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

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Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Fuller, seventeenth century, fencing schools, wit combat, single combat, tournaments

response that by the early-seventeenth century, and probably long before, had become a formal accomplishment. It was a skill that needed to be mastered in preparation for wit-combat, just as fencing schools, tournaments and military exercises provided training for single combat and war.

Jonson is even reputed by Thomas Fuller to have engaged in such rehearsals of verbal duelling with William Shakespeare. ^⁵⁷The following playful epigrammatic exchange appears to be the only surviving example attributed to them:

Jonson
If, but stage actors, all the world displays,
Where shall we find spectators of their plays?

Shakespeare
Little, or much, of what we see, we do;
We are all both actors and spectators too.^⁵⁸

Fuller, who provides a rich, but questionably reliable, source of anecdotes about verse exchanges, describes the putative wit-combats between these men in naval terminology that reflects the pseudo-martial purpose that such exercises in wit might be supposed to fulfil, and in a way suggestive of the Catholic-Protestant hostilities often expressed in such exchanges: “Many were the wit combates betwixt” them, he says, in which Jonson played the part of a (Catholic) “Spanish great Gallion” and Shakespeare that of an (Protestant) “English man of war”. Jonson,

Was built far higher in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English-man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.^⁵⁹

The martial terminology employed in verse answering usually uses language deriving more

⁵⁷ See also I. A. Shapiro, ‘The “Mermaid Club”’, MLR, 45 (1950), 6-17 (p.6).
⁵⁸The Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. Bernard H. Newdigate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), p.339.
⁵⁹ Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, Who for Parts and Learning Have Been Eminent in the Several Counties (printed for Thomas Williams, 1662), sig. Qqqii^v(2), Wing F2241. Fuller, of course, unlike many earlier commentators had available to him the analogy of ships of the line firing broadsides at one another.

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