ABSTRACT
In the libelous poems of early modern England there is no sweetness and light. Many of the poems were cleverly conceived and deftly executed; some were witty, at least in part, and undoubtedly added to the fun in the alehouse at Christmas or Whitsuntide. But the standard fare of this poetry was insult, mockery, criticism, taunts, and denigration of one’s neighbors. Ocular malice was a regular feature, reducing people to a boozy nose, a pocky face, a bald pate, a pair of skinny legs, a tiny penis, or a smelly pudendum. In cases for which there is now no information about the social context, defamatory verses often seem to be random acts of unkindness springing from the free-floating anger of vandals, like Robert Hill and John Bedford, who finished their night at the tavern in High Littleton by frightening poor women housed in a barn, damaging private and public property, and “goinge vpp and doune the streete” crying “Cookholdes Cookholdes as loud as they coulde.”1 Accounts of both the origins and the ends of libel, as Kenneth Gross has observed, “gesture toward a place in the self not subject to civilized controls” (46-7). Libelous poetry can be depressing even when contextualized. Although it sometimes expressed a populist rejection of oppressive authorities,2 it was more often a means by which one group of people pressured others to conform to established social and sexual mores. Libel broke the law to enforce another law, the entrenched codes of conduct of a patriarchal order.
