defamation, Early Modern England, reputation, satire
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25
to “disgrace those in authority, cause disobedience and sedition, and bring all to confusion”. In the terms of the threat that libels posed to personal reputations Kaplan claims, “it is clear that the desire to preserve reputation in Early Modern England positioned defamation as a central consideration of the period”. Similarly, Lawrence Stone observes, “One of the most characteristic features of the age was its hyper-sensitive insistence upon the overriding importance of reputation”.
32
The notion that abusive words might be capable of inflicting actual physical harm upon their recipients also deserves mentioning as a potential source of anxiety since many of the verses I have selected boast of, or imply, their intentions to achieve such maledictory ends.
33
The Romans endeavoured purposely to deflect curses by responses in kind, and it would be mistaken to dismiss such motives out of hand in sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century England.
34
Puttenham is sceptical of the efficacy of pagan curses that “neuer the
verses, although these are self-conscious about their divergence from prose (see Cat. Anon 22).
32 Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, HR, 68 (1995), 266-85 (p.271); Kaplan (1997), p.2 and Stone (1965), p.25.
33 Robert C. Elliott discusses beliefs regarding the potency of words as curses in the Early Modern period in his The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966). See also Jacqueline Simpson, ‘“The Weird Sisters Wandering”: Burlesque Witchery in Montgomerie’s Flyting’, Fo, 106 (1995), 9-20. Among the most explicit instances in which maledictory curses are used in English verse answering is an example that occurs slightly outside the historical scope of this study. In his answer-poem, ‘A Charme for a Libeller’, the dramatist, Philip Massinger, portrays his anonymous detractor as a demon whom he will incarnate and trap in a magic circle (implicitly in-the-round) in order to exact his “coniuracon” upon him (l.19):
I’me in my Circle & I haue thee here,
ragg of a Rime &, if thou dar’st, appeare,
son of the people, thinge without a name.
How shall I raise thee or with what arte frame
an answeare to thy nothinge? (ll.1-5)
Quoted from Peter Beal, ‘Massinger at Bay: Unpublished Verses in a War of the Theatres’, YES, 10 (1980), 190-203 (p.196).
34 See, for instance, H. D. Jocelyn, ‘The Poet Cn. Naevius, P. Cornelius Scipio and Q. Caecilius Metellus’, Ant, 3 (1969), 32-47 (p.47).
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