SOURCE: Corthell, Ronald J. “Beginning as a Satirist: Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum Sixe Bookes.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 23 (winter 1983): 47-60.

In this essay, Corthell discusses how the Virgidemiarum reveals Hall's early conception of himself as a writer in the Elizabethan era. Further, the critic argues that Hall's first satire represents the work of a young poet attempting to establish an original mode of writing in the shadow of great poets such as Edmund Spenser.

In his compelling studies of the Elizabethan idea of the literary career, Richard Helgerson has encouraged a reading of Elizabethan literary history which attends primarily to various career models followed by poets rather than to stylistic or generic distinctions between writers. In a recent essay which borrows cautiously from principles of modern linguistics, Helgerson has portrayed the late Elizabethan literary world as a “system” of signs within which we can interpret what he terms...