Sidney, Oxford, tennis court, glass grievences, king, commoner, peer, death, leveller
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41
Weare I a kinge I coulde commande content,
Weare I obscure unknowne shoulde be my cares,
And weare I ded no thought should me torment,
Nor wordes, nor wronges, nor loves, nor hopes, nor feares;
A dowtefull choyce of these thinges one to crave,
A Kingdom or a cottage or a grave.
[Answer]
Wearte thou a king, yet not commaund contente;
Wher empire none thy mynd could yet suffice.
Were thou obscure, still cares would the tormente,
But wearte thou dead all care and sorrowe dyes.
An easye choise of three things the to crave,
Noe kingdome nor a cottage, but a grave.
75
Although there is some doubt over the authorship of the answer it is interesting that it has been ascribed to Sidney since it steers so closely to the violently expressed class grievances arising from the tennis court incident. Oxford’s poem elides consideration of his own social status and imagines fluid social boundaries; he might migrate between the status of king and commoner and even meet with death, the leveller, in his pursuit of happiness, but there is no consideration of what it means to be a peer. This allows the answer-poet to pass over the fact that he is denigrating a social superior. The answer also contemplates class migration that excludes the peerage, and does so in order to suggest the possibility that Oxford will meet with ill fortune in each of his imagined occupations. By attacking Oxford throughout the course of his hypothesised social migration the answer certainly crystallises the potentially antisocial aspect of quarrelling and exacting retribution in terms of upturning social hierarchy.
The antisocial nature of such disputes is also stressed repeatedly in conduct books throughout this period, which contend that vituperative retaliation is beneath the dignity of an educated, civil or courtly man. Since the same books simultaneously promote skills in disputation they expose the problematic status of the art of riposte as a valued social accomplishment that is also perceived as antisocial and a threat to civil order. In his Boke Named the Governour (1531) Sir Thomas Elyot suggests that “the best waye to be aduenged is so to contemne Iniurie and rebuke” (III.xii.), and abstaining from retributive action continues to be an important trait of civil behaviour throughout the Tudor and early
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