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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subjectsElizabeth, Ralegh, Boethius, Philosophy, Fortune, Petrarchan, blind cupid

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254

thy brakishe teares” (l.16).

Elizabeth leads Ralegh towards enlightenment much more succinctly than Philosophy. It takes Philosophy the space of another two books to move from telling Boethius that he needs to amend his perspective to directing him away from “erthely things” and towards God. In the third book Philosophy leads Boethius to the realisation that God, “the father of all” rather than Fortune is the prime mover (III.viii. 82). In joy at the opening of Boethius’s eyes she breaks into jubilant hymn:

Graunt that the mind, O father! Clime to thy hiest seat,
And on thy vew the clirest Sigh[t] may Set.
Away Cast erthely Cloude and Waight of this mold
Do thou with lustar then them Grace. (Consolation, III.ix. 25-8)


Similarly, Elizabeth reminds Ralegh that the exercise of “vertue” is an appeal to a higher authority than Fortune, and it is only by looking above and beyond earthly Fortune to this power, that a true perspective of the less than omnipotent role of Fortune in the grand metaphysical scheme can be appreciated.

Elizabeth plays a dual role in her answer, both as Philosophy and as the divinity towards whom Ralegh/Boethius is taught by Philosophy to direct his attention. She places herself on the “hiest seat” where “the clirest Sight may Set”, above and beyond the terrestrial limitations of Fortune’s influence, when she reassures Ralegh of her imperviousness to Fortune: “it passeth fickle fortunes powere and skill,/ to force my harte to thinke thee any ill” (ll.2-3). Thus she reminds him that she is in absolute control of Fortune, and particularly his. It is implicit, moreover, that she is a divinity in the form of God’s elected representative on earth, rather than in that of a stellified Petrarchan beloved. She politely ignores Ralegh’s references to “blind cupid” thereby, for all her maternal sympathy towards her courtier, directs the context of the discourse towards that of client-patron.



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