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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subjectsLodowick Bryskett, Discourse of Civil Life, 1606, Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 1528

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42

Stuart periods. Lodowick Bryskett claims in his Discovrse of Civill Life, published in 1606 but perhaps written two decades earlier, that by answering slander a man “doth not onely not purchase any honor to himselfe thereby, but also heapeth on his owne head Gods wrath and indignation” (p.77). 76 Bryskett’s Discovrse, like the vast majority of such texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, borrows heavily from the most influential of conduct books, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528); translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, but available in Italian and Latin considerably earlier. Since the Courtier overflows with enthusiasm for debate, it is simultaneously unsurprising and enlightening to find that responding to insults in kind is represented as an anathema to civil behaviour. In one of his most frequently quoted recommendations for good living Castiglione writes that,

The surest way in the world is, for a man in his living and conversation to governe himselfe alwaies with a certaine honest meane, which (no doubt) is a great and most sure shield against envie. (II. p.133)

Castiglione’s insistence upon the propriety of moderate speech and behaviour suggests both the impropriety of angry reprisals and, implausibly, that the exercise of temperance is a sure way to prevent slurs upon one’s reputation.

The high estimation in which the quality of temperance was held is obviously at odds with the urgent impulse to rebut detractors in kind, and the number of extant responses to polemical verse provides a clear indication that a moderate or polite reaction was a high-minded ideal that might be put into practice infrequently. This is reflected by Bryskett’s Discovrse in which he contradicts himself noticeably upon the subject of reprisal. Contrary to what he claims about the dishonour and wickedness of retaliation, he also argues that it is imperative to be aggressively proactive in defence of one’s good name:

75 These poems are quoted from May (1975), pp.388-9.
76 See Peltonen (2003), p.85.



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