George Gascoigne Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rayna Kalas

Critical Essay by Rayna Kalas

SOURCE: Kalas, Rayna. “The Technology of Reflection: Renaissance Mirrors of Steel and Glass.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 3 (spring 2002): 519-42.

In the following essay, Kalas examines the symbolic importance of the mirror in Gascoigne's The Steele Glas.

In 1576, just a few years after the newly invented crystal glass pocket mirror was first available as a novelty import in England, George Gascoigne published a verse satire conspicuously titled The Steele Glas. The poem is an estates satire for the sixteenth century and as such levels its invective on all of society. Yet as its title indicates, the poem orchestrates its censure around a single paradigmatic object, the crystal glass mirror. In everything from its manufacture to its exchange to its use, the crystal glass mirror signals social and material changes that contravene the modes of production and signification that Gascoigne identifies with the traditional...
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