Steven W. May - Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland read online ebook FB2, PDF, DJV
9780198739210 English 0198739214 In Renaissance England and Scotland, verse libel was no mere sub-division of verse satire but a fully-developed, widely-read poetic genre in its own right. This fact has been hidden from literary historians by the nature of the genre itself: defamation was rigorously prosecuted by state and local authorities throughout the period. Thus most (but not all) libelling, in verse or prose, was confined to manuscript circulation. This comprehensive survey of the genre identifies all sixteenth-century verse libel texts, printed and transcribed. It makes fifty-two of the least familiar of these poems accessible for further study by providing critical texts with glosses and explanatory notes. In reconstructing the contexts of these poems, we identify a number of the libellers, their targets, the circumstances of attack, and the workings of the scribal networks that disseminated many of them over wide areas, often for decades. The book's concentration on poems restricted to manuscript circulation throws substantial new light on the nature of Renaissance scribal culture. As poetic technicians, its practitioners were among the age's most experimental and creative. They produced some of the most popular, widely read works of their age and beyond, while their output established the foundation upon which the seventeenth-century tradition of verse libel developed organically., In modern times, personal verbal attacks on others (libels) are nearly always in prose, but poets of the English Renaissance cultivated a robust tradition of verse libel. They composed insulting poems, sometimes to a length of several hundred lines, that could only circulate in manuscript--the punishments for libeling were severe. A number of these works circulated for decades, long after their victims were dead and forgotten, for insults (roasts, for example),can be entertaining and these poems are often lively, indecent examples of the kind. This book surveys the whole phenomenon of Renaissance verse libel and provides carefully edited texts of fifty-two ofthese poems, most of them made available here for the first time. Difficult and unusual words in these poems are glossed, while the commentary explains who is being attacked and why.
9780198739210 English 0198739214 In Renaissance England and Scotland, verse libel was no mere sub-division of verse satire but a fully-developed, widely-read poetic genre in its own right. This fact has been hidden from literary historians by the nature of the genre itself: defamation was rigorously prosecuted by state and local authorities throughout the period. Thus most (but not all) libelling, in verse or prose, was confined to manuscript circulation. This comprehensive survey of the genre identifies all sixteenth-century verse libel texts, printed and transcribed. It makes fifty-two of the least familiar of these poems accessible for further study by providing critical texts with glosses and explanatory notes. In reconstructing the contexts of these poems, we identify a number of the libellers, their targets, the circumstances of attack, and the workings of the scribal networks that disseminated many of them over wide areas, often for decades. The book's concentration on poems restricted to manuscript circulation throws substantial new light on the nature of Renaissance scribal culture. As poetic technicians, its practitioners were among the age's most experimental and creative. They produced some of the most popular, widely read works of their age and beyond, while their output established the foundation upon which the seventeenth-century tradition of verse libel developed organically., In modern times, personal verbal attacks on others (libels) are nearly always in prose, but poets of the English Renaissance cultivated a robust tradition of verse libel. They composed insulting poems, sometimes to a length of several hundred lines, that could only circulate in manuscript--the punishments for libeling were severe. A number of these works circulated for decades, long after their victims were dead and forgotten, for insults (roasts, for example),can be entertaining and these poems are often lively, indecent examples of the kind. This book surveys the whole phenomenon of Renaissance verse libel and provides carefully edited texts of fifty-two ofthese poems, most of them made available here for the first time. Difficult and unusual words in these poems are glossed, while the commentary explains who is being attacked and why.