Previous
Personification
Definition of Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians... read full definition
Act 3, Scene 5
Explanation and Analysis—Women's Cosmetics:
Excitedly explaining his plan to kill the Duke by tricking him into kissing the poisoned skull of his dead fiancée, Vindice pauses to reflect on the fleeting nature of beauty and what he considers to be the vain follies of women. His speech, excerpted here, constitutes an extensive and misogynistic satire of women and female vanity:
Does every proud and self-affecting dame
Camphor her face for this, and grieve her maker
In sinful baths of milk, when many an infant starves,
In her superfluous outside, for all this?
Who now bids twenty pound a night, prepares
Music, perfumes, and sweetmeats: all are hushed.
Thou mayst lie chaste now! It were fine, methinks,
To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts,
And unclean brothels [...]
You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms.
Gazing upon the skull of Gloriana, to which he has applied make-up to mimic the appearance of a live young woman, Vindice meditates satirically upon the foolish sacrifices that he believes women make in the name of beauty. Women, he claims, apply camphor, a tree-derived powder used in cosmetics, to their skin in order to change their appearance, and they accordingly “grieve” God by disguising the faces that God made in the act of divine creation. Further, Vindice claims that women take “sinful baths of milk” in order to soften their skin, leaving infants starving for lack of milk. While these cosmetic procedures might “deceive men,” he notes that all men and women look the same in death and “cannot deceive worms.”
Related Themes:
Act 4, Scene 2
Explanation and Analysis—Satire of Lawyers:
In Act 4, Scene 2, Lussurioso orders the death of “Piato” who is in fact Vindice in disguise. In a turn of both dramatic and situational irony, he decides to find a new “panderer” and asks Hippolito about Vindice, who then assumes a new disguise as a lawyer. In their “first” meeting, Vindice offers a harsh satire of lawyers, a conventional target for satirical works in the early modern period:
Lussurioso. What, three and twenty years in law?
Vindice. I have known those that have been five and fifty, and all about pullin and pigs.
Lussurioso. May it be possible such men should breathe,
To vex the terms so much?Vindice. ’Tis food to some, my lord. There are old men at the present, that are so poisoned with the affectation of law-words – have had many suits canvassed – that their common talk is nothing but Barbary latin. They cannot so much as pray, but in law, that their sins may be removed, with a writ of error; and their souls fetched up on heaven with a sasarara.
Vindice claims that he has spent 23 years studying law, a comic exaggeration of the lengthy education and training of lawyers. Upping the ante of this satirical exaggeration, he also claims to know other lawyers who have spent 55 years studying the arcane laws that regulate animal husbandry (“pullin,” or poultry, and “pigs.”) Lussurioso responds with shock, asking if it could really be possible that men “vex” or litigate such minor concerns so extensively as to require such an arcane and complex legal code. Further developing his satire of the legal profession, Vindice adds that many elderly lawyers are "so poisoned with the affectation" of legal language through their extensive experience handling “suits” that they can only speak in a corrupt form of Latin, the language used in legal courts throughout Europe at the time. Further, they speak to God as if at trial, offering a “writ of error” to expiate their sins, and they are summoned to heaven by a “sasarara,” or a legal summons. The play's satire of lawyers suggest that they reduce spiritual mysteries to mere legal procedure.
