New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture
Downs-Gamble, Margaret
Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (August 1996): Contents
Abstract
Thomas Fuller first related the legend that Sir Walter Ralegh used a diamond to etch the words, “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,” on a window pane at Court where Elizabeth I could not fail to see them. As the story goes, the Queen answered Ralegh in rhyme with the corrective “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all” (Fuller 261). More than a telling vignette of the insecurities of Court life, the narrative of this verse exchange serves to foreground the dialogic nature of poetic practice in the Renaissance. Because dialogue is in some sense circumscribed by the immediacy with which an exchange can occur, it should not be surprising that the flowering of dialogic verse occurred within a manuscript culture. But manuscript transmission alone does not account for the variety of practices evinced by early modern manuscripts. The forms of their communicative acts were determined by Renaissance emphases on rhetoric and dialectic. However ritualized the practice may appear, and however stylized, poetry served a primarily communicative function.
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