Chapter 1: “What lyfe may lyue, long vndefamde”: Personal and Propagandist Responses to Libel and Satire

The Verse Libel: A Sociological Perspective

The foremost influence upon the sharp increase in hostile verse answering in the sixteenth century was the corresponding and well-documented epidemic of defamation; as Thomas Churchyard complained during his verse war with Thomas Camel (1551-2), “What lyfe may lyue, long vndefamde”. ²⁵ Invective is dialogic in nature and thereby any increase in libellous verse might be accompanied predictably by a corresponding increase in verse answering. As M. Lindsay Kaplan observes, “defamation is not only reversible, it is also reflexive, since each party in effect counter-accuses the other”. Kaplan also remarks that “poetry was considered an excellent medium for defamation by its malicious practitioners”. ²⁶ During the century then the conditions were highly favourable for a proliferation of hostile verse answering.

Numerous factors contributed towards this impulse to respond to libels in kind specifically among the nobility, gentry and clergy. In summary, these included ineffectual legal reactions to prohibited literature, the duration and expense of litigation against libels and the spasmodic and inconsistent suppression of opposition literature through censorship and licensing laws. ²⁷ The theological controversies of the Reformation in particular were a fertile influence upon the proliferation of acrimonious verse exchanges as well as

²⁵ The Contention betwyxte Churchyeard and Camell, vpon Dauid Dycers Dreame (printed for Mychell Loblee, 1560), sig. Bii^v, STC 5225.
²⁶ M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge and NY: CUP, 1997), p.15 and p.11.

²⁷ See, for instance, Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp.240-2; Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, SLR, 37 (1985), 661-765 (p.663) and Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in the Elizabethan Period (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp.4-5.