Ware the Hawk, John Skelton, verse complaint, legal proceedings, ecclesiastical court, Replication, Rejoinder, Surrejoinder
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31
The emphasis placed upon defending one’s honour personally was also an indirect consequence of ineffectual legal provision and enforcement of the law, as well as of deliberate or conscious social practice where the libelling of private individuals, public figures and antigovernment polemics are concerned. In the case of prosecuting seditious literature through the courts, extensive evidence was necessary in order to secure a conviction.
46
Furthermore, as Philip Hamburger points out, while “grand juries were sometimes reluctant to indict gentlemen for paper crimes if mutilation or hanging were likely to follow”, failure to prosecute was often also due to the inadequacy of libel laws.
47
At the beginning of the century, in his Ware the Hawk, Skelton claims to have resorted to using a verse complaint as an alternative to legal proceedings once recourse to the ecclesiastical court failed.
48
Stanley Eugene Fish comments that the “speaker regards his poem as a second opportunity to plead his case; although he has lost in the courts he turns to his audience for a second hearing”.
49
Similarly, a number of hostile verse exchanges are presented as informal substitutes fo r legal proceedings and use legal terminology such as ‘Replication’, ‘Rejoinder’ and ‘Surrejoinder’ in their titles to draw attention to this.
50
46 Clegg (1997), p.33.
47 Hamburger (1985), p.676. Hamburger analyses the various legal alternatives available to the authorities to punish and suppress illicit literature and finds their common feature, from at least the 1550s onwards, to be their general weakness and ineffectuality (see pp.666-92).
48 The Poetical Works of John Skelton: With Notes and Some Account of the Author and his Writings, ed. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols (Rodd, 1843), I. pp.155-67. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
49 Stanley Eugene Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry (London and New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1965),
p.89.
50 See Cat. C 83-4, C 91-2 and S 268. In his Boke Named the Governour (1531) Sir Thomas Elyot describes the parts that make up legal disputations as “Narrations, Partitions,Confirmations and Confutations, named of some Reprehensions, they haue Declarations, Barres, Replications and Reioyndres”, and suggests that the mastery of these should be accomplished by all gentlemen irrespective of whether they are practicing lawyers, ed. Foster Watson (Dent; NY: Dutton, 1907), I. xiv. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
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