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 I, Goodyer, Mary, Fortune my Foe, dialogue, ballads, criminals, hanging

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61

Elizabeth’s reservations about those who befriended Mary by continuing the dialogue.

By appropriating the themes of Elizabeth’s poem in his petition Goodyer possibly hopes to manoeuvre her into following the conventions of a ballad duet, beginning “Fortune, my Foe, why dost thou frown on me?”, in which the lover receives a “comfortable and pleasant answer” to his suit from his beloved, even though he believes he has lost her favour and consequently that of a personified fortune. 115 This possibility becomes even more seductive when it is remembered that the tune to which the ballad is sung (known simply as ‘Fortune my Foe’) was also used for ballads in which convicted criminals make their last farewells to the world. 116 Elizabeth may have had this “hanging tune” in mind when she warns seditious subjects that she will “polle their toppes”, as Puttenham’s version of her answer to Mary reads (l.16). 117 It makes perfect sense for Elizabeth to take advantage of the popular appeal of this ballad in her substitute proclamation, just as it is logical that Goodyer should follow suit in the hope of a “comfortable and pleasant answer”.

In his first line Goodyer inverts his queen’s opening premise and applies it to his own circumstances. Whereas Elizabeth can have no present joy due to her prudent consideration of the future dangers posed by Mary and her rebellious English supporters, Goodyer, as Elizabeth’s prisoner, exists in a state of present woe that might be alleviated were he to be

115 Cat. Anon 2 (see also Cat. A 59). Claude M. Simpson points to “ample evidence that [‘Fortune my Foe’] was in existence before 1590”, and possibly prior to Elizabeth’s poem: “In 1565-1566, John Cherlewood was granted a license to print a ballad “of one complaynynge of ye mutabilitie of fortune”; this may or may not be ‘Fortune my Foe’”, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1966), p.225 (SR, I. 310).

116 See, for instance, The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. W. M. Chappell, 8 vols (Hertford: Reprinted for the Ballad Society by S. Austin, 1888), VI. p.73. This anthology provides numerous examples, although the earliest of these is dated 1591 and thus considerably later than Henry Goodyer’s verse petition to Elizabeth of 1572 (see I. p.555). See also I. p.144, p.147 and p.155; II. p.491.



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