JOHN SKELTON
Dunbar looks back at the medieval world and seems to draw a line under the fifteenth century. The center of gravity, after the decisive Scottish poetic flowering and subsequent military defeat, shifts back to the south. Ford Madox Ford calls the Tudor and Stuart years the Spacious Age. How much our writers owe to the Mediterranean, especially to Boccaccio and Petrarch! He adds: “With the sixteenth century the art of letters had become essentially a matter of movements rather than one of solitary literary figures.” English begins to acquire a coherent literature. Classical humanism was in part responsible; so was the development of the popular theater, but also the growth of printing.
At the beginning of the century, the constant in English poetry was rhyme, meter being irregular because the language had not been stabilized, the status of the final e unresolved right through the reign of Henry VIII. John Skelton depends on rhyme to an unusual extent: his “Skeltonics” are based on little else: “a poetical barbarism.” It was not just because of his apparent formal crudeness that Alexander Barclay, the monkish Scot, calls him a “rascolde poet”: he was something of a rascal in fact. But an unusual one: classically educated, he could “forget his Classics when looking at the countryside and not see Margery Milke-Ducke as Phyllis and Jolly Jacke as Corydon, or find ‘behind every bush a thrumming Apollo’ (John Clare’s criticism of Keats)”—says Robert Graves, approvingly. Dunbar’s contemporary, he stands like Janus at the threshold of the English Renaissance, facing both ways. He teases the tired old courtly traditions and discharges satire without mercy. He writes astonishing religious poetry, but his poems of celebration, social comment, parody and praise, and those headlong “Skeltonics,” are what make him alive. His is the first modern English: we read him without recourse to a glossary.
No Englishman more relished the Scottish defeat at Flodden than Skelton. He gloated in his indecently chauvinistic poem “Against the Scots.” He played for a time in the Tudor court a role comparable to Dunbar’s in the court of James IV. Like Dunbar he was a man of the cloth and a courtier with royal duties. He tutored the Duke of York, later Henry VIII. He commented wryly on the pleasures and vices of the royal milieu. With Dunbar he shared a certain public heartlessness, but he was never a convincing courtier. He kept getting into trouble. He wasn’t convincing as a priest, either, though he was rector of Diss, Norfolk, where his diocesan bishop punished him for “having been guilty of certain crimesAS MOST POETS ARE.”
Milton agreed with the bishop: “I name him not for posterity sake, whom Henry the 8th named in merriment his vicar of hell.” Milton declines to understand the king’s jest: the rector of Diss, the rector of Dis (Latin for hell). Milton calls him “one of the worst of men, who are both most able and most diligent to instil the poison they suck into the courts of princes, acquainting them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin.” The poet of Paradise Lost and the author of the classic tract against censorship Areopagitica would gladly have censored the anarchic, joyous laureate, as though he single-handedly had derailed the future king. Alexander Pope dismissed him as “beastly Skelton.” This had nothing to do with the fact that Skelton was a kind of editor, assisting Caxton with his Virgil. Had Pope known this, he might have disparaged him even more vehemently.
Skelton isn’t formally competent in the way Dunbar is; instead of a diverse skill he possesses a distinctive style, with certain affectations: those insistent and surprising rhymes, a refusal to stay still before his subject. His poetry is in touch with the spoken language of the day. He is not, of course, a reporter of court or gutter speech, but his language includes what he heard from highly placed and humble people alike. His pastoral work took him among wool merchants, farmers and clerics, all with different accents and ways of talking; and new religious notions flowed in at the port.
He is capable like Dunbar of savage flytings; he spares no foe. But his best work is compassionate and moral in a new manner. In his time allegory was no longer an entirely viable mode. The new humanism found it crudely scholastic. Skelton drew upon it to exaggerate and satirize, driving it to the extreme by individual idiosyncrasy.
Born probably in 1464, possibly in Cumberland, he was first known to the world as a classical humanist. He studied at Cambridge, went to “Oxforth,” where he was made Poet Laureate and took a further degree in 1488, a degree which “implied a diligent study of mediaeval grammar and rhetoric, though the Poeta Laureatus need not have written any poems—except perhaps a hundred Virgilian hexameters, and a Latin comedy, both eulogizing Oxford, to prove that he had mastered Latin prosody and the Aristotelian unities.” He translated Diodorus Siculus’s History of the World (c. 1485) and the Epistles of Tully (Marcus Tullius Ciceronis, a.k.a. Cicero). In 1489 he was laureate of Oxford and Louvain, a scholar of international repute. Erasmus called him Britannicarum literarum decus et lumen. He compiled A New English Grammar, now lost with much of his other work. In 1489 he was admitted laureate of Cambridge. In 1498 he took religious orders and wrote a bitter satire, The Bowge of Court. The next year he was tutoring the future king, Henry VIII: “I gave him drink of the sugared well / Of Helicon’s waters crystaline.”
His Latin verses were praised even by Warton, who finds little to praise in the rest of his work. The verses on refusing to return a borrowed palfrey are in character; other verses express his doubt about the real presence in the sacrament. There is a frailty in his theological poems which contrasts with the imaginative force of his devotional writing (“Woefully Arrayed,” for example). It makes sense to distinguish between theological poems, which examine tenets of faith, and devotional problems, which respond to Christian verities, especially the Crucifixion.
Skelton was first rewarded for his labors as tutor to Prince Henry by the future king’s mother: she gave him a curacy “to reward his conscientious tutorship and good influence on the unruly boy.” Good influence, Milton take note. His praise for her father, Edward, is undoubtedly sincere. It was 1504 when he removed to Diss, where his vernacular poetry came into its own. No record survives of the shock his fresh and extremely “low” verses provoked in humanist erstwhile colleagues. Phyllyp Sparowe, which includes the first mention in English poetry of some seventy species of bird, The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, celebrating a seriously unlicensed publican, and other pieces did his reputation as a scholar no good. His conduct as rector did him no credit either. He was said to keep “a fair wench in his house.” When the bishop instructed him to expel her through the door, Skelton obeyed, only to receive her back again—legend has it—through the window. But his faith was almost orthodox, however unorthodox his character as rector.
By 1509 he was back at court. The king pardoned him for an unrecorded offense. Advanced in years in 1512, after being created Orator Regius, a sort of Latin secretary, by his former pupil, he made—Graves reports—“a startling public avowal of devotion to the Muse-goddess, when he appeared wearing a white and green Court dress embroidered with the golden name CALLIOPE. He chose Calliope (‘lovely face’) rather than any of the Goddess’ eight other names because, as he writes in an amplificatio of Diodorus Siculus’ History, Calliope combines ‘incomparable riches of eloquence with profound sadness.’ ” In 1516 he wrote Magnificence, his one surviving interlude and not a negligible contribution to the development of secular drama. Some of the passages call Blake to mind: “To live under law it is captivity: / Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride.”
By 1519, living in a house within the sanctuary of Westminster, he expressed his freedom by launching a campaign, with bleak and comic consequences, against Cardinal Wolsey as traitor to king, church and people in Collyn Clout and other work. He was a “cur and butcher’s dog.” The next year, Why come ye nat to Courte brought the conflict to a head. The king could no longer protect his orator. Skelton was abandoned to the cardinal, who sent him to prison. He earned his liberty by a penance and a jest. Kneeling before Wolsey, he suffered a long lecture, and at last said, “I pray your grace to let me lye doune and wallow, for I can kneele no longer.”
“Speke Parrot” was composed in 1521. He enjoyed the patronage of the Howards in Yorkshire, wrote his self-staged apotheosis in The Garlande of Laurell, and returned to London, where he now flattered Wolsey in the hope of receiving a prebend. It was not granted. In old age he called himself the “British Catullus.” He died in 1529, the year before Wolsey fell, leaving several children by a marriage he confessed to upon his deathbed. He was buried at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and his stone reads Joannes Skelton, vates Pierius, hic situs est.
There is a strong case against Skelton. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589) Richard Puttenham called him “but a rude railing rhymer, and all his doings ridiculous; he used both short distances and short measures, pleasing only the popular care.” Francis Meres in his invaluable Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury (1598) branded him “buffoon.” Warton states the case most fully: “Skelton would have been a writer without decorum at any period,” his humor “capricious and grotesque.” Not only his subjects but his manner Warton finds objectionable: “He sometimes debases his matter by his versification.” But Caxton claimed that Skelton improved the language. How could this be so, asks Warton (forgetting that Caxton died in 1491, before Skelton had begun to give offense), for Skelton “sometimes adopts the most familiar phraseology of the common people.” About the style he is emphatic. It is an “anomalous and motley form of versification.” “Motley”: Skelton as jester once again.
Warton describes fairly; but we reach a different verdict. Our prejudice favors “the most familiar phraseology of the common people,” the spoken language. Not that anyone ever spoke Skeltonics, but his diction draws on the demotic of various classes. Warton does not mention the large number of invented and obscure words that are also found in the poems, a literariness that derives from Skelton’s master Lydgate and from Chaucer. Sufficient evidence of artistry exists to make us trust even his most apparently off-the-cuff verses. Graves and Auden find in him the English poet of the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Graves insists that “a study of the Oxford English Dictionary will show that Skelton enriched our vocabulary more than any other poet before or since, even Chaucer.”
The taproots of his English work go deep into the fourteenth century and beyond. The rhyming Goliardic tradition of medieval Latin verse attracted him. He called his poems “trifles of honest mirth,” which aligns him with the Goliardic, though he preferred accentual to syllabic prosody. If his Latin elegiacs were free of monastic phraseology, as Warton says, his English verses often include monastic Latin tags, developing a macaronic style of mixing English and Latin and sometimes French, which has been practiced in English for centuries, usually in carols, hymns and religious compositions, seldom in so lighthearted and witty a fashion, even by Dunbar. Skelton is a renegade humanist who recognized—having contributed to the movement—the spiritual and linguistic impoverishment that doctrinaire humanism implied. He came to relish elements in language that humanism tried to extirpate in its frenzy to purify Latin and, in a different sense, English.
His first English poem is an elegy on Edward IV. It’s less elegy than meditative monologue, spoken by the king reflecting on ephemerality, fortune (with “sugared lips”), and “mutability.” The complex verse form includes Latin refrains and an effective use of the ubi sunt (“where have they gone”) motif, celebrating deeds even as it acknowledges their passing. The poem is not all wooden; it suggests what is to come. The accentual verse, with a marked caesura, falls into two short, phrased lines, with a truncated Anglo-Saxon feel. Though not systematically alliterative, it has the pondered emphases of alliterative verse, with short syntactic phrases.
In his next poem, also an elegy, he asks Clio to help him “expel” his “homely rudeness and dryness.” “My words unpolished be, naked and plain, / Of aureat poems they want illumining.” But nakedness and an individual plainness were to be his hallmarks, until the exuberance of the late poems. With The Bowge of Court he came of age. “Bowge” (bouche) means “rewards.” In this secular allegory a dreamer takes ship and experiences the comradeship of courtly Disdain, Riot, Dissimulation and other perilous personifications. Boarding in innocence, he is reduced to paranoid dread. Chaucer is Skelton’s master: the stanza form is that of Troilus and Criseyde, and when the language is most achieved, we feel Chaucer in the very movement of the verse. Riot is described in these terms:
Entering on his forties (an older age then than it is today), living in the provinces, perhaps intellectually uncompanioned, driven upon himself, Skelton changed his style of life and writing. The eccentric poet hinted at in earlier poems came into his own in Phyllyp Sparowe. He used Goliardic verse, parodying the sacred rituals of the Church, to celebrate Jane Scroop’s sparrow eaten by the convent cat. The first line reads “Pla ce bo,” the first word of the Office of the Dead, divided into three mock-solemn syllables that set the rhythmic pattern: short-lined, three-stressed. The first part of the poem is spoken by Jane, lamenting the bird. The elegy develops to ranging parody and satire. The famous catalogue of birds is not just a list: it evokes some of Philip’s cousins, “The lark with his long toe,” “And also the mad coot, / With balde face to toot” and more. An erotic subtext gives the poem its force: Jane laments her sparrow as a lover:
Jane pleads her simplicity and ignorance, then entertains with a show of erudition and an enormous reading list. Finally Skelton’s voice takes over and praises her. She loved the bird, the poet loves her. A Catullan syndrome, a very English poem.
The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng is certainly not charming: a poem in seven “fits,” it’s indebted to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Elynour’s obnoxious “tunnyng,” or alcoholic brew, luridly described in its vat, attracts fallen women of all sorts. Elynour herself, based on an actual publican who traded near Leatherhead, Surrey, is Skelton’s most repulsive creation. Her face was “Like a roast pig’s ear, / Bristled with hair.” The poem is the quintessence of his “motley” verse, which he describes in Collyn Clout:
For though my ryme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rayne-beaten,
Rusty and mothe-eaten,
Yf ye take well therwith,
It hath in it some pyth.
The “pyth” is that of satirical moralist. In the poems against Wolsey he satirizes with equal verve ecclesiastical corruption and the faithless laity. He is an establishment man, opposed to those who use rather than serve it. Skeltonics, a helter-skelter measure bordering on doggerel, suit the helter-skelter social world he mocks.
When, late in his career, he chose to use a long line, a more relaxed syntax followed and greater depth. “Speke Parrot” is—even in the corrupt texts we have—his masterpiece. The years of learnedness laugh at themselves in obscure references and allusions. He shifts attention from immediate effects to a more integrated poetic language that reflects a mind that, to begin with, seems abandoned to eloquent mania. The parrot who speaks is a Polly-glot, stuffed with knowledge, all of it—given the situation of the bird, a pet and a captive, caged—garbled and useless.
“Speke Parrot” celebrates language and, in the same breath, acknowledges its impotence in the world of action. The poem slides away from mock allegory and rhetorical and linguistic jollity, until we’re left with a bold, unmasked indictment of the state of learning, morality, the Church, the judiciary.
In Skelton’s later work there is a constant pull toward dramatic form. The poems employ dialogue and idiomatic speech and develop character. In this as in other ways Skelton is a poet of transition, still dignified with the authority of the Middle Ages, yet expert in the new learning and the new forms. In The Garlande of Laurell occur those lyrics—“With marjoram gentle,” “By Saint Mary, my lady,” “Merry Margaret” and others—that crown the medieval lyric tradition and are at the same time among the finest celebratory lyrics of the early Renaissance.