One of the boons of interdisciplinary study is that it enables scholars to ask new kinds of questions and to use a wider array of texts and approaches to answer them, thereby articulating the complexities of human experience with greater precision. Within the social sciences and humanities, interdisciplinarity equips scholars to resist the critical tendency to conceptualize projects in terms of a disciplinary hierarchy, whereby one field is cast as the instrument of another. Too often, political historians view literature as a source of evidence or context for an argument about history, and not also as a repository of knowledge that fundamentally alters the terms of historical debate. Similarly, literary critics (and literary historians) too frequently mine political history for anecdotes rather than sustaining a dialogue with its assumptions and methods. What gets lost in this instrumental approach to writing history is a balanced account of the ways in which literature and politics shape one another. Happily, Andrew McRae's recent work, Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State, draws upon the resources offered by both literary and political history to address the questions posed by scholars in each field. In the first of two proposed books, McRae focuses on satire as “the pre-eminent literary mode of discrimination and stigmatization” to illumine how early moderns contested the prevailing belief that the right to free speech stemmed from monarchical authority (1). Utilizing a wide range of unauthorized texts, he argues that satire enabled people to make sense of confusing political circumstances, to forge innovative discourses of dissent, and to imagine alternative political identities.

Though McRae declares early on his wish to explore how the Bishop's Ban (1599) affected satire, leading readers to expect a narrative of literary and political developments, he organizes his book more around generic than chronological concerns. Thus, part 1 of his study, “Personal Politics,” investigates satire's raucous relative, the libel, which McRae highlights as “perhaps the single most important textual site for interaction between political and literary cultures” (8). The first chapter sketches the libel's classical origins and its proliferation in the seventeenth century, which owed as much to the anonymity encouraged by the manuscript circulation of verse miscellanies as to the outrage provoked by governmental excesses and court scandals. The second chapter examines how libelers challenged monarchical authority by attacking the bodies of the social and political elite, whose elevated status purportedly signaled the king's approval of their worth. By exposing the myth that outward appearance reflects inner virtue, libelers undermined elite efforts to shape identity through strategic self-display. Together, these chapters contend that the libel emerged in the early decades of James's reign as the primary tool for disputing idealistic constructions of the self.

Those chapters comprising part 2, “Public Politics,” assert that satirists extended the boundaries of authorized critique in their struggles “to conceive of novel discourses of politics, founded on radically new notions of individual freedom” (87). Drawing on published verse, pamphlets, and drama as well as unpublished libels, chapter 3 shows how satirists rebelled against conventional understandings of satire as a form of counsel. Such rebellion, McRae notes, reveals the boundary between liberty and license, but it also demonstrates satirists’ sustained attempts to construct a public sphere. Chapter 4 considers how satire developed in response to theories of statecraft advanced by Tacitus and Machiavelli, such that satirists’ rages against corrupt governance situated them not as obedient subjects offering wise counsel, but rather as indignant individuals capable of collective action.

The book's final part, “The Politics of Division,” finds McRae turning to royalist discourse in an effort to detail “the emergence of a trenchant conservative response to the insistent early Stuart expressions of political dissent” (156). The fifth chapter explores the polarizing poetic of royalist Richard Corbett. According to McRae, Corbett's desire to distinguish himself and his patron from their enemies motivated Corbett to eschew the values of unity and concord in his patronage poetry (values strongly espoused by Ben Jonson) and to embrace instead those of discord and division. Chapter 6 assesses the indomitable efforts of three Puritans, John Bastwick, Henry Burton, and William Prynne, to redefine orthodoxy and obedience in works published before and after their public stigmatization for sedition. Despite the state's repeated attempts to quell their critiques of secular and ecclesiastical practices, these three men continued to employ satire as a tool for positing alternative political and religious truths. McRae concludes his study by showing how oppositional discourses broke down in the 1640s due to a crisis of authority that was at once political and linguistic. In these turbulent years when rebellion raged to the point of regicide and civil war, distinctions between satire and the libel—indeed, between licit and illicit discourse more generally—blurred together such that no political truth escaped uncontested.

McRae's conviction that later writers such as John Cleveland and Andrew Marvell were deeply indebted to the unauthorized works of earlier writers helps to establish the formative role early Stuart satire played in shaping the early modern literary and political imagination. The primacy of the libel in this process may very well be confirmed by the electronic publication of “Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Political Poems from Manuscript Sources” (in Early Modern Literary Studies, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html), a collection McRae and Alastair Bellany coedited. McRae makes bold claims for satire throughout his book, but his chapters tend to rehearse rather than fully develop his fascinating contention that satire enables new political discourses (and political subjects). To be fair, McRae acknowledges at the outset that “the book's chapters ask distinct yet overlapping questions, and are concerned with distinct yet overlapping bodies of material … [since] this is not a subject best tackled in narrative form” (16). Yet numerous chronological regressions, coupled with relatively little argumentative progression, make for occasionally frustrating reading. Moreover, the textual evidence McRae provides does not always successfully bolster his interpretations. His discussion of “The Five Senses,” for example, fails to show how the political poem “hints at radically new structures of speech and action” (82). Despite these difficulties, McRae's study offers a welcome corrective to literary and political histories that overlook the ways in which unpublished satire fostered robust political debate.