production, miscellany, collaboration, collection, Googe, topoi, friendship, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Ovid, Remedia Amoris

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role, and participate actively, in the production of the miscellany and their collaboration in a collection appearing under Googe’s name suggests that he viewed their contributions as contiguous with his own (as Blundeston recollects in ‘The Preface of L. Blundeston’, Googe even left him in charge of seeing the miscellany through the press). ³²⁹ The effect aimed for is precisely that of displaying the cohesiveness of this fraternity. Googe seems to be responsible for choreographing the responses he receives, and the sentiments they express suggest their participation in a poetic game contrived by him.

Googe orchestrates his friends’ answers in order that the miscellany will come out in favour of proverbial topoi upon the subjects of friendship, reason and love, and he deploys his poems as either sententious ‘truths’ to be endorsed or contentious ‘falsehoods’ in need of rebuttal. He lades his verse heavily with allusions to, and translations from, prominent classical authorities in order to direct his respondents towards conclusions that are compatible with the outlook he wants his miscellany to register. The texts that he chooses provide familiar points of reference for his interlocutors since they are both standard components of the Universities’ curricula and favoured recreational texts, and possibly also known to them from their time together at the Inns. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (VIII and IX) furnishes him frequently with material for discussing friendship and Ovid’s Remedia Amoris is often his authority for discussing love. ³³⁰ By using concepts and ideas that were common currency among his peers as points of orientation for his poems, Googe is able to choreograph responses to them and thereby maintain artistic control over, and regulate the tone of, the miscellany.

Doubtlessly he is aware that bluntly contentious statements are likely to provoke

³²⁹ Googe asked him to “put in print these works of worthy skill” (l.55).

³³⁰See, for instance, Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance

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