Courtesy books, art of debate, Baldassare Castigliones, Il Cortegiano, civil life, Renaissance writer, balladists, ballads, imitation, printers
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11
rigorously, and the art of debate also featured prominently in the grammar schools.
11 Courtesy books, many deriving from Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528), taught aspiring gentlemen that one of the most important accomplishments of civil life was a well-rounded aptitude for debate.12 Under the influence of such forms of education, answer-poetry became representative of a literary mindset in which writers took pride in getting the better of their peers. As Downs-Gamble observes, “if the first objective of the Renaissance writer was the successful imitation of a master, the second was mastery”, and perhaps in no mode of verse is this objective so pronounced as it is in answer-poetry.
13 Such competitiveness even filtered down to printers and balladeers. According to Rollins,
When one press turned out a ballad that met with popular approval, rival printers, eager to share in the profits, at once imitated, moralized, answered, or attacked it. […] Printers often contented themselves with ordering balladists to write replies, devoid of piety or moralizing, to some ballad issued by a rival.
14
There is a distinctly mercantile aspect to such verse exchanges, and ballad mongers were particularly adept at recognising and manufacturing demand for their ballads. As Rollins points
11 Formal disputation was a conspicuous and rigorously practiced component of the legal training received at the Inns. This included daily disputations after dinner and supper, and mock disputations which took place “every night during Grand Vacation and twice a week in term”, Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1969), p.9. Among the rhetorical tropes taught at the grammar schools was the destructio or subversio, using which the student learnt how to “overthrow any argument based on probability with one of his own, based on a counter-probability”, Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1978), p.46. A significant number of poets who passed through the Inns apply their debating skills through verse answering, including Laurence Blundeston, John Donne, Barnabe Googe, John Grange, Edward Guilpin, Sir John Harington, the younger, John Marston, Alexander Neville, Benjamin Rudyerd, George Turbervile and Sir Henry Wotton. Finkelpearl (1969) lists several of them as resident students of the Middle Temple (Appendix A, pp.261-4).
12
The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione, Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby: Anno 1561, ed. Ernest Rhys (London and Toronto: Dent; NY: Dutton, 1928). Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
13 Downs-Gamble (1996), 2.10.
14 Hyder Edward Rollins, ‘The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad’, PMLA, 34 (1919), 258-339 (pp.292-3).
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