Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England by Helen Pierce
Yale University Press, £35
Challenging the peculiarly English division of words and images as equal partners in communication lies at the heart of Helen Pierce’s book about early graphic satire. Looking beyond an early dictionary definition of satire as a nipping and scoffing verse, Pierce explains how the combination of drawn or engraved line and text helped to deliver powerful pieces of communication in early modern England. This despite a society which distrusted images and iconography because of its close association with Roman Catholic religious observance.
The Lutheran-Catholic tensions of the time provided much energy for all satirists but what was most interesting to this reviewer was the amount of home grown questioning of domestic political affairs such as the selling of monopolies in commerce.
The satirists of the time clearly understood the knavery offered by such officially sanctioned gifts, as The Description of Giles Mompesson shows. Sir Giles was the holder of the monopoly for the licensing of public houses and inns – and he fully exploited its opportunity for profiteering between 1616 and 1623.
This particular piece of art uses line
and text to make what might now be described as a comic strip. Mompesson and King James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, come out particularly badly in the book’s examples although neither gets the pain the Spanish Ambassador, one Gondomar, receives and all he had wrong with him, apart from his employer, was an anal fistula. Still, it really hadn’t been that long since the Armada had passed.
Much of the joy in reading this book lies in making schadenfreude-laden comparisons between the earliest days of the English print media and its spiky reflection of a society in turmoil and our own contemporary versions of chaos. Of course, no one knows how our current recession and the collapse of the mass-market print industry will end, but the need for communication of news and ideas through a powerful medium will remain. It’s up to the modern practitioners of unseemly pictures to find a way to make it work for them long after their dying print patrons are gone. Books like this will help.
Matt Buck
