A Study of Satire in a Seventeenth Century Pamphlet

A rapid expansion in the production of cheap, printed pamphlets of various kinds, most notably the prototypical newspapers known as ‘newsbooks’, took place during the early years of the English Civil War. Such pamphlets have been extensively studied to date but there has been relatively little attention paid to the use of satire in them despite the social importance of this genre. In this paper I discuss how satire was used in one such pamphlet and show how a close reading of the text’s satirical elements can provide much information about the social context in which it was produced.