Legal pressures fundamentally shaped English satire during the long eighteenth century. Rather than being purely repressive, however, the law often encouraged authors and their booksellers to find creative ways to write and publish satire to circumvent both the authorities and the courts. As part of their strategy, satirists developed verbally evasive forms of satire, producing coyly ironic, densely allegorical, and circumlocutory rhetorical styles markedly unlike the seventeenth century’s most bald-faced manuscript lampoons. Shifty printers and booksellers also complicated the mechanics of detection and prosecution through a host of publication ruses. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers’ tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also eventually led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire’s most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of eighteenth-century rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature. Such acoustic and visual forms relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.