Black-letter journalism, monstrous fish, abnormal births, court, news, game, patroness, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford
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214
provides a further source of antagonism. Black-letter journalism was suspect due to its sensationalism in reporting spectacular events such as the appearance of monstrous fish (like Donne’s remoras perhaps; see overleaf) and abnormal births.
362
Donne is certainly guilty of exaggeration in his generalised, blanket condemnation of the court, which fails to distinguish between its good and bad elements. His breathless tone of urgency, moreover, gives the impression that his news that there is no news is so hot off the press that there has been insufficient time for him to consider his subject in any depth and to effectively rationalise it. Thus, it is left to Wotton to supply the balance and moderation missing in Donne’s news story.
The use of the term “newes” in the title also suggests a further means by which Donne signposts for Wotton his expectation of a contradictory answer. The game of ‘News’ was a dialogic parlour game played between groups of friends at social gatherings in which the first player would formulate a proposition (usually in prose) based around a predetermined theme. The second player then had to compose an antithetical proposition. Like Donne’s poem these compositions often contained the word news in the title or opening line and gestured towards events at court. Louise Schleiner observes that these games probably served “as a practice ground for Donne’s famous conceited witticizing”. Since both his patroness, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford and her kinswoman, Cecelia Bulstrode, are known to have been enthusiastic players, it would be surprising if another of his acquaintances were unable to readily interpret Donne’s “Here’s no more newes” as
362 See, for instance, H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558-1603: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (CUP, 1965), pp.221-2 and Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1959), p.205.
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