When late seventeenth-century readers wanted to inform themselves about happenings at the centres of power and fashion they had no newspapers or gossip columns to fall back on. Instead they turned to lampoons - frank, malicious, and often highly indecent accounts in verse of the real or fabricated goings on of the court and ruling elite. Harold Love presents the first comprehensive account of the thousands of lampoons and more serious `state poems' that survive from RestorationEngland and their impact on the life of the nation and the literary practice of satire.

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

The first book length study of the motif of impotency in poetry from early antiquity through to the late Restoration, this book explores the impotency poem as a recognisable form of poetry in the longer tradition of erotic elegy. Hannah Lavery’s central claim is that the impotency motif is adopted by poets in recognition of its potential to signify satirically through its use as symbol and allegory. By drawing together analysis of works in the tradition, Lavery shows how the impotency motif is used to engage with anxieties as to what it means to enact ’service’ within political and social contexts. She demonstrates that impotency poems can be seen on one level to represent bawdy escapism, but on the other to offer positions of resistance and opposition to social and political concerns contemporary to a particular time. Whilst the link between the 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Ovid and Rochester is well known, Lavery here looks further back to the origins of the concept of male impotency as degradation in the works of earlier Roman poets. This is an important context for considering how the impotency poem then first appears in the French and English vernaculars during the sixteenth century, leading to translations and adaptations throughout the seventeenth century. Lavery's close readings of the poems consider both the nature of the literary form, and the political and social contexts within which the works appear, in order to chart the intertextual development of the impotency poem as a distinct form of writing in the early modern period.

Monarchical government in the later 17th century was a political fact of life and remains central to an understanding of the period. The subject of this book is the court of the later Stuart kings in the period 1660-1702. Its purpose is to provide an introduction to some of the emergent themes of court politics, culture and society. Marshall achieves this by analyzing the ritual side of court government in its structural, political and cultural guises.

Essays by leading scholars explore the work, life and times of the notorious libertine poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

A major new study of the notorious Restoration rake-poet, set in his intellectual context.

Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.

The Farce of Sodom is a sexually explicit play which satirizes the reign of Charles II of England during the Restoration of the English monarchy. Explicit and uncompromising in tone, this send-up of the Royal Court grossly exaggerates the rumors surrounding the court of the king. We witness the homosexual King Bolloximian ban ordinary sexual intercourse in his kingdom, decreeing that only anal intercourse be permitted among the entire population. The excesses of the wealthy are shown in a sequence of erotic acts in a court preoccupied with luxuriating in debauchery. Eventually the nature of the acts the wealthy are consigned to perform upsets enough members of the court, and King Bolloximian is violently deposed. He and his closest companions are then consigned to hellfire. Banned for centuries, during recent years The Farce of Sodom has attracted renewed appreciation, with a version of the drama staged at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival.