Introduction iv

These practices of textual circulation coalesced with established methods for the dissemination of poetry. Many poets, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, acknowledged what has become known as the “stigma of print”, and consequently eschewed the relatively new technology of the printing press in favour of scribal distribution (Saunders). John Donne is the most notable example of a poet whose work circulated only in manuscript form in this lifetime; by contrast, Michael Drayton draws attention to this phenomenon by presenting a contrary argument, lamenting that “nothing [is] esteem’d in this lunatique Age, but what is kept in Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription” (4.v*). Moreover, despite Drayton’s biased representation, manuscript culture was by no means a private and controlled mode of textual circulation. Though most prevalent within certain sites-the universities, the court, and the inns of court-surviving evidence reveals authors and collectors alike seeking and exchanging poetry, thereby constructing miscellanies which reflect personal tastes and interests. Moreover, while literary history has tended to focus on identifiable canonical authors, scores of surviving miscellanies also include anonymous libels. These poems were appreciated as products of wit, and therefore transcribed, often without comment, alongside the works of authors such as Donne, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick.

Some scholars have argued that the vogue for libels within this context was influenced by the “Bishops’ Ban” of 1599, which outlawed the works of certain prominent satirists. According to this argument, the banning of printed satires drove this vital literary mode “underground”, where it metamorphosed into more virulent strains of libel (esp. Cogswell, “Underground”). This narrative is in many respects simplistic, and overlooks the many important distinctions between the neoclassical verse satire that flourished in the 1590s and the libels of the early Stuart decades (Bellany, Politics 99-100; McRae, Literature 27-29). Crucially, the libel was not merely a debased offshoot of an acknowledged genre, but an independent mode with its own traditions and conventions. Nevertheless, it remains unquestionable that in the early seventeenth century formal verse satire slipped from the prominent status it had held in the preceding decade, while the related mode of the libel was increasingly embraced as a preeminent product of wit. The vogue for the libel, in other words, is attributable to developments in literary culture as well as those in politics. Under the conditions of censorship which prevailed in the early seventeenth century, as contemporaries became anxious about the state of their nation and sought new ways to engage in political discourse, the libel emerged simply as the most pertinent form of satire.