The Verse Satire
Verse Answering and the Provocative Satirical Outlook of some Tudor Self-Publicists

Although satire has played an important part in the polemical verse exchanges considered so far, it also deserves some consideration for its modest contribution towards the outpouring of hostile answer-poetry in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries in its own right. I am concerned here with the portion of satirists’ repertoires devoted to the subject of detraction and specifically with the satirical temperaments they cultivate, and the ways in which they employ their combative idioms to propagate verse disputes. Unlike those clandestine libellers and satirists who strive deliberately to elude direct confrontation, a number of writers were particularly keen to draw attention to their identity and to attach their names to controversy. These writers are occupational satirists who, rather than necessarily being roused to write satire out of a sense of social responsibility, choose a satirical temperament as their literary idiom, and who, as well as castigating society in general, single out or seek to attract individuals upon whom they might vent their spleen through the medium of verse controversies. They draw attention to the controversial aspects of their work deliberately (often through preemptive defences or