Robert Gould (poet)

In the seventeenth century, a writer of an ode could expect remuneration, either in the form of a gift or, at the least, a higher fee from the bookseller in anticipation of sales to the flattered subject's supporters and family.

In 1683, however, Gould changed employers and made a name for himself as an author by writing Love Given O'er: Or a Satyr on the Inconstancy of Woman.

For example, Gould complains of the lust of women thus, "And now, if so much to the World’s reveal’d, Reflect on the vast store that lies conceal’d.

(lines 114-123) These lines are less scathing than the repetition of the anecdote of the Ephesian lady (from Juvenal) who would meet her lovers at her husband's tomb, the statement that women envy the greatness of Eve's sin, and that a prostitute is far better than a wife, since she only damns the soul, while a wife will damn the soul and destroy all happiness.

The next poems from Gould continued the misogyny of Love Given O'er (e.g. A Satyr on Wooing, Epistle to One Made Unhappy in Marriage, A Scourge for Ill Wives, inter al.) and attempted to broaden out the satire into an attack on human vanity in particular and mankind in general.

Satyr Upon the Play-House (1688), for example, attacked the parentage and pretense of Elizabeth Barry and Thomas Betterton, as well as the dissipate, drunken, whoring patrons of the theater.

It records the life of London around Covent Garden, complete with demobbed soldiers, thieves, prostitutes, and the nobility who only cover their filth in gold, cosmetics, and perfumes.

He also produced a few topical satires, such as To Julian, Secretary of the Muses, which attacks an anonymous lampoon author and gives specific detail about the personalities and personages of some of the dramatists of the day.

He even wrote a poem in honour of a retarded villager of Lavington before, two years later, writing a violent attack on the stupidity and obduracy of all the "simple folk" of the country.

However, the year after the publication of Poems, Gould engaged in a bitter exchange with the Poet Laureate, John Dryden.

Therefore, in the 1709 Works, Gould adds another section of the Satyr on the Play House just for Barry and lessens the invective against Betterton.)

In his satires, the families and ancestors of living noblemen are ridiculed viciously, if they took the Cromwellian side in the English Civil War.

Additionally, Gould not only asserts Church of England positions, but he has nothing but vitriol for radical Protestants, from Richard Baxter to George Fox onward.

His pen earned him a profession other than servitude and enabled him to escape a menial life, and, at the same time, allowed him to treat wealthy and established figures on an even footing.

Because his satires are sexually frank and exceptionally vicious, he was wholly unacceptable to the Victorian era critics who attempted literary histories and were responsible for the twentieth century's canon formation in literature.

At the end of the twentieth century, his name was revived as an example solely of "subliterary misogyny" by feminist literary critics such as Felicity Nussbaum, whose The Brink of All We Hate held out Gould's most scabrous satires (and almost exclusively Love Given O'er and the passage quoted above) as typical of an unpreserved tradition of misogyny.