The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Romeyn de Hooghe and the Glorious Revolution

Meredith McNeill Hale

The first detailed study of the political satires of Romeyn de Hooghe since the nineteenth century
Provides a detailed examination and deep-level interpretation of individual satires via a series of case studies
Reveals the origins of modern political satire, in the process deconstructing the genre's dominant tropes and critical functions

The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Romeyn de Hooghe and the Glorious Revolution

Meredith McNeill Hale

Description

Political satire has been a primary weapon of the press since the eighteenth century and is still intimately associated with one of the most important values of western democratic society: the right of individuals to free speech. This study documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when political print became what we would recognise as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, Meredith M. Hale locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III's invasion of England known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe on the events surrounding William III's campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe's satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.

The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Romeyn de Hooghe and the Glorious Revolution

Meredith McNeill Hale

1:Introduction. The Birth of Modern Satire: Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) and the Glorious Revolution
2:The Roots of Modern Political Satire
3:Foreign Subjects: The End of the Absolute Monarch
4:Satires on Domestic Subjects: William III and Amsterdam
5:Text, Image, and the Performance of Satire
6:The Role of the Satirist and the Problem of Moral Conviction
7:Conclusion: The Geography of Satire

The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Romeyn de Hooghe and the Glorious Revolution

Meredith McNeill Hale

Author Information

Meredith McNeill Hale, Lecturer in History of Art and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, and Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge

Meredith M. Hale received her PhD from Columbia University in New York and was awarded the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She worked as a Senior Specialist in Old Master Paintings at Christie's New York before taking up the Speelman Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, from 2009 to 2018. She joined the University of Exeter as a Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture in 2019.

The Birth of Modern Political Satire

Romeyn de Hooghe and the Glorious Revolution

Meredith McNeill Hale

Reviews and Awards

"Meredith Hale, from the University of Exeter, has carried out the first detailed analysis of the satires, including translating them into English, to show how De Hooghe responded to the rapid unfolding of events in England and the Netherlands — dating some of the satires to within weeks. She argues they are the first images that can be classed as modern political satire." - Mark Bridge, The Times