Introduction x

Throughout the period, libels did not stand alone, but rather functioned within a highly contentious culture. Numerous poems directly respond to others, while all pieces contribute regardless to often bitter debates over the significance of individual lives and events. In recognition of this context, the present edition includes a range of laudatory poems, which could not strictly be defined as libels. Instead, many might be described as anti-libels: poems directly responding to the charges of libels, and “offering rival interpretations of controversial events or attacking those whom the libellers criticised” (Bellany, “Poisoning” 115). Others simply try to maintain principles of orthodoxy and decorum: lamenting the death of Buckingham in a conventionally elegiac voice, for instance, despite the plethora of libels presenting contrary images. Given that poetry of praise accounts for a significant proportion of seventeenth-century literature, however, editorial decisions have necessarily produced a limited selection of such works. These decisions have been determined by the extent to which particular poems demonstrably participated in conflicts conducted in manuscript culture. Hence most of the poems included are concerned with individuals who were attacked in libels, while those on relatively uncontroversial figures are generally not included. In particular, the edition does not represent the wealth of poems marking royal deaths and births, even though some of these may contain critical political content.

Another way in which the parameters of the edition have been determined by the culture of the manuscript miscellany is apparent in the inclusion of anagrams and chronograms. Each form typically scrutinizes the name of its target: either by teasing meaning out of the name’s rearranged letters, or by assigning numerical values to letters (“usually employing Roman numerals, so that V signified 5, C 100 and so on”) (Bellany, Politics 105). Anagrams and chronograms appear to have had an ambiguous function, appreciated widely as entertaining products of wit, but also offering themselves as “keys to deeper...meaning”, or unauthorized truths (Bellany, Politics 107). A popular chronogram on Buckingham, for example, derived the year of his assassination, 1628, from the letters of his name. Noting this curious fact, one couplet commented darkly: “Thy numerous name great George, expresseth thee / But XXIX I hope, thou ne’re shalt see” (“Thy numerous name great George, expresseth thee”). For the purposes of this edition, anagrams and chronograms assume significance principally because of their obvious connections with libels. In many instances, such as that of the Buckingham chronogram, they are followed by explanatory epigrams. More fundamentally, they were commonly composed and collected by those involved in the culture of political libelling, and valued as products of wit. As Sir Simonds D’Ewes recalled in his Autobiography, when relating the murder of Thomas Overbury: two anagrams “came ... to my hands, not unworthy to be owned by the rarest wits of this age” (1.87).1