ABSTRACT
A broadsheet verse satire is a single-sheet publication printed on one side, in three columns of closely printed text. It is more likely that such broadsides were intended to be read alongside other printed volumes rather than displayed on the wall. The satire extends to 154 lines in rhymed pentameter couplets, and is broadly burlesque in its strategy, imitating a serious, even heroic, manner to discuss a vulgar, quotidian and fraudulent topic, coffee and coffee-houses. As a target of satire, coffee-houses and coffee-men – ‘these sons of nothing’ (l. 47) – are emblematic of the profound political and cultural revolution that was occasioned in London by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. But the satire further explores coffee’s medicinal properties and physiological effects, which had been widely inflated by medical writers (surveyed in Volume 4 of this edition). These claims are ridiculed here, and coffee are revealed to be a fraudulent and inefficacious quack remedy that (contradictorily) encourages syphilis and other morbid conditions. The taste and flavour of coffee are given extensive analysis, denigrated by repeated and diverse associations with excrement. In part this curiosity about the ‘hogo of sirreverence’, not only in coffee but also China ale and other spiced drinks, suggests a search for, and curiosity about, a critical language for new bitter flavours (see Ellis, Coffee-House, pp. 116–17).
