John Taylor, forensic, Muses, Coxcombe, knavery, Challenge, legalistic, disputation, liar
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149
his Ryming Poet/ Although too farre vnworthy, I confesse,/ To merit it, the Title I possesse” (sig. Aviiiv). While he purports to be aware of his limitations, he claims that Taylor’s imperviousness to his own mediocrity has caused him to abuse the craft of poetry and brought the name of poet into disrepute: “What Coxcombe foole would proffer such abuses/ As thou hast done to Poets and the Muses?” (sig. Bir).
As well as the more outrageous accusations and insults that the protagonists level at one another, they also set out to convince their readers of their adversary’s knavery through more persuasive exhibitions of legalistic disputation. Taylor, for instance, subjects Fennor’s excuses for failing to attend to a forensic analysis in order to prove him a liar:
How is’t possible thou couldst deuise
At once to slap me and the world i’th mouth
That thou wast Rid, East, West, and North, & South
That day thou shouldst haue met me on the Stage
Thou wentst three wayes at once on pilgrimage. (sig. Bivv)
Fennor cannot be telling the truth about the reason for his absence because his various excuses conflict with one another and cancel each other out, so Taylor contends. In return, Fennor attempts to expose the irrelevance of Taylor’s argument by claiming that it fails to account for the fact that Taylor had broken the conditions of his attendance. In consequence of this breach of verbal contract Fennor claims to have sent word that he would not be participating in the competition well in advance. In his dedication, ‘To All that Can Iudge, of What Degree soeuer’, he writes that it had been agreed that “I should see the Manner of his Challenge before it was published, and set my Answere to it with my owne hand”. However,
This Water-Taylor […] presuming he had bound me with his Earnest-money, printed his Challenge-Bill, and my Answere annexed thereunto, without my Hand, Knowledge, or Consent: Nay more; My Answere was by him set vp so meane and insufficient to so brauing a Challenge, that I altogether disliked thereof […] and thereupon sent my Man […] fiue dayes before the Play, to certifie them, That I was otherwise employed, and would not come, in regard of the Wrong done vnto
in his Satyres and Satirical Epigrams (1617) (see Cat. F 128).
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