The Rehearsal Transpros’d and the Rehearsal Transpros’d:The Second Part

In his exuberant bestseller The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672‒3), Marvell deploys Menippean satire to parry Samuel Parker’s bullying intolerance and lobby Parliament to extend the royal indulgence for Dissenters. This chapter traces Marvell’s debts to the Menippean tradition with its many voices, identifying within that tradition a ‘conciliar’ strain that values group decision-making in councils and thus consensus and conciliation. Gleefully mingling verse and prose, jest and earnest, high and low, drama and religion, the oral and the written, ad hominem and general attacks, Marvell allows the genre’s characteristic heterogeneity to underscore the value of religious and political pluralism.