satire

satire, from the Latin satira, a later form of satura, which means ‘medley’, being elliptical for lanx satura, ‘a full dish, a hotch-potch’. The word has no connection with ‘satyr’, as was formerly often supposed. A ‘satire’ is a poem, or in modern use sometimes a prose composition, in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule [OED]. In English literature, satire may be held to have begun with Chaucer, who was followed by many 15th-cent. writers, including Dunbar. Skelton used the octosyllabic metre, and a rough manner which was to be paralleled in later times by Butler in Hudibras, and by Swift. Elizabethan satirists include Gascoigne, Lodge, and Morston, whereas J. Hall claimed to be the first to introduce satires based on Juvenal to England. The great age of English satire began with Dryden, who perfected the epigrammatic and antithetical use of the heroic couplet for this purpose. He was followed by Pope, Swift, Gay, Prior, and other satirists of the Augustan period (see mock-biblical and mock-heroic). The same tradition was followed by Charles Churchill, and brilliantly revived by Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The Victorian age was not noted for pure satire, although the novel proved an excellent vehicle for social satire with Dickens, Thackeray, and others. In the early 20th cent. Belloc, Chesterton, and R. Campbell (in his Georgiad) contributed to a moderate revival of the tradition, pursued in various verse forms by P. Porter, J. Fuller, Clive James, and other young writers; and prose satire continues to flourish in the works of E. Waugh, A. Powell, Angus Wilson, K. Amis, and others. In theatre and television the ‘satire boom’ of the 1960s is generally held to have been pioneered by the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1960) by Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.