Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
train the youth to my commands,
In strict conformity.
All naughty boys you must correct,
With birch and ferule too:
For spare the rod and spoil the child,
A saying is most true.
Gage the schoolmaster goes on to promise “favours” such as “cakes and sugar plumbs” to children who are obedient, but to those who are not, he adds a curious threat: “But if you should rebellious prove, / For all that do amiss, / I keep at home a monstrous red / A red veil soak’d in p[iss].”7 The latter reference to the red veil seems to have originated from the inaccurate belief that Gage, who was from Ireland, was a Roman Catholic. Though the parody never elaborates on the veil’s function, the image played into stereotypes of the Inquisition, depicting Gage as not merely pedantic but cruel. Such emphasis on the general’s potential for ruthlessness, in turn, underscored the function of the parody itself as an act of public resistance, demonstrating the people’s willingness to disobey orders whatever the cost, and representing the proclamation’s claim to embody political authority as an utter failure.
A similar portrait of Gage is found in “A Parody on a Late Proclamation,” which, like its counterpart, eschewed any claim to high literary artistry, suggesting through its numerous metrical irregularities that the author was a literary novice. Again, however, the author’s implicit ordinariness actually heightens its ideological force by highlighting the contrast between Gage and the people whom he purportedly wishes to “humbly encourage.” For this parody goes further in directing its satire to the person of Gage, presenting him as an ambitious pretender who is particularly drawn to the pomp and affect afforded by the act of issuing his proclamation:
Humbly to imitate our Lord the King
(As Monkies [sic] do Mankind) in ev’ry Thing,
Who, in his first Year’s Reign, to the Nation,
Publish’d a right Royal Proclamation
For the Discouragement of Sin and Vice,
And the suppressing Immoralities,
This great Vice-Roy (now plain Thomas Gage,
Tho’ further Titles my high Hopes presage)
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Do issue, after mature Deliberation,
In our first Year, a like Proclamation,
Exhorting our Subjects to avoid and fly
Licentiousness, Sedition, and Hypocrisy.8
The primary trope of the parody—unmasking the governor as playing at being king, and adding that such playacting is itself a symptom of Gage’s appetite for power—displaces the governor’s self-representation with a parodied Gage, or “counter-Gage,” who is at once more ridiculous and more dangerous: thus, for instance, Gage as speaker employs the royal “we,” speaks of the people of Massachusetts as “our subjects” (as opposed to the king’s), and contrasts his current humble station with “high hopes” for “further titles.” Beyond recasting Gage in personal terms, moreover, the parody takes special aim at the regal pomp and theatricality of the text itself, culminating in an echo of Gage’s demand, at the end of his original proclamation, that the document be read ceremoniously before the people: “We hereby require all Justices of the Peace / To cause Offenders ’gainst the Laws to cease, / … / … / But first, make this Proclamation known, / That, by our Will they regulate their own.”9
This is parody, in short, not simply as a clever form of imitation but (to borrow Isaac D’Israeli’s description of the genre from his 1794 edition of Curiosities of Literature) “a work grafted onto another work” for the purpose of “turning” or transforming the original work’s meaning or representation of truth. Implicit in this definition is a conception of literary creation as involving the act of reading as well as writing, and this assumption underlies much of the poetic warfare of the Revolution and the early republican period. At the same time, in addition to its status as parody, it is the act of versifying, or turning a prose work into verse for a satirical purpose, that is crucial for understanding the versification vogue of 1774–1775 as well as the persistence of versification as a mode of political satire in the decades to follow. Students of eighteenth-century British poetry are well aware that versification had long been a popular nonsatirical literary activity, often associated with turning biblical texts into poems or songs. The underlying logic of this activity originated in the belief that translating prose into verse signified the elevation of mundane language into something more decorative or figurative. This might seem, at first glance, to be inconsistent with the purpose of parody, which more often works to the opposite effect of deflating the seriousness of elevated or official discourse. Yet the crucial element of the practice of versification involved the further recognition that poetry distinguishes itself from prose by the myriad ways—meter, sound devices, linguistic extravagance—it calls attention to itself as language (as opposed to content). This is the aspect that allowed the act of versifying an official proclamation to be understood as nullifying the interpellating function of legal or official discourse, by representing it not as a textual manifestation of power but as “mere” language—or, more precisely, as no less of a linguistic performance than any other imaginative composition.10
This was not the first time satirical versification had been employed in colonial America as a means of resisting the power of political language. David Shields reminds us, for instance, that the speeches of Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher had been turned into doggerel verse in the 1730s by Joseph Green; beyond this, examples of the genre are found in the satiric attacks against Sir Robert Walpole during the same period in England.11 What was unique about the sudden dissemination of versifications in 1774–1775 was precisely its status as a perceived literary vogue or fashion, culminating in the spontaneous appearance of versifications by numerous authors in different colonies. First, the dynamic of the vogue signified that verse parody was not merely about recasting in negative terms the words of a public figure but about constructing a critical audience representing the public at large, which conceived itself as free to respond to a vice-regent’s speech act with approval or, more commonly, censure. This critical power, moreover, was built into the physical appearance of versifications in the form of broadsides, for this was the print mode designed in large part for public display (which was also the reason the broadside was the preferred form for disseminating Gage’s and others’ proclamations in the first place). And though there is no extant record that the anti-Gage parodies were publicly displayed in the same locations as the original proclamations, the idea of public textual displacement was implied in the act of imitating a broadside document in the form of a broadside parody.
Equally important about the immediate response to Gage’s proclamation is that it was simultaneously parodied by poets from different colonies, creating the appearance, at least, of an intercolonial response to the Coercive Acts by poets who conceived themselves as part of a unified public in print. That such a public could be conceived at all owed itself to the communications network described in Warner’s Protocols of Liberty, in which local committees of correspondence made use of the vestiges of the British postal system to communicate strategies for responding to the administration in London and the colonial governors under its charge. In this sense, the versification vogue demands to be seen as part of this broader emergence of the increasingly unified colonial resistance that had led to the calling of the First Congress. Indeed, the appearance of a unified satiric response is one of the defining aspects of Gage’s governorship. For once the Pandora’s box of versification was opened in the summer of 1774, Gage could hardly utter a public word without being promptly parodied in verse, with the verifications themselves either originating or being reprinted in nearly every colony from Massachusetts to Virginia.12
In response to the formation of the Provincial Congress in October 1774, Gage issued a proclamation declaring the Congress illegal and ordering the people to ignore its directives