singing contest, eclogues, Virgil, Ovid, Heroides, Classical texts, Cicero, De Oratore, Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria, mooting, legal debate

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verse answering such as the singing contests of Virgil’s Eclogues (I, VII, IX) and Angelus Sabinus’s epistolary answers to Ovid’s Heroides (XVII, XIX and XXI). Classical texts also provided instruction in the art of riposte, including Cicero’s De Oratore (II. liii-lxxi) and Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria (V. 13). ⁹ While these sources probably lent respectability to the practice of verse answering and provided young scholars with reservoirs of witty answers and advice upon how to use them, selections of drolleries found in the perennially popular jestbooks brought an aspect of less socially prestigious camaraderie to the genre while offering further examples of pithy epithets suitable for response. ¹⁰

Inculcated in Tudor and early-Stuart writers of all literate groups of society was the utility and social prestige of being able to gain the upper hand in any social scenario from the alehouse to the courtroom or the court with a well-turned, preferably impromptu, witty rejoinder. The mooting or legal debate was a staple of education at the Inns and taught

⁹ The Eclogues, Bucolics, or Pastorals of Virgil: A Revised Translation, with Introduction, Text and Notes, trans. and ed. Thomas Fletcher Royds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1922); The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ouidius Naso, In Englishe Verse: Set Out and Translated by George Turberuile ... with Aulus Sabinus Aunsweres to Certaine of the Same (printed by Henry Denham, 1567), STC 18940; Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, completed by H. Rackham, LCL, 2 vols (Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1942); Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory: Or, Education of an Orator in Twelve Books, trans. John Selby Watson, 2 vols (Bell, 1882). Subsequent references for these texts are given in parentheses following quotations.

¹⁰ The first of these, and also the first book printed in English, was William Caxton’s publication of a translation of Mubashshir ibn Fatik’s The Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophers (1477), containing “quick answers” (see Curt F. Bühler, ‘New Manuscripts of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers’, MLN, 63 (1948), 26-30 (pp.28-30)). Jestbooks featuring witty rejoinders attributed to classical philosophers remained a staple part of the presse’s output throughout the period. William Baldwin’s Treatise of Morall Phylosophie Contaynyng the Sayinges of the Wyse. Gathered and Englyshed by Wylliam Baldwyn (printed by Edwarde Whitchurche, 1547) went through twenty-two editions before 1625 and contains ‘The First Book of Lives and Answers’ (STC 1253). Another was John Florio’s Florio his Firste Fruites: which Yeelde Familiar Speech, Merie Proverbs, Wittie Sentences, and Golden Sayings (printed for Thomas Woodcocke, 1578), which contains ‘Pretty Demands with their Ready Answers’ (STC 11096). For other examples see F. P. Wilson, ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, HLQ, 2 (1938), 121-58.

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