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

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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

  CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD

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ISBN-10: 0–19–927360–X (alk. paper)

1. Skelton, John, 1460?–1529—Criticism and interpretation.

  

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  4. Liberty in literature. I. Title.

  3. Authority in literature.

  2. Poetry—Authorship—History—16th century.

  

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The liberty to speak: authority in the poetry of John Skelton.

  

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John Skelton and poetic authority : defining the liberty to speak / Jane Griffiths.

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ISBN-13: 978–0–19–927360–7 (alk. paper) To the memory of my grandparents: Reginald and Jessica Griffiths Phyl and Alan Buckett

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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 in Medievalia & 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.

  Among my colleagues and friends, in Oxford and elsewhere, I should especially like to thank Alexandra Gillespie for invaluable discussions and suggestions, without which this would have been a very different book. Lucy Newlyn and Sharon Achinstein at St Edmund Hall have given me every possible encouragement, while the members of the Tudor Seminar and the Medieval Graduate Seminars in Oxford have (often unknowingly) spurred me to rethink and rewrite. Greg Waite very kindly made available his electronic edition of Skelton’s works, and allowed me to read his forthcoming article ‘Approaching the Poet’s viii Acknowledgements 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.

  Jane Griffiths

  St Edmund Hall, Oxford

  

Contents

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   x Contents

  

  

  

  

  

  

7. Rewriting the Record: Skelton’s Posthumous Reputation 158

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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

STC A Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland

& Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd rev. edn., 3 vols.

(London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)

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  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

  1

  short of the Reformation. 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

  2

  as a new beginning by writers of the later sixteenth century. 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

  3 poetic experiments as leading to ‘a dead end’. 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 Renais-

  2 Introduction 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

  4

  assimilable to Elizabethan visions of a native poetic tradition. 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

  5

  century they were almost wholly ignored. 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.

6 L. R. Edwards’s work. 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’s

  Skelton and Satire (1961), and Stanley Fish’s John 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 of

  Speke Parrot in 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 5} See Ch. 7 below.

  For an overview of Skelton’s publication history, see R. S. Kinsman, John Skelton, Early Tudor Laureate: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979). ₆ The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Rodd, 1843); William Nelson,

  John Skelton: Laureate (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1939); H. L. R. Edwards and William Nelson, ‘The Dating of Skelton’s Later

  

Introduction

  3 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

  7 Skelton—whose works have substantive moral purpose. 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’s

  John 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 of A Garlande

  

of Laurell and A Replycacion, there has been no recent reassessment of

8 Skelton’s poetry. 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’,

  SP 65 (1968), 124–39; idem, ‘ ‘‘The book compiled by Maister Skelton, Poet Laureate, called

  Speake, Parrot’’ ’, ELR 1 (1971), 3–26; Nancy Coiner, ‘Galathea and the Interplay of Voices in Skelton’s

  Speke, 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’, ₈ EC 30 (1980), 9–28.

  John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). Vincent Gillespie, ‘Justification by Good Works: Skelton’s

  The Garland

of Laurel’, Reading Medieval Studies, 7 (1981), 19–31; idem, ‘Justification by Faith:

Skelton’s

  Replycacion’, in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (eds.), The Long Fifteenth

  4 Introduction 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

  9 ‘moment of sudden break’.

  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

  10

  with a later counterpart in writers such as More and Elyot. 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 translatio or

  

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 literary auctoritates and 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

Mum and the Sothsegger, Skelton’s Bowge of Court, and Elyot’s Pasquil the Playne’, in

Cooper and Mapstone (eds.),

  Long Fifteenth Century; and J. H. Hexter, ‘Thomas More and the Problem of Counsel’, in Michael J. Moore (ed.),

  Quincentennial Essays on St

Thomas More: Selected Papers from the Thomas More College Conference (Boone, NC:

  

Introduction

  5

  11

  to recognized By the time at which Skelton was writing, auctores. this view of authority had long been subject to challenge (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Henryson might all be cited as precedents), yet

  

12

  it remained a dominant presence. 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

  13

  belief, title to be believed’. 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, and poet 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 the Bibliotheca Historica of 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’, ₁₃ Viator, 23 (1992), 281–99.

  6 Introduction Siculus ( c.1487) through works of his maturity such as Magnyfycence ( c.1516) and Speke 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 satire

  Speke 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

  14

  poetry, perhaps forever.’ 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 ₁₄ W. H. Auden,

  The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber & Faber,

  

Introduction

  7 reading as a form of rewriting, all contribute to the sense of Skelton both

  15

  enacting and inviting audience rescriptions of his text.’ 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 to

  Agaynst the Scottes, Phyllyp

Sparowe, and Speke Parrot are cases in point. The last of these is perhaps

  the most striking, as it is in

  Speke Parrot more 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 Yorkshire c.1460 and educated at Cambridge from the late 1470s until the early 1480s, Skelton was attached to Henry

16 VII’s court by 1488. 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 is The 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. ₁₆ For Skelton’s position at court, see David R. Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign

of Henry VII’, SCJ 22 (1991), 253–79; and Greg Walker, ‘John Skelton and the Royal

  

Court’, in Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell (eds.), Vernacular Literature and Current

  8 Introduction 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 from The Bowge of Court, is the Latin prose treatise Speculum Principis, a short work of moral

  17

  instruction written for the two princes. 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 appears

  c.1505

  18

  in During this time he also Ware the Hauke and Phyllyp Sparowe. composed the Latin lament for Norwich, after it suffered two disastrous

  19 fires in 1507, and the parodic epitaphs for two of his parishioners.

  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

  20 influence on his writing.

  On his return, Skelton’s position as poet was formally recognized by his appointment as orator 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’,

  SP 50 (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, in SP, Texts and Studies, 88/4 (1991). ₂₀ See further Pollet,

  Skelton, 58–62; and Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics

  

Introduction

  9 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 may Elynour Rummyng (

  

c.1517). Skelton’s most serious essay in the advice-to-princes tradition,

  21

  the morality play Magnyfycence (c.1516), also dates from this period.

  Even following his second dismissal from court

  c.1517 and his

  subsequent retreat to Westminster, Skelton’s writing maintains its

  22

  courtly focus. 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 legate

  a latere in England, and—in the secular realm—Lord

23 Chancellor. 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), and Why Come Ye Nat

  

to Court? (1522). Speke Parrot and Why stress 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, while Collyn 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 and

  Agaynst 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 of Magnyfycence, 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. ₂₃ See A. F. Pollard, Wolsey (London: Longmans, Green, 1929), 13–23; and Peter

  Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London: Barrie &

  10 Introduction

  

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

  24

  the king’s favour. In his view, the two satires written shortly after the poor reception of Speke Parrot —Collyn Clout and Why 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, and vates. 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

  25

  printers. 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.), ₂₅ Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs.

  See Jane Griffiths, ‘What’s in a Name? The Transmission of ‘‘John Skelton,

  

Introduction

  11 that Skelton himself did deploy the titles strategically, in assertion of his authority—but the types of authority they proclaim prove decidedly heterogeneous. There is a particular potential for conflict between the title orator regius, formally granted to Skelton in 1512, and that of vates, which Skelton adopted unilaterally at an early stage in his career. The former posits the poet as the official spokesperson of the monarch, while the latter implies that he is the inspired mouthpiece of a deity. The two types of authority inevitably come into conflict, and the gap between them can be bridged only partially by the title most closely associated with Skelton, that of

  poet laureate. In origin an academic title, it may

  present the poet either as an educated man, and thus a fit spokesperson for the king, or as an educated man, and thus one worthy to receive the gift of inspiration. Each of these three titles thus presents a subtly different view of the poet’s credentials. In practice, their simultaneous deployment may result in a kind of overdetermination, an emphatic claim to all the types of authority available. Yet, on occasion, in the poems of the 1520s in particular, the different kinds of authority come implicitly or explicitly into conflict with one another. In such cases, the suspicion arises that the poet’s authority is not derived from a source external to himself, but that the titles serve as smoke-screens deflecting attention from the possibility that it is inherent in the very act of writing.

  While Skelton’s titles give some sense of the views of the poet available to him, the way in which he redefines them depends not on theory but on his own practice as a writer. The second chapter begins a re-examination of its implications, focusing on his early translation of the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus (c.1487). Although the

  

Bibliotheca has been neglected critically, it is none the less central

  to Skelton’s understanding of the writer’s authority. Most obviously, it provides him with a number of commonplaces on the subject of writing that recur again and again in his later works. More importantly, however, his practice as translator repeatedly demonstrates the extent of the writer’s influence over his subject. Where his source-text presents the historian as one whose authority is derived from his material—that is, in the writings of previous historians—Skelton’s translation proposes an altogether different relation between the writer and his subject-matter. His source consistently discusses the writer’s

  res (or subject-matter) in

  classical terms, as independent from the

  verba (or the words in which it

  is clothed). Thus, the meaning of the original may be transferred intact, unaffected by its treatment by a new writer or translator. By contrast,

  12 Introduction 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.