political, religious, social, relationships, genre, chronological, dialogic, John Skelton, Stationers' Register, Tudor
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subject matter and genre.
The availability of primary material also determines which groups or categories of verse answering might be approached, and over what timescale. Indeed, there are occasions when answers related by type, subject matter and influence are separated by a substantial chronological hiatus. This is often attributable to one man, John Skelton, whose preoccupation with the dialogic context of verse anticipated and provided a source of inspiration for the self-conscious dialogism of answer-poets well into the seventeenth century. Limits are, of course, imposed by the tantalising and substantial number of answer-poems known to have existed from the Stationers’ Register that have perished. Owing to the occasional nature of conversational verse this is inevitable.
The reader is referred to the ‘Select Catalogue of Answer-Poetry in Manuscript and Print, 1485-1625’ provided in Appendix One for what is hopefully a useful mapping of the wider genre. The process of compiling this catalogue has furnished much of the raw material that enabled this thesis to be written, allowing the referencing and cross-referencing of poems and the sorting of them into generic and chronological groupings. Without this resource it would have been a much more formidable task to establish perspectives upon the nature of the genre and its social functions. It is hoped that the catalogue might continue to be of use in future studies of answer-poetry.
While the forms and functions of answering verses are extensive, they can be broken down into the basic types of political, religious and social relationships that they articulate. From the examination of these groups it is then possible to ascertain the roles played by answer-poetry as one of the most pronounced manifestations of dialectical poetics in the Tudor and early-Stuart period. Marotti attributes the vogue for answer-poetry to the
Age/index.html. Marx also cites altercatio, certamen, controversia and debaat among others.
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