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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subjectsJames VI, Schort Treatise, flyting, literary tastes, Taylors Revenge, Fennor, dedication

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142

of flyting by James VI in his ‘Schort Treatise’ on the art of poetry. 254 Their competing to prove their loyalty to James certainly suggests they were not beyond trying to appeal to his literary tastes.

The main point of contention, however, is their disagreement over the details of the supposedly aborted verse contest. In the first pamphlet in the controversy, Taylors Revenge, Taylor voices his indignation at Fennor’s failure to attend, owing to which he claims to have incurred financial loss and suffered humiliation at the hands of a disappointed audience. In his dedication, ‘To Any that Can Read’, he claims that,


I lost my Reputation amongst many, and gaind disgrace in stead of my better expectations. In Reuenge of which wrongs done vnto me by the said Ryming Rascal, I haue written this Inuectiue against him, cheifly because the ill looking Hound doth not confesse he hath iniur’d me, […] but on the contrary part, he Railes and Abuses me with his callumnious tongue. 255


Although Taylor’s biographer accepts such information provided about the event, the background details recounted by both poets may well be a fiction in which they participate in order to furnish them with a topic for their printed and, doubtlessly, commercially driven exchange of insult. 256 The actual performance of any such formal verse exchanges is difficult to establish. They may well have been common, but the only evidence I have uncovered relating to their performance resides in fictional accounts of them or of abandoned events such as this one.

Skelton had stressed the literary nature of his third and fourth responses to Garnish, and such epistolary acknowledgements of familiarity with an adversary’s attack by having

254 ‘Ane Schort Treatise, Conteining Some Revlis and Cautelis to be Oseruit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie’, Craigie ed. (1955), I. p.76 and p.81.

255 Taylors Revenge: Or, The Rymer William Fennor Firkt, Ferritted, and Finely Fetcht Ouer the Coales (Rotterdam, 1615), sig. Aiiiv, STC 23804. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.

256 Capp (1994), pp.14-15.



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