George Turbervile, Troubadour verse, Scottish literary culture, Hugh Singleton, Antipophora, George Puttenham, Elizabethan Ballads, Early Modern England, Rejoinder, Replication
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out, “Occasionally a wide-awake stationer would print both a ballad and its answer, as when on the same day Hugh Singleton licensed “Though Fondly Men write their Minds, Women be of Gentle Kind” and “I will Saye as I do Find, my Wife to me is nothing Kind””.
15 Similarly, Richard Jones licensed a ballad condemning the murder of George Turbervile’s brother, Nicholas, and an answer in defence of the murderer, John Morgaine, with the Stationers’ Register on the same day.
16
Further up the social ladder, poets, scribes and manuscript compilers were also scrupulous to emphasise the discursive nature of verse composition, suggesting that the dialogue form was a highly marketable commodity and, whether for private circulation or public consumption, held considerable fascination for the reading public. Answer-poems in manuscript and print are often signposted clearly by titles such as ‘Answer’, ‘Responsio’, ‘Rejoinder’, ‘Replication’ or ‘Reply’, and whole sections of miscellanies and entire collections of verse are devoted to verse answering.
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It is initially surprising then that modern scholarship has not inherited a satisfactory terminology with which to describe the relationship between answer-poems and the poems they answer in Early Modern England whereas, among others, Scottish literary culture has the flyting, hymns and songs, the antiphon, classical pastoral, the amœbæan, Troubadour verse, the tenson, sirvente and partimen and Japanese verse, the tanka and renku.
18 This is
15 Rollins (1919), p.293.
16 These poems are discussed and transcribed by Norma H. Hodgson, ‘The Murder of Nicholas Turbervile. Two Elizabethan Ballads’, MLR, 33 (1938), 520-7. See also Cat. W 294 and W 296.
17 See Cat. Anon 17, Anon 19, Anon 41, C 83, E 120-1, H 145, R 231, R 236-9 and W 299-302.
18 George Puttenham makes only a fleeting analysis of verse answering, although he does use several answer-poems to illustrate his rhetorical tropes and schemes. He uses the term Antipophora to describe a pair of poems in which a poet preempts and forestalls a competitive or aggressive response to his first poem by answering it himself. He also uses a classical rather than a contemporary example, although there was an abundance of homegrown material from which he might have chosen, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. R. C. Alston (printed by Richard
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