of the superstitions and delusions common among Elizabethan and Jacobean men and women of all classes, which ranged from the blatantly racist to the utterly
, unappreciated, and exiled (i.e., “oppositional”); culturally, he is high class; as a satirist, he is indirect, using allusion and allegory, e specially pastoral and animal allegory, to create deniability for his attacks. The way that other writers made use of this general understanding of the meaning of “Spenser” changed over time, however, as the political situation in England changed. After the censoring of the Complaints volume, poets did not closely imitate Spenser’s satirical works during the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. Instead, poets signaled the importance of
poem—John Buxton demonstrates that the allegory was difficult even for contemporaries by noting that, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornefull Ladie, “the disappointed Roger asks whether he had gone to all the trouble of expounding the Owl only to be jilted” (Michael Drayton, 291–92), and MUP_Hile_SpenserSatire_Printer.indd 157 14/10/2016 15:36 Spenserian satire 158 Richard Hardin argues that for “the uninitiated reader (which class includes all of us),” the general complaints about social ills in the seventeenth century form a sufficiently coherent message of