As William R. Jones explains, “satire is an inherently ideological act” (22), and his compelling study successfully illustrates that point. Jones argues that this genre engages, with clear authorial intention, in a reformative ideological agenda of what he throughout calls “perceptual translation.” No definition is provided, but I understand him to mean the power to reorient ideology and thereby reshape public perception, hence cultural orthodoxies. Jones emphasizes that satire is fundamentally “activistic” in being an ideologically committed attempt to induce social change. He explains the usage “activistic” by way of comparison to the difference between “a moralist” and “someone ‘moralistic’” in “making moral judgments without the same level of commitment” (15). A satirist's activistic role is less “direct social intervention” than an activist's (15), just as in comparison to “activist art” satire is less focused on a single issue, often “present[ing] … [a] lanx satura, or overflowing dish, of wrongs to be righted” (17).

Jones argues persuasively that what differentiated the period's authorized satirists from its censored ones—as well as their opposing classical models—was their ideological position on a “centripetal-centrifugal binary” (22). On one end was centripetal “nationalistic satire,” whose “agenda [was] to support the centralization of authority in traditional institutions” (21)—i.e., the work of what Alvin Kernan calls the “conservative revolutionary” (The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance [1959], 50). The classical model here was Horace, whom Dryden would later characterize scathingly as a “naturally servile,” “well-mannered court-slave” (37), and “minister of state in Satire” (41). Jones explains the affinity among many Renaissance English writers for Horace's toothless satire in terms of the similar precariousness of the English Reformation era and the early years of the Roman Empire: “Both historical periods are linked by incubate empires in crisis, struggling to fortify their national images and hierarchical structures” (41). On the other, centrifugal end of the ideological spectrum, the contrasting late Elizabethan vogue for Juvenalianism was thus associated with “radical iconoclasm” (31) asserting individual “libertas (freedom)” (71). Imitation of Juvenal's biting, relatively demotic satire therefore produced what Marston called a “barking satirist” (80), one authorities deemed not nationalistic but “nihilistic” (88) and “potentially seditious” (81).

At the center of the book is the Bishops’ Ban of 1599. After the opening chapter reorients readers to an ideologically activistic focus via modern-day examples, ensuing chapters take up ideologically stabilizing efforts first by the Henrician courtier Thomas Wyatt, in his seminal Horatianism published posthumously in 1557, and then in schoolmaster Thomas Drant's 1566 translation of Horace, aimed at “Englishing” satire and bolstering nationalism, empire, and the sanctioned order of the English Church (chapter 2); the contrasting vogue for unorthodox Juvenalian satire culminating in the Bishops’ Ban (chapter 3); this ban's singling out of two antifeminist satires due to their unqualified threat to Elizabeth's authority (chapter 4); and the attempt during the War of the Theatres (1599–1601/02) to return satire to a more stabilizing form while, in “Shakespearean meta-satire” (134), “allow[ing] the audience to witness (with critical distance) aspects of the Juvenalian ideology in dialogue with a number of other competing discourses … without authorial judgment” (chapter 5) (134).

I have few criticisms. The sensational Martin Marprelate controversy (1588–89), initially solicited and then censored by bishops, is omitted (as are stage clowns’ satirical engagements), and the pamphlet war between that “young Juvenal” Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey (1592–99) receives only passing mention (66, 70–71). The survey of criticism occasionally loses the through line of the thesis. And frequent use of the theoretical-sounding phrase “perceptual translation” and invocation of proliferating “fields” (“social,” “cultural,” “sociocultural,” “economic,” “political,” “literary,” “phallocentric,” etc.) are less than clarifying.

Quibbles aside, this is a smart, quick (168-page) read for both students and scholars. Among its valuable contributions, Jones's book offers a nuanced approach to satire; fruitful analysis of differing classical models’ ideological commitments; a significant intervention in what Charles Knight calls “satiric nationalism” (The Literature of Satire [2004], 50); a convincing account of the long-debated rationale for the Bishops’ Ban's targets and nontargets; and fresh readings of Wyatt, Drant, Weever, Hall, Marston, and Shakespeare.