1730s by Joseph Green; beyond this, examples of the genre are found in the satiric attacks against Sir Robert Walpole during the same period in England.11 What was unique about the sudden dissemination of versifications in 1774–1775 was precisely its status as a perceived literary vogue or fashion, culminating in the spontaneous appearance of versifications by numerous authors in different colonies. First, the dynamic of the vogue signified that verse parody was not merely about recasting in negative terms the words of a public figure but about constructing a critical audience representing the public at large, which conceived itself as free to respond to a vice-regent’s speech act with approval or, more commonly, censure. This critical power, moreover, was built into the physical appearance of versifications in the form of broadsides, for this was the print mode designed in large part for public display (which was also the reason the broadside was the preferred form for disseminating Gage’s and others’ proclamations in the first place). And though there is no extant record that the anti-Gage parodies were publicly displayed in the same locations as the original proclamations, the idea of public textual displacement was implied in the act of imitating a broadside document in the form of a broadside parody.
Equally important about the immediate response to Gage’s proclamation is that it was simultaneously parodied by poets from different colonies, creating the appearance, at least, of an intercolonial response to the Coercive Acts by poets who conceived themselves as part of a unified public in print. That such a public could be conceived at all owed itself to the communications network described in Warner’s Protocols of Liberty, in which local committees of correspondence made use of the vestiges of the British postal system to communicate strategies for responding to the administration in London and the colonial governors under its charge. In this sense, the versification vogue demands to be seen as part of this broader emergence of the increasingly unified colonial resistance that had led to the calling of the First Congress. Indeed, the appearance of a unified satiric response is one of the defining aspects of Gage’s governorship. For once the Pandora’s box of versification was opened in the summer of 1774, Gage could hardly utter a public word without being promptly parodied in verse, with the verifications themselves either originating or being reprinted in nearly every colony from Massachusetts to Virginia.12
In response to the formation of the Provincial Congress in October 1774, Gage issued a proclamation declaring the Congress illegal and ordering the people to ignore its directives and declarations. The proclamation was soon answered by a versification in the Newport Mercury, setting forth a pattern of parodic resistance that would continue past the outbreak of the war itself. Indeed, in the weeks immediately before the Battle of Bunker Hill, Gage gave perhaps his most momentous proclamation to date, declaring martial law in Massachusetts. Notwithstanding that his earlier proclamations had been satirized for their rhetorical extravagance, this time the governor went to the trouble of employing a ghost writer, the newly arrived Major General John Burgoyne, himself the author of numerous poems and plays, including The Maid of the Oaks, which was staged that same year at the Drury Lane Theater. As a hired stylist, Burgoyne did not disappoint, producing a proclamation twice as long as any of Gage’s earlier efforts, representing even more ostentatiously the vice-regent’s power before the people. First, the royal seal was significantly larger on this broadside than on Gage’s previous proclamations, and the obligatory list of titles more expansive: “By his Excellency, The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq.; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s province of Massachusetts-Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same.” Finally, the tone of the document was decidedly more pompous and indignant, as illustrated in the opening passage: “Whereas the infatuated multitudes, who have long suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known Incendiaries and Traitors, … have at length proceeded to avowed rebellion; and the good effects which were expected to arise from the patience and lenity of the King’s government, have been often frustrated, and are now rendered hopeless, by the influence of the same evil counsels; it only remains for those who are entrusted with supreme rule … to prove they do not bear the sword in vain.”13
Given Burgoyne’s literary pedigree, it is fitting that his first foray into the proclamation genre would draw into the versification trend two of the most famous poets of the American Revolution, Philip Freneau and John Trumbull. Scarcely twenty-three years old, Freneau was eager to lend his pen to the cause of the resistance, and his parody Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified, which appeared in July 1775, was the first of several anti-Gage poems he would publish that year. Trumbull, meanwhile, who had already achieved some literary renown for The Progress of Dulness (1772–1773), was petitioned by Silas Deane and other delegates to the Congress to compose a burlesque account of Gage’s military exploits. While working on that poem, which would eventually become the mock epic M’Fingal, he also quickly produced an anti-Gage versification entitled A New Proclamation! which appeared in the Connecticut Courant in August 1775 and as a separate pamphlet soon after. Following the tendency of the earlier parodies, Trumbull made much of the idea that the proclamation constituted a discursive or literary form, taking particular aim at Burgoyne’s rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, in the opening lines, he alludes to what many readers would have recognized as the definitive satire of the haughty proclamation—the one read before Gulliver on behalf of the emperor of Lilliput in the opening section of Gulliver’s Travels. Nor does this allusion merely satirize the vice-regent’s affectation, but it comments pointedly on the real limitations of Gage’s power in his army’s losses at Bunker Hill (see Figure 3):
By THOMAS GAGE, whom British frenzy,
Stil’d honourable and Excellency,
O’er Massachusett’s [sic] sent to stand here
Vice Admiral and Chief Commander;
Whose power Gubernatorial still
Extends as far as Bunker’s-Hill,
Whose Admiralty reaches clever,
Full half a mile up Mistic river,
Let ev’ry clime and ev’ry nation
Attend once more—
A PROCLAMATION.
Figure 3. Title page, John Trumbull, A New Proclamation! 1775. Trumbull’s versification of Gage’s proclamation of June 12 self-consciously imitates the iconography and the rhetorical flourishes (such as the ceremonial list of titles) of the original. Library of Congress.
As in the earlier anti-Gage versifications, Trumbull highlights Gage’s self-conscious performance by emphasizing the conventions of the proclamation as a form: “WHEREAS th’infatuated creatures, / Still led by folks whom we call traitors….” The parodied Gage acknowledges this pattern of repeating “whereas” clauses through the poem, adding parenthetically near the end, “And now (for bravely we come on, / One more Whereas, and then we’ve done).” Yet ironically, here, the function of the “whereas” clause—to set up the proclamation by stating universally acknowledged facts—only reinforces the precariousness of Gage’s military authority, forcing him to admit as fact that the rebels have “proceeded to give battle, / And with deep wounds, that fate portend, / Gall’d many a Reg’lar’s latter end.”14
Along the same lines, in a digression from the original document, the fictional Gage confesses that his entire practice of disseminating proclamations has all along been part of a wholly dishonest propaganda campaign. Elaborating on a statement from the original proclamation about how “the press, that distinguished appendage of public liberty” has been “prostituted to the most contrary purposes,” Trumbull adds fifty lines in which Gage complains that the people have refused to credit the falsehoods put out by Loyalist printers,
