John Skelton and Poetic Authority Defining the Liberty to Speak

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OX F O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A PH S

General Editors

c h r i s t o p h e r b u t l e r k a t h e r i n e d u n c a n - j o n e s m a l c o l m g o d d e n h e r m i o n e l e e

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John Skelton and

Poetic Authority

Defining the Liberty to Speak

J A N E G R I F F I T H S

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1

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

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John Skelton and poetic authority : defining the liberty to speak / Jane Griffiths. p. cm.—(Oxford English monographs)

Originally presented as the author’s thesis (doctoral—University of Oxford) under the title: The liberty to speak: authority in the poetry of John Skelton.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–927360–7 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–927360–X (alk. paper) 1. Skelton, John, 1460?–1529—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Poetry—Authorship—History—16th century. 3. Authority in literature.

4. Liberty in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR2348.G74 2006 821_.2—dc22 _2005029757

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ISBN 0–19–927360–X 978–0–19–927360–7

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To the memory of my grandparents:

Reginald and Jessica Griffiths

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Acknowledgements

I have acquired many debts during the writing of this book, several of which go back to its earlier incarnation as a doctoral thesis. I should again like to thank my supervisor, Douglas Gray, for his unstinting encouragement, Glenn Black for his patience with unwieldy early drafts, and Roger Hutchins for his generous criticism. I am also extremely grateful to the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, for a Senior Mackinnon Scholarship from 1996 to 1998, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academy for a Postgraduate Studentship from 1998 to 2000.

An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared in Renaissance Studies, 17 (2003) under the title ‘A Contradiction in Terms: Skelton’s ‘‘effecte energiall’’ in A Replycacion’, and I should like to thank Blackwell Publishing for permission to reprint parts of it here. An early version of Chapter 4 appeared inMedievalia & Humanistica, 30 (2003).

I am most grateful to the members of the Medieval and Renaissance Research Seminar at Columbia University who gave such a warm response to an experimental version of Chapter 2. I owe a particular debt to Paul Strohm, not only for his invitation to speak at the seminar, but for his support in so many academic matters over the past few years. Sophie Goldsworthy at Oxford University Press rescued the proposal for this book from the oblivion threatened by an extraordinary series of administrative errors (not of the Press’s making). I am most grateful to her and to her successor, Andrew McNeillie, for a commitment far beyond the bounds of duty, to Tom Perridge, and to all others at the Press who have contributed their time and expertise.

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Language: Holograph Records of Skelton’s English’. I should also like to thank Stephen Partridge and Roma Bhattacharjea for permission to cite their as yet unpublished doctoral theses, and the staff of the English Faculty Library, Duke Humfrey’s Library, and the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian for years of patient assistance.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my parents for all kinds of support over the last few years, to Nigel Smith for more friendship and encouragement than should really be possible across the Atlantic, and to my grandparents, without whose belief in education and independence of spirit I should not have been in a position to write at all.

Everyone mentioned here has greatly enhanced the quality of life and the quality of this book. Any errors or misapprehensions are of course entirely my own.

JaneGriffiths

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Abbreviations

CR Chaucer Review EC Essays in Criticism

EETS es Early English Text Society, Extra Series EETS os Early English Text Society, Original Series

ELN English Language Notes ELR English Literary Renaissance HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly

JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

MED Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956–2001)

MLN Modern Language Notes

OED Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

Oxford DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association PQ Philological Quarterly

RES Review of English Studies RQ Renaissance Quarterly RS Renaissance Studies

SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal SP Studies in Philology

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Introduction

John Skelton (c.1462–1529) has generally been viewed as a maverick who cannot readily be accommodated either to medieval or renaissance poetics. He tends to be remembered piecemeal—perhaps for his long, ludic poem on an ale-wife,Elynour Rummyng, perhaps for his equally playful elegy on a sparrow in the voice of its young female owner, perhaps for one of his late satires against Cardinal Wolsey. In his uncertain reputation he is at least in part the victim of chronology. In historical terms, his career reaches from the end of the Wars of the Roses to another period of unrest in the 1520s, stopping only just short of the Reformation.1_{In poetic terms it reflects the emergence of} a vernacular poetic tradition in the fifteenth century, showing no trace of the Italian influence which is so prominent in the writing of only slightly younger men such as Wyatt and Surrey, and which was heralded as a new beginning by writers of the later sixteenth century.2 Dying in 1529, Skelton is the last English poet not to be religiously and culturally divided from his fifteenth-century predecessors. His free treatment of their forms and genres has led to a view of his works as a late and decadent efflorescence of fifteenth-century poetics. Yet despite his bold adaptation of the conventions available to him, the results stand at such an oblique angle to the writing subsequently identified as canonical that even a sympathetic critic such as Andrew Hadfield has described his poetic experiments as leading to ‘a dead end’.3

1 _{For Skelton’s life, see Maurice Pollet,}_{John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England}_(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1971).

2 _{See e.g. George Puttenham,} _{The Arte of English Poesie}_{, in Brian Vickers (ed.),}

English Renaissance Literary Criticism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 210; and Richard Tottel, quoted in Patricia Thomson (ed.),Wyatt: The Critical Heritage(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 32.

3 _{Andrew Hadfield,}_{Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to}

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The difficulty of placing Skelton is in evidence from a very early date. Even Skelton’s near-contemporaries treat him as a problematic writer, one who is difficult to ‘place’. Despite his pronounced influence on Protestant writers of the mid-century, those late sixteenth-century poetic treatises which acknowledge him at all indicate that he is not readily assimilable to Elizabethan visions of a native poetic tradition.4_Although such judgements are themselves far from objective, concerned as they are to establish a new, courtly poetic, they anticipate what has become the persistent problem of ‘locating’ Skelton and, with it, his relative neglect. While his works were published at fairly regular intervals during the century after his death, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century they were almost wholly ignored.5 _{It was not until 1843 that} Alexander Dyce produced his monumental two-volume edition, the first concerted attempt to bring together Skelton’s works since John Stow’s edition of 1568. Even then, critical interest lagged considerably behind, reviving only in the twentieth century with William Nelson and H. L. R. Edwards’s work.6 _{Crucially illuminating both Skelton’s life and} the circumstances in which the satires of the 1520s were composed, their pioneering research was followed by the publication, in the 1960s, of what remain two of the most influential works on Skelton: A. R. Heiserman’sSkelton and Satire(1961), and Stanley Fish’sJohn Skelton’s Poetry(1965). Although they are close in date, these two studies are strik-ingly different in approach. Heiserman’s is the first extended attempt to provide a context for Skelton’s idiosyncratic practices, considering satire as the foundation for an entire poetics. By contrast to this literary-historical approach, Fish’s work treats Skelton’s writing as the first of the self-consuming artefacts that were to become the focus of his subsequent work. Concentrating on rhetorical structure rather than theme or genre, his analysis ofSpeke Parrotin particular has probably done more than any other to shape the course of subsequent Skelton criticism. Parrot (and hence Skelton, for whom he is a mask) is said to be essentially irrespons-ible—unwilling to engage with what he himself clearly perceives to be the duty of a poet and satirist: to speak out against the abuses he perceives.

4 _{See Ch. 7 below.}

5 _{For an overview of Skelton’s publication history, see R. S. Kinsman,}_{John Skelton,}

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Since publication of Fish’s study, there have been a few dissenting voices: most notably those of F. W. Brownlow, Nancy Coiner, and David Lawton, each of whom argues for a Parrot—and thus for a Skelton—whose works have substantive moral purpose.7 _None, how-ever, has proved sufficiently influential to challenge Fish’s reading. This may in part be the result of the fragmentation of Skelton studies during the late Sixties and beyond. Recent criticism has seen a large number of articles on individual works of Skelton’s, ranging from discussions of structure and voice through feminist, Marxist, and historicist approaches to a new interest in textual scholarship. The last two in particular have produced some exciting readings, but in many cases Skelton the author is decidedly dead, the object of a method of study rather than its independent subject. Even the two book-length studies of Skelton to have been published since the 1960s, Arthur F. Kinney’sJohn Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (1987) and Greg Walker’s John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s(1988) are concerned with a specific aspect of Skelton’s work: Kinney’s to argue that Skelton’s Christianity informs both the content and the structure of each of his works, and Walker’s to reinterpret Skelton’s later career, and thereby to rehabil-itate Wolsey. Like Heiserman’s and Fish’s, these two studies form an instructive contrast; Walker sheds new light on the question of Skelton’s patronage, while Kinney attacks the idea that patronage and the court were important to Skelton at all. Yet, despite such contrasting readings, despite publication of a new edition of Skelton’s works, and despite two important articles by Vincent Gillespie on the poetics ofA Garlande of Laurell andA Replycacion, there has been no recent reassessment of Skelton’s poetry.8 Thus, he is implicitly left as an anomaly, standing at an oblique angle to the English literary canon.

The purpose of this study, then, is, first, to provide a new reading of Skelton’s work, and second, to question whether Skelton is as

7 _{F. W. Brownlow,}_{‘Speke Parrot}_{: Skelton’s Allegorical Denunciation of Cardinal} Wolsey’,SP65 (1968), 124–39;idem, ‘ ‘‘The book compiled by Maister Skelton, Poet Laureate, calledSpeake, Parrot’’ ’,ELR1 (1971), 3–26; Nancy Coiner, ‘Galathea and the Interplay of Voices in Skelton’sSpeke, Parrot’, in David G. Allen and Robert A. White (eds.),Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance(Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1995); David Lawton, ‘Skelton’s Use of Persona’,EC30 (1980), 9–28.

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unassimilable to the English literary canon as has frequently been assumed. Focusing in particular on his treatment of poetic authority, I will contend that Skelton’s nonconformity has its roots in his con-frontation of precisely those questions that exercised the later sixteenth century too: the purpose of poetry, the social position of the poet, and the relation between external guarantors of the poet’s authority and the energy they seek to contain. Skelton’s interest in authorization manifests in two contrasting ways. It is most in evidence in the serious attempt to locate the poet as the driving force at the centre of his work. Yet it also appears as a playful and parodic counter to that position, manifested in the incorporation of multiple voices that question the very possibility of circumscribing a work’s meaning. His fusion of the two perspectives anticipates later poetic concerns in such a way as to suggest that a new reading of Skelton may pave the way for what James Simpson has described as a ‘reformist’ rather than a ‘revolutionary’ interpretation of sixteenth-century English literary traditions and genealogies; that is, an interpretation which focuses on continuities rather than assuming a ‘moment of sudden break’.9

As this implies, Skelton’s take on authority is a complex one. While his determination to claim a high status for the poet can never be in doubt, the details of the claims vary widely. He frequently voices the traditional view of the poet as educator and advisor, specifically an advisor to princes, thus placing himself squarely in a tradition derived (via Lydgate) from the poets attached to the court of Richard II, and with a later counterpart in writers such as More and Elyot.10 While this gives the poet a degree of both moral and social status, Skelton also presents the poet as one who derives his authority from his place in a literary tradition, drawing on the view of poetry as translatioor imitatio, and attaching considerable importance to written authority. Here too he refers to an established set of values, according to which each new writer is grounded in the use of literaryauctoritatesand reference

9 _{James Simpson,} _{Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547}_{(Oxford: Oxford} University Press, 2002), 2.

10 _{See Richard Firth Green,}_{Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in}

the Late Middle Ages(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 135–67; Helen Barr and Kate Ward-Perkins, ‘ ‘‘Spekyng for one’s sustenance’’: The Rhetoric of Counsel in

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to recognized auctores.11 _{By the time at which Skelton was writing,} this view of authority had long been subject to challenge (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Henryson might all be cited as precedents), yet it remained a dominant presence.12 This kind of authority may be claimed both in confirmation of, and in distinction to, the authority derived from the poet’s role as spokesperson for the king. So too may the third type of authority that Skelton attributes to the poet: the divine inspiration that stems directly from God.

Already, then, we see a number of widely divergent and potentially conflicting stances. Yet they have one thing in common: each of them assumes authority to be a form of ‘derived or delegated power; conferred right or title; authorization’. It is clear, however, that this alone is not sufficient to account for Skelton’s poetics; that there is a decided tendency in his work to claim authority in the sense of ‘Power to inspire belief, title to be believed’.13_{The two are not always mutually exclusive:} the latter may be claimed in consequence of the former. Yet in Skelton’s case there is frequently a marked tension between the two. The very multiplicity of stances on which he draws and the way in which he repeatedly names himself as poet,vates, andpoet laureate suggests that none of the sources of authority that he is able to name is quite sufficient for him. It is as if the idea of the poet carries a weight and a charge far beyond that contained in any one of the titles, for which Skelton persistently seeks an acceptable (or even a possible) form of words.

This study aims to uncover the origin of the pressure inherent in Skelton’s treatment of the poet. It will argue that the views of authority to which Skelton alludes explicitly are only the public face of a private obsession, and that Skelton’s most radical discussions of the poet’s authority are to be found not in his adaptations of established views, but between the lines of his works themselves. We shall repeatedly find that Skelton’s practice as a writer betrays a fascination with process. From an early work such as his translation of theBibliotheca Historicaof Diodorus

11 _{See Alastair J. Minnis,}_{Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes}

in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (London: Scolar Press, 1988), 10–12.

12 _{For Chaucer, see Alastair J. Minnis,}_{The Shorter Poems, Oxford Guides to Chaucer} (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); for Gower, see Minnis, ‘De vulgari auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower, and the Men of Great Authority’, in R. F. Yeager (ed.),Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange(Victoria: University of Victoria, 1991), esp. 51–63; for Henryson and Hoccleve, see Tim Machan, ‘Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgate and Henryson’,Viator, 23 (1992), 281–99.

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Siculus (c.1487) through works of his maturity such as Magnyfycence (c.1516) andSpeke Parrot(1521) to his last known poem,A Replycacion (1528), he repeatedly explores the idea that meaning is fluid, contextual, and subject to change by the very act of writing that attempts to pin it down. This of course creates a powerful centrifugal pressure in his work, which runs strongly counter to his assertions of his own authority over his writing. Yet the two are inextricably linked: ultimately the centralizing tendency is an attempt to put a name to what is transformative, improvisatory, and unpredictable in the process of writing.

It is here that my subtitle comes in. The phrase ‘the liberty to speak’ is of course taken from Skelton’s satireSpeke Parrot, whose main focus is Thomas Wolsey. In its immediate context, therefore, the liberty which Parrot requests is a political freedom of speech, and a recognition of the poet as a figure of sufficient authority to satirize the cardinal. In view of Skelton’s interest in improvisation, however, it seems that Skelton’s ‘liberty’ refers not only to political freedom, but to the freedom and unpredictability of thought itself. So ‘defining the liberty to speak’ does not only refer to Skelton’s attempt to gain recognition as a poet in accordance with existing perceptions of that role, but connotes his bold, conflicted effort to redefine the nature of the beast altogether. Authority proves to inhere less in the figure of the poet than in what he does—it is innate, but innate only at the time of writing. W. H. Auden wrote in The Dyer’s Hand that: ‘In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.’14 _{Skelton comes close to exemplifying this} perception, although he would perhaps place less stress on the moment of the last revision, and emphasize instead the process in its entirety.

It is this that creates such a sense of excitement in Skelton’s writing, and it is intimately connected with his habit of revision. Skelton’s works are never finished, but can always be extended by an envoy, or some marginal glosses, or be rearranged and in part inserted in a different poem. As Seth Lerer has argued, this process has consequences for Skelton’s readers too. For Lerer, ‘Skelton is a poet of continuous rewriting. His many additions to his poems, the evidence that some of them were composed over many years, and his thematic concern with

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reading as a form of rewriting, all contribute to the sense of Skelton both enacting and inviting audience rescriptions of his text.’15_{Yet, as Lerer} acknowledges, this position demands some qualification. In his later works in particular, Skelton does frequently seem to urge the audience to share in his own liberty of mind, encouraging or even goading them into recognition that meaning is contextual. But even as this becomes something of a corner-stone of his poetic thinking, he is not wholly easy with the surrender of power that it implies. Many of his envoys take the form of an attack on those readers who have failed to recognize his authority or accept his message: those toAgaynst the Scottes, Phyllyp Sparowe, andSpeke Parrotare cases in point. The last of these is perhaps the most striking, as it is inSpeke Parrotmore than in any of his other works that Skelton explicitly voices the theory that the poet’s work is completed only by his readers. Whereas the envoys to the two earlier works record a conflict between poet and audience, those to Speke Parrot serve instead as a form of challenge to the reader to undertake reading as a kind of leap of faith, a process of invention, rather than the passive reception of precept. It is evident in Skelton’s late works that he seeks readers who share his excitement over the process of creating meaning, and it is his failure to find them that leads to his assumption of contradictory positions, simultaneously recognizing the freedom of the written word and attempting to impose a recognition of that freedom.

Such tensions are at least potentially inherent in much of Skelton’s writing, yet his early works reveal a rather more stable focus on the court as the ultimate locus of authority. There are good biographical reasons for this emphasis. Born in Yorkshirec.1460 and educated at Cambridge from the late 1470s until the early 1480s, Skelton was attached to Henry VII’s court by 1488.16 _{Although at first his attachment seems to have} been a fairly loose one, it none the less conditioned much of his poetic production. The best known of his works from this period isThe Bowge of Court, an attack on courtly abuses, yet its satirical approach is atypical of Skelton’s writing at this early stage in his career. In what appears to be a determined quest for patronage, the majority of his poems of the 1480s mirror precisely those of the court’s acknowledged poet, Bernard

15 _{Seth Lerer,}_{Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 194.

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Andr´e. By contrast, tellingly little survives from the period when Skelton had achieved the preferment he sought, gaining the position of tutor to the future Henry VIII, then the young Duke of York. For the years 1492–1502, his sole remaining work, apart fromThe Bowge of Court, is the Latin prose treatise Speculum Principis, a short work of moral instruction written for the two princes.17_{The next period for which we} have evidence of a sustained poetic output is that of Skelton’s residence at Diss, in Norfolk, where he became rector following the death of Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1502, and with it the end of Skelton’s employment as tutor to Henry. It was in Norfolk that he first wrote extensively in the form to which he gave his name, the Skeltonic: a verse form characterized by short lines of two or three stresses and rhyme leashes of irregular and often excessive length that first appearsc.1505 in Ware the Hauke andPhyllyp Sparowe.18 _{During this time he also} composed the Latin lament for Norwich, after it suffered two disastrous fires in 1507, and the parodic epitaphs for two of his parishioners.19 Despite his considerable involvement in Norfolk affairs, it is clear that Skelton made a determined effort to return to court at the time of Henry VIII’s accession in 1509. He composed at least two poems on the occasion, ‘A Lawde and Prayse’ of Henry and a Latin ‘Palinodium’ that still more explicitly states his desire to return. Yet it was not until 1512 that he achieved this aim, and the court again became a dominant influence on his writing.20

On his return, Skelton’s position as poet was formally recognized by his appointment asorator regius: a position that may be attributed to the new king’s need of a propagandist in his renewed offensive against the French. Whereas Skelton’s earlier courtly production had been a largely speculative attempt to attract patronage, his writing of the 1510s reflected his newly official status: among other works, he composed

17 _{For those works of Skelton’s which match Andr´e’s, see sect. 1.1 below. For} the Speculum Principis, see F. M. Salter, ‘Skelton’s Speculum Principis’, Speculum, 9 (1934), 25–37.

18 _{For the two most cogent discussions of the origins of the verse form, see Nelson,}

John Skelton: Laureate, 82–101; and R. S. Kinsman, ‘Skelton’s ‘‘Uppon a Deedmans Hed’’: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic’,SP50 (1953), 101–9. In an article which I hope to publish shortly, I contend that the form is also influenced by the medieval lyric.

19 _{For Skelton’s Latin works, see ‘The Latin Writings of John Skelton’, ed.} Dav-id R. Carlson, inSP, Texts and Studies, 88/4 (1991).

20 _{See further Pollet,}_Skelton_{, 58–62; and Greg Walker,}_{John Skelton and the Politics}

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satirical responses to the Battle of Flodden and memorial verses for the tombs of Henry VII and Margaret of Beaufort. Even his lighter verse gestures towards his new position.Agenst Garnesche(c.1514), consisting of Skelton’s five contributions to a flyting with a fellow courtier, openly declares itself as a piece of courtly entertainment: each part is said to have been composed ‘by the king’s most noble commandment’.Agaynst Dun-das(c.1515)—a continuation of the conflict with the Scots by literary means—may have served a similar purpose, as mayElynour Rummyng (c.1517). Skelton’s most serious essay in the advice-to-princes tradition, the morality playMagnyfycence(c.1516), also dates from this period.21

Even following his second dismissal from court c.1517 and his subsequent retreat to Westminster, Skelton’s writing maintains its courtly focus.22_In_{Speke Parrot} _{(1521) he continues to posit the poet} as advisor, even while his advice takes the form of an attack on the monarch’s right-hand man, Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey had been ordained in the same year as Skelton, 1498, yet his position in 1520 could scarcely have been more different. By the mid-1510s he had turned his initial position as counsellor to Henry VIII to such good use that he had become the Bishop of Lincoln and of Tournai, the Archbishop of York, the Pope’s legatea laterein England, and—in the secular realm—Lord Chancellor.23 _{He had thus acquired what were regarded by some as} excessive powers: a position Skelton puts forcefully in his satires of the early 1520s,Speke Parrot, Collyn Clout(1522), andWhy Come Ye Nat to Court?(1522).Speke ParrotandWhystress that they are aimed at the cardinal rather than the king, presenting Wolsey’s rise as both symptom and cause of the excesses of the times, whileCollyn Clout turns from generic complaint about the behaviour of the clergy into a satire focused exclusively on a single prelate.

Such apparently overpowering animosity towards Wolsey creates a serious problem of consistency when it is discovered that Skelton’s three subsequent works,A Garlande of Laurell (1523),Howe the Douty

21 _For _{Agenst Garnesche}_{, see Walker, ‘Skelton and the Royal Court’; and for this} poem andAgaynst Dundas, see Gregory Kratzmann,Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 1430–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 153–7. For Elynour Rummyng, see Pollet,Skelton, 104–11. For the dating ofMagnyfycence, see sect. 3.2 below.

22 _{For Skelton’s dismissal from court, see Alistair Fox,}_{Politics and Literature in the}

Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 143–7.

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Duke of Albany (1523), and A Replycacion (1528) are dedicated to the cardinal. In these late poems Wolsey is, it seems, openly heralded as the poet’s influential patron, usurping the powers of the court in Skelton’s own works as Skelton had formerly accused him of doing in the kingdom. Skelton’s change of opinion has had a marked influence on his reputation. Whereas early criticism took its cue from the satires to depict Skelton as the conscience of the nation, Greg Walker has more recently argued that Skelton’s writing of the early 1520s is driven primarily by the need to find a patron to compensate for his loss of the king’s favour.24_{In his view, the two satires written shortly after the} poor reception ofSpeke Parrot—Collyn Clout andWhy Come Ye Nat to Court?—should not be read as works of high moral principle, but as Skelton’s opportunistic attempts to fit his writing to the resentments of the merchant class of London. When, in response, Wolsey himself offered Skelton patronage (perhaps in return for a promise to desist from satire writing), Skelton was only too happy to oblige. Thus, following Walker’s argument, we find a Skelton whose desire for patronage in his later years is wholly consistent with his search for courtly preferment at the outset of his career. A survey of Skelton’s life then seems to suggest a view of the poet as one who possesses delegated rather than innate authority, and for whom the preferred source of such authority is the court. However, as we have already seen, close consideration of his works tells a rather more complicated story.

The tension between innate and delegated authority is in evidence even in the titles deployed in Skelton’s works:poet laureate, orator regius, andvates. These are the subject of the first chapter; for even if each title does ultimately function as a manner of speaking of that whereof Skelton cannot speak, each too provides a clue as to the views of the poet available to him. In the absence of holograph records of all but one of Skelton’s works, it is not necessarily safe to assume that every use of his titles in sixteenth-century witnesses to his poems is authorially sanctioned. Indeed, occurrences of Skelton’s titles in the paratext surrounding his works may more often be attributed to sixteenth-century scribes or printers.25 _{There does remain sufficient internal evidence to indicate}

24 _Walker, _{Skelton and Politics}_{, 100–3. For an alternative view, see Fox,} _Politics

and Literature; and, for a rather more subtle reassessment, A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Dunbar, Skelton, and the Nature of Court Culture in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Britnell and Britnell (eds.),Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs.

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practises a form of translation in which the subject is spectacularly affected by the words in which it is described. His version of the Bibliotheca vividly reflects the realization that an author inevitably reshapes his material in his own image. It thus establishes a position that will prove central to his vexed engagement with the question of poetic authority.

TheBibliotheca, then, represents an early recognition of the writer’s freedom from the authority of the past; while such authority remains something that may be appealed to for rhetorical purposes, the practice of translation proves that such appeals themselves are a matter of form rather than substance. Yet Skelton’s awareness of his separation from literaryauctores andauctoritates is not wholly liberating; as the third chapter demonstrates, it also entails a degree of anxiety about the sources and the guarantors of the writer’s output. Works such asThe Bowge of CourtandMagnyfycence, whose most immediate concern is with the position of the poet and the problem of advice at court, are shot through with traces of an equally pressing but purely poetic problem. InThe Bowge, the narrator’s literary inheritance is presented as a burden that prevents him from finding his own voice. His predicament is starkly contrasted with the fluency of the vices in the work. Unlike the narrator, they are not fettered by the obligation to feign responsibly, according to set conventions, but speak freely in order to deceive. Whereas the narrator is forced to abandon his poetic vocation, the vices can be seen as alternative figures of the poet.The Bowge thus raises questions that recur inMagnyfycence, where the vices’ successful operation again depends on their ability to shape their victim’s perception by an adroit choice of words. Both works, then, confront fears arising from the possibility that words shape matter and that the poet creates as much as he conveys. Yet they also show Skelton beginning to redefine the kind of ‘education’ that the poet is expected to provide in such a way as to take account of this possibility. For his predecessors, such as Lydgate and Hoccleve, advice consists of direct instruction: the skilful rehearsal of consensus and commonplace. But inThe Bowge of Court, and still more inMagnyfycence, instruction is shown to rest in the challenge to the reader: to be wary, to read, to interpret, and to take nothing, least of all the commonplace, on trust.

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affairs and biblical allusion) as one who usurps the rightful authority of the king, and whose potential for evil is matched only by the Antichrist. YetSpeke Parrot just as emphatically confronts Skelton’s concern with the stability of poetic meaning, at a time when the question is given a new urgency by the linguistic issues raised by the ‘Grammarians’ War’ (1519–21). In this conflict, concerned ostensibly with the question of whether Latin in schools was best taught by an emphasis on imitation of classical authors or by an emphasis on grammatical precept, Skelton’s position is commonly held to have been a reactionary one. Yet, although he supported the traditional faction, a close examination ofSpeke Parrot indicates that his purposes in doing so were radical, rather than con-servative. As this chapter demonstrates, the new method of language teaching championed by Skelton’s opponents—with an emphasis on imitation rather than grammar—is treated as analogous to Wolsey’s appropriation of royal authority: both are viewed as attacks on the poet’s traditional freedoms or, in Parrot’s words, on his ‘liberty to speak’. Con-versely, to teach by grammatical precept becomes the path to the fluent and interpretive reading necessary for a full understanding of the poet’s apocalyptic warnings, and thus for the possibility of political change.

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These two potentially conflicting sources of authority—secular and divine—join company with a third in A Garlande of Laurell (1523), which adds to the list of putative sources of authority a large group of past writers, the English Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate prominent among them. The coexistence of such divergent poetic stances in Skelton’s late works derives from an equivalent divergence between ideal and reality. In an ideal world, there is no necessary conflict between the different roles: the poet is able to place his inspiration and his authority as a writer within a developing vernacular tradition at the service of the monarch, while the monarch’s recognition in turn guarantees the poet’s status. In this formulation the humanist ideal of the educated man as advisor is given a specifically poetic slant; poetry becomes not merely one of the ways of displaying the advisor’s education, but itself gives him the authority to advise. However, in a fallen world the relationships are less harmonious. Skelton’s antagonism towards Wolsey allows him to attribute blame for the failure of the ideal relationship between poet and monarch to a third party, and thereby to retain faith that the ideal might become reality under more favourable conditions. This situation then lends urgency to the reconsideration of the poet’s authority that is already implicit in Skelton’s practice. If the poet cannot be defined wholly in relation to the court, but is compelled to speak as an outsider, he must ultimately locate the source of his authority in himself alone.

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This is nowhere more apparent than in A Garlande of Laurell. The poem is usually held to mark the beginning of Skelton’s newly conciliatory attitude towards Wolsey, yet the glosses confirm indications in the text that the poem should not be interpreted as an unambiguous witness to a reconciliation. Rather, their complex intertextual allusions not only draw attention to the poem’s political subtext, but on occasion undermine that message by refusing to acknowledge it as a poem’s sole end. In defiance of the poor reception ofSpeke Parrot, Skelton pursues the idea of education as challenge to its logical conclusion. Adopting a textual practice traditionally said to locate authority in a source external to the author, he in fact anticipates two distinct authorizing strategies of English writing of the later sixteenth century: the presentation of the poet as possessed of a serious moral purpose, and the creation of a textual tissue of allusions playfully wrested from their original context. While the former proposes the poet as educator, the latter reveals education to be inseparable from an uncontainable proliferation of meanings that serves equally as matter for entertainment. The glosses thus become part of an elaborate fictive construction of a kind which is frequently linked to the rise of humanist education in England, and which has been seen as evidence of a division between Latin and vernacular culture.26 Yet A Garlande, the work in which Skelton most explicitly places himself within a vernacular poetic tradition, remarkably anticipates such interests. If comparable concerns inform both traditions, this suggests that poetic formulations of the late sixteenth century may have points of connection with those of the fifteenth, as both balance the poet’s ‘liberty’ against his ‘authority’.A Garlandemaintains Skelton’s focus on the reader, but does so light-heartedly: the poet’s authority comes to rest less in his assertion of it than in the instant’s immediacy when the reader uncovers one of the work’s sleights of thought and brings the writer startlingly into the present, in a momentary liberty from the constraints of time, place, and monolithic interpretations.

Such freedom (or sheer uncontainability) of thought is central to Skelton’s sole surviving direct statement of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet, which comes under scrutiny in Chapter 6. The claim inA Replycacionthat the poet is divinely inspired is generally spoken of as the first formulation of the theory of divine inspiration in English. However, juxtaposition of Skelton’s description of inspiration with his

26 _{See Arthur F. Kinney,}_{Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth}

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treatment of the fantasy inMagnyfycence demonstrates that it is in fact something far more radical: a metaphor for the operation of the poet’s own mind. His loose, half-implicit theory thus proves to deploy building blocks similar to those used by Sidney, Puttenham, and others of their contemporaries. All circle the relation between inspiration, invention, and the poet’s powers of mind, placing great weight on the poet as originator of his work, and dealing with the consequences of freeing him from external guarantors of authority.A Replycacionshows Skelton, like the writers of the later defences, adapting a theoretical position to his own practice: harnessing an idea of poetic authority handed down over centuries to the energy engendered by the act of writing.

The fact that these connections have remained largely invisible is at least in part the result of a selective reading of Skelton from a very early date. This is the subject of the final chapter, which focuses on Skelton’s reception during the century after his death. Taking as its starting-point Skelton’s divided reputation in the late sixteenth century, when he is referred to both as a proto-Protestant reformer and as an irreverent figure of a lost merry England, it demonstrates that such apparently conflicting views in fact have more in common than might be expected. Skelton’s influence is most immediately obvious in the writing of Protestant Reformers such as Luke Shepherd, Robert Crowley, and the anonymous authors of treatises such as The Ymage of Ypocresy (1534) andVox Populi Vox Dei(1547). The Skeltonic form comes to be so closely associated with anti-Catholic abuse that Skelton himself is treated as part of the Reforming tradition. This occurs not only in Spenser’sShepheardes Calendarbut, more unexpectedly, in works such as Anthony Munday’s Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1599) and Ben Jonson’sFortunate Isles(1624), which seem initially to present Skelton merely as a jester or entertainer. The fusion of the two views of Skelton is important. Where the criticism of the period tends to view him as ‘other’ and unassimilable, poetic practice proves much more flexible, willing to approach Skelton not as the representative of a dead age, but as a writer who combines instruction and entertainment, and who may stand as the emblem of poetic licence.27_{At a time when a combination} of the Reformation and Continental literary influences had apparently

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1 Titular Identity:

orator regius, poet

laureate, and

vates

In hisSelf-Crowned Laureates, Richard Helgerson posits the emergence of a new type of poet in the late sixteenth century: the ‘laureate’ poet, exemplified by Spenser and Jonson, who defines himself as ‘the something of great constancy at the centre of [his] work’. Asserting his importance to the monarch and the state, the laureate distinguishes himself from those of his contemporaries for whom poetry is merely a social accomplishment or, in Ascham’s terms, the form of choice for ‘quick wits’ who lack judgement.1_{In Horace’s much-repeated dictum,} poets should either delight or instruct, and the laureates’ aim is decidedly that of instruction. At first sight, then, Spenser’s and Jonson’s concerns differ wholly from those of that earlier poet John Skelton, notorious for his rude railing and rhyming, and linked by Puttenham with ‘Pantomimi and Buffoons’. Spenser’s and Jonson’s own responses are rather more equivocal, but they too posit Skelton as an outsider.2_{Although Skelton} himself lays such explicit claim to the laureate title, the resemblance initially seems to be one of name alone. However, many of the later laureates’ concerns are central to Skelton’s writing too. Foremost among these is the question of the poet’s authority. Like Spenser and Jonson, Skelton is strongly drawn to define his role in relation to the state. Like them, too, he is equally attracted by alternative formulations of poetic identity: those that locate the poet’s authority in his learning, his place in a literary tradition, or his claim to divine inspiration. This

1 _{Richard Helgerson,}_{Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the}

Liter-ary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 40; Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, inThe English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 189.

2 _{George Puttenham,} _{The Arte of English Poesie}_{, in Brian Vickers (ed.),} _English

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first chapter will trace a number of these ideas through analysis of his poetic titles. It will thus identify the two contrasting views that recur throughout Skelton’s writing. While the titleorator regius locates the poet’s authority in his position as the king’s spokesman, the titlespoet laureate and vates pave the way for viewing the poet’s authority as innate.

1.1 Aspirational Poetics: The Poet as

orator regius

in the

Dolorus Dethe

and

Agaynst the Scottes

Although the works for which Skelton is now most frequently remem-bered date from the first quarter of the sixteenth century, his earliest surviving works were composed in the 1480s. Critical treatments of Skelton as the last in a line of Chaucerians recognize that he was influenced by fifteenth-century views of the poet and the poet’s role; yet the Chaucerian tradition itself has frequently been treated as a pale reflection of past glory: a long line of lesser poets attempting to match Chaucer and missing the mark. It is only recently that studies such as those by Seth Lerer and Lois Ebin have subjected the loose perception of a fifteenth-century Chaucerian tradition in vernacular poetry to closer scrutiny, demonstrating that it did not come about merely as the result of a passive emulation of Chaucer, but as the self-conscious forging of a vernacular tradition.3At the same time, there has been a marked shift away from overly literal readings of the poetry of the fifteenth century. Work on individual authors such as Gower, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Henryson, combined with investigations of the conditions of poetic production, has established the rhetorical importance of what in the past were frequently taken for formulaic rehearsals of poetic principles. While fifteenth-century England may not have had a formal or theoretical poetics, the recurrent assertion of the same principles in the works of Skelton’s most familiar predecessors is now recognized as a form of art.4

Prominent among these principles is the orientation towards the patron in general, and the court in particular. As David Carlson and

3 _{Lois Ebin,}_{Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century} (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Seth Lerer,Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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Richard Firth Green have demonstrated, there was no formal system of courtly patronage in England in the late fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Chaucer and Hoccleve were civil servants, while Lydgate, ‘the monk of Bury’, was provided for by his order. However, this did not rule out one-off commissions; nor did it prevent writers from presenting themselves as affiliates of or advisors to the court.5 _{Indeed, the two} frequently fall together. The circumstantial detail with which Gower describes the commissioning of hisConfessio Amantisand the attention which Lydgate gives to the commissioning of hisTroy Bookshow just how important the association with the monarch was to these poets.6 Such claims to possess merely a derivative authority are themselves instances of self-fashioning, imaging an ideal relationship between poet and patron which it then becomes the patron’s responsibility to realize.

In the late fifteenth century there was some indication that Henry VII might begin to do just that. He gave substantial rewards to a number of Continental writers who sought his patronage, prominent among them the Burgundian Bernard André. Like Skelton, André was initially employed as tutor to the royal princes; yet, from 1496 onwards he appears in account books not as tutor but as ‘the blynde poet’.7 _His nationality is a point of interest. The Burgundian court had established the official position ofindiciaire, or royal chronicler, in 1455. As Gordon Kipling has demonstrated, there was a substantial Burgundian influence on the English court in the late fifteenth century, and it is possible that André’s semi-formalized position reflects this.8_{His surviving works} certainly demonstrate that his role was conceived as very similar to that of the Burgundianindiciaire. The first of the Burgundian post-holders, Georges Chastelain, was appointed to ‘mettre en fourme par manière de

5 _{See David R. Carlson, ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and} Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response’,SP85 (1988), 279–304; Richard Firth Green,Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 168–211. For a contrasting view of patronage, see Alistair Fox, ‘Literary Patronage: The System and its Obligations’, inPolitics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

6 _{John Gower,} _{Confessio Amantis}_{, in} _{The English Works of John Gower}_{, ed. G. C.} Macaulay, EETS es 81 and 82 (1900), Prologue, 1st recension, ll. 22–92; and vii. ll. 3887–90; John Lydgate,Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, i, EETS es 97 (1906), Prol. ll. 69–120.

7 _{See David R. Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII’,}_SCJ_{22 (1991),} 259 and n.

8 _{Gordon Kipling,}_{The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan}

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cronicque fais notables dignes de memoires’.9_{André’s best-known work,} theVita Henrici Septimi, is similarly a chronicle: one whose political bias gives a further indication of the nature of his role. It consistently stresses Henry VII’s ancestry, and thus his entitlement to the throne; but the most remarkable evidence of its partisan approach to the past is to be found in its tactful omission of the details of the Battle of Bosworth, as André makes his blindness an excuse for leaving blank that part of the page which should have recorded them. Just as remarkable is André’s determination to prove his own necessity to the king. He insistently includes his own earlier works within the history, inserting them at appropriate points in the narrative with detailed records of the occasions for which they were composed. History writing thus becomes a form of auto-bibliography. Throughout André’s career, by far the greater num-ber of his surviving works celebrate, chronicle, or commemorate royal events, while the majority even of those works which do not treat directly of the king and his family include dedications to Henry VII or Henry VIII. André’s listing of those works which he composed prior to 1502 within theVitamay then be read as a manner of re-dedication. While the Vitaitself provides an indication of the type of work expected of a writer attached to the court, concentrated on the end rather than the means, André’s inclusion of his past works in their entirety shows the need for a writer to provide constant reminders of his rhetorical usefulness in the past, even while writing a new work with the same aim.10

Thus, theVita Henrici Septimiemphasizes that even Andr´e’s official position oforator regiuswas subject to a considerable element of self-fashioning. The post-holder’s writing had constantly to prove that he was worthy of his position. Something comparable appears in Skelton’s case. As we have seen, Skelton was not formally granted the title of orator regius until 1512. However, he presents himself as the king’s spokesperson at a much earlier date, long before achieving official recognition.11 _{This is first discernible in his choice of subject-matter.}

9 _{Kenneth Urwin,}_{Georges Chastelain: La Vie, les Oeuvres}_{(Paris: Pierre Andr´e, 1937),} 12; cf. Jean Devaux,Jean Molinet: Indiciaire Bourguignon(Paris: H. Champion, 1996), 26.

10 _{See Bernard André,}_{Historia Regis Henrici Septimi}_{, ed. James Gairdner (London:} Longman, Brown, Green, 1858), 32, 35, 41–2, 44–6. For a full bibliography of André’s works, see David R. Carlson, ‘A List of the Writings of Bernard André’,RS12 (1998), 232–50.

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Agaynst the Scottes, composed during Skelton’s time asorator regius, has a counterpart in André’s Invocatio de Inclita Invictissimi Regis Nostri Henrici Octavi in Gallos et Scotos Victoria(1513). So too do a number of Skelton’s earliest works, composed long before he was formally recognized as a court writer. One of his earliest surviving poems,Skelton Laureat Upon the Dolorus Dethe and Muche Lamentable Chaunce of the Mooste Honorable Erle of Northumberlande, is an exact parallel to a work of André’s, while Skelton’s lostPrince Arturis Creacyounmust be presumed to complement André’s poem on the occasion of Arthur’s investiture as Prince of Wales.12

Skelton’s self-projection as the king’s spokesman is still more apparent in his treatment of his subject-matter, as is strikingly apparent when theDolorus Detheis compared with the first of his formal commissions, Agaynst the Scottes, written after the Battle of Flodden in 1513. In both poems, the narrator presents himself as the voice of good order, while his opponents are identified as agents of chaos. InAgaynst the Scottes, the central charge is that Henry is ‘anoynted kyng’ (l. 118), while James is not; Henry’s anointment confirms him as James’s sovereign and God’s representative on earth, and James’s invasion of English territory is thus a violation of God’s law. When Skelton claims that James’s ‘will’ ran before his ‘wit’, he does so not only on the practical grounds that this was a battle James could not win, but on the religious grounds that in acting against God’s will he violated the image of God within himself. Skelton here draws on the long-standing view of reason as that which is the image of God in man, separating him from the beasts.13James’s lack of reason thus suggests that he is something less than human—a charge which is confirmed when James is said to have gained even this spurious

Ŵrecords his permission ‘to use the dress allowed him by the Prince’, suggesting that the university was recognizing the laureate status already granted Skelton by the court. See J. R. Tanner (ed.),The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 345.

12 _{For Skelton’s lost works, see R. S. Kinsman and Theodore Yonge,}_{John Skelton:}

Canon and Census, Renaissance Society of America: Bibliographies and Indexes, 4 (Darien, Conn.: Monographic Press, 1967), 24–33.

13 _{The origins of the equation of God and reason are Aristotelian (see}_{The Nicomachean}

Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926),. vii. 1). For its application in fifteenth-century England, see Sir

Freder-ick Pollock,Essays in the Law(London: Macmillan & Co., 1922), 33; and S. B. Chrimes,

English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 196–214. For the symbolic nature of kingship, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz,

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kingship by dishonest means: he is accused of being a patricide. This was a common charge in anti-Scots writing of the time.14In Skelton’s poem, however, it brings into play the concept of ‘nature’ and what is ‘natural’—concepts frequently considered in connection with the idea of ‘reason’ as morality.15 It is man’s nature to be reasonable: that is, to reflect the image of God. Thus, James is ‘unnatural’ in wanting respect for his sovereign, and doubly so in violating human ties too: he contravenes God’s laws on all possible levels.

Even as he renders James monstrous, the poet presents himself as James’s antitype, the voice of reason, with an implicit play on reason as the image of God in man and reason as verbal discourse.16_Repeatedly emphasizing the Scots’ ‘boste’ and ‘crake’ (ll. 31–2), and ‘claterynge’ (l. 1), he contrasts their bragging before the battle with the outcome as ‘written’ and ‘enrolde’ in the poem. The tactic rendersAgaynst the Scottespart of a war of words, in which the representation of events carries as much weight as the events themselves.17_{Ostensibly intended} to affirm Henry’s position, it also underwrites Skelton’s own. The verbal incontinence of the Scots is presented as further evidence of their general want of reason. By contrast, Skelton’s alignment with Henry allows him to adopt the voice of theorator regius: he speaks as the representative of the representative of God on earth. The strategy did not prove wholly successful. The envoy toAgaynst the Scottesreveals that Skelton’s attack on a monarch—even an enemy monarch—was itself construed as ‘unnatural’. Yet Skelton’s decision to include a record of his critics’ disapprobation in the poem allows him once more to assert just how necessary he is to the king. The final line of the poem is the exclamation ‘Si veritatem dico, quare non creditis michi?’18_{The implied addressees} are his critics, but the intended audience is Henry. The truth which the

14 _{See John Scattergood, ‘A Defining Moment: The Battle of Flodden and English} Poetry’, in Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell (eds.),Vernacular Literature and Cur-rent Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century: France, England and Scotland(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

15 _See_OED_{, ‘reason,}_n._{1’, sense 10a; ‘nature,}_n._{’, sense 2b (cf.}_OED_{Online, draft} entry June 2003, 6 Oct. 2004<http://oed.com/cgi/entry/00321594>;, sense 7a); and cf. C. S. Lewis, ‘Nature’, inStudies in Words(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 24–74.

16 _See_OED_{, ‘reason,}_n._{1’, sense 19: ‘The exercise of reason; the act of reasoning or} argumentation.’

17 _{For the confusion surrounding the battle and the differing accounts of it, see} Scattergood, ‘Defining Moment’.

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poet expresses is the justice of the king’s cause. Thus, Skelton’s claim of historical accuracy becomes an assertion of loyalty.

A similar strategy may be traced in the earlier Dolorus Dethe. In Agaynst the Scottes, reference to the association of nature and reason is made only in passing, as one of a number of charges, but in theDolorus Dethe it becomes the very basis of the attack. Like the related term ‘kind’, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ are treated as norms, synonymous with God’s law, against which human conduct may be tested—and in this instance, found wanting.19In 1489 Henry levied a tax on the country to fund his war in Brittany. The commoners of Thirske, however, refused to pay, and on 28 April the fourth Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, was murdered while attempting to suppress their rebellion. For Skelton, the fact that the earl was murdered while on the king’s business rendered his attackers doubly to blame: they not only killed their own ‘naturall’ lord, but did so while he actually as well as symbolically represented the king. As inAgaynst the Scottes, the argument does not develop quite smoothly. The repeated charge of ‘unnatural’ behaviour initially seems to be levelled exclusively at commoners who refused to pay the tax. While they are said to be full of ‘frantyk frensy’ (l. 51), and without ‘wit and reson’ (l. 52), they are also viewed as ‘karlis of kynd’ (l. 34): that is, they are churls who are by nature ‘unnatural’. However, the threat becomes more sinister when these charges are extended to include the earls and barons in the earl’s entourage who are said to have deserted him, and in doing so to have forsaken their own, supposedly innate, nobility.

It is at this point that Skelton abandons analysis of events, as if unwilling to examine the social consequences further.20 Instead, he turns to apostrophe, emphasizing both the earl’s loyalty to his sovereign and the corresponding quality in himself. Just as the earl was ‘Trew to his prince for to defende his right’ (l. 149), so the poet claims to have been startled into writing; his ‘homely Muse’ must ‘Yet sumwhat wright supprisid with hartly lust,/Truly reportinge his right noble astate’ (ll. 144–6). While this claim anticipates the strategy of the concluding line ofAgaynst the Scottes, the fact that it is in English rather than in Latin gives

19 _See_OED_{, ‘kind,}_n._{’, senses 3a and 4.}

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it an extra persuasive twist. At this date, ‘truth’ and ‘troth’ are synonyms; thus ‘truly’ may mean ‘loyally’ as well as ‘accurately’, in a play on words that stresses the writer’s ability to present the version of events favourable to the monarch even as he claims impartiality.21_{The poet’s assertions} of ‘truth’, like his claim that his words are ‘unpullysht. . .nakide and playne’ (l. 127), are thus clearly a means of rhetorical persuasion. As inAgaynst the Scottes, Skelton casts the monarchy as representative of divine order, and himself as its representative. As inAgaynst the Scottes, too, the strategy falters. None the less, the resemblances between the two poems—one commissioned and one merely speculative—confirm Paul Strohm’s perception that:

unpatronized works may be fully complicit in the plans and projects of a sovereign or governing elite. A writer may align himself with his prince’s programme without enlisting him as an actual reader, entering his presence or receiving his reward. . .[and the court may be understood] less as an entity or even a font of material reward than as an imaginative stimulus and emotional aspiration.22

Just as much asAgaynst the Scottes, theDolorus Dethereveals Skelton’s idea of the orator regius as a mouthpiece of the monarch, even—or perhaps especially—when his own position is far less secure.

1.2 The Poetics of Ambivalence: The Poet as

laureate

and

vates

in

A Garlande of Laurell

and

A Replycacion

Whereas the view of the poet as orator regius inevitably implies his dependence on an external source of authority, the title poet laureate allows rather more scope for the reinterpretation of his role. Of all Skelton’s titles, this is the one most consistently associated with him. In the standard edition of Skelton’s works it recurs on almost every page. Although it is not always possible unreservedly to attribute the use of the title to Skelton himself, it is clear from its appearance within the text of several of his poems and in the paratext of works printed

21 _See_OED_{, ‘truth,}_n._{’, sense 2a. For the poem’s ambivalent portrayal of the poet’s art,} see Kevin L. Gustafson, ‘Rebellion, Treachery, and Poetic Identity in Skelton’sDolorus Dethe’,Neophilologus, 82 (1998), esp. 653–4.

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within his lifetime that he did willingly deploy it.23 _{The question} therefore arises as to what its precise significance is. Despite widespread use, the title has a remarkably fluid meaning in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the laureateship was not then the court appointment it became at a later date. Its primary associations were academic. Caxton writes of Skelton that he was ‘late created poete laureate’ by the University of Oxford, and Oxford was not alone in awarding Skelton this title. Under the date 1493, one of the Cambridge Grace Books records that ‘John Skelton, poet, having been crowned with laurel at Oxford, and also in parts beyond the sea, shall receive the same decoration from ourselves’.24 The title might be granted for achievement in rhetoric or grammar. Records of the laureation of Skelton’s contemporary, Robert Whittinton, at Oxford in 1513, give an indication of the requirements. His supplication speaks of ‘studium 14 annorum in eadem arte [of rhetoric] et informatione puerorum 12 annis’, while laureation is granted him on condition that he compose ‘C carmina’: that is, one hundred poems.25 _{Whittinton’s records thus} reveal that a laureate’s duties included both academic commentary and independent poetic production.

The source of this conflation is the fourteenth-century Italian rein-vention of a supposed classical tradition of the laureation of poets. As J. B. Trapp has demonstrated, there is little evidence that such a ceremony ever took place in antiquity. Despite some references to laureation in the writing of that time, ‘The truth may be that a literary convention has been imposed upon historical fact: that those classical poets represented by themselves and by later ages as laureated are in fact claiming kinship with Apollo rather than asserting that their foreheads have in fact borne the bay.’26 None the less, the authors Petrarch and Mussato render literal the classical metaphor, appropriating the laurel to celebrate poetic

23 _{See further Jane Griffiths, ‘What’s in a Name? The Transmission of ‘‘John Skelton,} Laureate’’ in Manuscript and Print’,HLQ67 (2004), 215–35.

24 _{William Caxton, ‘Preface to Eneydos’, in} _{Caxton’s Own Prose}_{, ed. N. F. Blake} (London: Andr´e Deutsch, 1973), 80; Grace-Book B I, cited in Tanner (ed.),Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, 345. See further William Nelson,John Skelton: Laureate(New York: University of Columbia Press, 1939), 40–7.

25 _{Robert Whittinton,}_Vulgaria_{, in}_{The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria}

of Robert Whittinton, ed. Beatrice White, EETS os 187 (London, 1932), p. xxii. The supplication speaks of ‘fourteen years’ study in that art [of rhetoric] and the instruction of boys for twelve years’.

26 _{J. B. Trapp, ‘The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays: An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands’,}

John Skelton and Poetic Authority Defining the Liberty to Speak

OX F O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A PH S

John Skelton and

Poetic Authority

Defining the Liberty to Speak

J A N E G R I F F I T H S

1

To the memory of my grandparents:

Reginald and Jessica Griffiths

Acknowledgements

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

1

Titular Identity:

orator regius, poet

laureate, and

vates

1.1 Aspirational Poetics: The Poet as

orator regius

in the

Dolorus Dethe

and

Agaynst the Scottes

1.2 The Poetics of Ambivalence: The Poet as

laureate

and

vates

in

A Garlande of Laurell

and

A Replycacion