George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, nipping epigrams, biting satires, flyting, Renaissance

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exchanges of abuse. Poetry manuals are equally dismissive of the practical value of vituperative riposte, and such verses appear to have been regarded as unworthy of serious consideration. Puttenham, for instance, although he gives some consideration to nipping epigrams and biting satires, is particularly keen to dissociate what he calls “Diræ” from his repertory of verse forms. “Diræ”, which in Puttenham’s description sounds like something between a response to libel and participation in a flyting, is relegated to “A certaine auncient forme of poesie by which men did vse to reproch their enemies”. It is a pagan practice that ought not to be emulated and therefore is proscribed from what he considers a courtly and poetical education. He writes of those ancients who

seeke reuenge against them that malice [them], or practise [their] harmes […]. This made the auncient Poetes to inuent a meane to rid the gall of all such Vindicatiue men […]. And this was done by a maner of imprecation, or as we call it by cursing and banning of the parties, and wishing all euill to a light vpon them, and though it neuer the sooner happened, yet was it great easment to the boiling stomacke […]. We Christians are forbidden to vse such vncharitable fashions, and willed to referre all our reuenges to God alone.

No wonder that he dismisses John Skelton, one of the most influential vituperative answer-poets during the Tudor and early-Stuart periods, as “a rude rayling rimer & [in] all his doings ridiculous”. ²⁴ Contrary to Puttenham’s appraisal, there is ample evidence to suggest that an aptitude for heated riposte might carry considerable social prestige and that in practice satirists, flyters and victims of libel had recourse to a wide-ranging repertoire of literary conventions, and a set of rhetorical strategies and techniques that amount to a vibrant and sometimes prestigious art of response. In this first section I examine this mode of discourse by taking a broad historical and chronological perspective of responses to libel, satire and flyting, placing individual answer-poems and their antecedents in their immediate political, religious, sociological and biographical contexts, and attempting to establish the role of the hostile response in Renaissance poetics.

²⁴ Puttenham, (repr. 1968), p.46 and p.69.

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