Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland

摘要

SPEAKING AT A 1627 STAR CHAMBER TRIAL of three vagrant fiddlers, Attorney General Robert Heath lamented that libels were the 'epidemical disease of these days'. He was all too aware that the fiddlers' 'base and barbarous' songs savaging the royal favourite Buckingham were only a small sampling of the deluge of 'railing rhymes' that were poisoning the politics of the 1620s. Over the past twenty years, historians and literary scholars have reconstructed the complex lineaments of the Early Stuart libel epidemic, but their work has paid little attention to the epidemic's roots in sixteenth-century political and literary culture. Steven W. May and Alan Bryson's fascinating new edition of over sixty sixteenth-century English and Scottish verse libels makes a major contribution to our understanding of this remarkable genre of poetic and political expression. Offering richly annotated editions of the poems, complete with detailed commentary and smart technical analysis of textual variants and transmission, May and Bryson cast revealing light on many obscure byways of sixteenth-century culture, and make it clear that we cannot fully understand Early Stuart verse libels without exploring what they owe to-and where they depart from-their Tudor precursors.