SOURCE: Munns, Jessica. “‘The Monster Libell’: Power, Politics, and the Press in Thomas Otway's The Poet's Complaint of His Muse.” In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, edited by James E. Gill, pp. 59-75. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Munns asserts that the Exclusion Crisis, coupled with Otway's own need for artistic patronage, led him to compose The Poet's Complaint, an ode that gives qualified support to royal authority.

Thomas Otway's twenty-one stanza ode, The Poet's Complaint of His Muse; or, a Satyr Against Libells, was written in 1679 and published in 1680.¹ It was written at the height of the Exclusion Crisis—the movement to exclude the heir, the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from the royal succession—which many feared was a prelude to another civil war. Although the poem describes the contemporary political fractures and concludes with a panegyric on...