Reynard's Last Shift

Printed for & Sold by Carington Bowles, at his Map & Print Warehouse, No. 69 in St Pauls Church Yard, London. Publish'd as the Act directs, 24 June 1779

Private collection

Satire or Droll?

The catalogue title, mezzotint satires, retains the designation used by Frederick Stephens and Dorothy George who list these mezzotints under personal satires. Recent commentators like Diana Donald, Sheila O’Connell, and Ellen D’Oench follow this convention. Yet, the eighteenth-century catalogues from the printshops of Carington Bowles, Robert Sayer, and their successors Bowles & Carver and Laurie & Whittle avoid a usage that would restrict these images to satire, narrowly conceived as a genre. There the prints appear under such headings as "Droll and Humorous Subjects," or "drolls." The Laurie & Whittle catalogue of1795 continues this tendency to generalize beyond satire by advertising posture mezzotints, largely Robert Sayer’s plates, as "the greatest variety of whimsical, satirical and burlesque subjects (but not political)."

This broadening to "humorous subjects" illuminates one of the curiosities in the emergence of the droll, its relationship to the fancy picture--that is, paintings and their mezzotint reproductions from earlier in the eighteenth-century that both draw on continental, principally Dutch, genre painting and develop a domestic tradition through the work of artists like Philip Mercier, Henry Morland, and Henry Walton. As Martin Postle points out, the fancy picture explores the picturesque in a range of subjects such as children, beggars, women servants, the itinerant poor, rural folk, and cottagers. From this rich variety of subjects from paintings and large mezzotints, selected images were reduced to the 10 x 14 inch posture plate and marketed as drolls.

To a modern viewer, the humorous or satiric content may not be readily self-evident, for instance my experience in coming across pictures like Physick or Law without inscriptions beyond the title at Colonial Willliamsburg. But a few weeks later, I found copies at the British Museum with verse subtexts that pointedly satirized doctors and lawyers. It was then readily evident why these images were staples in the stock of both the Sayer and Bowles firms through three decades appearing in lists of "Droll and Humorous Subjects" from Sayer’s 1766 catalogue through those of Bowles & Carver and Laurie & Whittle in the mid-90s.

A similar twist surfaces in Philip Mercier’s School for Girls and A School of Boys reduced from larger paintings and mezzotints to posture size with satiric subtexts. In the case of School for Girls the verse on the schoolmaster’s lascivious intent accords with picture, but turning an image of schoolboys standing by sheepishly as another is punished into a commentary on the strong mobbing the weak seems more of a stretch. But it demonstrates the cunning with which engravers and printsellers responded mid-century to this growing market for a print that was topically fetching as well as being both affordable and of a size that lent itself to convenient handling. The posture allowed for easy display in a printshop window, provided a print that could as well fit readily into a portfolio or an album for the casual collector as decorate a tavern, kitchen, or brothel—all venues in which mezzotints appear in other print images.

Along with the shifts in size, text, and context that help identify a posture image as a droll, Diana Donald suggests another, quoting from a mid-eighteenth-century commentator "On Ridicule," John Brown:

For in fact, do we not see every different Party and Association of Men despising and deriding each other according to their various Manner of Thought,
Speech, and Action? Does not the Courtier deride the Fox-hunter, and the Fox-hunter the Courtier? What is more ridiculous to a Beau, than a Philosopher: to a Philosopher, than a Beau? Drunkards are the Jest of sober Men, and sober Men of Drunkards. Physicians, Lawyers, Soldiers, Priests and Freethinkers, are the standing Subjects of Ridicule to one another. . .(28)

This delineation of one group, one stereotype from another can justify satire, "its attraction. . .therefore at best partial," Donald writes, "at worst socially divisive, expressive of mutual prejudice and contempt"(28). But the response may be more generous as well. The point is that beggars, urchins, servant girls, lawyers, prostitutes are all to one degree or another potentially "other" to the print’s audience. The distance may provoke derision and contempt, to echo John Brown, but depending on the subject—say, The Unlucky Boy, A Drowsy Dame, or A Lady’s Maid Soaping Linnen—possibly a response more amused and whimsical. What I am trying to suggest here is that the embrace of the drolls is such that the type may be satiric on the one extreme, its most pejorative and divisive, or more in the spirit of a joke on another, possibly even conciliatory, fostering a measure of social understanding and sympathy.

This distinction comes through in the discussion of jokes by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. Like John Brown, above, she acknowledges the role of boundaries or social categories—gender, class, race—that may provoke ridicule. Satire may in fact sustain or amplify difference as a way of preserving moral or social hierarchies. Thus Bakhtin notes, " The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it." The joke, on the other hand, may allow openings for continuing negotiation and reconciliation. Even if on the wrong end of a joke, its target, we can still laugh, most generously to show that we can share the humor of the situation, or defensively to show that we can "take" a joke.

Certainly the tension at the boundary is played upon and where the stakes are too high or the transgression too dangerous, the divisiveness of satire will prevail. But whereas satire polices the boundaries, the joke may succeed in effecting, under the cover of humor, a felicitous crossing, or "rite of reconciliation." Douglas writes, "boundaries are fuzzy and face two
ways. . .Boundaries connect as well as separate"(105). The joke may reduce the degree to which difference or a category crisis involving social distinction is perceived to separate rather than connect. "Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchized, undifferentiated social relations" (104).

In this sense then, broadening the category from satire to droll may open new avenues for interpretation. The prints certainly play upon key divisions within late 18th Century British society. As Douglas observes, "If there is no joke in the social structure, no other joking can appear"(98). But derision and contempt may soften into levels of amusement and whimsy that lower the stakes and take the edge off a potential conflict. Part of the success of a droll may be in fact that it defuses a potential satiric reading by suggesting multiple perspectives.

For instance, on one level Reynard’s Last Shift may be read satirically as a comment on the upper-class hunters’ callous indifference to the disruption their sport brings down upon a peasant family. But we know as well that the image takes place within a narrative that here begins to yield other possibilities, among them the lascivious joke of the huntsman grabbing tail, highlighted by his reach between the legs of the alarmed woman. There is also the problem of the two genteel bystanders, woman and man, whose amused nonchalance is so striking. Is this cruel indifference or is it just possible that the young man’s gesture and her gaze indicate that they share our lascivious joke, setting up a complicity with the viewer? And indeed who are we as the imagined viewer? Possibly our 18th Century counterparts—the purchasers for a print like this—would be more of the "middling sort" who would see themselves as neither gentry or peasant, but there were always openings for alignment one way or the other. It could be that part of what made "jokes" like this so resilient in the period was a fluidity of the social structure in which the boundaries were unstable, even while readily recognizable within the visual delineation the prints suggested through such markers as dress.

The fluidity of terms like satire, droll, joke, or fancy picture in this context indicates how slippery the boundary issues raised by the posture mezzotint can be. I have included a broad enough representation of the fancy picture here, particularly from the 1760s, that readers or viewers can seek out their own boundaries. The caution is that if one is too exacting, one might find oneself drawing lines that the printsellers themselves, as reflected in their catalogues, sought to obscure. In other words, the lists of impressions under headings like "posture mezzotints," "droll or humourous subjects" include a rich intermingling of genre or fancy pictures with images that are transparently satiric, droll, or comic.

Yet in constructing the catalogue, I have more strictly observed other boundaries also echoed in the printsellers’ catalogues. Numerous mezzotints, many in the posture size, from the period feature prominent actors often in celebrated scenes from the stage. Generally more expensive than the drolls, these theatre prints are well represented in Lennox-Boyd, Theatre: the Age of Garrick, but not here. Another distinct category, also a staple in printsellers’s catalogues from the period, is "Scripture Pieces," Biblical illustrations. For the most part, I have excluded these, with two exceptions. The one is Susanna and the Two Elders that seems to play to a more lascivious audience, the other is the Prodigal Son series that appear between 1770 and 1800. As Ellen D’Oench has shown, this parable sets up a powerful resonance with late 18th Century political and social tensions. In this respect, the series takes on elements of caricature and a highly contemporary modeling, reflected in both dress and setting that distinguishes them from scriptural illustration and sets them more squarely within their audience’s culture.

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