Satire, What Is It Good For?

Abstract

Satire and war have a longstanding literal and metaphoric relationship. Satire has long been the medium to criticize war, while also being figured itself as literary ‘warfare.’ This essay examines the interplay between war and satire in two early modern English prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The vnfortunate trauller (1594) and Thomas Dekker’s Worke for armorours (1609). Both writers contributed satirical works to literary ‘wars’ of the period, but this essay moves away from their literary feuds and argues that Nashe and Dekker’s prose employ sites of war as settings for social satire and to explore how war, like satire, functions a force that disrupts as a means to correct social abuses.