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.
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