COMPARING 18TH CENTURY SATIRE

Comparing 18th Century Satire

Comparing 18th Century Satire

Introduction

The phrase satire is so current in common parlance that defining its range of applicability may seem to daunt at first. The first problem is to define what is meant by political: even by excluding more contemporary forms of mass-media-related satire in liberal and democratic political contexts and, because of space constraint, cinema, journalism, and video art and provisionally agreeing on the referential nature of satire (to the world outside the text, to history, to the community indeed, critics have often pointed out that satire flourishes in urban settings), the scope of political remains redoubtably broad.

Comparing 18th Century Satire

William Congreve's retelling of the Ovidian myth of Semele bore, at the time of its publication (1705-1707), a more vague political reference than it would be happened when, in 1743, George Frideric Handel (1785-1859) set it to music as an oratorio. The story of a woman, Semele, who is burnt because she asks to mate with Jupiter in his divine form and not in a human disguise, could soon be linked by the public to current events, namely, the intrusive political maneuvers of King George II's (1683-1760) German mistress. In Stephen Lawless's 2006 stage production of the oratorio, Semele, Juno, and Jupiter were portrayed, respectively, as Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), Jacqueline Kennedy (1929-1994), and President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), and the program notes at New York City Opera contained excerpts from journalistic reports on the Monica Lewinsky (b. 1973) and Chandra Levy (1977-2001) affairs. It must be noted that Handel and other composers switched from the opera to the oratorio form as a result (among other causes) of the page 1167 | Top of Articleimmense impact of the parody, and satire, of Italianate opera John Gay's (1685-1732) The Beggar's Opera of 1728.

As the Italian ...