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



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subjectsScripture, vernacular, Bible, Diet of Worms, satire, clerical ineptitude, William Tyndale, interpretation

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266

deprecating claim that the preacher ought to be ashamed of being outwitted by a woman:

Your preacher then may well stand much perplext
To see how grossely he belied the text
And blush his sermon was no better suted
Then by a woeman thus to be confuted. (ll.15-18)

Neither is Harington’s arrangement of the circumstances in which his female respondent is permitted to flaunt her knowledge particularly flattering. When mentioning his preacher’s “latten” Bible, he is surely aware that any female respondent will probably be forced to pass silently over the language in which her text is written. 426 In this way he orchestrates the outcome of a debate that implicitly pits a case for the restriction of direct access to Scripture against one for making vernacular translations available to the lay community. Cheke’s use of a vernacular Bible as opposed to a Latin one, such as that used by the preacher, allows her to refute him, but the conclusion she is led to draw opens up a theological can of worms, or even a Diet of Worms of sorts. Harington’s patronising test calls for a literal rather than an exegetical reading of the Bible and one that provokes a pretty mundane conclusion. This challenge to extract a literal interpretation is the bait he uses to dupe Cheke into completing his satirical project. At this point it becomes apparent just what a satirical tour de force he has choreographed.

Harington’s satire against clerical ineptitude follows the tenets of the most vehement critic of bumbling clergymen of the century, William Tyndale. It also might be suspected, however, that men such as Tyndale were also his target. The satire, when complemented by its answer, highlights the risks not only of knowing Scripture only through the mediation of bumbling clergymen, but also those of putting the onus of interpretation upon lay folk, of whom Cheke serves him as an unwitting example. If Cheke was Harington’s intended

426 Notably, the argument of an epigram appearing shortly before this piece in the 1615 edition is that women ought to avoid Latin and confine themselves to their native tongue alone, although even “One Language may be tongue too much”, ‘Of Women Learned in the Tongues’ (l.4), sig. Bir.



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