giving the lie, challenge, combat, Touchstone, civil discourse, conduct book
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21
whereby “giving the lie”, or casting a slur upon someone’s honour, is responded to by a formal challenge to combat. What is significant about this is that Touchstone is aware that there exists a formal methodology of literary quarrelling and that this represents a counter-culture to the sort of civil discourse propagated by the conduct book.
22
One source of the social rhetoric of this counter-culture is the fencing manual, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Touchstone’s taxonomy is reminiscent of the divisions of the first book of a fencing manual attributed to Sir William Segar, The Booke of Honor and Armes (1590), which includes definitions of lies “certeine”, “conditionall”, “generall” and “speciall” among others. Disputative answer-poems mostly fall into the category of “lies certaine”, whereby ill words are “spoken and affirmed” plainly and directly against another.
23
This is a poetics that is engaged immediately with the social world and which appears in stark contrast to Sidney’s gentle, non-affirmatory and comparatively disengaged poesy.
The language of duelling is only one among many idioms of polemical verse answering which together represent, as Touchstone’s statement suggests, a poetics of polemical response. These other idioms tend to derive from more official sources such as the language of legal disputation taught at the Inns of Court and the language of the royal proclamation. The employment of such skills for exchanges of abuse was nonetheless associated in the Renaissance mind with incivility and sedition.
Conduct books often attempt to dissuade their readers from being seduced into
22 David Lampe describes this counter-culture as using an “inverted rhetoric of abuse” whereby Ciceronian rhetorical techniques of civil oratory are turned to purely abusive or defamatory ends, ‘“Flyting no Reason Hath,” The Inverted Rhetoric of Abuse’, in The Early Renaissance, Acta, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo [Proceedings of SUNY Regional Conferences in Medieval Studies], (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1978), V. pp.101-20 (p.101).
23
[Sir William Segar(?)], The Booke of Honor and Armes (printed by Richard Jones, 1590), sigs Biiir-Civ, STC 22163. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
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