Introduction ix

The edition’s canon is determined further by a decision to privilege poems that originated in manuscript culture. Some pieces were subsequently printed, most notably after the effective collapse of censorship in the 1640s; and in such cases details of publication are provided, though manuscript sources are preferred. But a handful of other poems (not included here) moved in the other direction, originally surfacing in fugitive printed texts, but surviving in manuscript sources once the printed source was no longer available. The Interpreter (1622), probably written by Alexander Leighton, is a signal example of this phenomenon.1 Other poems that are clearly libellous managed to scrape past the censors, often when packaged in a volume of otherwise relatively innocuous material, or when presented in a sufficiently veiled manner. William Goddard managed this risky feat in 1615, when he published two epigrams on the controversial marriage of Frances Howard and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, in which the latter is identified pointedly as “the dunghill Carr” (F4r). In the present context, however, it is entirely justifiable to treat poems which were presumably written for manuscript circulation as a relatively discrete body of writing. Manuscript poetry had its own codes and conventions, and the libel was without question a product of this particular culture.

The temporal parameters, though relatively clear, also require some notes of justification. At the beginning of our period, the only significant questions concern poems on Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, who was executed after his failed uprising against Elizabeth I in 1601. Strictly speaking, these should not belong in an edition of early Stuart poetry; however, they are included partly because they do much to establish the conventions of libelling, and partly because the factional conflicts they describe continue to influence politics over the following decades. Most notably, many of the vitriolic libels on the death of Cecil in 1612 explicitly invoke this context, and the study of such poems can only benefit from being read alongside the earlier works (Croft, “Libels” 275-76; Croft, “Reputation” 46-47). The main body of material, as will become apparent, dates unproblematically from the middle decades of the early Stuart period, with the activity of libelling reaching a high-point in the 1620s. The edition’s range ends in the early 1640s, with the collapse of the early Stuart censorship regime and the subsequent outbreak of the Civil War. As has been demonstrated in numerous studies of the 1640s and 1650s, these two events mark a relatively distinct cultural watershed (esp. Hill; Loxley; Potter; Smith; Zwicker). Although is hoped that this edition will demonstrate some of the ways in which libels of the preceding decades informed the better-known writing of the revolutionary era, it is nonetheless sensible in the present context to keep the two periods distinct.