culture and rhetoric of the answer poem 1485-1626

The Culture and Rhetoric of the Answer Poem: 1485-1626

SECTION 1: POLEMIC: FLYTING, LIBEL AND SATIRE

Chapter 1: Responses to Libel and Satire

  1. The Verse Libel
    1. A Sociological Perspective
    2. Verbal Duelling
    3. Proclamatory Answers
  2. The Verse Satire
    1. Self Publicising Tudor Satirists
    2. John Skelton
    3. John Marston

Chapter 2: Domestic and Cross-Cultural Flyting

  1. Cross-Cultural Flyting
    1. Anglo-French Flyting
    2. Anglo-Scottish Flyting
  2. Domestic Flyting
    1. John Skelton and Christopher Garnish
    2. Thomas Smyth and William Gray
    3. Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camel
    4. John Taylor and William Fennor

SECTION 2: MARRIAGE, FRIENDSHIP COURTSHIP/COURTIERSHIP

Chapter 3: Answer Poetry and Marriage: 1550-1570

  1. Pros and Cons of Marriage
  2. Duties of Husbands and Wives

Chapter 4: Late Tudor Amicable Verse Exchanges

  1. Barnabe Googe
  2. Isabella Whitney
  3. John Donne

Chapter 5: Women's answer-poetry and the female-voiced response

  1. Henrician Answer Poetry
  2. Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Answer Poetry
    1. Elizabeth I
    2. Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
    3. Lady Mary Cheke
    4. Lady Mary Wroth



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subjectslibel laws, seditious literature, legal, honour, reputation, verbal, duel, fencing

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32

Hamburger, whose study stretches from 1550 to beyond the end of our period, also illustrates that while libel laws, and other available legal remedies for seditious literature, were subject to considerable change, their ineffectuality remained relatively consistent. 51 Thus, answers in kind remained important weapons of counter-attack for both individuals and the government so long as this situation persisted. Where slander is concerned, Stone concurs and observes that, during the latter part of the sixteenth century, although “litigation [was] the most popular of indoor sports” among the nobility this was “mostly about property” rather than in response to defamation. He goes on to explain that duelling offered an alternative to litigation and that “one of the causes of the spread of duelling was by general consent the absence of adequate legal remedies for slander”. 52

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Honour, Reputation and the Verbal Duel

As well as borrowing from the legalese of the Inns, the formal language of the duel was also suited to the purpose of airing differences in answer-poetry. Wit-combat and duelling are both intertwined closely with codes of honour, and there are a few notable occasions upon which they become linked to one another in the late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart periods, by which time the evil of duelling had become, in the words of one recent commentator, “dangerously fashionable” among the upper classes. 53 It was expected that members of the nobility and gentry would be equipped to defend their reputations in person with either wit or violence, depending upon the occasion. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, while reeling off a list of sententious advice for

51 Hamburger (1985), pp.663-4.
52 Stone (1965), p.242 and p.249.
53 David Harris Willson, James VI and I (Cape, 1963), p.305. Stone (1965) notices a sharp rise in mentions of duelling in newsletters of the 1590s and again in the first two decades of the seventeenth century compared to those found in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, p.245.



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