Introduction

In both recent and more distant studies of the sociological characteristics of Renaissance verse several claims have been made for the centrality of answer-poetry to Renaissance poetics, although a full-length study of the genre has not been forthcoming. Lauro Martines notices that “when combined with politics, the fashion for occasional verse goes to help explain the mid-seventeenth-century vogue for mocking answer poems”, and E. F. Hart describes answer-poetry as, “one of the most characteristic poetic productions of the first forty years of the seventeenth century”. ¹ More recently a few critics have become attuned to the presence of the genre in the sixteenth century. While Steven W. May observes that, “a good deal of poetic interchange took place among certain Elizabethan aristocrats”, Arthur F. Marotti, in his wider examination of answer-poetry in print and manuscript, writes that,

Given the socially dialogic context of the manuscript miscellanies and poetic anthologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is no surprise to discover in such an environment various forms of verse exchange, including large numbers of answer poems. ²

Margaret Downs-Gamble recognises a lack of critical attention to these “large numbers of answer poems”. She notices that, while the influence of the Renaissance education in dialectic upon drama and prose has received considerable attention, “argumentative disputation, the ultimate goal in Renaissance education, the ultimate joy in Renaissance entertainment, has been excluded from our consideration of Renaissance poetic”. ³ In her short study of answer-poetry

¹ Lauro Martines, Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p.57; E. F. Hart, ‘The Answer-Poem of the Early Seventeenth Century’, RES, n.s. 7 (1956), 1929 (p.19).

² Steven W. May, ‘Companion Poems in the Ralegh Canon’, ELR, 13 (1983), 260-73 (pp.260-1); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), p.159.

³ Margaret Downs-Gamble, ‘New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture’, EMLS, 2:2 (1996), 33 pars (32), <http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/02-2/downdonn.html>.