The literary culture of early stuart libeling

Modern Philology

Volumn 97, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 364-392

  Mcrae, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62949118317     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/492866     Document Type: Article

References (109)

1. This phenomenon is documented in Pauline Croft, "The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th sen, 1 (1991): 43-69.
2. John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2vols. (Philadelphia, 1939), 1:364.
3. John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), pp. 89-90.
4. Chamberlain, 1:364.
5. On the manuscript verse miscellany, and its relation to the commonplace book, see Peter Beal, "Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book," in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), pp. 131-47 (esp. pp. 142-44).
6. and "Poems from a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript with the Hand of Robert Herrick," ed. Norman Farmer, Texas Quarterly 16, suppl. (1973): 41-43.
7. Agnes Latham's edition of The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1951) includes a twelve-line version first printed in 1658.
8. Croft discusses its authorship in "The Reputation of Robert Cecil," p. 62.
9. Thomas Cogswell, "Underground Political Verse and the Transformation of English Political Culture," in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modem England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester, 1995), p. 278;
10. and Pauline Croft, "Libels, Popular Literacy, and Public Opinion in Early Modern England," Historical Research 68 (1995): 280.
11. Other work by historians on this material includes Alastair Bellany, " 'Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse': Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603-1628," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 285-310,
12. and "A Poem on the Archbishop's Hearse: Puritanism, Libel, and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference," Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 137-64.
13. Adam Fox considers a parallel tradition of libeling in localized disputes in "Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England," Past and Present, no. 145 (1994), pp. 47-83.
14. Arthur F. Marotti provides a valuable survey of the extant material in Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), chap. 2.
15. See also Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616-1660 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), chap. 2;
16. and James Holstun, "'God Bless Thee, Little David!': John Felton and His Allies," ELH 59 (1992): 513-52.
17. Kirk Combe considers a relatively small canon of poems as evidence of generic development from complaint to satire ("The New Voice of Political Dissent: The Transition from Complaint to Satire," in Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism, ed. Kirk Combe and Brian A. Connery [Basingstoke, 1995], pp. 73-94).
18. 9.1 am adopting here Edward Rosenheim, Jr.'s, definition of satire as an "attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historical particulars" (Jonathan Swift and the Satirist's Art [Chicago, 1963], p. 31).
19. William Hudson, "Treatise of the Court of Star Chamber," in Collectanea Juridica: Consisting of Tracts Relative to the Law and Constitution of England, 2 vols. (London, 1791), 2:100.
20. Francis Bacon, "Certain Observations made upon a Libel Published this Present Year, 1592," in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), 8:148.
21. For legal purposes, libelous epitaphs might not be actionable at common law but fell within the Star Chamber's jurisdiction of controlling disorder (Collectanea Juridica, 2:103).
22. The libel cases surviving in Jacobean Star Chamber records are analyzed in Fox. For a consideration of the relation between the poetry of the Star Chamber libels and Renaissance satire, see my "The Verse Libel: Popular Satire in Early Modern England," in Subversion and Scurrility: The Politics of Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, ed. Dermot Cananagh and Tim Kirk (London, 2000), in press.
23. Quoted in Douglas Gray, "Rough Music: Some Early Invectives and Flytings," in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson (London, 1984), p. 43.
24. Renaissance debates over the propriety of using real names in satire are covered at length in A. L. Soens, Jr., "Criticism of Formal Satire in the Renaissance" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1957), pp. 235-41, 308-12, 405-6.
25. The first quote is from Richard Stanyhurst, discussing the work of classical satirists, in the dedication to his translation, The First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis (Leiden, 1582), sig. A2r;
26. the second quote is from Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia; or, A Shadowe of Truth, in Certaine Epigrams and Satyres (1598), ed. D. Allen Carroll (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974), p. 58.
27. Robert C. Elliott argues the significance of Celtic satire on the English development of the genre in The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, N.J., 1960), pp. 3-48.
28. John Dryden, Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), 2:21.
29. See Croft, "Libels" (n. 7 above), p. 273.
30. Quoted in C.J.Shson,Lost Plays of Shakespeare'sAge(.Cambndge, 1936),pp. 187-88.
31. William Goddard, A Neaste of Waspes (1615), facsimile ed. (Oxford, 1921), sig. F4r.
32. See Richard A. McCabe, "Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops' Ban of 1599," Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 188-93;
33. and Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), chap. 9.
34. See, e.g., C. G., The Minte of Deformitie (1600); Samuel Rowlands, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine (1600), in Complete Works, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1880), vol. 1;
35. John Weever's translations of satires by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, published in Faunus and Melliflora (1600), ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1948);
36. and the debates over satire conducted in a series of pamphlets around the turn of the century, collectively known as The Whipper Pamphlets, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1951). My argument here is supported by Clegg's research into the Bishops' Ban, which suggests that it was a reaction to certain topical references rather than a considered assault on a literary genre.
37. Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1993), p. 11.
38. The text, which was published in 1657, is usually cataloged as the probable work of Thomas May; however, Leonie J. Gibson, who valuably situates it in the 1620s, suggests Thomas Middleton ("Formal Satire in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, 1600-1650" [D.Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1952], p. 305).
39. T. M., Life of a Satyrical Puppy, p. 49.
40. Transcribed from Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 166, in Ted-Larry Pebworth, "Sir Henry Wotton's 'Dazel'd Thus, with Height of Place' and the Appropriation of Political Poetry in the Earlier Seventeenth Century," Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 71 (1977): 167.
41. Nathaneal Carpenter, Achitophel, Or, The Picture of a Wicked Politician (London, 1629), p. 10.
42. Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sirfohn Mennes, James Smith, and the Order ofthe Fancy (Newark, N.J., 1994), p. 22.
43. See also Alastair Bellany's skeptical comments about this explanatìon for authorship in "The Poisoning of Legitimacy? Court Scandal, News Culture, and Politics in England, 1603-1660" (Ph.D. diss̀., Princeton University, 1995), p. 128.
44. r.
45. On the Cotton circle, see Bellany, "The Poisoning of Legitimacy?" p. 127; on clubs, see Raylor.
46. Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. "Gill." He is identified as an author of libels, and possibly of "The Five Senses," in documents printed in Original Papers Illustrative of the Life and Writings offohn Milton, ed. W. Douglas Hamilton (London, 1859), pp. 65-71.
47. Historical Manuscripts Commission: Calendar of Manuscripts of the Most Honorable the Marquis of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House (Dublin, 1906), 17:114.
48. Quoted in Bellany, "A Poem on the Archbishop's Hearse" (n. 7 above), p. 145.
49. Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Charles I (1628-1629) (London, 1856-), 116:56.
50. r).
51. v.
52. See The Court and Times of Charles I, comp. Thomas Birch, 2 vols. (London, 1848), 1:427-28.
53. Townley's poem, "Enjoy thy bondage; make thy prison know," is printed in Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and his Assassination by John Felton, ed. Frederick W. Fairholt (London, 1850), pp. 74-76.
54. "The Duke Return'd Againe," in Fairholt, ed., p. 22.
55. See OED, s.v. "expostulate," 2 and 3.
56. For examples of libelous poems in print, see Goddard's A Neaste of Waspes (n. 24 above), sig. F4r;
57. and for evidence of the punishment of men who printed a ballad celebrating the violent death of Buckingham's physician, Dr. John Lambe, see Birch, comp., 1:367-68.
58. On the notion of publication through means of manuscript distribution, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993).
59. This impression contradicts the undocumented claims of John Wilcox ("Informal Publication of Late Sixteenth-Century Verse Satire," Huntinglon Library Quarterly 13 [1949-50]: 191-200).
60. My argument is confirmed by a survey of prominent 1590s satirists in Peter Bcal's Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1, 1450-1625, 2 parts (London, 1980). There are no listings of surviving manuscript versions of the satires of major writers such as John Marston and Thomas Lodge, while the only listing for Joseph Hall's satires is a reference to a volume of material on heraldry, in which the compiler has transcribed twenty-seven lines on the topic from the beginning of Virgidemiarum (1599), bk. 4, no. 3 (BL MS Add. 26705, fol. 130r).
61. Croft, "Libels" (n. 7 above), p. 273.
62. Thomas Scott, Vox Dei (1623), p. 71, reprinted in Works (1624), facsimile ed. (Amsterdam, 1973).
63. Mark Kishlansky, "The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament," Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): 619.
64. David Colclough, "'Of the alleadging of authors': The Construction and Reception of Textual Authority in English Prose, c. 1600-1630:
65. With Special Reference to the Writings of Francis Bacon, John Hoskyns, and John Donne" (D.Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1996), p. 107.
66. See further Colclough, "Parrhesia: The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Early Modern England," Rhetorica 17 (1999): 177-212.
67. Kishlansky, p. 618. See also Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 1-34.
68. The Poems ojJames VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1955-58), 2:182.
69. See, e.g., BL MS Egerton 923 (James's poem at fols. 37r-38r).
70. The Poems of James VIofScotland, 2:182.
71. Love (n. 52 above), p. 189.
72. David Farley-Hills, ed., Rochester: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972), p. 54.
73. Debora Shuger, "Civility and Censorship in Early Modern England," in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 91-94.
74. Raleigh (n. 6 above), p. 53.
75. The best account is in Bellany, "The Poisoning of Legitimacy?" (n. 38 above), pp. 143-50.
76. On the importance of news, see Richard Cust, "News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present, no. 112 (1986), pp. 60-90.
77. Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata 1593 to 1609. From the Original MS of John Hawarde (London, 1894), p. 373.
78. David Anthony John Cockburn, "A Critical Edition of the Letters of the Reverend Joseph Mead, 1626-1627, Contained in British Library Harleian MS 390" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1994), p. 615.
79. Andrew Mousley considers news as "a problematic form of knowledge," in "Self, State, and Seventeenth-Century News," Seventeenth-Century 6 (1991): 149-68.
80. Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk: From 1625 to 1642, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (New York, 1968), p. 22.
81. The anagrams, which were circulated widely, were: "Francis Howarde. Car finds a whore" and "Thomas Overburie. O! O! a busie murther" (The Autobiography of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, ed. James Orchard Halliwell, 2 vols. [London, 1845], 1:87).
82. Rous, p. 8. The single word "upstart" is used in The Letters of John Holies, 1587-1637, ed. P. R. Seddon, 3 vols. (Nottingham, 1975-86), 2:346;
83. and Diary of Walter Yonge, Esq., ed. George Roberts (London, 1848), p. 100.
84. (Surgical) probe; cf. Hector's description of "modest doubt" as "the tent that searches / To th'bottom of the worst" (Troilus and Cressida 2.2.16-17).
85. William Whiteway, His Diary 1618 to 1635, Dorset Record Society 12 (Dorset, 1991), p. 36.
86. On such rituals, see Martin Ingram, "Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England," in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London, 1985), pp. 166-97.
87. See Baird W. Whitlock, John Hoskyns, Serjeant-at-Law (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 392-93, 283-88,
88. and his annotated text of "The Parliament Fart," pp. 288-92.
89. The best text for "Mr Buckleys Libell of Oxon" is Bodleian MS Tanner 465, fols. 105r-109r; though a partial version is printed in The Arundel Haringlon Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. Ruth Hussey, 2 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1960), 2:279-86.
90. One Cambridge reader of the poem was John Finet (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 85, fols. 72v-75v).
91. Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566-1638 (New Haven, Conn., 1937), p. 19.
92. Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot, 1992), p. 34. I expect to consider further the work and influence of Corbett in a book-length study of early Stuart political satire.
93. This has been published as The Holies Account oj Proceedings in the House of Commons in 1624, ed. Christopher Thompson (Orsett, 1985).
94. Bodleian MS Malone 23, pp. 145, 67-102.
95. The Calidonian Forest was published in 1641;
96. and BL MS Harley 6920, pp. 1-22.
97. See, e.g., Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. c. 50, which contains only libels on Buckingham; and J. A. Taylor's discussion of Leicestershire County Record Office MS DG 9/2796, which contains rare poems in support of the Duke ("Two Unpublished Poems on the Duke of Buckingham," Review of English Studies 40 [1989]: 232-40).
98. Thomas Bastard, Poems English and Latin, ed. Alexander Grosart (Manchester, 1880), p. 39;
99. Ben jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1954-70), 8:411.
100. Daniel Heinsius, De Satyra Horaliana (1629); quoted in Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, Ky., 1994), p. 14.
101. "Poems from a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript" (n. 6 above), p. 45.
102. Bodleian MS Eng. Poet, c.50, fol. 30r.
103. Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London, 1651), pp. 84-85.
104. See Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 39-40.
105. Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), p. 74.
106. BL MS Sloane 542, fol. 15v.
107. BL MS Egerton 2725, fol. 84r-v.
108. On this case, see David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London, 1993).
109. BL MS Egerton 2230, fol. 69r.