Joseph Hall

Joseph Hall (1574–1656) was an English bishop, satirist and moralist, born at Bristow Park in Ashby-de-la-Zouch and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His contemporaries called him the English Seneca for the plainness and fullness of his prose, and in later life he served as Bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich.

In 1597–98 he published Virgidemiarum, six books of verse satires, which he boasted was the first English satire in the manner of Juvenal and Persius. The first three books, the Toothless Satires, mock bad poets, the universities and the follies of daily life; the last three, the Biting Satires, turn to the vices of the great. Only those pieces that survive intact in the early printed texts are given here.