Subversive Satire: the Glasgow Verses

The Glasgow Verses constitutes a formal anomaly in terms of genesis, appearance and meaning. Discovered only in 1995, the verses are part of a larger text, the so-called Hunter Codex, a manuscript MaruliÊ wrote and dedicated to his friend Dmine PapaliÊ. Closer investigation revealed that this collection of poems had been entirely overlooked by traditional scholarship, and that it was neither chronicled nor categorized within the authoritative compendia one uses in order to consult on such matters. It was thus established that the verses were a varied and separated compilation in their own right, completely new and unknown to critic and reader alike. Complicating the situation further was the erroneous ascription of these verses as epigrams. Marci Maruli eiusdem Epigrammata would seem to suggest that all 141 poems are somehow uniform in nature, and that they all abide by the conventional standards of a single rhetorical form. To the surprise and delight of the reader this is not entirely correct, for manifested within the verses is a playful satiric strain, which is not only subversive and individualistic, but also unprecedented within the known corpus of MaruliÊ’s work. This discovery augments the novelty and significance of the text as a recent scholarly find truly worthy of further research and examination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram as fla dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its sole.« It is immediately obvious that on a structural level some