Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland ed. by Steven W. May, Alan Bryson (review)

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 by-ways 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.

As the editors acknowledge, this is not a complete edition of all currently known Renaissance verse libels, but rather a sampler of representative works that will serve as a foundation and provocation for future study. The editors have organized their collection of sixty-six poems into (somewhat porous) thematic groups. A preliminary group of ‘Representative Libels’ is followed by a selection of ‘Court Libels’ dominated by several ideologically fraught poems against the factional enemies of the late Elizabethan Icarus, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. The third group of poems consists of ‘Religious Libels’, including attacks on individual clerics and a fascinating Catholic verse mocking the martyrologist John Foxe. The fourth group focuses on ‘Scottish Libels’ drawn primarily from the outpouring of invective produced during the crisis of the late 1560s and early 1570s. This selection includes a politically complex Catholic attack on Queen Mary that wrestles with difficult questions about how a murderous queen might be held to account, as well as an equally fascinating Marian attack on the insatiable ambition and Machiavellian politics of the Protestant Regent Moray. After two brief selections of ‘Inns of Court’ and ‘Parliamentary’ libels, the edition concludes with a sample of ‘University Libels’, including the widely copied and unusually long-lived ‘Libel of Oxford’, written by Thomas Buckley of All Souls in the late 1560s, which catalogues the sexual misdeeds of town and gown through a series of riddling puns that playfully unlock the identities of the guilty parties.

May and Bryson offer rich contextual readings of the individual poems, but they hope to make a couple of broader critical interventions. The first concerns the system of scribal publication that was the primary vector of these libels’ circulation. Tracking the passage of railing rhymes through the manuscript miscellanies of the age, they argue, reveals the dynamics of ‘an ambitious and voluminous scribal culture that transcended the boundaries of geography, class, and time’ (p. 27). The editors also make large claims for these libels’ literary value. ‘The array of unusual forms … is simply astonishing’, they write. ‘Together, the poets who created this relatively small corpus of clandestine verse, most of them unknown or unidentified, rank among the most innovative poetic technicians of their time’ (p. 66). And it is this literary appeal, the editors argue, that was at the core of the interest of these texts to many contemporaries and, they imply, is the main reason for modern scholars to take these poems seriously.

The editors are right to emphasize these poems’ aesthetic qualities, but are less convincing when they attempt to minimize the Renaissance verse libel’s ‘political dimensions’ (p. vi). At one point, the editors...