Chapter 4: Collaboration and Choreography in Amicable Verse Exchanges of the later Tudor Period

In the previous chapters we have seen how verse answering provided an important means of articulating rivalries, animosity and differences of opinion in the Tudor and early-Stuart period. In such exchanges convivial relationships usually only emerge when a poet intervenes to take the side of one of the combatants in a verse controversy. From the 1560s onwards, however, verse answering also emerges as a conspicuous means of expressing friendship in the amicable verse epistles found in the miscellanies of poets such as Barnabe Googe and Isabella Whitney and, around the turn of the century, friendship is again a predominant theme in the exchanged verse epistles of John Donne. ³²²

Although one-upmanship continues to be the animus of these verse answers and efficacious riposte continues to be a gauge of personal accomplishment, the context for this is deferential communication based around shared assumptions and commonly held storehouses of general knowledge. These areas of consensus facilitate rhetorical manoeuvrability for correspondents as they situate themselves in relation to these mutually assumed truths by either adherence to, or departure from, them in order to negotiate their place in the relationships they cultivate. In the case of Googe and Donne, they sometimes depart from normative saws of wisdom in order to offer their correspondents the opportunity to assume superior rhetorical positions as deliberate strategies for securing answers from them. The dialectical position Isabella Whitney assumes in her short sequence of ‘Certain Familier Epistles and Friendly Letters by the Auctor with Replies’ is

³²² My analysis of such rhetorical conceits here is far from comprehensive. Equally worthy of consideration, for instance, would have been Thomas Howell’s verse conversations, the verses exchanged between William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and numerous other verses exchanged between friends (see Cat. A 56, A 65, C 81, F 126, H 159-60, H 163-5, H 168-9a-b, H 173a-b, H 177-8, K 191, L 194, L 198, M 204, R 236-9, S 266 and T