In his carefully researched study, Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603: “A Kingdom for a Man,” Per Sivefors provides richly contextualized close readings of the late Elizabethan verse satires of John Donne, John Marston, Joseph Hall, and Everard Guilpin. He builds on the groundwork laid by historians and theorists of early modern manhood, most prominent among them Alexandra Shepard, who in Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003) taxonomizes different modes of masculinity in the period. Sivefors takes from Shepard the central idea of “competing forms of manhood,” some of which strayed from “patriarchal norms” of moderation and control (1). Late Elizabethan satire was written by young men from the Inns of Court and universities, milieus that promoted a culture of youthful excess. Hence, even as these satirists asserted dominant notions of manliness, they also evinced insecurity about their own social, economic, and cultural authority. Sivefors astutely uses this seeming paradox to wedge open the reductive manly/unmanly binary, thus placing a wider, less polarized, range of masculinities into view.

Demonstrating how previous critics have advanced reductive, inattentive, or dismissive accounts of Elizabethan satire, Sivefors produces historicized readings that take these texts seriously. For instance, he rejects the traditional view that finds in Marston's crabbed rants evidence of the author's psychological or aesthetic deficiencies. Unlike critics who simplify the cultural contradictions in Guilpin's Skialetheia by categorizing it as “angry satire,” Sivefors argues that Guilpin structures his text as a progression from the voice of a sharp-tongued young man to that of a more mature Stoic. Rejecting pat categorizations of his four authors, Sivefors deftly explores the cultural, economic, social, and legal particularities that inform these texts and that distinguish them from each other in argument and style.

Along with Shepard, Sivefors relies on the insights of several historians and cultural theorists of early modern gender: Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (1995); Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (1996); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999); Todd Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006); and Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (2011). These studies give heft to his analysis of Elizabethan satire in terms of topics such as self-control, violence, friendship, husbandry, procreation, patronage, honor, flyting, and the passions. At times, however, Sivefors's reliance on this scholarship unnecessarily limits the critical conversations into which he might have entered. For instance, although Sivefors often discusses satire as a contest of wit, he does not engage with Adam Zucker's The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (2011). While Zucker addresses dramatic, not poetic, texts, his treatment of wit, particularly in the chapters on London city comedy, is highly relevant to Sivefors's analysis of the satirical representation of urban life. Missed opportunities to engage slightly oblique studies such as Zucker's, as well as the reliance in particular on Shepard's taxonomy of manhood, give a slightly predictable cast to Sivefors's readings and might limit the usefulness of his study to scholars working outside his primary areas of interest.

Representing Masculinity is organized into four main chapters, each examining the satirical text or texts of a single author. Focusing each chapter on a different aspect of early modern masculinity (such as self-control in Donne, husbandry in Hall), Sivefors productively explores each satirist's engagement with one important criterion or experience of manhood. In chapter 1, Sivefors addresses the precariousness of male self-control in Donne's Satires. Despite Donne's reputation as a manly poet, the speakers of his satires seem unable to moderate their passions. Moving carefully through the five poems, Sivefors analyzes the ways in which Donne's speakers are compromised by the same divergence from patriarchal norms that they excoriate: for instance, in Satire One, the satirist shares a bond with the humorist, and in Satire Three the speaker is effeminized through his own immoderation.

Male violence in John Marston's Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie is the focus of chapter 2. Putting pressure on the concept of violence and its association with masculinity, both in the past and today, Sivefors argues that, for Marston, aggression is not a viable alternative to the failures of manhood he anatomizes. Marston ferociously condemns others’ faults even as he acknowledges his own, and expresses pessimism about the very possibility of adhering to patriarchal ideals. Sivefors offers a pithy formula that, to some degree, applies to all four writers in his study: “Marston builds the failure of masculinity into the very assertion of it” (84).

Asserting the centrality of husbandry to Elizabethan notions of manhood, Sivefors addresses in chapter 3 failures of provision and householding in Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum. In part because Sivefors locates in Virgidemiarum signs of conflict regarding a long-scale historical shift—“rising, egalitarian conceptions of husbandry” (96)—I found his argument in this chapter to be one of the most compelling in the book. Sivefors's attention to matters of household management and patrimony is a fitting approach to the only satire in Representing Masculinity to depict the English countryside. According to Sivefors, rather than simplistically reasserting decayed patriarchal values, Hall questions the values of thrift and independence as the essence of male husbandry.

Apart from a short Coda examining the effects of the 1599 Bishops’ Ban on subsequent satiric writing, Sivefors concludes with an analysis of the progression in Guilpin's Skialetheia from ritualized youthful misrule to a more stable, tempered kind of manhood. Sivefors includes here an account of youthful male insult and boasting that illuminates the texts of all four of his authors. Although in the later satires Guilpin's speaker adopts a tone of sententious detachment, Sivefors argues, his achievement of wisdom is tentative and fails to distance him completely from the faults that he castigates.

Representing Masculinity is a valuable study for anyone interested in early modern manhood or seeking a reliable guide to these difficult texts.