culture and rhetoric of the answer poem 1485-1626

The Culture and Rhetoric of the Answer Poem: 1485-1626

SECTION 1: POLEMIC: FLYTING, LIBEL AND SATIRE

Chapter 1: Responses to Libel and Satire

  1. The Verse Libel
    1. A Sociological Perspective
    2. Verbal Duelling
    3. Proclamatory Answers
  2. The Verse Satire
    1. Self Publicising Tudor Satirists
    2. John Skelton
    3. John Marston

Chapter 2: Domestic and Cross-Cultural Flyting

  1. Cross-Cultural Flyting
    1. Anglo-French Flyting
    2. Anglo-Scottish Flyting
  2. Domestic Flyting
    1. John Skelton and Christopher Garnish
    2. Thomas Smyth and William Gray
    3. Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camel
    4. John Taylor and William Fennor

SECTION 2: MARRIAGE, FRIENDSHIP COURTSHIP/COURTIERSHIP

Chapter 3: Answer Poetry and Marriage: 1550-1570

  1. Pros and Cons of Marriage
  2. Duties of Husbands and Wives

Chapter 4: Late Tudor Amicable Verse Exchanges

  1. Barnabe Googe
  2. Isabella Whitney
  3. John Donne

Chapter 5: Women's answer-poetry and the female-voiced response

  1. Henrician Answer Poetry
  2. Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Answer Poetry
    1. Elizabeth I
    2. Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
    3. Lady Mary Cheke
    4. Lady Mary Wroth



Bookmark this page:

StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble It!

bookmark the culture and rhetoric of the answer poem

CULTURE & RHETORIC HOME | contents | sitemap | | © the culture and rhetoric of the answer poem 2008

subjectsMary Cheke, third Earl of Pembroke, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury

<< previous   next >>



263

third Earl of Pembroke, and reminds her of her reputation for adorning her “dainty toes” with lascivious satyr’s nails (ll.5-6). 421 In her answer to Denny she treds a very fine line between self-assertion and self-effacement in her deflection of his abuse and this makes for a highly multivalent poem, several interpretations of which also allow her to proliferate her literary and intellectual presence. By comparison Cheke is the victim of being duped into responding by Harington in order to prove his antifeminist thesis, and her answer only serves to confirm his assertion that women are not suited to enjoy direct access to the Bible.

Lady Mary Cheke

Ostensibly a lighthearted piece of misogyny, Sir John Harington, the younger’s verse beginning ‘Thear was, not serten when, a certayn preacher’ (c.1590s), is actually a piece of tour de force satirical virtuosity. It is designed insidiously to beguile any prospective respondent into proving unwittingly his poem’s central thesis of women’s intellectual inferiority as he deploys craftily the technique of dissimulatio in order to determine and shape the answer he receives to his deliberately and conspicuously erroneous argument. 422 Harington presents his verse as a purposely flawed exercise in biblical exegesis that offers ample opportunity for a corrective response to his antifeminist argument. As May points out, Harington’s satirical persona admits that he is uncertain of his ground and provides his respondent, Lady Mary Cheke, with a straw man. 423 May is not attuned fully, however, to the degree of control that Harington exercises over this ostensible wit combat; for him Cheke’s response is “spirited” while Harington’s poem is

421 ‘A Merry Rime Sent to the Lady Wroth upon the Birth of my L. of Pembroke’s Child, Born in the Spring’, in The English and Latin Poems of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p.42.

422 Both poems are printed by May (1999), pp.245-6.
423 May (1999), p.149.



<< previous   next >>

Google
 


Find this book at Biblio.com  Betterworld Books