Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics

Abstract

This article surveys and assesses recent interdisciplinary scholarship on early Stuart verse libels -scandalous, defamatory poems surreptitiously circulating criticism of courtiers, councilors, and royal policies. It situates this scholarship within revisionist and post-revisionist historians' debates on the nature of early Stuart politics and the causes of the English Revolution, and within the cultural turn in early modern studies and in the discipline of history at large. The article then surveys what scholars have argued about the libel as a form of political media operating within an early modern literary underground and an emerging public sphere, and as a form of political expression which articulated serious critique through allegations of sexual and other forms of personal corruption. It concludes with suggestions for future research.

Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), Visual Culture and Dissent in Early Eighteenth-Century England

“…80 The potency of ridicule was seen in satire, which its authors claimed could shame offenders into reforming their vices; in the rough justice with which communities humiliated the shrews, cuckolds and other transgressors of the patriarchal codes that bound them together; 81 and in the use of derogatory libels in popular politics, the unseemly rhymes with which ordinary people protested against authority. 82 The potency of laughter disturbed early modern society. Caution was urged over who and what should be exposed to contempt.…”

The ‘strange and dangerous Poynado’ of Georges Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: Weaponry, propaganda, and political identity

“…Bellany and McRae note that the word 'meane' or 'mainland' in the libel echoes directly the first coranto that said that the assassin had been 'sent (…) over into the mayne'. 63 It poetically changes Buckingham's grace into treachery. The textual dialogue between the coranto and the libels creates what Bakhtin defines as an 'event of utterance', 64 which emphasises social conflict and reverses the transliterated object's laudatory purpose.…”