Legal Excess in John Donne’s ‘Satyre V’

Chapter 3 examines John Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, which applies the social and ethical reforming energy of the satiric genre to the need for system-wide legal reform in England. The piece is a tribute to his employer, the Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, who was lauded for his integrity and commitment to reforming the financially exploitative aspects of legal process, particularly in the Court of Chancery. Central to Donne’s satiric critique of the law is his attack on the excesses within the legal-political system that have been generated by the offences of suitors and legal professionals alike. His analysis is complicated, however, through the evocation of corrective strategies that instrumentalise excess, including equitable reasoning and practices (in Chancery and in statute interpretation), legal and political representation, and secretarial service. Donne exploits and revitalizes traditional legal-political analogies to illuminate the tensions in a system that was forestalled by, but also functioned through, excess. The result is an analogical, rather than metaphysical, style that generates new ethical implications for the Donnean speaker’s characteristic subject position. His in-betweenness emerges here not as a function of individual freedom, but as a function of his new proximity and enlarged responsibilities to others as well as to prevailing social, legal and political forms.