60 -) English Literature

60- ) English Literature 

John Skelton (poet)  

John Skelton, also known as John Shelton (born c. 1463 – died June 21 st 1529, London), possibly born in Diss, Norfolk, was an English poet and tutor to King Henry VIII of England. Skelton died in Westminster and was buried in St. Margaret's Church, although no trace of the tomb remains .Tudor poet and satirist of both political and religious subjects whose reputation as an English poet of major importance was restored only in the 20th century and whose individual poetic style of short rhyming lines, based on natural speech rhythms, has been given the name of Skeltonics .

His place of birth and childhood is unknown. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and later achieved the status of “poet laureate” (a degree in rhetoric) at Oxford, Leuven (Louvain) in the Netherlands (now in Belgium), and Cambridge. This success and also his skill at translating ancient Greek and Roman authors led to his appointment in 1488 first as court poet to Henry VII and later, in addition, as “scolemaster” to the Duke of York (later Henry VIII). In 1498 Skelton took holy orders and in 1502, when Henry became heir to the throne and the royal household was reorganized, he became rector of Diss, in Norfolk, a position he held until his death, though from 1512 he lived in London. In about 1512 Henry VIII granted him the title of orator regius, and in this capacity Skelton became a forthright adviser to the King, in court poems, on public issues, and on church affairs.

Education

Skelton is said to have been educated at Oxford, though it is documented that he studied at Cambridge. He could be the "one Scheklton" mentioned by William Cole as taking his M.A. degree at Cambridge in 1484, but this is unconfirmed. In 1490, William Caxton, in the preface to The Boke of Eneydos compyled by Vyrgyle, refers to him as though Skelton already had a scholarly reputation when the book was published. "But I pray mayster John Skelton," he says, "late created poete laureate in the unyversite of Oxenforde, to oversee and correct this sayd booke ... for him I know for suffycyent to expowne and englysshe every dyffyculte that is therin. For he hath late translated the epystlys of Tulle, and the boke of dyodorus siculus, and diverse other works... in polysshed and ornate termes craftely... suppose he hath drunken of Elycons well."

The laureateship referred to was a degree in rhetoric. As well as Oxford, in 1493 Skelton received the same honour at Cambridge, and also at Leuven. He found a patron in the pious and learned Countess of Richmond, Henry VII's mother, for whom he wrote Of Mannes Lyfe the Peregrynacioun, a lost translation of Guillaume de Diguileville's "Pèlerinage de la vie humaine." An elegy "Of the death of the noble prince Kynge Edwarde the forth," included in some of the editions of the Mirror for Magistrates, and another (1489) on the death of Henry Percy, fourth earl of Northumberland, are among his earliest poems.

There are, for instance, no records of his birth or baptism, although allusions in his work point to a birthplace in the north of England, perhaps Yorkshire. As F.W. Brownlow points out, The Garland of Laurel (1523) alludes to Skelton’s horoscope and birth on May 2, 1463. Nothing is recorded of his early schooling, but his display of learning suggests a strong early education, and his extensive knowledge and love of music suggest he may have been trained at a monastic choir school. In one poem he speaks affectionately of Cambridge as his alma parens from whom he took his sonship—”Namque tibi quandam carus alumnus eram”—and adds a marginal note that Cambridge first nourished Skelton laureate with “the pap of her knowledge.” William Caxton, in his preface to his translation of Virgil’s Eneydos (1489), calls Skelton “the late created poet laureate in the University of Oxford,” and in 1493 Skelton was given the only laureateship ever awarded at Cambridge. The Oxford laureation may have come in 1488, because some important event that year inspired Skelton to begin a personal calendar to which he later alludes. It is also fairly certain that at about this time he took up duties at court in the service of King Henry VII, where, he notes in a short poem, he was given his own “habit,” a robe in the Tudor colors of green and white with Calliope embroidered on it in gold. Skelton was one of only a few poets and a few native English scholars chosen by the king. Finally, Brownlow notes that in late 1488 Thomas Howard was released from the Tower of London by the king and that Skelton’s patronage by the Howard family was likely reaffirmed; his livelihood secure, his career as a poet thus had a new and lasting rebirth.

Indeed the best scholarly guess, now approaching consensus, is that from his time at Cambridge Skelton served as the poet and servant of the Howard family, the most powerful Catholic family in northern England. Quite likely he began, as a traditional humanist scholar might, as a tutor to the Howard children, for Caxton’s tribute speaks of Skelton as a translator of classical texts; he “late translated the epistles of Tully [Cicero] / and the book of Diodorus Siculus, and diverse other works out of Latin into English, not in rude and old language, but in polished and ornate terms craftily.” The Howards are more directly implicated in other early works. The Bouge of Court (circa 1499) is set at Powers Quay, a place in Harwich then belonging to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, at the date of the poem’s dream vision, encoded in the first stanza as August 19, 1482.

Poet laureate

In the last decade of the 15th century he was appointed tutor to Prince Henry (afterwards King Henry VIII of England). He wrote for his pupil a lost Speculum principis, and Erasmus, in 1500, dedicated an ode to the prince speaking of Skelton as "unum Britannicarum literarum lumen ac decus." This Latin phrase roughly translates as "the one light and glory of British letters."[citation needed] In 1498 he was successively ordained sub-deacon, deacon and priest.[2] He seems to have been imprisoned in 1502, but no reason is known for his disgrace. Two years later he retired from regular court attendance to become rector of Diss, a benefice he retained nominally until his death.

Skelton frequently signed himself "regius orator" and poet-laureate, but there is no record of any emoluments paid in connection with these dignities, although the Abbé du Resnel, author of "Recherches sur les poètes couronnez," asserts that he had seen a patent (1513–1514) in which Skelton was appointed poet-laureate to Henry VIII. As rector of Diss he caused great scandal among his parishioners, who thought him, says Anthony Wood,[5] more fit for the stage than the pew or the pulpit. He was secretly married to a woman who lived in his house, and earned the hatred of the Dominican friars by his fierce satire. He consequently came under the formal censure of Richard Nix, the bishop of the diocese, and appears to have been temporarily suspended. After his death a collection of farcical tales, no doubt chiefly, if not entirely, apocryphal, gathered round his name—The Merie Tales of Skelton.

During the rest of the century he figured in the popular imagination as an incorrigible practical joker. His sarcastic wit made him enemies, among them: Sir Christopher Garnesche or Garneys, Alexander Barclay, William Lilly and the French scholar, Robert Gaguin (c. 1425–1502). With Garneys he engaged in a regular "flyting," undertaken, he says,[citation needed] at the king's command, but Skelton's four poems read as if the abuse in them were dictated by genuine anger. Earlier in his career he found a friend and patron in Cardinal Wolsey, and the dedication to the cardinal of his Replycacion is couched in the most flattering terms. But in 1522, when Wolsey in his capacity of Papal legate dissolved convocation at St Paul's, Skelton put in circulation the couplet:

Gentle Paul, laie doune thy sweard

For Peter of Westminster hath shaven thy beard.

In Colyn Cloute he incidentally attacked Wolsey in a general satire on the clergy. Speke, Parrot and Why Come Ye nat to Courte? are direct and fierce invectives against the cardinal. To avoid another arrest Skelton took sanctuary in Westminster Abbey.[6] He was kindly received by the abbot, John Islip, who continued to protect him until his death. According to his biographer, Edward Braynewood, Skelton was buried before the high altar of Saint Margaret's Church with this inscription on alabaster: Joannes Skeltonus vates pierius hic situs est (Here lies John Skelton, Pierian bard).[4]

His works

Little of Skelton’s early work is known, but his reputation was such that Desiderius Erasmus, greatest figure in the northern Renaissance, visiting England in 1499, referred to him as “the incomparable light and glory of English letters.” His most notable poem from his time at court is Bowge of courte, a satire of the disheartening experience of life at court; it was not until his years at Diss that he attempted his now characteristic Skeltonics. The two major poems from this period are Phyllyp Sparowe, ostensibly a lament for the death of a young lady’s pet but also a lampoon of the liturgical office for the dead; and Ware the Hawke, an angry attack on an irreverent hunting priest who had flown his hawk into Skelton’s church. Skelton produced a group of court poems, mostly satirical: A ballad of the Scottysshe Kynge, a savage attack on the King’s enemies, was written in 1513 after the Battle of Flodden; and in the next year he entertained the court with a series of “flyting” poems of mock abuse. In 1516 he wrote the first secular morality play in English, Magnyfycence, a political satire, followed by The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge, a portrayal of a drunken woman in an alehouse, which, though popular, contributed largely to Skelton’s later reputation as a “beastly” poet. His three major political and clerical satires, Speke Parrot (written 1521), Collyn Clout (1522), and Why come ye nat to courte (1522), were all directed against the mounting power of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, both in church and in state, and the dangers—as Skelton saw them—of the new learning of the Humanists. Wolsey proved too strong an opponent to attack further, and Skelton turned to lyrical and allegorical themes in his last poems, dedicating them all to the Cardinal himself. Skelton’s reputation declined rapidly in a 16th-century England predominantly Protestant in religion and Italianate in poetic style. A new appreciation of his qualities, however, emerged in the 20th century.

In his Garlande of Laurell Skelton gives a long list of his works, only a few of which are extant. The garland in question was worked for him in silks, gold and pearls by the ladies of the Countess of Surrey at Sheriff Hutton Castle, where he was the guest of the duke of Norfolk. The composition includes complimentary verses to the various ladies, and a good deal of information about himself. But it is as a satirist that Skelton merits attention. The Bowge of Court is directed against the vices and dangers of court life. He had already in his Boke of the Thre Foles drawn on Alexander Barclay's version of the Narrenschijf of Sebastian Brant, and this more elaborate, imaginative poem belongs to the same class.

Skelton, falling into a dream at Harwich, sees a stately ship in the harbour called the Bowge of Court, the owner of which is the "Dame Saunce Pere." Her merchandise is Favour; the helmsman Fortune; and the poet, who figures as Drede (modesty), finds on board F'avell (the flatterer), Suspect, Harvy Hafter (the clever thief), Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dyssymuler and Subtylte. These figures explain themselves in turn, until at last Drede, who finds they are secretly his enemies, is about to save his life by jumping overboard, when he wakes with a start. Both poems are written in the seven-lined Rhyme Royal, a Continental verse-form first used in English by Chaucer, but it is in an irregular metre of his own—known as "Skeltonics" —that his most characteristic work was accomplished.[citation needed]

The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, the lament of Jane Scroop, a schoolgirl in the Benedictine convent of Carrow near Norwich, for her dead bird, was no doubt inspired by Catullus. It is a poem of some 1,400 lines and takes many liberties with the formularies of the church. The digressions are considerable. It depicts Jane as having a wide reading in the romances of Charlemagne, of the Round Table, The Four Sons of Aymon and the "Trojan cycle." Skelton finds space to give an opinion of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and John Lydgate. Whether we can equate this opinion, voiced by the character of Jane, with Skelton's own is contentious. It would appear that he seems to have realised Chaucer's value as a master of the English language. Gower's matter was, Jane tells us, "worth gold," but his English she regards as antiquated. The verse in which the poem is written, called from its inventor "Skeltonical," is here turned entirely to whimsical use. The lines are usually six-syllabled but vary in length, and rhyme in groups of two, three, four and even more. It is not far removed from the old alliterative English verse, and well fitted to be chanted by the minstrels who had sung the old ballads. For its comic admixture of Latin Skelton had abundant example in French and Low Latin macaronic verse. He makes frequent use of Latin and French words to carry out his exacting system of frequently recurring rhymes. This breathless, voluble measure was in Skelton's energetic hands an admirable vehicle for invective, but it easily degenerated into doggerel.

By the end of the 16th century he was a "rude rayling rimer" (Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie), and at the hands of Pope and Warton he fared even worse. His own criticism is a just one:

For though my ryme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rayne beaten,

Rusty and moughte eaten,

It hath in it some pyth.

Colyn Cloute represents the average country man who gives his opinions on the state of the church. It is an indictment of the sins of the clergy before the Reformation. He exposes their greed and ignorance, the ostentation of the bishops and the common practice of simony, taking care to explain the accusations do not include all and that he writes in defence of the church. He repeatedly, indirectly hits at Wolsey in this satire. Speke, Parrot has only been preserved in a fragmentary form, and is very obscure. It was apparently composed at different times, but in the latter part of the composition he openly attacks Wolsey. In Why Come Ye nat to Courte? there is no attempt at disguise. The wonder is not that Skelton had to seek sanctuary, but that he had any opportunity of doing so. He rails at Wolsey's ostentation, at his almost royal authority, his overbearing manner to suitors high and low, and taunts him with his mean extraction. This scathing invective was not allowed to be printed in the cardinal's lifetime, but no doubt widely circulated in manuscript and by repetition. The charge of coarseness regularly brought against Skelton is based chiefly on The Tunnynge of Elynoare Rummynge, a realistic description in the same metre of the drunken women who gathered at a well-known ale-house kept by Elynour Rummynge at Leatherhead, not far from the royal palace of Nonsuch.

"Skelton Laureate against the Scottes" is a fierce song of triumph celebrating the victory of Flodden. "Jemmy is ded And closed in led, That was theyr owne Kynge," says the poem; but there was an earlier version written before the news of James IV's death had reached London. This, the earliest singly printed ballad in the language, was entitled A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge, and was rescued in 1878 from the wooden covers of a copy of Huon de Bordeaux. "Howe the douty Duke of Albany, lyke a cowarde knight" deals with the Campaign of 1523, and contains a panegyric of Henry VIII. To this is attached an envoi to Wolsey, but it surely was misplaced, for both satires on the cardinal are of earlier date.

Skelton also wrote three plays, only one of which survives. Magnificence is one of the best examples of the morality play. It deals with the same topic as his satires - the evils of ambition. The play's moral, namely "how suddenly worldly wealth doth decay," was a favourite with him. Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry described another piece titled Nigramansir, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1504. It deals with simony and the love of money in the church; but no copy is known to exist, and suspicion has been cast on Warton's statement.

Illustration of Skelton's hold on public imagination is supplied from the stage. A play (1600) called Scogan and Shelton, by Richard Hathwaye and William Rankins, is mentioned by Henslowe. In Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, Skelton acts the part of Friar Tuck, and Ben Jonson in his masque, The Fortunate Isles, introduced Skogan and Skelton in like habits as they lived.

Very few of Skelton productions are dated; their titles are here necessarily abbreviated. De Worde printed the Bowge of Court twice. Divers Batettys and dyties salacious devysed by Master Shelton Laureat, and Shelton Laureate agaynste a comely Coystroune have no date or printer's name, but are evidently from the press of Richard Pynson, who also printed Replycacion against certain yang scalers, dedicated to Wolsey. The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell was printed by Richard Faukes (1523); Magnificence, A goodly interlude, probably by John Rastell about 1533, reprinted (1821) for the Roxburghe Club. Hereafter foloweth the Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe was printed by Richard Kele (1550?), Robert Toy, Antony Kitson (1560?), Abraham Veale (1570?), John Walley, John Wyght (1560?). Hereafter foloweth certaine bokes compyled by mayster Shelton ... including "Speke, Parrot", "Ware the Hawke", "Elynoure Rumpiynge and others", was printed by Richard Lant (1550?), John King and Thomas March (1565?), and by John Day (1560). Hereafter foloweth a title boke called Colyn Cloute and Hereafter ... Why Come Ye nat to Courte? were printed by Richard Kele (1550?) and in numerous subsequent editions. Pithy, plesaunt and profitable workes of maister Shelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published was printed in 1568, and reprinted in 1736. A scarce reprint of Filnour Rummin by Samuel Rand appeared in 1624.

Five of Skelton's "Tudor Portraits", including The Tunnying of Elynour Rummyng were set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in or around 1935. Although he changed the text to suit his music, the sentiments are well expressed. The four others are "My pretty Bess", "Epitaph of John Jayberd of Diss", "Jane Scroop (her lament for Philip Sparrow)", and "Jolly Rutterkin." The music is rarely performed, although it is considered funny,[by whom?] and captures the coarseness of Skelton in an inspired way.

See The Poetical Works of John Shelton; with Notes and some account of the author and his writings, by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (2 vols., 1843). A selection of his works was edited by WH Williams (London, 1902). See also Zur Charakteristik John Skeltons by Dr Arthur Koelbing (Stuttgart, 1904); F Brie, "Skelton Studien" in Englische Studien, vol. 38 (Heilbronn, 1877, etc.); A Rey, Skelton's Satirical Poems... (Berne, 1899); A Thummel, Studien über John Skelton (Leipzig-Reudnitz, 1905); G Saintsbury, Hist. of Eng. Prosody (vol. i, 1906); and A Kolbing in the Cambridge History of English Literature (vol. iii, 1909).

No one can deny the power, endurance, and memorable lines of the work of John Skelton; he is indisputably the first major Tudor poet, writing during the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, and (for most of his career) Henry VII and Henry VIII. His poems are by turn lyric, passionate, vitriolic, learned, allusive, bewildering, scriptural, satiric, grotesque, and even obscene; his one extant play, Magnificence (circa 1530), makes dramatic allegory sternly didactic and pointedly political. Yet while Skelton’s importance is clear enough, just how he is to be read and evaluated has always been contested. His poems might be royalist in tone, or they might be highly critical of government; he could write for the court and his patrons, the Howard family, yet still need political sanctuary; he could write a moving lament for a young novitiate’s loss of a pet sparrow at the same time that he was castigating his own parish curate, the archbishop of York, and the lord chancellor. While his poems seem to have circulated widely, few of them were published in his lifetime. Nor have readers in later times fared much better in penetrating his meaning and appreciating his style. After the Reformation, George Puttenham found this very Catholic poet a “rude railing rhymer,” and Ben Jonson used him as a character, but in an antimasque; by the time of Alexander Pope he was “beastly Skelton,” offensive for his attack on a village alewife in The Tunning of Elinor Rumming (circa 1521), a poem which nevertheless remained in print throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, often as the single representation of his art.

In recent scholarship, there remains much disagreement. John M. Berdan, without much quarrel, called Skelton in 1920 “the greatest English poet to have been born in the fifteenth century”; he is seen as an erudite and clever poet of considerable breadth by F. W. Brownlow; an early-Tudor humanist steeped in classical learning by William Nelson; a poet primarily concerned with the literary aspect of his poems, as in his play with the medieval strategies of satire, by A.R. Heiserman; a chiefly rhetorical poet who invokes a reader response through his personal engagements and disengagements with his subjects for Stanley Eugene Fish; and essentially a priest who used poetic and dramatic works to instruct the laity by basing them in scriptural lessons and liturgical services of the Roman Catholic church for Arthur F. Kinney. Perhaps the best way to recover and understand Skelton’s work is to consider all of these perspectives.

One fundamental difficulty in understanding Skelton is that very little is known of his life, and the absence of facts has been filled in over the centuries with legend and myth as well as, on occasion, questionable evidence—there were about one hundred John Skeltons born in the 14th and 15th centuries—or conflicting evidence—he seems to have written The Garland of Laurel both near the middle and the end of his life, and the result is a layered poem with some obscure passages. There are few extant documents that can be associated with him with certainty, so that the biography of the poet whom William Wordsworth once described as “a demon in point of genius” rests on such demonizing Protestant works as the anonymous Merry Tales of Skelton (1567), which make him into a legendary subject for jest and even scurrility, and on the genius Skelton inscribes for himself in his work. Both sources can be unreliable if not treacherous unless the reader is careful, so that any reconstruction of his life is more or less conjectural.

Howard was also “bannerer” at the funeral of Edward IV and as such may have prompted Skelton’s moving lament for the king. In this elegy of eight 12-line stanzas the king recalls his own life, listing his accomplishments (the Tower and city wall of London, the fortification of Dover, the royal palaces of Nottingham, Windsor, and Eltham) only to realize that worldly things are motivated by vanity and bound by time: “Where is now my conquest and victory? / Where is my riches and my royal array?” Instead he must, like anyone else, eventually yield to Death: “Humbly beseeching thee, God, of thy grace! / O ye courteous commons, your hearts unbrace,” and sleep forever in dust: “Et, ecce, nunc in pulvere dormio!” is the poem’s moral, mourning refrain.

In 1485 John Howard was killed at Bosworth Field, fighting on behalf of Richard III; his son and heir, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, was wounded, captured, attainted for treason, stripped of his property, and put in the Tower of London. When Henry VII released Howard in late 1488, Skelton may have composed The Garland of Laurel, reaffirming his love of the Howards and his duty to them. In 1489 Howard was charged by the king to put down the northern rebellion that had killed Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Skelton followed his patron’s lead by writing an elegy for Northumberland. This longer elegy blames the earl’s death on “fickle” Fortune’s frown and on “Fortune’s double dice,” commending Northumberland to the Virgin Mary.

The most important poem of this earliest period is The Bouge of Court, with “bouge” meaning “rewards” or “provisions.” It appears to be a traditional dream vision in rhyme royal with allegory, personification, and a formulary incipit. But Skelton moves his dream vision from the typical garden or hillside to a public house in the Suffolk seaport of Harwich and changes the season from spring to autumn, “when the sun [is] in Virgo” and Luna is prominent and “full of mutability.” He names his protagonist Drede (dread) and puts him on shipboard with seven tempters but no one of virtue: Favell (flattery), palsied Suspicion, Harvey Hafter (a rogue), ashen-faced Disdain, Riot, Dissimulation (with a two-sided cloak), and Deceit. Each in turn welcomes Drede, befriends him, and then apparently, alone or conspiratorially, betrays him. Drede’s meetings accelerate and accumulate as his anxiety grows into an incurable fear; his final decision to commit suicide by jumping overboard causes the dreamer to awaken and write Drede’s story as an admonitory poem.

Clearly Skelton’s ship, roughly contemporary with Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (1494), is a ship of fools, but it is also a ship of young courtiers whose temptations are, like those at court, the temptations of political favor. If the poem is a study in the growth not of dream but of nightmare, then one moral is a warning against the evils of political life, bred by greed and jealousy and promoted by dissimulation and betrayal. That Drede can initially be tempted is revealed when he follows merchants on board the ship; it is in this context that Desire, telling him that Fortune guides and rules the ship, at first presents no threat. But the danger is there from the start for Drede, because in following a Dame Fortune that does not really appear, he is seduced by self-interest. Fortune proves illusory; truth resides not in dreams but in life and not in favors but in belief in the true Church. Thus the language of unholy parody—where the tempters frequently swear in blasphemous delusion themselves—leads the reader of Skelton’s poem to recall Saint Bernard’s spiritual ages of man and his sense of man’s fallen state, a state in which one is undirected and in which the surrender of the self to secularism divides man from Holy Mother Church. On board a ship no longer guided by Christ but instead by an antitype of the Holy Virgin (during the sign of the Virgin), where favor and success are measured by power and by material gain, Drede realizes that life is no longer a pilgrimage but an increasing exile from Eden.

The Garland of Laurel, which Skelton wrote in 1495 at Surrey’s Sheriff Hutton Castle, treats a more secular subject. (The castle, which once belonged to Richard III, was the royal outpost to secure peace in the rebellious northern part of England.) The poem purports to recount Skelton’s life at midpoint—he was in his early 30s—in a dream vision which recounts his works and in which Dame Occupation, with the support of Dame Pallas (wisdom), helps to secure Skelton’s place in the Palace of Fame. The story is complicated and comprehensive; while it treats the value of art as creative and even redemptive, it also makes amusing comments about those who try to take Fortune by storm, about those whose work is not fully understood (like Skelton), and those who, like members of the Howard household and their friends, are charming students and companions.

The narrative of The Garland is located precisely in time and place. Brownlow, in his edition of the poem, has decoded the astrological description to locate the precise time at which it is set: between 7:00 and 7:30 on the morning of May 8, 1495. The place is more explicit: the marshy woods of the Forest of Galtres outside Sheriff Hutton Castle, where the Howards reside. Together the heavens and landscape reflect “Poeta Skelton”—the poem’s persona—and his twin desires: the longing for immortality and the desire for earthly fame as a poet. At first he is melancholy and depressed, in a dull half-sleep of exhaustion and a sense of failure, before his dazzling dream takes him to the pavilion of Dame Pallas and the palace of the Queen of Fame. What could be serious and dull, however, is enlivened by characterization. Poeta Skelton is the hapless artist who has stopped creating art, and the Queen of Fame is petulant and complaining, for although Poeta Skelton is enrolled in her books, he has lost his right to be there because he is no longer producing poetry. Fame suggests he write in favor of women, since they are his audience. Pallas understands the wider learning in Poeta Skelton’s work and appreciates a writer’s difficulties. If he writes poems of praise in lovely English, he is accused of lies and flattery; if he tells the truth, he is called stupid and his plainspokenness threatened with punishment. On one hand, he must write to earn his place in the roll of fame; on the other, he risks calling down complaints on himself.

Pallas and Fame decide to resolve this predicament by holding a Court of Fame at which the poet will speak on his own behalf. When Eolus, the god of wind, blows his trumpet, a motley crowd of the rude and stupid comes running, passionately longing for fame. Fame tells Pallas that success alone will not win entry to her palace but that hard work and virtue are needed for success and admittance; she confesses to maintaining high standards and a keen sense of responsibility. Actually, she has neither. Those in the rabble that arrives are not the sort of people with whom the poet wishes to associate, and he disengages himself from them. Pallas, old and plain in appearance, is the real keeper of standards; Fame, in comparison, is incompetent and even destructive. Her court, by extension, is unjust, and so are her complaints about Skelton. Someone else must judge his case.

The poem proceeds, like The Bouge of Court, by associational or psychological development—a dream logic. Eolus’s trumpet draws not only the usual untalented seekers of reputation but the entire college of true poets, both living and dead. They too have taken an interest in Skelton’s case and appear not in motley but in splendid dress, many of them carrying their own works. They gladly drink the wine Bacchus offers them. But the reader learns that their magnificent and musical language, inspired by Apollo, began at first in pain, grief, and failure; their laurels are the sign of Apollo’s hopeless love for Daphne, who in mythology turned into a laurel tree to escape the god’s amorous pursuit. Pain, not fame, causes poets to write. Poetry is also the process of healing—another application of Apollo as the god of medicine—and poets must win their own return to health. The poets thus form their own court to render an independent judgment. They send Poeta Skelton three English predecessors—John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate—to assure him that there is a place for him in their college and that they intend to present him to Fame’s court. They also fetch Lady Occupation, Fame’s registrar, who is the poet’s old best friend, having supported him for long hours at his desk. But she is also admonitory and shows him a dreadful vision of the life of mere ambition.

Occupation’s vision depicts the world as a walled field, with gates for past and present nations, the gate of Anglia culminating in a royal leopard and strange verses of warning; it has been seen as a world governed by time and history, of growth and death, and a vision of the English court especially as dangerous. Poeta Skelton claims to be “no thing proud / Of that adventure,” suggesting he has strayed from the vocation of a poet to activities at court and that Lady Occupation is urging him to return. At one point, in what may be a later-interpolated passage, “one there was there—I wondered of his hap—/ For a gun stone, I say, had all to-jagged his cap, / Ragged and dagged [bemired] and cunningly cut; / The blast of the brimstone blew away his brain.” Although this strange man is not identified and at least one scholar has thought it a self-portrait of Skelton endangered by court, it may instead be a portrait of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, whose ambition to Skelton seemed greatest and most dangerous.

After this, an enveloping mist clouds the vision, and Occupation returns the poet-dreamer to a formal, enclosed garden where Apollo plays his harp and the Muses are led in a dance by Flora, the goddess of spring. Only a bad fiddler named Envious Rancor mars this paradise; the character has been decoded as Roger Statham, a courtier Skelton disliked. Between the dangers of court and the personal dangers of envy, Occupation leads the poet to a winding stair which goes to a chamber where Skelton discovers the countess of Surrey, her three daughters, and seven attendant ladies, all weaving a garland of laurel for him. Like Pallas, the countess is an older woman who becomes the poet’s sponsor, and the poet addresses the ladies with some of his most charming, and perhaps most personal, poetry. Occupation returns Poeta Skelton to Fame’s palace, where she reads aloud Skelton’s bibliography. The queen can only ratify his case; when Occupation arrives at The Garland itself, the audience of poets bursts into applause. This noisy response awakens the poet-dreamer, and he gives himself a new-year greeting, marking 1488 as the beginning of his rededication to poetry.

Despite the seriousness of the theme, the poem is also witty—in the case of Eolus (who may also suggest the Last Judgment), Poeta Skelton wearing his garland for a hat, and even the brainsplattered syphilitic intruder. The cluster of poems surrounding the countess is itself a garland analogous to the one Skelton is awarded in the poem, and while they align the larger work to the Howards, they make of Skelton’s employment at Sheriff Hutton a pleasurable experience at some distance from the bouge of court with its competitive politics and daily harangues. Despite the eccentricity of some of the lines, the changing of moods, and the visionary shifts in subject, The Garland remains one of the age’s greatest poetic tributes.

Sometime in the 1490s Skelton left Sheriff Hutton for court in London, perhaps to accompany the Howards, or as an extension of his service to Henry VII, which may have begun in 1492 when he accompanied the king to France. Perhaps he was called to court by Lady Margaret Buford, Countess of Richmond, to tutor her grandson Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) for his place as archbishop of Canterbury and head of the church. In any event Skelton seems to have been acting as the court poet when in 1494 he celebrated Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York with some Latin verses, “Carmen ad principem, quando insignitus erat ducis Ebor. titulo.” In addition he was apparently involved in creating court entertainments, although one later play, Magnificence, written in 1516, is all that survives. His role as court poet is supported by the single autograph copy of “The Rose Both White and Red,” possibly a coronation poem for Henry VIII, found between the leaves of an account book of the royal revels; several of his other poems were set to music by William Cornish, the music master of the children of Westminister Abbey and later Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. The only manuscript of Skelton’s translation of Diodorus Siculus was written for Robert Pen—like Cornish, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal—so that Skelton’s activities at court may also have connected him to the King’s Chapel.

Among the lost works attributed to Skelton in The Garland of Laurel is his translation of a moral allegory, La Pélerinage de la vie humaine (The Pilgrimage of Human Life, 1330–1331) by Guillaume de Deguileville, done for Lady Margaret. He also wrote for her a “devout prayer,” and a record of December 1497 notes a payment of 66 shillings and eight pence (a large sum) given by her “to my lady the king’s mother’s poet.” Whether her influence, the influence of the Chapel Royal, or some other factors were in play, in 1498 Skelton decided to take orders in the Roman Catholic Church, and in March, April, and June he was swiftly ordained as subdeacon, deacon, and priest by the bishop of London. A series of religious poems at this time—”Vexilla Regis,” “Upon a Dead Man’s Head,” and “Woefully Arrayed”—may have been inspired by these events, and Henry VII probably attended Skelton’s first celebration of Holy Mass when on November 16, 1498 he gave the new priest a gift of twenty shillings, about three times his usual Sunday offering.

Skelton nevertheless continued teaching the prince. His Speculum principis, signed “At Eltham, August 28, 1501,” is a “little mirror” written in rhyming Latin prose to teach “the princes in their minority.” (Later, when the prince became king, Skelton revised the work and presented it to him formally.) But his job ended suddenly in 1502—quite likely because in April of that year Prince Arthur, the first son of Henry VII, died, and young Prince Henry was sent off with a new instructor to prepare for a life of politics rather than religion. A record from April 29, 1502 shows that the “Duke of York’s schoolmaster” was paid forty shillings by the king, likely to discharge him from his duties.

At that time the king’s mother may have become Skelton’s patroness, for the next record, dated April 10, 1504, shows him to be the parson of the parish church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Diss, a prosperous wool town and trading center in East Anglia on the road from Bury Saint Edmonds to Norwich, and a living in the gift of Lady Margaret. Diss, in the powerful diocese of Norwich, was also well located near sites of political and ecclesiastical power: Skelton’s church was four miles from Hoxne Abbey, where the bishop of Norwich was often in residence, and eight miles from Redgrave, where in 1506 Thomas Wolsey was appointed parson of the parish church. Also, Diss was about 20 miles from Framlingham Castle, the chief residence of his patrons, the Howard family, and one of the most impressive and fortified castles in Tudor England.

At East Anglia he wrote, among other works, “Epitaphs of Two Knaves of Diss,” “Ware the Hawk,” and “Philip Sparrow,” perfecting a verse form composed of short, cascading lines of dimeter and trimeter phrasings, which has been named “Skeltonic” verse. The form, however, was not new with Skelton but was a variation on the musical form of plainsong (Gregorian chant) which is strophic, not metrical, and varies the accents and the number of accented syllables at will for better expression, thus emphasizing a feeling for spoken language. Various interpretations of plainsong rhythms exist—mensuralist, rhythmicist, and nonmensuralist—but from the viewpoint of a student of Skeltonics, plainsong is always nonmetrical and allows for a free placing of accent. Usually the lines are dimeters or trimeters controlled by the substance and meaning of lines as much as their mood, allowing a mixture of long and short lines such as can be found in a later Skelton poem such as “Colin Clout.” Furthermore, extensions of plainsong which were first connected to the “Alleluia,” known as sequences, in time became detached and used as independently shaped melodies that could also vary, as Skelton varies poetic form in The Garland of Laurel. Finally, plainsong became in time the basis of troping, those long, digressive poems that often occur at the “conductus” of the Mass. This kind of troping lies behind Jane’s Mass of Birds, where it follows its liturgical model in seeming both formed and formless, accretive and endless, digressive and an extended analogy of the basic meaning of the larger poem (or service) to which it is attached through performance. A more secular troping is found in a later Skeltonic poem, The Tunning of Elinor Rumming, which extends the title in a way that is only apparently formless.

In “Epitaphs of Two Knaves of Diss” the juxtaposition of mock epitaphs for John Clark, soul priest (a curate who prays for the souls of others), and Adam Uddersall, bailiff, draws on the satiric strains of late-medieval goliardic poetry, but it also pairs the two quarrelsome troublemakers as if they were figures for John and James, the equally quarrelsome disciples in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Clark may have earned his role as knave because in his will, dated February 2, 1506, he gives money to the local guild foundation in Skelton’s parish but pointedly excludes Skelton’s own benefice. The form Skelton uses for the mock-epitaphs is that of the trental of pilgrim’s prayers at Lent; for Skelton this becomes thirty Masses, said one after another over thirty days and all revealing how Clark, like Peter at the Last Supper, betrays Holy Service: he is portrayed as mocking the Eucharist by his desire to acquire a red amice, the liturgical color for the Passion as well as for those who celebrate the Black Mass; he eats intestines of sheep, goats, and oxen rather than the blessed elements of Host and wine; he reverses the prayer “Orate, fratres” in the Canon; he kneels before a football as if it were the Host; he chants “Bibite multum” instead of the proper “bibite ex eo” at the elevation of the chalice; and he kisses the Devil’s culum (ass) rather than sacred elements. In short, John Clark’s heresies, according to this epitaph, show him to be a soul priest whose own soul is misdirected.

Just as Clark is attacked for betraying his vocation, so Uddersall is blamed for misusing his authority as a bailiff. Like Clark, he subverts the talents and the office given him by God, and so reveals his disobedience to Him. He is compared to a foe of Israel: Agag, King of Amalek, defeated by Saul (1 Samuel 15:5-9). Both poems are figural, seeing their specific subject matter as typological behavior open to interpretation and judgment on a spiritual spectrum.

“Ware the Hawk” is a more complicated and powerful poem. The title is a proverbial cry used to encourage a hawk to obtain its prey; the poem tells the story (presumably autobiographical) of the rector of Diss’s finding a neighboring curate hawking in his church during his absence, a practice that Pope Innocent III had specifically forbidden in an injunction of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Although hawking was a common offense and the hawking parson a commonplace of poetic satire—already having been employed by Chaucer and Gower—Skelton portrays this instance as a desecration of the church since this “lewd curate, / A parson beneficed,” has allowed the hawk to pollute the altar and eventually to defecate on it. Not only is the altar stained, but the blood of the hawk’s prey falling on the Host and chalice mocks the blood of Christ whose suffering is the very heart of Holy Mass celebrated there.

What follows this initial narration is the body of the poem, a sermon which interprets the situation as exegesis does a biblical text. In form, this sermon is a penitential one, divided into eight parts labeled “Observate,” “Considerate,” “Deliberate,” “Vigilate,” “Deplorate,” “Divinate,” “Reformate,” and “Pensitate” and followed by a new “table” of laws to replace the Ten Commandments. This table can hardly be for the erring curate, for he has been called irredeemable; rather, as the imperative mode of the subtitles suggests, it is meant for the poet’s congregation and for his readers. Furthermore, by setting this incident on August 29, the feast day of the Decollation of Saint John the Baptist, Skelton stresses the idea of sacrifice by death; by alluding to the desecration of the Temple in 2 Kings 16 and 2 Chronicles 28, Skelton shows that the curate is prefigured by Ahaz, who “defiled ... all the furniture of the temple.” Even in the section called “Reformate,” Skelton provides a long catalogue of Roman emperors who persecuted Christians and more recent pagans, such as the Turks, who in 1453 desecrated the Church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, the mother church of the Eastern papacy where Saint John’s head was taken as a relic. As God provided a Hezekiah to overcome the savage destruction of Ahaz, so he has caused Skelton to see (and to overcome through his poem) the destruction wrought by the curate. The dark denunciations suggest that the matter of the poem is God’s prophecy, not an idle boast by Skelton who, after all, was surprised to find the curate hawking in his church. That was the doing of God, just as the appointment of Skelton to punish the curate is God’s decision. In confronting the curate with his crime, the exasperated Skelton is reduced to calling him “Doctor Dawcock” and “Domine Dawcock.”

Since the 19th century, “Philip Sparrow” has been Skelton’s best-loved poem. Its occasion is the death of a pet sparrow trained and beloved by Jane Scrope, a young novitiate then living with her mother, the recently widowed Lady Eleanor Windham, at the Benedictine Priory of Saint Mary at Carrow just outside Norwich. Part 1 of the poem is based on a single liturgical service, the vespers of the Office of the Dead, and opens with a brief antiphon after which the service is named: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum” (I shall please the Lord in the land of the living). It concludes with an augmented version of the same antiphon, to which there is the reply “Hei mihi, Domine, qui incolatus meus prolongatus est” (Woe is me, O Lord, that my sojourn is prolonged).

But, unlike the service, Jane’s “Placebo” begins and remains antiphonal:

Pla ce bo,

Who is there, who?

Di le xi,

Dame Margery,

Fa, re, my, my.

Wherefore and why, why?

For the soul of Philip Sparrow,

That was late slain at Carrow,

Among the Nuns Black.

For that sweet soul’s sake,

And for all sparrows’ souls

Set in our bede rolls [mourners’ prayer rolls]

Pater noster qui

With an Ave Mari,

And with the corner of a Creed,

The more shall be your meed [reward].

These opening lines indicate the thrust of the entire “Placebo” of the poem: clearly what Jane has done—the first half of the poem is in her voice and in her thought—is to turn a liturgical service which she is attending into an antiphon, and she responds with the plainsong of her own stream of consciousness, which is in turn directed by the service. Because her entire thought pattern is a projection of her own suffering over the recent loss of her sparrow, the antiphonal exchange following the opening of the Office of the Dead is rendered keenly autobiographical. She is sorrowful herself at her prolonged sojourn, separated as she is from Philip; she asks how, left in the land of the living without her sparrow, she can possibly be expected to please the Lord. The dialectic proposed by the text in her primer becomes the basic dilemma that her private meditation must work out even as the more public service is impersonally sung around her. That Jane is prompted to such thoughts is parodic in a special sense meant to underscore how seriously, and how personally, she applies the text of the Divine Office: while others say or sing it, she lives it.

Other versicles from Psalms are sung, and then the service invokes the Magnificat, at which point Jane awards Philip with his own more fitting Requiem Mass of Birds. While this may seem intrusive, even digressive, it comes at a point in the service roughly analogous to where the sequence of the proper of any mass might be “troped” (extended by a fitting digression), and in accommodating her Requiem to Philip, Jane acts as intercessor just as Mary, in the Magnificat, is made intercessor between God and man; notably, Saint Philip is the historic saint of intercession. The more dolorous matter of the requiem transforms the young novitiate for the moment into the Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowing mother at the cross of a misunderstood Christ. Those who might laugh at Jane for her excessive grief over a pet do not measure truly the need and function of intercession: it is, after all, the sparrow for whom Christ says God has special providence.

Part 2 of “Philip Sparrow” follows exactly a service complementary to the “Placebo”: the Commendation of All Souls, found in the same primers and Books of Hours. This service is also named for a formulary which suggests intercession: “Tibi, Domine, commendamus animam famuli tui N. et animas famulorum famularumque tuarum” (To thee, O Lord, we commend the soul of thy servant N. and the souls of thy servants both men and women), this latter formula providing the last liturgical reference in the poem. The eight main sections in part 2, each introduced by a versicle from Psalms, have appeared to many critics as erotic stanzas cataloguing Jane’s physical charms, astonishingly out of place in this poem. But the point is that they are based on praises of the Virgin drawn from popular carols and rounds, the Canticle of Canticles, and Saint Valentine’s Day poems to the Virgin. Skelton follows part 1, based loosely on the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, with his own more celebratory Seven Joys of the Virgin; he returns (as Jane does with the Magnificat) to the relationship between mother and child marked by pleasure and happiness.

The two parts of the poem thus function as one by realizing the double interpretation of Christ’s death as derived from Saint Origen: the first resurrection, by which the soul rises from the death of the body (as Philip rises from his death by the cat Gib) and the second resurrection—Philip’s, the cat’s, and the reader’s—by which the body finds occasion to be freed from all corruption, to renew spiritual dedication, and to take joy in newfound spiritual health.

Such a poem grows directly out of the experience of life in the convent, where Skelton likely met Jane Scrope and her mother. But the allusions of such figural poetry, which find their meaning only in light of received liturgy and Scripture, apparently confused Skelton’s first readers as they have most readers until recently. Skelton remarks in The Garland of Laurel: “What ail them to deprave / Philip Sparrow’s grave? / His Dirige, her Commendation / Can be no derogation, / But mirth and consolation / Made by protestation, / No man to miscontent / With Philip’s entrement.” To prevent misreading, Skelton wrote a brief part 3, the “Addition,” in which he replies directly to his critics. In writing this, he follows part 1 (the intercession of Jane for Philip) and part 2 (the intercession of Jane to God) by interceding on Jane’s behalf to the poem’s readers. This final act of intercession becomes, as the others have become, an act of commendation; and all three become acts of pleasing (“Placebo”).

After 1511 Skelton’s name no longer appears in records at Diss; on July 5, 1511 he was in London dining with the prior of Westminster Abbey. By 1512 the poet appears to have given Henry VIII three manuscripts: a revised copy of his Speculum Principis; a poem titled “Complaint,” decrying “Skelton Laureate, onetime royal tutor” as being “quiet in soliloquy with himself” and “wholly given over to oblivion, or like one dead from the heart”; and an annotated copy of the old Chronique de Rains about Richard the Lion-Hearted, inscribed with a new dedication to Henry. The Speculum Principis ends with an allusive jab at one of Henry’s advisers, possibly Wolsey, who had left the parish of Redgrave and by 1512 was royal almoner and privy councillor to the king: “Grow strong, prince, easily a prince of all princes. Understand that a king must rule and not be ruled. Listen to Samuel, read Daniel, banish Ishmael. Banish! Banish!”

Whether Skelton’s persistence or the king’s sense of obligation to his first tutor played the major part, in the spring of 1512 or 1513 the poet was formally recognized by letters patent as orator regius, court poet and rhetorician to Henry VIII. At first he seems to have written court poems natural to that office, including an epigraph for Henry VII (“Eulogium pro suorum temporum conditione”) that he used to honor the son—”Noster Honor solus, filius, ecce, suus!”—and which was duly hung in the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, and an “Elegia” for Lady Margaret Buford which, more than a century later, John Weever found still hanging over her tomb. The king’s orator also wrote occasional poems on political triumphs. “Contra Gallos” celebrates the Battle of the Spurs in 1513, when Henry VIII invaded France and took Thérouenne and Tournai. A series of other poems honors Skelton’s longtime patrons, the Howard family who defeated Scottish forces at Flodden Field in 1513; they include the “Chorus de Dis contra Scottis,” the “Ballad of the Scottish King,” and, later, a revision of the ballad with added invective, retitled “Against the Scots.”

There is some indication that Skelton was part of the large retinue from court that went with Henry VIII to France in 1513, for it was there that Christopher Garnesche, Sergeant of the King’s Tent and a partisan of Wolsey, was knighted for his services. Skelton’s series of poems “Against Garnesche,” some of which are written in Skeltonics, is part of a notable duel of invective, although Skelton remarks at the end of each section of his work that this contest of abuse was actually written “by the King’s most noble commandment.” Although this highly personal and doubtless occasional work is a minor part of Skelton’s canon, it remains important as the first example of a “flyting” in English. He also returned at this time to the mock epitaph in his diatribe against William Bedell, former Treasurer of the Household for Lady Margaret Buford. The Latin poem is based on Psalm 73, but its cause and meaning remain obscure.

Two works of 1516 were aimed at Wolsey. The first one, “Against Venemous Tongues,” was occasioned by the elevation in 1515 of the archbishop of York to cardinal of the church (and so chief prelate in all England). Skelton admonishes: “All matters well pondered and well to be regarded, / How should a false lying tongue then be rewarded? / Such tongues should be torn out by the hard roots, / Hoyning [grunting] like hogs that gronis [grunt] and wrotez [root in soil].” The reference to “hogs,” alluding to Wolsey as a butcher’s son, clearly identifies Skelton’s target. But more galling than the cardinal’s low birth is his ostentatious display of his new badge of office: “for before on your breast and behind on your back, / In Roman letters I never found lack.” “Never found lack” is a turning point in the poem, for while there is a surplus of letters (“T” and “C” for “Thomas Cardinalis”) on his livery, there is a “lack,” which Skelton finds “In your cross-row nor Christ-cross-you-speed, / Your Pater noster, your Ave, nor your Creed,” for these are the true texts which the cardinal forgets both to speak and to practice.

Although the poem is ostensibly one of denunciation, the poet must find a way to salvage language when it has been all but destroyed by debasement. His means for achieving this is to make an analogy between proper and improper use of language and the good and bad men who are responsible for its corruption; further, he makes good men (such as himself) those who remain responsible to the beliefs of the Church and the lessons of Scripture and the evil ones those who flout their office at the expense of their faith. Thus the poem is really a colloquy between the priest of the Church, who calls on the Church’s authority for his credentials, and that Church’s prelate, who has apparently forgotten what lessons that Church taught him.

The second work of 1516 is Skelton’s only surviving play, the allegorical morality play Magnificence. In her 1980 edition of the play, Paula Neuss claims that its title has three meanings: “liberality ... combined with good taste,” or “munificence,” as derived from Aristotle’s use of the word; “glory,” which can lead either to proper dignity or, when misused, pride; and “a title of honor applied to ... distinguished persons.” The play unfolds simultaneously on at least three levels. On the allegorical level, the title character is a figure for mankind, over whose soul and mind the virtues and vices of measure are warring. On the philosophical level, the play considers the meaning of magnificence to be proper balance or moderation: “measure is treasure.” On a literal or narrative level, the character named Magnificence ceases to be prudent, invites corrupt conspirators to his court, loses his power, and struggles to regain his authority. Although Skelton seems by this time to have taken sanctuary in Westminster under the auspices of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster Abbey and a member of the king’s Privy Council, there is nevertheless in the play a mix of moral debate and tragedy and a constant movement from the abstract to the specific and back to the abstract, which prevents any easy association of Wolsey with the central character.

The theme of the play is the traditional one of virtue versus vice, as in The Bouge of Court. The struggle is between prudence and folly, not good and evil, but the play is concerned with worldly success rather than salvation. Although the text is not divided, Magnificence clearly falls into five stages or acts: prosperity, conspiracy, delusion, overthrow, and restoration (again resonant of The Bouge of Court). But this moral allegory about good and evil is also a political allegory about good and bad rule. The prince is distracted and seduced by six vices which have been associated with Wolsey, such as Counterfeit Countenance, aimed at Wolsey’s lower social origins, and Courtly Abusion, aimed at reminding the audience of Wolsey’s love for extravagant dress. In the vices there is great wit, and many of the scenes inject a comedy not common to moralities of the time. Nan Cooke Carpenter notes that Magnificence is “a mixture of old and new, of seriousness and humor, of traditional religion and practical politics. Its hero is Henry VIII and at the same time any man whom adverse Fortune may cast down at any time. Its vices add up to Thomas Wolsey, or to anyone else motivated by extreme self-love and selfish ambition.” Cloaking pointed references in the guise of general wrongs, Skelton is able to write strong satire while never clearly attacking the king’s favored adviser.

Magnificence was Skelton’s first lengthy attack on Wolsey, followed in the 1520s by three more daring poems which must have been risked only because Skelton had been granted sanctuary and because, urging traditional morality, he could argue that he was a truer priest than Wolsey was a prelate: “Speak, Parrot” (1521), “Colin Clout” (1522), and “Why Come Ye Not to Court?” (late 1522 and 1523), each increasingly direct. “Speak, Parrot” is Skelton’s most recalcitrant work. Not only is it obscure in itself, but it exists only in two separate, partial versions (one in manuscript) that must be conflated to establish a full text. It was written at discrete periods and seems layered in its presentation. Even in the opening section, which like The Bouge of Court declares the situation on which the poem elaborates, the Parrot feels it necessary to speak figuratively rather than directly, by what he describes as “Confuse distributive”: that is, speech that seems confusing because it scatters or distributes its meaning throughout the poem, though its significance grows in the mind of the reader as he progresses through it (as was often the case with the reading of Scripture and its exegesis).

But the poem is hardly the “cryptogram of which we have lost the key” that C.S. Lewis thought it. “Speak, Parrot” is a poem of commentary and instruction in which Parrot does not warn us what will happen so much as tell us what we are to know and how we are to interpret it. About this, Parrot could not be plainer:

But of that supposition that called is art,

Confuse distributive, as Parrot hath devised,

Let every man after his merit take his part;

For in this process, Parrot nothing hath surmised,

But that metaphora, alegoria withall,

Shall be his protection, his pavys [shield], and his wall.

In constructing a proposition (“supposition”) that one would consider well arranged (“art”), Parrot has jumbled together scattered bits of truth (“Confuse distributive”) in a way that will allow readers to determine their meaning, each according to his merit, reminiscent of the biblical “every man shall receive his own reward, according to his own labor” (1 Corinthians 3:8). But the “art” is in the “supposition,” the controlling idea and the selection, not in the subject matter, which is neither original (“No matter pretended”) nor unusually arranged (“nor nothing enterprised”).

Parrot employs signs and figures (metaphor, allegory) as his shield (“pavys”). Moreover, he will use the mirror in his cage to see prismatically, as if through a glass darkly: “The mirror that I tote [peer] in Quasi di phanum, / Vel quasi speculum in engimate” (1 Corinthians 13:12). But although what he will say is politically dangerous, this is not the reason for his indirection—he is only a parrot and will not flinch in his envois from openly exposing Cardinal Wolsey. Rather, metaphor and allegory are necessary because God’s truth is so dazzling. Parrot’s truth, like Saint Paul’s, must be comprehended indirectly on earth; only in Parrot’s home of Paradise would we be able to see it directly, in all its brilliant glory. There, it would be splendidly lucid, neither divided in its grand design nor distributed across human history.

The plainness of Parrot’s message, once the parts are connected, is complicated by the narrator, a composite which Skelton expects his readers to take apart. Parrot derives from at least three traditions. Contemporary bestiaries stressed the parrot’s exotic origins (in India), its skill at language, and its quick ability to mimic others. Thus Parrot the narrator can change swiftly, gather up varied scraps of wisdom in foreign tongues, and put his bits of knowledge into revealing juxtaposition. This wise fool came from Paradise, and, still trailing clouds of that glory, he will occasionally speak in what seems to be tongues, reminiscent of Pentecost or Whitsunday. A second pedigree comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), which assigns to Parrot divinity as a descendant of Prometheus, who breathed life into clay, like God. Parrot, as the son of Deucalion, barely escaped the flood, the apocalyptic memory of which will nearly overcome him at the end of the poem. Finally Parrot has in his cage a special mirror that refracts light and so throws into relief much that is around him. In medieval homiletic literature, the mirror was a figure for the Host, its broken pieces the various communicants who wished to unite their bodies with Christ’s. Parrot’s comments, then, are divinely inspired.

In part 1, Parrot begins by trying to keep things as whole as possible. He injects stanzas to demonstrate that in Tudor England (where he is presently caged) Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey are reenacting typological roles already forewarned in the Old Testament. Three biblical types offer man’s basic choice for Parrot: Melchisedech, Moloch, and Gideon. Melchisedech offers Abraham bread and wine (Genesis 14:18), prefiguring the Eucharist. In time Melchisedech came to prefigure Christ as Prince of Peace (Hebrews 6:20), and his name was invoked in each Mass celebrated by the Church during the celebrant’s fifth pass over the chalice. Parrot directs his Tudor congregation back through the Mass to Church history beause Melchisedech’s law was the continuity of a covenant with Noah, and Parrot identifies his own history with the time of Noah’s flood. Parrot even identifies with Melchisedech because neither had any known parents. But speaking in tongues, he joins with Henry VIII, as the King of Peace, in eternal contest with Moloch/Wolsey. Wolsey, however, is identified with Moloch (the Antichrist of Leviticus 18:21). For Moloch, God allows no concessions: “the people of the land shall stone him” (Leviticus 20:2). Moloch’s position in the Old Testament prefigures that of Herod in the New Testament, an enemy of God familiar to the viewers in Skelton’s day of the cycle of biblical mystery plays. As part 1 progresses, Parrot grows more urgent, even more plainspoken. He first condenses his fears into a single line, “But moveatur terra, let the world wag,” recalling Psalm 98 (“The Lord hath reigned, let the people be angry: he that sitteth on the cherubims: let the earth be moved”) and the Libera me from the Office for the Dead (“In that dreadful day, when the heavens and the earth are shaken”).

That dreadful day, Doomsday, is brought closer to home in part 2, where the apparent digression concerning the “Grammarians’ War” of 1519–1521 enlists humanist educators to testify to the advancing forces of Moloch, because their New Learning provides referential texts that are no longer Scriptural. Parrot’s own attempted use of “Such shreds of sentence, strewn in the shop / Of ancient Aristippus and such mother more” leads into rhetorical nonsense that can only suggest the fallen world, and grammatical nonsense that suggests the Tower of Babel.

Part 3 is a single brief interlude in a markedly different tone. Parrot’s mistress, Galathea, approaches his cage and “prays” that, “for Mary’s sake,” he will sing her a love song. Parrot’s response is a song at once erotic and so general that it seems to be a song of intercession for all mankind. His song wins Galathea’s gratitude and blessing, and their subsequent dialogue suggests that the imminence of the Last Judgment predicted in earlier times is possible again in their own.

Part 4 is a series of four unusually long envois (sequentially dated by an internal system beginning with the year of Skelton’s laureateship at Oxford) which details Wolsey’s failure at Calais as an index (as Moloch/Wolsey) of his increasingly futile but dangerous power. The envois conclude with a reference to Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, who was executed in 1521 on trumped-up charges of treason by Wolsey. Wolsey used this event to ruin the spirit of Thomas Howard, Skelton’s lifelong patron, and so effectively ended the power of the older aristocracy which both Buckingham and Howard represented.

Early in the poem there are dark hints of such an outcome. The whole work places an increasingly powerful Moloch against a progressively weaker Melchisedech. What is needed is a savior, figured in Gideon. Parrot tried to be that Gideon but failed, and in a sense Skelton tries and fails, too. Warnings fall on deaf ears, and the poem is taken over by the hulking body of Wolsey. “Speak, Parrot” draws to a close with a portrait of England’s chief prelate riding his mule in trappings of gold, a parody of Jesus on his way to Jerusalem where his trial and crucifixion would allow him to harrow hell. The gold associated with Wolsey here is reminiscent of Aaron’s golden calf, the story used by Parrot earlier in the poem to begin the history of man’s fall.

But Wolsey’s thirst for power and greed for wealth knew no bounds that Skelton could discern. As Cardinal and Lord Chancellor, he embodied an unholy wedding of sacred and secular power, of church and state; in his papal appointment in 1518 as legatus a latere he threatened the very foundation of the English Catholic Church. This papal appointment enormously extended Wolsey’s ecclesiastical powers; acting in the place of the pope in England, he could remit sins, take jurisdiction of wills from English bishops, demand tribute from all levels of the clergy, and (in time) legitimize bastards, chastise the clergy, grant degrees in theology, arts, and religious orders, appoint benefices at will, absolve those excommunicated or under other sentences, and reform the monasteries. Wolsey even undermined these privileges. By simultaneously holding a bishropic and an archbishopric, he introduced episcopal pluralism into England. He made a game out of appointments for himself, trading up the sees by turning in Bath and Wells when Durham fell vacant, and exchanging that for the see at Winchester. Most disastrous of all, he dissolved twenty-nine monasteries on the grounds that they were hopelessly decayed and then took their confiscated property to endow the colleges he was building at Ipswich and Oxford as well as to make extensive alterations to York Place and Hampton Court.

Skelton’s next attack on Wolsey, in “Colin Clout,” was prompted in part by the dissolution of the nunneries of Lillechurch, Kent, and Bromehall, Berkshire, effected at the cardinal’s direction in October 1521. The poem takes the form of a colloquy announced in the epigraph’s juxtaposition of passages from the Old and New Testaments: “Quis consurget mihi adversus malignantes, aut quis mecum adversus operantes iniquitatum? Nemo, Deomine!” (Who will rise up with me against evil-doers? Or who will stand up with me against the workers of iniquity? [Psalm 93:16]; No one, O Lord! [John 8:11]). Representative of the common man, Colin is opposed to Wolsey instinctively because he is simple, blunt, and honest. But he does not merely discern and announce the truth; he is truth.

The poem spirals outward in a lengthy series of observations that are highly critical of Wolsey’s spiritual and temporal actions. As Wolsey is both chief prelate and lord chancellor, so this poem, like the opening epitaph as colloquy, keeps splintering and doubling. In the course of Colin’s investigation, Wolsey becomes both the origin of evil and simply the worst example of it, both type and prototype. Colin, too, becomes more than simply Colin; he also becomes the spokesman for a whole community of suffering, honest laymen: “I, Colin Clout, / As I go about, / And wandering as I walk, / I hear the people talk.” In all of his characteristics—his simplicity, his clear-sightedness, his bluntness, his pain, his anxiety, and his stubborn faith—Colin resembles the anonymous author of Psalm 93 with his cry of tribulation and his prayer for deliverance. Indeed the moving inner drama of “Colin Clout” is Colin’s sense of possible complicity and his struggle to maintain the force of the psalmist’s lament, alongside the Christian understanding of man’s need, from time to time, for charity and divine support. It is this conflict within Colin that makes his poem especially rich and powerful.

Skelton’s next poem on Wolsey, “Why Come Ye Not to Court?,” is even more direct in its bitter attack than “Colin Clout.” It is also far simpler and so more forceful. The structural principle is also plainer, because Skelton announces it in his incipit and repeats it twice in the opening lines: “All noble men, of this take heed, / And believe it as your Creed.” His prologue then begins with the general state of the world that produces the need for a new creed to replace the Nicene Creed. Such fundamental and summary charges concerning selfish, negligent, and ignorant leadership cause the speaker to level the damning accusation that the Church creed from the Council of Nicaea, in use since the sixth century when it replaced the Apostles’ Creed, has now been overturned by the practices of Wolsey as the new apostle to the devil. “Why Come Ye Not to Court?” thus presents a tripartite argument: (1) it begins with a statement full of interpretive details to give a concrete and comprehensive view of the present condition of men under the dispensation of the new creed; (2) it supplies, through a series of questions and answers, an itinerary of events, often in foreign countries, which are a direct consequence; and, finally, (3) it locates the cause of all these evil conditions and acts in the biography of Dicken (the devil symbolizing Wolsey), who alone is responsible.

Part 2 of the poem, rather than examine the catechumen on the Ten Commandments, asks a series of ten quite different questions, the answers to which (as potential commandments) can only reveal Wolsey’s misdeeds and shortcomings—for their focus is on him, not on church belief. When the catechumen is asked the ultimate question under the New Dispensation, “Why come ye not to court?,” he must understand it is not the king’s court where God has presumably placed his regent, but Hampton Court where Wolsey in true power and majesty now resides. By sharply juxtaposing the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, by which God punished blind sinners in the Old Testament (Genesis 19:11), with the current Litany of the Mass, Skelton ends part 2 by triumphantly showing how Wolsey’s usurpation of the king’s rule and justice has led to a moral blindness by which Wolsey also means to usurp God’s teachings to the faithful—and God himself. Truly, Wolsey is the devil incarnate.

 

Part 3 is an infernal biography, in which Wolsey is compared to Amalek, a chronic enemy of God (Exodus 17:8-16), and condemned as the antitype to Saint Peter from which the true Church descended. The prelate’s wild boasts are compared to those of the character Mahomet in the anonymous Corpus Christi plays; tropes make Wolsey analogous to the necromancer at Charlemagne’s court and show him descending to hell to harrow it but staying to take over: “he would break the brains / Of Lucifer in his chains, / And rule them each one / In Lucifer’s throne.” Skelton next portrays Wolsey usurping the archbishop of Canterbury, the lesson from the Confessor Bishop Mass (a movable feast), canon law, and finally the law of the provincial synods of Canterbury and York. Skelton’s anger cannot subside: the poem concludes with an epitome and a decasticon, which present another biography of Wolsey, modeled on a debased Nicene Creed. “Why Come Ye Not to Court?” thus argues forcefully, typologically, specifically, and savagely that both for men of corruption and for men of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Bible and the catechism are the only sources of reliable instruction. But Wolsey is seen as blind to what every child of the Church is taught from the beginning.

Skelton creates a more common devil incarnate in the eponymous heroine of what, from Pope’s day on, was Skelton’s best-known and most notorious poem, The Tunning of Elinor Rumming. John Harvey has discovered in the court rolls of the manor of Packenescham what may be an authentic source of the poem: an actual Alianora Romyng, “a common tipellar of ale” who ran the Running Horse tavern that still stands in Leatherhead, Surrey, was fined two pence on August 18, 1525 for selling ale “at excessive price and by small measures.” “Tunning” means both “brewing” (the process) and “brew” (the product), and by extension drinking and drink. The poem is a portrait of an early Tudor alehouse and the narrative of Elinor, an alewife. She makes her own brew with the aid of chicken dung, taking as payment anything her large and degenerate crowd of women will give her. The poem also concentrates on how such corrupt habits contaminate the personalities of her customers and deform them physically as they arrive, one by one, for a drunken melee, until the poet breaks off what appears an endless troping when a particularly fastidious customer, asking for additional credit, catches sight of all the goods that the greedy Elinor has collected and stashed under her bed.

Nearly from the start the poem begins to fill with her customers, who flock to her alehouse for more of her “noppy ale” than they can quite manage. Although “Some have no money / That thither comey, / For their ale to pay,” she allows them to barter freely. “Instead of coin and money, / Some brought her a conny [rabbit], / And some a pot with honey, / Some a salt, and some a spoon, / Some their hose, some their shoon [shoes],” and some, things they have stolen, including even sacred things such as rosary beads. In the end, “Such were there many / That had not a penny” that, when they stagger to their feet, Elinor has them chalk up their own indentures on a board hanging in the tavern. Gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins had been a frequent subject of satire in the medieval period—by the goliardic poets, by Geoffrey Chaucer, by William Langland—but Skelton’s subject is also deformity, both spiritual and physical.

Following several goliardic predecessors, the poem portrays a topers’ Mass or mock Mass: “Now truly, to my thinking, / This is a solemn drinking.” Elinor, the high priestess, is a devil or witch practicing maleficium: “The devil and she be sib [ siblings].” She is dressed like a Turk (infidel) or gypsy (pagan) in “Her huke [cape] of Lincoln green,” the devil’s color, with “Her kirtle Bristol red” mocking the liturgical color of the vestments for Passion Week and Whitsunday as her brewing mocks Christ’s first miracle at Canna (turning the water into wine) and its prefiguration of the Last Supper. Her preparations are clearly meant to mock ablutions and Communion because the real subject of the poem is a portrayal of a witch’s coven, and the customers who come perform a mock confessional and perform the Offertory with various goods—some frivolous, some vital, some stolen, and some sacred—holding them up, indiscriminately, “To offer to the alepole” or “To offer to the ale tap.” The “tunning” which Elinor serves is, in short, witch’s brew, and her “tunning” or celebration is a witch’s or devil’s Sabbath, a Black Mass.

This poem is, in fact, a deliberate inversion of “Philip Sparrow,” which talks of sacrifice instead of self-indulgence; the connection here is more firmly made by Elinor’s means of taking over the property of her sisters as they enter her establishment, which is a detailed mockery of the practice at Benedictine abbeys, linked to the priory of Saint Mary at Carrow. The poet thus stops abruptly when the fastidious customer sees her rosary treated like so many worthless trinkets in the mock reliquary under the bed where Elinor and her husband “root like hogs.” He stops when Saint Benedict himself is invoked as one who argues for vows of poverty coupled with obedience and, in his case, charity. But the poet does not stop without cause: he stops because he is so outraged at what he has described and because this portrayal of the wages of sin is so total in its condemnation. This is, however, the only poem which Skelton set at Leatherhead; the reason may be that it was a popular alehouse with visitors to Hampton Court. In fact, the alehouse may be an inversion of Wolsey’s court, since it consists of all women and not, like Wolsey’s court, all men, while it is in full congruence in also being a place absolutist in its power and autocratic (for Skelton) in its immorality and self-indulgence. This may also explain why this poem was written as late as the 1520s, when the actual Alianora Romyng was declared a con artist by the courts.

The Garland of Laurel, Skelton’s first major poem, was not published until 1523, incorporating some later incidents in Skelton’s life and a mysterious and puzzling envoi that seems to argue a final reconciliation with Wolsey. It has been contended that The Garland, which concentrates on happier early days at Sheriff Hutton Castle with the Howard family, was deliberately published at the retirement of Skelton’s patron, Thomas Howard, from court in 1522. The newly augmented and completed poem, which traces the incidents in the life of a poet laureated in three universities, thus becomes the record of a poet’s life work, the fortunes which a patron helped to produce, and a unique and charming tribute to the family that made Skelton’s career possible. But the Latin envoi (“To the Most Serene Royal Majesty, equally with the Lord Cardinal, Most Honored Legate-from-the-side”) may still bewilder. Most scholars have thought the poem is meant to establish Skelton’s mastery as a poet and the envoi an apology meant to win a prebendary so that he might retire from the sanctuary of Westminster into a pastoral life in his final years. That would not square, however, with the contention that The Garland is a tribute to Howard, whose retirement was forced by Wolsey and who remained, until his early death, Wolsey’s arch-enemy.

Read more closely, however, the envoi may also be seen to venerate and praise not Wolsey but the king: the reverence due to the cardinal is directly contingent on the fulfillment of a promise already made but one that must come eventually from the king and not the cardinal. Forcing Wolsey’s hand in a poem which honors Howard, Henry VIII’s Lord Treasurer, is also tantamount to insisting that the prelate make good his patronage while the aging Howard still lives: Skelton will honor his patron in a poem which secures continuing patronage through a new appointment.

This apology, if that is what it is, seems to have been unsuccessful, however, for Skelton remained in Westminster. There is, furthermore, no indication that Thomas Howard II ever provided the support and protection for Skelton that his father had. But in the final years of his life, Skelton suffered no abatement in energy, courage, invention, or invective. His final extant poem, “A Replication Against Certain Young Scholars” (1528), is an attack on two Cambridge students, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, who were declared guilty of Lutheran heresy and required to abjure publicly and to bear faggots to Paul’s Cross in London on the Feast of the Conception, December 8, 1527, as a sign of their recantation. The poem is in three parts—the protestation, proposition, and confutation—and borrows legal terminology and form only to transcend them. Skelton argues that while Bilney and Arthur support latria, or the supreme worship of God alone, they deny dulia, the veneration of angels and saints, and especially hyperdulia, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin. In citing the miracle of the Conception, Skelton intercedes to instruct and save the young heretics, much as the Virgin has interceded for all mankind, as the Sequence for the Mass of the feast day of Conception makes clear. He will, therefore, make his own priestly and poetic responsibilities inseparable.

Part 3 bestows special powers, however, on the poet, and Fish has said it is the basis for his entire poetical career:

There is a spiritual,

And a mysterial,

And a mystical

Effect energial [energia]

(As Greeks do it call),

Of such an industry

And such a pregnancy

Of heavenly inspiration

In laureat creation,

Of poet’s commendation,

That of divine miseration

God maketh his habitation

In poets which excells,

And sojourns with them and dwells.

By whose inflammation

Of spiritual instigation

And divine inspiration,

We are kindled in such fashion

With heat of the Holy Ghost,

Which is God of mightiness most,

That he our pen doth lead.

Skelton elevates poetry and the poet—deliberately giving himself (because of the inspiration of the Holy Ghost) more authority even than Wolsey, legate a latere. In addition, the poem, which begins with what appears to be a note of conciliation, actually begins with subterfuge. In arguing that the young heretics were first supported by gifts of money given toward their education by several prelates, including the cardinal, Skelton indirectly argues that Wolsey is also guilty of promoting this heretical act. This gives a new and quite different meaning to the dedication, in which the poet writes that Wolsey is “assuredly the most excellent promoter of this present treatise” and clarifies why and how the poet means to give “all due reverence proper to so great and so magnificent a prince of ecclesiasts” as one who has aided and abetted the very heretics under examination.

Thomas Howard died in 1524, and his bier, transported with the cortege from Framlingham Castle to burial at Thetford Abbey, paused to spend the night midway at Diss, where the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin was draped in black and where a requiem mass, presumably celebrated by the aging Skelton, was the last holy service celebrating him. Skelton died a few years later, on June 21, 1529, in Westminster. According to his early biographer, Edward Braynewood, he was buried before the high altar of Saint Margaret’s Church, his parish church alongside the great Abbey, with this inscription on alabaster: “Joannes Skeltonus vates pierius hic situs est” (Here lies John Skelton, Pierian bard). Both the tomb and its marker have long since disappeared, but records remain in the churchwardens’ accounts of Saint Margaret’s of the expenses incurred: four tapers were lit and set around his body, and four torches illuminated the funeral procession. Church bells tolled and a sum was paid for a special knell by Our Lady’s Brotherhood, a parish guild to which Skelton belonged, along with others attached to the neighboring palace. If his service was not as flamboyant as his best-known poetry, it was as ceremonial and holy as he seems, from his final poem, to have wished.

“If we think that we are not in the presence here of poetic greatness,” John Holloway told the British Academy in 1958 regarding Skelton, “it is because there is a kind of poetic greatness which we have not learnt to know.” Skelton’s medieval conventions, his humanist learning, his rhetorical strategies, his hyperbolic wit, his angry invective, and his liturgical allusions have all served to obscure his poetry in the intervening centuries. But that was not always the case. Surely the very fact that he pursued a lifelong career of figural poetry suggests that he had an audience who appreciated him. Nor did his readers disappear with his death. In the short space between 1545 and 1563—during the Protestant reign of Edward VI and, more appropriately, the Catholic reign of Mary I—there were 21 editions recorded of his work. But even then his reputation was being transformed: under Elizabeth I, increasingly more jests and jest books about Skelton emphasize his wit and ingenuity at the expense of his piety, as if for a country becoming more determinedly Protestant, a Catholic priest could only trivialize and mislead—could even become a buffoon. Ben Jonson, who in two of his works seems to have admired Skelton, nevertheless makes him into a clown. And the kind of poetry Skelton forged had to wait until John Donne’s “Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day” (circa 1620) to find an adequate successor. Yet in recent times his Skeltonics have found their disciples in Robert Graves and W.H. Auden and their champions in E.M. Forster and Lewis. The number of major critical studies that have appeared since Richard Hughes’s 1924 edition of Skelton has at last conclusively established him as the premier poet under Henry VII and the first major English poet in the court of Henry VIII.

Family

John Skelton's lineage is difficult to prove. Some scholars have thought he may have been related to Sir John Shelton and his children, who also came from Norfolk.[citation needed][9] Sir John's daughter, Mary Shelton, was a mistress of Henry VIII's during the tenure of her cousin, Anne Boleyn. Mary Shelton was the main editor and contributor to the Devonshire MS, a collection of poems written by various members of the court.

It is said that several of Skelton's works were inspired by women who were to become mothers to two of Henry VIII's six wives. Elizabeth Boleyn (Howard), Countess of Wiltshire and Ormonde, was said to be so beautiful that Skelton compared her to Cressida. This comparison may have been a double entendre, because Cressida, as depicted by Chaucer in his work Troilus and Criseyde, was notable as a symbol of female inconstancy. A popular but unverifiable legend suggests several poems were inspired by Margery Wentworth; she is noted as one of the women portrayed in Skelton's Garland of Laurel. She also is reported as having an eponymous poem written in her honour by Skelton. Elizabeth was the mother of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife; Margery was the mother of his third, Jane Seymour.

59-) English Literature

59-) English Literature

George Chapman

George Chapman (Hitchin, Hertfordshire, c. 1559 – London, 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator and poet, whose translation of Homer long remained the standard English version. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism . William Minto speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.

Playwright, poet, and translator George Chapman was an important figure in the English Renaissance. His plays, particularly, were adapted for the stage throughout the Restoration, and, though his reputation dipped during most of the 18th century, the 19th saw a marked revival of interest in his works, perhaps best summed up in John Keats’s well-known sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” (1816).

Life and work

Chapman was born in Hitchin (as an allusion in Euthymiæ Raptus; or the Teares of Peace [1609] has it), a town in Hertfordshire some 30 miles from London. He was the second son of Thomas Chapman and Joan Nodes, the daughter of George and Margaret Grimeston Nodes and a cousin to Edward Grimeston the translator. Of his early life little is known except that he attended Oxford University in 1574 and left before earning a degree. There is conjecture that he studied at Oxford but did not take a degree, though no reliable evidence affirms this. Very little is known about Chapman's early life, but Mark Eccles uncovered records that reveal much about Chapman's difficulties and expectations. Upon Anthony Wood’s testimony, Chapman was a person of “most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet,” one who excelled in Latin and Greek but not in logic and philosophy. We know that from at least 1583 through 1585 he was in the household of Sir Ralph Sadler, who was employed by both Queen Elizabeth and William Cecil, Lord Burghley. There is evidence to suggest that Chapman served in the military campaigns in the Low Countries in 1591 and 1592 and that he had returned to London before 1594.

 In 1585 Chapman was approached in a friendly fashion by John Wolfall Sr., who offered to supply a bond of surety for a loan to furnish Chapman money "for his proper use in Attendance upon the then Right Honorable Sir Rafe Sadler Knight." Chapman's courtly ambitions led him into a trap. He apparently never received any money, but he would be plagued for many years by the papers he had signed. Wolfall had the poet arrested for debt in 1600, and when in 1608 Wolfall's son, having inherited his father's papers, sued yet again, Chapman's only resort was to petition the Court of Chancery for equity. As Sadler died in 1587, this gives Chapman little time to have trained under him. It seems more likely that he was in Sadler's household from 1577 to 1583, as he dedicates all his Homerical translations to him.

By 1585 he was working in London for the wealthy commoner Sir Ralph Sadler and probably traveled to the Low Countries at this time. His first work was The Shadow of Night . . . Two Poeticall Hymnes (1593), followed in 1595 by Ovids Banquet of Sence. Both philosophize on the value of an ordered life. His poem in praise of Sir Walter Raleigh, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum (“An Epic Poem about Guiana,” 1596), is typical of his preoccupation with the virtues of the warrior-hero, the character that dominates most of his plays.

The first books of his translation of the Iliad appeared in 1598. It was completed in 1611, and his version of the Odyssey appeared in 1616. Chapman’s Homer contains passages of great power and beauty and inspired the sonnet of John Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1815).

Chapman’s conclusion to Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished poem Hero and Leander (1598) emphasized the necessity for control and wisdom. Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace (1609), Chapman’s major poem, is a dialogue between the poet and the Lady Peace, who is mourning over the chaos caused by man’s valuing worldly objects above integrity and wisdom.

Chapman was imprisoned with Ben Jonson and John Marston in 1605 for writing Eastward Ho, a play that James I, the king of Great Britain, found offensive to his fellow Scots. Of Chapman’s dramatic works, about a dozen plays survive, chief of which are his tragedies: Bussy d’Ambois (1607), The Conspiracie, and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron . . . (1608), and The Widdowes Teares (1612).

Chapman spent the early 1590s abroad, and saw military action in the Low Countries fighting under renowned English general Sir Francis Vere. His earliest published works were the obscure philosophical poems The Shadow of Night (1594) and Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595). The latter has been taken as a response to the erotic poems of the age, such as Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Chapman's life was troubled by debt and his inability to find a patron whose fortunes did not decline: Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, and the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry both met their ends prematurely. The former was executed for treason by Elizabeth I in 1601, and the latter died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen in 1612. Chapman's resultant poverty did not diminish his ability or his standing among his fellow Elizabethan poets and dramatists.

If one can isolate a central passion in Chapman’s life and works, it would be the central project of Renaissance Christian humanism: an attempt to make literature (among the other disciplines) an instrument for both an upright private ethics and a benevolent and just public policy. In more parochial terms the project intended as well to establish a national literature powerful enough to rival the Latin and the Greek. In his poetic canon, including his Homeric translations, Chapman constantly aims at converting Greek and Latin poetry (classical as well as contemporary) to native English and claims as well an attempt to surpass his predecessors. If Chapman consistently borrows from other works (a practice hardly unknown in the period), he likewise consistently experiments with his borrowings, and that experimentation shows in his poems as well as in his plays. Since Algernon Charles Swinburne’s essay in 1875, Chapman (until recently) has been taken as one of the most difficult and obscure poets in the Renaissance, a kind of moralist whose thought manifests itself in moral imperatives tortuously crammed into his dramatic or poetic works. Contemporary criticism, however, has sought to redeem Chapman from the reputation for pedantry and obscurity (largely a product of late-19th-and early-20th-century scholarship) and to take him as he was seen by his contemporaries, a learned translator, a novel poet, and a very successful dramatist.

Chapman’s first published work was The Shadow of Night (1594), composed of two hymns, one to Night and one to Cynthia. They are modeled on Greek hymns of Proclus, Callimachus, and the Orphic hymns, even though they have a large number of borrowings and echoes from contemporary literature. Chapman may have found some of the Orphic hymns in Aldus’s edition of Hero and Leander (1517), which he later used for his adaptation of that poem (1598). The Shadow of Night is, in essence, a heroic poem laced with lamentations by the supplicant poet for the loss of true knowledge, learning, and virtue in the world, a subject Chapman incessantly returned to throughout his career. A reader needs to observe that complaints about the vanity of the world and the prostitution of learning were commonplaces of the age. The pronounced defensive posture of many literati assumed an attack by a society convinced, for religious or political reasons, of the vanity of art. The Shadow of Night is only partly allegorical, as in the tale of Euthimya (whose name means “Cheerfulness”) and the hunt (or chase of the passions) in “Cynthiam,” and despite its reputation for obscurity, it displays throughout a quite remarkable and clear handling of syntax within some powerful pentameter couplets. We should take it as part of a whole program, in this instance, of Chapman’s attempt to domesticate the Greek hymn, which can be noted clearly in the interpolated tale of the English victory over Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, at Nymeghen (1590). The two poems are followed by glosses, a habit Chapman continued from his early work through his final edition of Homer late in his life. The poem thus clearly stakes a claim for its author’s promise as a legitimate, as opposed to a popular, poet: the mode, the imitations, the borrowings, the glosses all proclaim a serious and accomplished poet worthy of serious patronage. Edmund Spenser, we should recall, started his career in exactly the same way 15 years earlier. The work has been notable in modern criticism (it had no subsequent edition in the Renaissance) for the theory, now largely discredited, that it reveals “a school of night” to which William Shakespeare supposedly responded in satiric portions of his Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598). Part of that theory makes Chapman the rival poet mentioned in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86.

Ovid’s Banquet of Sense followed The Shadow of Night in 1595, the same year that Chapman joined the Admiral’s Men, Philip Henslowe’s company of actors playing at the Rose Theatre. In addition to the title poem of 117 nine-line stanzas, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense includes some commendatory verses (one by Sir John Davies), the 10 sonnets of “A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy,” “The Amorous Zodiac” (translated from the French poem by Gilles Durant, 1587), and “The Amorous Contention of Phillis and Flora,” followed by some of its Latin original. The two translations are not by Chapman. The title poem depicts Ovid feasting each of his five senses as he watches Corinna in her bath. The poem is an extraordinary comic tour de force in the popular mode of Ovidian erotic poetry, and it remains a mini masterpiece, a reductio ad absurdum of the conventions of contemporary erotic poems. Chapman grafts onto the old trope of the banquet of sense all the possibilities of that fashionable mode: its eroticized Platonism, its faculty psychology, its innumerable strategies of seduction and pleas for mercy, its aggressive self-justifications. Ovid, even in the highest flights of his erotic fantasy, feasts on his own poetry. He gets little or nothing from Corinna. The poem was popular enough to see another edition as late as 1639, though its reputation in the 20th century rests on viewing it as a masterful explication of Neoplatonic love and, in essence, a semiserious philosophical and consciously obscurantist poem. Such a view badly underestimates a poem that is in fact a burlesque.

Chapman’s earliest drama, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, was produced in 1596, the year after Ovid’s Banquet of Sense appeared, and had been through at least 22 productions before it was published in 1598. Even though the play as printed is heavily cut, one can follow easily the machinations and wooings of Irus the beggar and some fine touches of social satire throughout.

Hero and Leander, one of the best-known poems of its era, appeared in 1598 as well and is the first poem in which Chapman directly courts a noble patron, in this case the wife of Sir Thomas Walsingham, a cousin of his better-known contemporary Sir Francis. Throughout his career, Chapman’s quest for patronage would prove both painful and vain, but there could scarcely be a more propitious beginning. Though in his dedication he somewhat disingenuously calls his poem a trifle (and promises matter of more substance later), we should recognize some claims to distinction. After all, he wryly notes, “He who shuns trifles must shun the world.” Christopher Marlowe’s portion of the poem had been an instant success and, in Abraham Fraunce’s words, “in every man’s mouth.” Marlowe’s 334-line poem, published early in 1598, was republished later the same year, now divided into two sestiads (after Hero’s town Sestos), with four new sestiads by Chapman. Chapman’s completion was published with Marlowe’s fragment in all subsequent editions. The poem is based on the Hero and Leander of Musaeus, a fifth-century poet who may have written from Alexandria. The Greek text of his poem was one of the first published by the famous Aldine press of Venice in 1494. Musaeus’s Hero and Leander is one of several late-Greek epic poems intentionally un-Homeric, often focusing on minor mythological figures, subjects, and themes distinctly unclassical. They often aim at high pathos in a poetic style at once intricate, hyperbolic, and even, on occasion, bombastic. The great Latin exemplar for the Renaissance was the enormously popular Rape of Proserpina of Claudian (circa 400). There were many editions to follow in the 16th century as well as adaptations of the poem by major poets all over Europe, including Hans Sachs. The adaptation by Marlowe and Chapman expands considerably upon the original (which both certainly knew), all the while observing its possibilities and suggestions. There are, for example, the characteristic epic similes, epic digressions in the tales of Mercury and Teras, battles or disputes with the gods, and jocular or satiric asides by the narrator-poet. Both poets preserve as well all the obsessions of their original: the focus on Hero’s torch, the division between Sestos and Abydos, the manic insistence on secrecy, the elaborate manipulation of the imagery of light and dark and day and night, the compounding of paradox, especially in Hero being Venus’s Nun. Hero and Leander is an exceptionally elaborate, brilliant, and often-comic story of the seduction of Hero by Leander, their marriage and its consummation, and their tragic deaths at the hands of the gods. The poem was tremendously popular, echoed in scores of contemporary works, and printed in at least seven editions by 1637. While Marlowe’s portion has always been praised, Chapman’s continuation has, in this century at least, been maligned for what has been taken to be its intrusive moral commentary. Yet such expansions, as other scholars see them, are both functional and appropriate to the original text. Chapman later translated Musaeus’s Hero and Leander in 1616 and dedicated it to Inigo Jones. Unlike his earlier adaptation, Chapman’s is one of the most judicious and accurate (as well as one of the shortest) of the several translations in the period. He clearly used the Greek of the Aldine text (1494 and many subsequent editions), frequently consulting the Latin translation that was published with it.

Chapman’s most successful bid for noble patronage (and, as it turned out, the most unfortunate and bitter) began with his first translations of Homer in 1598: his Seven Books of the Iliad, translations in fourteeners of books 1, 2, and 7–11; and Achilles Shield, a partial translation of book 18 of the Iliad in decasyllabic couplets. Both were dedicated to the brilliant Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Whether Chapman actually benefited from this work at the time we do not know. Essex might have been either pleased or embarrassed that the plight of Achilles in book 18 was made a direct analogy to his own circumstances in Chapman’s dedicatory epistle. The rest of Chapman’s Iliad was not to appear until 1609, with another, royal patron.

Chapman’s attention turned almost exclusively to drama for the next ten years. A Humorous Day’s Mirth was published in 1599, though it had been notably popular since 1597, when it was performed by the Admiral’s Men, perhaps because it was one of the “new plays of humors,” a comedy of humors.

Chapman left Henslowe’s company sometime in 1600, a year marked as well by his imprisonment for debt at the hands of a notorious usurer, John Wolfall. Chapman joined the Children of the Chapel (the Children of St. Paul’s), a company performing at the Blackfriars Theatre, and continued writing for this company until 1609. The company could scarcely have greater luck, for in 1603 or 1604 it produced Chapman’s first and best-known tragedy, Bussy D’Ambois, which was published in 1607. It enjoyed a remarkable popularity well into the Restoration. Bussy, the colossally self-confident and fearless courtier, after having offended various powers at the French court, succeeds in becoming a favorite of King Henry III. He is undone, however, after a sexual intrigue with Tamyra, the count of Montsurry’s wife. The duke of Guise and Montsurry plot against Bussy and, by stabbing and torturing Tamyra, succeed in luring him to his death. The play was clearly a smashing success, with five issues or editions by 1657, a revival by Nathan Field for the Whitefriars in 1610, performances by the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s old company) in 1634 and 1638, and a notably successful rewrite by Thomas D’Urfey for the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, published in 1691. Despite John Dryden’s unappreciative remarks in the preface to his Spanish Friar (1681), the play has remained exceptionally popular into the 20th century, having been published in a large number of editions.

The Children of St. Paul’s also performed Chapman’s now-lost The Old Joiner of Aldgate in February of 1603. From all evidence a farce based on contemporary gossip, the play is the first that got Chapman in trouble with local authorities (a relative commonplace for London playwrights). On this occasion he was interrogated in a slander suit but was not arrested. Chapman may also have been the “second Pen” mentioned in the preface to Ben Jonson’s Sejanus his Fall, performed in 1603 and published in 1605. That “Pen” or hand is credited with “a good share” of Jonson’s play. Henslowe’s diary does in fact attribute to Chapman “ii actes of a Tragedie of Bengemens [that is, Jonson’s] plotte.”

Our first sure record of a performance of Chapman’s play All Fools is on New Year’s Day of 1605 at the Blackfriars. All Fools is a far more sophisticated, high comedy than Chapman’s earlier plays in the genre. The lines glitter with wit, the characterization is fascinating, and the plot is masterfully handled, involving a whole series of intrigue and types: a jealous husband, a jealous father, a courtier, a wayward son, and Reynoldo the trickster. Chapman may have been pleased about the quiet success of All Fools in 1605, for while he had faced minor difficulties with the production of the Old Joiner, in 1603, he could never have forseen the storm that broke over Eastward Ho upon its publication and performance in 1605. A collaborative effort of Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, the play is a reply to Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho, performed in 1604 and published in 1607. Both are London City comedies filled with character types and deceptions, as well as with contemporary news, ballads, songs, and plays. There are, for example, at least five allusions to Hamlet in Eastward Ho. The cause célèbre of the play, however, was a pointed gibe at the large number of Scots newly arrived in England (at James I’s accession). The offending lines were immediately canceled from the first quarto, and Chapman and Jonson were imprisoned straightway. Apparently King James himself, according to Jonson’s later testimony, had been told of the outrage and ordered the arrest. They were released some weeks later, after a whole series of letters and petitions. Though city comedies were extremely popular in the theater, the notoriety of Eastward Ho, its relation to Westward Ho, and its exceptional comedy made it an instant, and perhaps to its authors an unwelcome, hit. One response was another play by Dekker and Webster, Northward Ho (acted in late 1605 and published in 1607), in which Chapman is gently satirized as the genial scholar Bellamont, a man witty enough to help unravel a plot to discredit a friend’s wife and to escape a trick designed to make a fool of him. There were three editions of Eastward Ho in 1605, simultaneous with its production at Blackfriars. The play was revived—offending passage omitted, of course—for a 1614 production at Whitehall before Princess Elizabeth and King James himself. The play retained its popularity well into the late 18th century. Chapman followed Eastward Ho with two other comedies, Monsieur D’Olive (performed at Blackfriars in late 1604 or early 1605 and published in 1606) and Sir Giles Goosecap (performed in 1603, published in 1606). The plot of Monsieur D’Olive, which involves a series of benevolent deceptions by Vandome, and the subplot, centered on D’Olive (a scurrilous satirist and perfect burlesque of a courtier), never do meet in what must be described as an entertaining, though imperfect, comedy. The parody of courtliness in D’Olive has some fine touches, especially in his extended panegyric on tobacco in Act 2.

Sir Giles Goosecap, published anonymously in 1606, is probably Chapman’s. It is clearly a comedy of humors, where the plot is markedly secondary to the examination of such characters as Foulweather, Rudesby, and the foolish, if benign, Sir Giles himself. The main plot, adapted from the first three sections of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide, focuses on Clarence, a studious and pure lover of Eugenia. The delay in publication of Sir Giles Goosecap is a likely result of censorship. Contemporary evidence strongly suggests that there were objections to the play and that the principal characters, especially Lady Furnivall, are satiric portraits of contemporary figures.

The Gentleman Usher, performed in 1601 or 1602 and published in 1606, is a play very different from Chapman’s earlier efforts. With a typically complex plot, centered about Vincentio’s love for Margaret (rewarded at the end), but with a pronounced attention to the dramatic possibilities of language, the play comes near to being a comedy of manners or, in the high pathos of some speeches, almost a tragicomedy. Stock comic characters remain, to be sure, as well as a series of standard deceptions. But acts four and five shift markedly to a comic/pathetic mode: the appearance of a real and dangerous villain, a real danger of death, the high pathos in the disfigurement of Margaret, and the final reconciliation. Although we have little evidence of the play’s success, it does mark Chapman’s first attempt at tragicomedy. The second is The Widow’s Tears, composed circa 1605 and published in 1612. There are primarily two sets of lovers in the play, Tharsalio, the cynical former servant who woos and wins his former mistress, Eudora, and Lysander, who puts his faithful wife, Cynthia, to cruel test of her fidelity. Cynthia does succumb to a seduction by her disguised husband, but, upon discovering his plot, turns the tables on him. This play shares with The Gentlemen Usher a focus on plot rather than (stock) character, avoids for the most part either satire or parody, and revels in incidents more appropriate to tragedy than comedy.

Chapman delayed the sequel to Bussy D’Ambois (The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois) until 1610 or 1611, when it was produced at the new Whitefriars by Nathan Field’s new company, the Queen’s Revels. Chapman’s second tragedy came four years after the singular success of Bussy D’Ambois: two plays combined as one, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, composed in early 1608 and published the same year. The Byron plays mark a considerable departure from dramatic trappings of Senecan drama—the blood, revenge, grotesqueries, and ghosts—of the Bussy plays. The focus in the Byron plays is unremittingly on the hero and his brand of virtuous Marlovian virtu. While these plays interest us as a new direction in Chapman’s tragedies, they also interest us for the furor they aroused. They were based on a recent controversy—the treason and execution of Charles de Gontant, Baron de Biron, courtier to Henry IV of Navarre. The French ambassador to court, Antoine Lefèvre de la Boderie, protested the production and arranged to have three of the actors jailed. Chapman apparently escaped and later sought refuge with Ludovick Stuart, Duke of Lennox. The offending scene, soon struck by the master of the revels, portrays the queen of France indelicately dressing down and boxing the ears of the king’s mistress, Madame Henriette D’Entragues, Marquise de Verneuil. There is as well the interview between Byron and Queen Elizabeth in act four that also came under the hand of the censors. As a consequence, act four of the Conspiracy, where a report of the interview with the queen is now reported secondhand, is badly mangled, as are acts one and two of the Tragedy. The censors apparently felt comfortable in allowing only one scene of act two in the Tragedy to remain, the masque where Queen Marie de Médicis (as Chastity) and the king’s mistress (appropriately playing Liberality) are reconciled. The Conspiracy traces the seduction of the proud and pliant Duke of Byron to a conspiracy against King Henry IV of Navarre and his ultimate capitulation to the king’s power. The Tragedy finds Byron in yet another plot and again called to court to confess his treason. He first refuses, then appears to protest his innocence, convinced the king will never condemn one so valuable to the state. Act five wholly focuses on Byron, caught between Christian resignation and Herculean fury until he is finally executed.

The year 1609 seemed to promise the beginning of the end of Chapman’s recurring money troubles. He had received a promise from the young Henry, Prince of Wales, of an annuity and the princely sum of three hundred pounds for his translation of Homer. He had revised his Seven Books of 1598 and added books three, four, five, six, and 12 for his Homer Prince of Poets (1609). This portion of The Iliad Chapman renders in a supple and innovative fourteen-syllable line, a verse form often taken as appropriate to the hexameter line of the classical epic by some Renaissance translators. His epistle dedicatory, partly a panegyric on Henry and partly a piece of literary criticism, is directed “To the High Borne Prince of Men, Henry.” Here Chapman enunciates views common in contemporary literary criticism: the usefulness (nay, the necessity) of poetry to princes (especially the heroic poetry of Homer) and the request for the prince to protect and advance the sacred vocation of poets. This epistle is followed by another, “To the Reader.” Both stand as a defense of poetry, the former more generalized, the latter very detailed. In the second, Chapman directly defends his native English as a language fully capable of catching the nuances of Homer’s Greek, even superior to other modern languages. He defends as well his “Pariphrases,” his expansions on the original in his own translation, as both judicious and necessary. Indeed, those who translate word-by-word are quite wrong because a translation must be guided by a perception of Homer’s complete invention, the scope and direction of the epic as a whole. It is here that we may discover not only Chapman the translator, but Chapman the dramatist, taking as his guide the coherence of character and plot for his rendering of individual lines and words. The epistle concludes with a remarkably vivid and accomplished attack on his detractors.

Euthymiæ Raptus; or the Tears of Peace, also 1609, is likewise dedicated to Henry, beginning and ending with notable references to Chapman’s Homer. The poem is of a piece with other “complaints” or lamentations of the period. Homer appears to the poet and introduces him to the allegorical figure Peace, whose tears are complaints about the degradation of Learning and the elevation of power and ambition in the world. This subject, about which Chapman wrote constantly in nearly all the prefaces and epistles to his works, might well stand as a constant thematic idea throughout his life and work.

Yet no thematic can account for Chapman’s continued success on the popular stage. Even while finishing his translation of the Iliad, his May Day (1611) and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) were being produced in 1611. Both are in notable, popular modes. The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois is Chapman’s attempt at the venerable revenge tragedy, focusing on the character of Clermont D’Ambois, a reluctant avenger who avoids both fury and haste, ever mindful of the tension between private revenge and public law. There is, of course, the ghost of Bussy to demand revenge, but Clermont is more comfortable in echoing Epictetus on the vanity of ambition and wealth than plotting deaths. He dies at the end not by the machinations of villains, but from grief at the loss of an ally and at the prospect of living in a world devoid of justice. May Day is a typical comedy of disguise and deception, multiple sets of lovers in multiple assignations, with the braggart soldier, the unapproachable lady, the bawdy maid (Temperance), the gull (Innocentio), and the witty intriguer (Lodovico). Chapman is consciously following the current hits of the day, providing not only a good deal of music and dance (even a masque) in the concluding act, but a large number of direct echoes from his contemporary playwrights.

Chapman entered The Iliads of Homer in the Stationers’ Register in April 1611. Dedicated again to Prince Henry, this edition comprises all 24 books of the epic, including entirely new versions of books one and two, some minor revisions of three to 12 (from the earlier editions), plus the new books, 13 to 24. Chapman added yet another “Preface to the Reader” (in prose) and a brief essay, “Of Homer.” The latter is the typical and epideictic minibiography of most late-medieval or Renaissance translations. The preface is of a piece with his earlier preface of 1609: another defense of his paraphrases and/or circumlocutions on historical and critical grounds, a response to the charge that he translated Homer out of Latin solely and not his Greek, and a promise to go on to a translation of the Odyssey. For the first time the text appears with a full, critical apparatus: marginal glosses and comments throughout and ten commentaries (“Commentarius”). The commentaries are justifications of various renderings of the Greek and quibbles with earlier translators. The volume concludes with a brief prose comment and a prayer. This comment is notable for the astonishing claim that Chapman rendered the last 12 books of the Iliad in “lesse than fifteene weekes.”

The volume appeared with an exceptionally handsome engraved title page and all the critical apparatus worthy of so great a poet and so beneficent a patron. Any of Chapman’s expectations, however, were soon dashed at the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612 at the age of 18. Though Chapman was to dun the court with letters pleading for the rewards Henry had promised, nothing was forthcoming. Even the production of The Memorable Masque for the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613 would not avail. The masque was commissioned by the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn and performed before King James in February. It was designed by Inigo Jones and written by Chapman. The published version (also 1613) includes a prose account of the great procession to Whitehall, a description of the set, and some stage directions as well as the “argument” or plot of the piece: Honour, presented like a goddess, meets Plutus (Riches) who is reformed by his love of Honour. Capriccio, a man of wit, has a dialogue with Plutus before he presents his (rather clumsy) antemasque. The celebration follows with songs and dances, and the volume concludes with a hymn to Hymen and an epithalamion. It has been speculated that Chapman had a hand in several masques, especially late in his career. This speculation is based largely, perhaps, on the strength of Ben Jonson’s testimony that besides himself, only Chapman “could make a masque.” But The Memorable Masque is the only specimen we have.

Chapman’s direct response to Prince Henry’s death was his Epicede or Funerall Song in late 1612. The lament on Henry was vastly expanded when Chapman added to it, at line 354, an adaptation/translation of Angelo Poliziano’s Elegia sive Epicedion (1546). Chapman’s poem appears to have been the first in a steady stream of elegies by, among others, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, John Donne, George Herbert, and John Heywood. The volume concludes with an extended description of the funeral itself. The loss of his patron did not deter Chapman from his project of publishing all of Homer in English. It did, however, send him in search of other patrons, where he discovered yet more misfortunes.

One of these attempts, perhaps, was Chapman’s elegy on the death of William, Lord Russell, in 1613, Eugenia: Or True Nobilities Trance (1614). The poem is at once an elegy, a satiric complaint about the world, and a heroic poem. The sister of Fame, Eugenia, falls into a trance upon Russell’s death, is revived by news of Russell’s son and heir, and thence begins the four “vigils” or speeches. Another was undoubtedly The Whole Works of Homer (1616?), with the previously published Iliads (its unsold sheets included here) and the new translation of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey in decasyllabic couplets. In some copies there is a separate title page to The Odyssey, suggesting that part of the volume was published separately for special patrons or friends. It is certain, however, that books 13 to 24 are from the press of a different, and distinctly inferior, printer. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on November 2, 1614 and probably appeared sometime between 1614 and 1616. The Register also lists Chapman’s Odyssey on that date, and it is likely that the first 12 books were printed as a New Year’s gift for Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, to whom the whole volume is dedicated. This epistle to Somerset, newly appointed lord chamberlain, includes perhaps Chapman’s clearest statement on how he understood the two epics in distinctly moral terms:

And that your Lordship may in his Face take view of his Mind, the first word of his Iliads is menin, wrath; the first word of his Odysses, andra, Man—contracting in either word his each worke’s Proposition. In one, Predominant Perturbation; in the other, over-ruling Wisedome; in one, the Bodie’s fervour and fashion of outward Fortitude to all possible height of Heroicall Action; in the other, the Mind’s inward, constant and unconquerd Empire, unbroken, unalterd with any most insolent and tyrannous infliction.

The epistle is also notable for its explicit defense of poetry, where Chapman takes poetry as the soul of truth inhabiting a body of fiction. As such, poetry teaches not only the most profound and useful matters but always extols virtue and condemns vice. Some of these views appear again in the marginalia to the volume (though the commentaries disappear), where apologiae for certain renderings, often with abundant philological rationales, are mixed with moral readings of the passage in question. These glosses become very sparse in the final 12 books of The Odyssey.

Chapman’s choice of 10-syllable couplets for his translation forces a far more involved syntax than did the fourteeners he championed as appropriate for the Homer of his Iliads. This form and the haphazard printing of books 13 to 24 often make for some difficult reading. Yet even these defects and his sometimes radical departure from Homer’s Greek (as well as from his favorite Latin text and commentary of Jean de Sponde [Spondanus]) do not finally destroy either the vigor or the originality of his work.

There can be little doubt that Chapman rushed to complete the volume and made special efforts to present it to Somerset. Chapman, unfortunately, could scarcely have made a worse choice to replace Henry as the recipient of his Homer. The unfortunate relationship between Somerset and Chapman began somewhat earlier in 1614 when Chapman, on March 16, registered and then published his Andromeda Liberata or the Nuptials of Perseus and Andromeda. The poem is dedicated to Somerset and Lady Frances Howard and was intended to celebrate their marriage. Despite the fact that Chapman borrows liberally from Comes’s Mythologia, from Marsilio Ficino, and from Plutarch for the poem, it is clear that the public took the poem as a very personal, contemporary allegory. In the poem Cepheus, profoundly disturbed by the appearance of a monstrous whale sent by Neptune to ravage his kingdom, consults an oracle. He discovers the curse can be removed if he exposes his daughter Andromeda to the monster. Cepheus complies and chains Andromeda to a rock. Perseus discovers her, falls in love, kills the monster, and marries her. Though Chapman is clear about some of the allegorical and mythological equivalents in the tale, many apparently saw a clear allusion to the sensational divorce proceedings brought by Lady Frances against her former husband, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Lady Frances, who testified that she was in fact a virgin and that the earl was impotent, won an annulment of the marriage in 1613. Three months later, Lady Frances married Somerset. The allegorical equivalents seemed plain: Somerset as Perseus had freed Frances as Andromeda from the rock Essex. Chapman immediately responded to the furor over his poem with A Free and Offenseless Justification of Andromeda Liberata (1614), a fascinating essay on the nature of allegory, which, of course, denied the public construction that brought so much notoriety to the poem. It is of some note to Chapman that matters for Somerset and Lady Frances only got worse. In 1615 it was discovered, and later proved in an extraordinary trial in 1616, that Lady Frances had arranged the murder of the go-between in her affair with Somerset, Thomas Overbury, the noted character writer. Though Frances confessed and Somerset maintained his innocence, both were convicted and sent to the Tower until 1622. Chapman remained faithful to Somerset, however, dedicating to him both his Pro Vere in 1622 and his concluding volume of Homer, The Crown of All Homer’s Works around 1624. Between the Overbury affair and that last volume of Homer, Chapman published his translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days. The Georgicks of Hesiod (1618) is replete with glosses, commendatory verses by Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, and a dedication to Sir Francis Bacon. Chapman’s text here is Philipp Melanchthon’s Greek text of Hesiod (1532) as well as a Latin rendering by Spondanus (1606). Chapman returns to the 10-syllable couplets he used in his Odyssey.

The Crown of All Homer’s Works effectively concludes Chapman’s life as a public poet, and one may sense something profoundly elegiac in it. The volume includes the mock epic Batrachomyomachia (the battle of the frogs and mice), 32 Homeric hymns, 16 miscellaneous poems, and, finally, Chapman’s own apologia for the whole project with its justly famous first line, “The Worke that I was borne to doe is done.”

Despite the fact that scholars sense some diminution of Chapman’s powers in this his last volume of poetry, the translation of Batrachomyomachia is very deft and, if one may say, very English. The welter of Greek names for the frogs and mice are given in highly comic and contemporary renderings (as “Bacon-flitch gnawer”), and on almost every occasion Chapman finds English equivalents for the abundant Greek nouns. This is not the case in the Hymns, where decorum would demand a more reticent approach to Englishing . Throughout the volume there is a grace and clarity in his rhymed couplets in spite of the fact that he occasionally bungles the Greek.

Even a cursory survey of Chapman’s poetry reveals his consistent preference for heroic verse both in his own English poems and in his translations (even in his sources, borrowings, and tragedies, it should be added). Even though some have seen in this a self-identification of a heroic Chapman with his poetic forebears in heroic poetry (indeed, the handsome title page of the Batrachomyomachia shows Chapman beneath a look-alike Homer), the better explanation might aim at two other causes: the search for patronage, and the humanist dogma that takes heroic poetry as the crown of a serious poetic vocation. Indeed, Chapman remained sensitive about this all his professional life, especially since his heroic poetry required a thorough knowledge of Greek. His final apologia appears at the end of the volume in the elegant 87-line poem defending his ability against the scholars of the schools:

And what’s all their skill but vast varied reading?

As if brode-beaten High-waies had the leading

To Truths abstract, and narrow Path and Pit,

Found in no walke of any worldly wit.

And without Truth, all’s only sleight of hand,

Or our Law-learning in a Forraine land,

Embroderie spent on Cobwebs, Braggart show,

Of men that all things learn and nothing know.

There were two plays that remained to be published, though both were undoubtedly written and produced earlier, Caesar and Pompey of 1631 and The Tragedy of Chabot in 1639. For the former, the source of historical information is Plutarch’s Lives (Shakespeare’s favorite) and, occasionally, some of his Moralia. The hero was the perennial favorite, Cato, the heroic voice for proper and rational choice, and the action centers on the contest of Julius Caesar and Pompey for power. The real interest of the play occurs after the battle of Pharsalia, when Cato declares his preference for justice and a free death rather than tyranny and servitude. He stabs himself and, in a typically Jacobean turn, plucks out his entrails before anyone can save him. Caesar enters, condemns Pompey’s murderers, and in a final paean to Cato’s just life, orders a magnificent tomb to be erected.

The Tragedy of Chabot, written in collaboration with James Shirley, was licensed in 1635 (the year after Chapman’s death) for production at the Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane. Most would place its composition sometime between 1611 and 1625. Chabot, an absolutely just and loyal servant of Francis I, is accused of defrauding the treasury. His proud and uncompromising protestations of loyalty infuriate the king, who orders that Chabot be tried by Chancellor Poyet. The trial is outrageously manipulated, the charges fabricated, the conviction coerced, and the minor sentence altered. With the intercession of the queen, Francis calls Chabot to him and offers him a pardon. In an astonishing scene, Chabot heroically refuses and submits that he cannot accept a pardon for something he has not done. The king, repenting his test of his absolute authority on a subject whose true conscience is his own authority, convenes a second trial, in which the treachery of the first is revealed and Poyet dismissed. Chabot, cleared but stricken to the heart with the injustice of it all, dies.

There are in fact few of Chapman’s plays that, according to evidence, were not popular. It was not uncommon for later publishers to attach Chapman’s name to plays he never wrote, hoping to benefit from his fame. This accounts, in some cases, to several plays ascribed to Chapman that are not his: Charlemagne or the Distracted Emperor, The Ball, The Tragedy of Alphonsus Emperor of Germany, The Revenge for Honour, Two Italian Gentlemenand, The Disguises.

Chapman is likely to have written plays or collaborated in others we no longer have. Sometime after 1623 he may have been responsible, along with Richard Brome, for the now-lost Christianetta. Henslowe’s diary has indications that Chapman’s hand was involved in several plays now unknown: “The ylle of A Womon,” “the ffount of new facianes,” “the world Rones A Whelles” or “all fooles but the foolle” (perhaps All Fools), and a “pastrall tragedie.”

George Chapman died in May of 1634. Of the last 20 years of his life we know next to nothing. There have been suggestions of contributions to other masques or plays, but we have no evidence of them. We do know, however, that Inigo Jones (the most famous architect and stage designer of his time) designed a Roman monument for Chapman which was to bear the inscription, “Georgis Chapmanus, poeta Homericus, Philosophers verus, (etsi Christianus poeta).” He is buried in the churchyard of St. Giles in the Fields.

It is a matter of some note, in assessing Chapman’s achievement, that nearly all modern commentators on his work have been essentially hostile to it: condemning him for his borrowings, for the supposed heterodox ethical or religious views in his fictions, and generally denouncing him for either conscious obscurity or simply bungling sense across the canon of his works. In almost all of these views, the works of Shakespeare and his other contemporaries are always the standard for comparison. The fact of Chapman’s evident success argues quite a different story. He was recognized among his contemporaries as one of the best dramatists of the age, as an accomplished poet of striking powers in both popular and elite modes, and as a rare and accomplished scholar. The reputation of his Homer has survived any number of rivals (Alexander Pope not the least among them) even into our own century. Even though he was not successful in becoming financially comfortable, in choosing patrons, or even in marriage (his negotiations with a well-to-do widow came to naught), his work stands as equal to any number of his better-known contemporaries.

Chapman died in London, having lived his latter years in poverty and debt. He was buried at St Giles in the Fields. A monument to him designed by Inigo Jones marked his tomb, and stands today inside the church.

Plays

The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596) , An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597)

Charleymayne , or the Distracted Emperor (1600) , Sir Giles Goosecap (1601)

Bussy D'Ambois (1603), Caesar and Pompey (1604) , All Fools (1604) , Eastward Hoe (1605) , Monsieur D'Olive (1605) , The Widow's Tears (1605)

The Gentleman Usher (1606) , The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) . May Day (1609) ,The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610)

The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (1612) , Rollo Duke of Normandy (1612), The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (1613)

Comedies

By the end of the 1590s, Chapman had become a successful playwright, working for Philip Henslowe and later for the Children of the Chapel. Among his comedies are The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596; printed 1598), An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597; printed 1599), All Fools (printed 1605), Monsieur D'Olive (1605; printed 1606), The Gentleman Usher (printed 1606), May Day (printed 1611), and The Widow's Tears (printed 1612). His plays show a willingness to experiment with dramatic form: An Humorous Day's Mirth was one of the first plays to be written in the style of "humours comedy" which Ben Jonson later used in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour. With The Widow's Tears, he was also one of the first writers to meld comedy with more serious themes, creating the tragicomedy later made famous by Beaumont and Fletcher.

He also wrote one noteworthy play in collaboration. Eastward Ho (1605), written with Jonson and John Marston, contained satirical references to the Scottish courtiers who formed the retinue of the new king James I; this landed Chapman and Jonson in jail at the suit of Sir James Murray of Cockpool, the king's "rascal[ly]" Groom of the Stool.[4] Various of their letters to the king and noblemen survive in a manuscript in the Folger Library known as the Dobell MS, and published by AR Braunmuller as A Seventeenth Century Letterbook. In the letters, both men renounced the offending line, implying that Marston was responsible for the injurious remark. Jonson's "Conversations With Drummond" refers to the imprisonment, and suggests there was a possibility that both authors would have their "ears and noses slit" as a punishment, but this may have been Jonson elaborating on the story in retrospect.

Chapman's friendship with Jonson broke down, perhaps as a result of Jonson's public feud with Inigo Jones. Some satiric, scathing lines, written sometime after the burning of Jonson's desk and papers, provide evidence of the rift. The poem lampooning Jonson's aggressive behaviour and self-believed superiority remained unpublished during Chapman's lifetime; it was found in documents collected after his death.

Tragedies

Chapman's greatest tragedies took their subject matter from recent French history, the French ambassador taking offence on at least one occasion. These include Bussy D'Ambois (1607), The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610[5]) and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (published 1639). The two Byron plays were banned from the stage—although, when the Court left London, the plays were performed in their original and unexpurgated forms by the Children of the Chapel.[6] The French ambassador probably took offence to a scene which portrays Henry IV's wife and mistress arguing and physically fighting. On publication, the offending material was excised, and Chapman refers to the play in his dedication to Sir Thomas Walsingham as "poore dismembered Poems". His only work of classical tragedy, Caesar and Pompey (written 1604, published 1631), although "politically astute", can be regarded as his most modest achievement in the genre.

Other plays

Chapman wrote The Old Joiner of Aldgate, performed by the Children of Paul's between January and February 1603 – a play which caused some controversy due to the similarities between the content of the play and ongoing legal proceedings between one John Flaskett (a local book binder) and Agnes How (to whom Flaskett was betrothed). The play was purchased from Chapman by Thomas Woodford & Edward Pearce for 20 marks (a considerable amount for such a work at the time) and resulted in a legal case that went before the Star Chamber.

Chapman wrote one of the most successful masques of the Jacobean era, The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, performed on 15 February 1613. According to Kenneth Muir, The Masque of the Twelve Months, performed on Twelfth Night 1619 and first printed by John Payne Collier in 1848 with no author's name attached, is also ascribed to Chapman.

Chapman's authorship has been argued in connection with a number of other anonymous plays of his era.[10] F. G. Fleay proposed that his first play was The Disguises. He has been put forward as the author, in whole or in part, of Sir Giles Goosecap, Two Wise Men And All The Rest Fools, The Fountain of New Fashions, and The Second Maiden's Tragedy. Of these, only 'Sir Gyles Goosecap' is generally accepted by scholars to have been written by Chapman (The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, with Sir Giles Goosecap, edited by Allan Holaday, University of Illinois Press, 1987).

In 1654, bookseller Richard Marriot published the play Revenge for Honour as the work of Chapman. Scholars have rejected the attribution; the play may have been written by Henry Glapthorne. Alphonsus Emperor of Germany (also printed 1654) is generally considered another false Chapman attribution.

The lost plays The Fatal Love and A Yorkshire Gentlewoman And Her Son were assigned to Chapman in Stationers' Register entries in 1660. Both of these plays were among the ones destroyed in the famous kitchen burnings by John Warburton's cook. The lost play Christianetta (registered 1640) may have been a collaboration between Chapman and Richard Brome, or a revision by Brome of a Chapman work.

Poet and translator

Other poems by Chapman include: De Guiana, Carmen Epicum (1596), on the exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh; a continuation of Christopher Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander (1598); and Euthymiae Raptus; or the Tears of Peace (1609).

Some have considered Chapman to be the "rival poet" of Shakespeare's sonnets (in sonnets 78–86), although conjecture places him as one in a large field of possibilities.

From 1598 he published his translation of the Iliad in instalments. In 1616 the complete Iliad and Odyssey appeared in The Whole Works of Homer, the first complete English translation, which until Pope's was the most popular in the English language and was the way most English speakers encountered these poems. The endeavour was to have been profitable: his patron, Prince Henry, had promised him £300 on its completion plus a pension. However, Henry died in 1612 and his household neglected the commitment, leaving Chapman without either a patron or an income. In an extant letter, Chapman petitions for the money owed him; his petition was ineffective. Chapman's translation of the Odyssey is written in iambic pentameter, whereas his Iliad is written in iambic heptameter. (The Greek original is in dactylic hexameter.) Chapman often extends and elaborates on Homer's original contents to add descriptive detail or moral and philosophical interpretation and emphasis.

Chapman also translated the Homeric Hymns, the Georgics of Virgil, The Works of Hesiod (1618, dedicated to Francis Bacon), the Hero and Leander of Musaeus (1618) and the Fifth Satire of Juvenal (1624).

Chapman's translation of Homer was admired by Alexander Pope for "a daring fiery spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ", though he also disapproved of Chapman's roughness and inaccuracy. John Keats expressed a fervent admiration of Chapman's Homeric authenticity in his famous poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer". Chapman also drew attention from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot.

Homage

In Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam, Shelley quotes a verse of Chapman's as homage within his dedication "to Mary__ __", presumably his wife Mary Shelley:

There is no danger to a man, that knows

What life and death is: there's not any law

Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful

That he should stoop to any other law.

The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde quoted the same verse in his part fiction, part literary criticism, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.".

The English poet John Keats wrote "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" for his friend Charles Cowden Clarke in October 1816. The poem begins "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold" and is much quoted. For example, P. G. Wodehouse in his review of the first novel of The Flashman Papers series that came to his attention: "Now I understand what that 'when a new planet swims into his ken' excitement is all about." Arthur Ransome uses two references from it in his children's books, the Swallows and Amazons series.

Quotes

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See also: English translations of Homer § Chapman

From All Fooles, II.1.170-178, by George Chapman:

I could have written as good prose and verse

As the most beggarly poet of 'em all,

Either Accrostique, Exordion,

Epithalamions, Satyres, Epigrams,

Sonnets in Doozens, or your Quatorzanies,

In any rhyme, Masculine, Feminine,

Or Sdrucciola, or cooplets, Blancke Verse:

Y'are but bench-whistlers now a dayes to them

That were in our times....