Satire, Immoderation and the Bishops' Ban of 1599

This anthology chapter offers a reconsideration of the Bishops' Ban in 1599. While the Ban has been considered a far-reaching act of censorship, little is known of its causes. In this chapter I argue that the reasons behind the Ban primarily had to do with the Martin Marprelate controversy earlier in the late 1580s and early 1590s, and that it was not so much the specific contents of the banned works that was targeted as the troublesome character of satire itself. The vogue for verse satire in the late 1590s arguably was linked to apprehensions about the lingering heritage of the Marprelate tracts, and associations of immoderation and slander attached to the religious pamphlets spilled over on to the printed verse satires later in the decade.