SOURCE: "Skelton's Garlande of Laurell and the Chaucerian Tradition," in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, edited by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 122-38.

[In the following essay, Scattergood compares Skelton 's The Garlande of Laurell to Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame and discusses Skelton's belief in the "all-embracing relevance of poetry."]

Of all the English Chaucerians nobody wrote more about poetry, about the nature of the poetic tradition, and his own role in it than Skelton, and The Garlande of Laurell is in many ways his most considered statement. Usually his comments appear in the context of some other subject, but this poem is about poetry and nothing else. For all that, it is not a particularly unified or cohesive performance, partly due to the circumstances of its composition. From the astrological opening¹ it would seem that Skelton began the poem in 1495 on the occasion of a celebration at Sheriff Hutton Castle (Yorkshire) organized by Elizabeth Tylney Howard, Countess of Surrey, and her circle, to mark Skelton's laureations by three universities—Oxford in 1490, Louvain in 1492, and Cambridge in 1493. But the revised version published by Richard Fakes on 3 October 1523 included a defence of Phyllyp Sparowe (lines 1261-1366) which must post-date 1509 and a list of works including some which date from the early 1520s. In a sense, this is not unusual: Skelton's poems frequently grow by addition and augmentation. What is important in relation to The Garlande of Laurell, however, is that by 1523 its original celebratory purpose had waned somewhat, and it had become rather a retrospective review of a lengthy career spent on poetry, and an attempt at justifying that career.

In view of its subject matter, it is a less complacent poem than it might have been. Skelton's dream of fame is set in a forbiddingly unfavourable context. The traditional enemies of fame are chance, time and death, and Skelton contextualizes his examination of the subject as he meditates, at the beginning of his poem, on the mutability of things:

In place alone then musynge in my thought
How all thynge passyth as doth the somer flower,
On every halfe my reasons forth I sought,
How oftyn fortune varyth in an howre,
Now clere wether, forthwith a stormy showre;
All thynge compassyd, no perpetuyte,
But now in welthe, now in adversyte.

In his despair he leans for rest on the stump of an oak tree in Galtres Forest, but it provides no comfort and merely reinforces those fears that are troubling his mind, for the once mighty and noble tree is now no more than an emblem of the ravages of time: its 'bewte blastyd was with the boystors wynde', its leaves were gone and the sap had left its bark. He aspires instead to the everlasting laurel, 'Enverdurid with leves contynually grene', the symbol of poetic fame, and this is granted him, though with reservations. Pallas, goddess of wisdom and the deity controlling the academic curriculum ('Madame regent of the scyence sevyn'), vouches for Skelton's excellence and the Quene of Fame allows his name to be registered 'With laureate tryumphe in the courte of Fame' because he has spent his time 'studyously', but this is only after a rigorous examination of his case and the raising of a number of serious objections. For Skelton, fame is not easily acquired. And even after he is acclaimed and accepted, once out of his dream the poem ends with another figure of transience—the double-faced Janus, Roman god of beginnings and endings, who is making calculations about time with his 'tirikkis' and his 'volvell'. In order to come to terms with what constitutes everlasting fame for the poet Skelton meditates profoundly on the past and the future.

Everlasting fame, glory, and honour are frequent subjects in poetry and in The Garlande of Laurell, Skelton uses many traditional ideas. There is no agreement, however, about whether he used closely any specific source. It has been argued, by Edvige Schulte, that his inspiration came from Italian, from Dante's Purgatorio and from Petrarch's Africa, the Triumph of Fame Chapter III and from Canzone CCXXIII.² On the other hand, Gordon Kipling has seen the French rhétoriquer tradition, as developed in the courts of Flanders, as providing Skelton with models for this and other poems.³ Again, Gregory Kratzmann proposes Gavin Douglas's Police of Honour as a significant influence.⁴ It may be that Skelton derived something from all these sources; it is clear that in The Garlande of Laurell he identifies himself with a tradition of poetry which he takes back to its mythic origins and which incorporates many languages and many periods both ancient and modern. But predominantly, this concern is with England and the English tradition. The poem is infused with a sort of literary nationalism: Skelton pays particular attention to the gate of the palace of Fame which is called 'Anglea' and which bears the English heraldic beast, 'a lybbard, crownyd with golde and stones'; and it is Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate 'Theis Englysshe poetis thre' who escort him to the Quene of Fame. The most substantial earlier treatment of the subject of The Garlande of Laurell in English poetry was Chaucer's House of Fame, and this is the poem, as was long ago proposed, which seems to me most important to Skelton here.

It is perhaps unfortunate that A. S. Cook chose to make the case for the 'dependence' of The Garlande of Laurell on Chaucer by citing parallel passages.⁵ His evidence shows that the same general ideas and literary strategies occur, but that there is no specific verbal correspondence. Though both poems are dream-visions in which the narrator confronts allegorical figures of authority, Skelton's poem is much simpler than the House of Fame: it is less inventive (there is no Dantean eagle to act as guide, and no aerial flight through the cosmos as there is in Chaucer's lines 496-1053); it is philosophically less enquiring (there is no disquisition on the way sound travels as in lines 765-852, or on the relation of rumour to fame in lines 1916-2120); and crucially it is much narrower in its conception of fame (there is no comparable equivalent to the various companies who put their cases to Chaucer's goddess in lines 1520-1867). Skelton is concerned, almost exclusively, with literary fame.

Yet something of Chaucer's poem is recalled by Skelton, though transmuted so as to be almost unrecognizable. In the House of Fame Eolus blows 'bad fame' or 'shame' out of his black trumpet to one company of petitioners:

… thrughout every regioun
Wente this foule trumpes soun,
As swifte as pelet out of gonne
When fyr is in the poudre ronne.
And such a smoke gan out wende
Out of his foule trumpes ende,
Blak, bloo, grenyssh, swartish red,
As doth where that men melte led,
Loo, al on high fro the tuel.
And therto oo thing saugh I well,
That the ferther that hit ran,
The gretter wexen hit began,
As dooth the ryver from a welle,
And hyt stank as the pit of helle.

Chaucer is concerned to show how bad fame spreads, and uses, amongst other comparisons, some of the traditional images associated with vainglory—smoke and stench.⁶ Though Eolus appears also in Skelton he is not an agent for the distribution of fame, being now no more than someone who performs ceremonial duties, calling for attention and such like. Yet Skelton remembers and responds to Chaucer's passage, though not by direct imitation. He takes Chaucer's simile, 'as pelet out of gonne', and literalizes it. He causes the presumptuously clamouring, unworthy figures who are besieging the palace of Fame to be scattered by gunfire from the walls:

With a pellit of pevisshenes they had suche a stroke,
That all the dayes of ther lyfe shall styck by ther rybbis.
Foo, foisty bawdias, sum smellid of the smoke …

—retaining the two traditional images. Similarly, in Chaucer 'good fame' from Eolus' golden trumpet is spread like a fragrance:

And, certes, al the breth that wente
Out of his trumpes mouth it smelde
As men a pot of bawme helde
Among a basket ful of roses.

This reappears in Skelton as the fragrance from the olive-wood fire kindled by the phoenix in the top of the laurel tree in Fame's garden: 'It passid al bawmys that ever were namyd'. Though he steals odd lines here and there, Skelton rarely makes extensive use of literary sources: the relationship between these poems is not one of direct borrowing. Rather, Skelton engages with some of the ideas in the House of Fame, and in some of Chaucer's other poems, in order to define his own position.

Even a cursory examination of the two poems, however, is enough to indicate that Skelton makes claims for his own importance as a poet—claims about the status of the poet writing in English, about his relation to the literary tradition, about his role as a perpetuator of noble subjects, and about fame acquired through labour and the multiplication of readers—which are more substantial than Chaucer ever felt able to make. This, as I shall seek to argue, is not simply to be attributed to Skelton's vanity,⁷ but is rather a reflection of a substantially different way of thinking about literature which had emerged in England in the hundred and fifty years separating the two poems, and of a new confidence which English poets were beginning to feel.

Chaucer sought to invest poetry with more dignity and significance than his predecessors in English. In a mode of high clowning, he frequently presents himself as a minstrel or a court entertainer and little more, but as A. C. Spearing rightly points out, the three invocations or apostrophes in Proem II of the House of Fame, imitated from Dante, are important in that Chaucer envisages, for the first time in English, the idea of poetry as a vocation, the idea of the poet as prophet, and the idea that sublime poetry was possible in the vernacular.⁸ Chaucer is also the first poet in English to use the evocative image of the laurel, symbolic of the everlasting fame of poets: the Muse Polyhymnia sings 'with vois memorial in the shade / Under the laurer which that may not fade' (Anelida and Arcite). And in Proem III to the House of Fame Chaucer asks Apollo, the god of poetry, for his help and promises, if he receives it:

Thou shalt se me go as blyve
Unto the nexte laure y see,

And kysse yt, for hyt is thy tree.
Now entre in my brest anoon!

But he also knew about Petrarch's laureation in Rome in 1341, a ceremony which formed the model for similar Renaissance occasions, for he refers to 'Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete' whose sweet rhetoric had spread the idea of poetry over all Italy. But Chaucer never claims the laurel, and expresses no pretensions to fame through laureation.

This modesty clearly disappointed his fifteenth-century followers, for they repeatedly suggest that he ought to have been invested with the honour. Lydgate praises Chaucer for 'the golde dewe dropes of speche and eloquence' in English and says that he 'worthy was the laurer too have / of poetry',⁹ and elsewhere suggests that he has an equal right to 'be registred in þe house of fame' with Petrarch.¹⁰ Caxton, in the Prohemye to the second edition of the Canterbury Tales, commends Chaucer 'the whiche for his ornate wrytyng in our tongue maye wel have the name of a laureate poete'.¹¹ And in the final stanza of The Kingis Quair, James I of Scotland extends the claim to include Gower as well as Chaucer, who were together 'Superlative as poetis laureate / In moralitee and eloquence ornate'.¹²

When Skelton confronts Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate in The Garlande of Laurell, he honours them as the establishers and enrichers of the English language as a medium for poetry: one of them 'first garnisshed our Englysshe rude', and another 'nobly enterprysed/How that our Englysshe myght fresshely be ennewed'. He remarks, however, that 'Thei wantid nothynge but the laurell'—an enigmatic line which has been read off as a not very subtle attempt on Skelton's part to enhance his own reputation, because he had been laureated, at the expense of theirs.¹³ The implication of it, however, may be the same as when Lydgate, Caxton and James I had treated the subject earlier, that because of the nature and importance of their achievements in poetry these English poets ought to have been awarded the laurel, but had not been. In the House of Fame, Chaucer approaches Apollo's laurel but does not claim it, just as he approaches the palace of Fame, but not to get fame. Skelton hesitates ('A made it straunge, and drew bak ones or twyse') but not for long; fame and the laurel are his due, he feels, not necessarily because he is a better poet than his English predecessors, but because English poetry itself and its representatives, including Skelton, deserve more honour and in more formal terms than had been accorded to them previously. Skelton appreciated the importance for English poets of claiming fame through status: he insists on his titles of 'laureate' and, after 1512-13, of orator regius. He may be following the example of the rhétoriquers in this: Octavien de Saint-Gelays refers to himself as 'simple orateur du roi'.¹⁴ But Skelton is the first English poet to feel able to do this.

In the second place, Skelton appears to have believed that fame consisted, in part, of belonging to a tradition of notable writers, of being able to set oneself in the context of illustrious predecessors. Norman Blake has pointed out the lack of a sense of tradition in much Middle English literature, and that 'texts often seem to appear quite fortuitously without past or future',¹⁵ though they are sometimes used as sources or quarried for ideas. With Chaucer this altered. He habitually seeks to define his own position by referring to authors of the classical and medieval past, usually with a sense of uneasiness and anxious deference: at the end of Troilus and Criseyde he urges his 'litel bok' to 'kis the steppes' of 'Virgile, Ovide, Orner, Lucan and Stace' (v, 1786-92). Chaucerian poets of the fifteenth century follow his example and, in addition, defer to him: he is referred to by Hoccleve as 'maister deere' or 'fadir reverent', and others echo this.¹⁶

Chaucer's method of definition by reference to other poets was taken over by Skelton's admirers (of whom in his lifetime there were many) and later by Skelton himself, who was doubtless encouraged by what he read about himself. The earliest praise of Skelton, by Caxton in 1490, sets him in a context of classical authors: 'he hath late translated the Epystlys of Tulle, and the Boke of Dyodorus Syculus and diverse other werkes out of Latyn into Englysshe … as he that hath redde Vyrgyle, Ovyde, Tullye and all the other noble poetes and oratours …¹⁷ In 1499 Erasmus goes further. Skelton has not only read classical authors, but is their equal: What Greece owes to Homer, and what Mantua owes to Virgil, by so much is Britain in debt to Skelton:

…Te principe Skelton
Anglia nil metuat
Vel cum Romanis versu certare poetis.¹⁸

[While you are its principal poet, O Skelton, England need fear nothing, for you are worthy to vie in versifying with Roman poets.]

This is elaborated by Roberet Whittinton in 1519 in his In Clarissimi Scheltonis Louaniensis Poeti: Laudes Epigramma. On Parnassus Apollo praises the 'monumenta suorum vatum' mentioning Homer, Orpheus, Musaeus, Aristophanes, Aeschylus and others among the Greeks, and Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius and others among the Romans. Then he turns to Britain, a land which nourishes poets, and at considerable length he praises Skelton for his rhetorical speech, his eloquence and his power to move. He is in no doubt about Skelton's claim to fame: 'Ecce virum de quo splendida fama volat', and he calls upon the Muses to make his glory eternal:

[Let him flourish in the eternal honour with which he celebrated you, and let his fame be perennial in the stars.]

Similarly, Skelton's contemporaries testify to his fame by setting him in a tradition of English poetry and among English poets. In 1510 the author of The Great Chronicle of London, perhaps Robert Fabyan, links him with William Cornish, Sir Thomas More, and Chaucer 'if he were now in lyffe'.²⁰ And a little later Henry Bradshaw twice defers to the authority of Skelton in association with Chaucer, Lydgate and Barclay.²¹

In The Garlande of Laurell, Skelton sets himself in a comprehensive tradition of poetry incorporating Greek and Latin authors, poets from the Middle Ages such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Renaissance figures such as Poggio 'that famous Florentine' and contemporaries such as Robert Gaguin; the list is closed by his three eminent English predecessors. In the fiction of his poem, the poets of this tradition approve his claim to fame: 'Triumpha, triumphal they cryid all aboute'. His vanity has provoked criticism from modern scholars, in part justifiably: 'For him, the poetic tradition which he evokes so fully seems to exist for his sake, rather than he for its … the tradition of poetry exists in order that Skelton may be its latest and most glorious representative'.²² But it has to be remembered that Skelton is here not claiming for himself anything more than his contemporaries thought he deserved.

When one turns, thirdly, to the subject of fame and poetry as perpetuation one finds on Skelton's part the same engagement with traditional ideas, with Chaucer and his followers, and the same desire to equal or outdo. The idea appears early that poets bestowed eternal fame on those whom they celebrated in their verses, and by doing so acquired fame for themselves.²³ Chaucer takes the idea up in the House of Fame where the notable poets of antiquity, whose durability is indicated by their positions on pillars of metal like caryatids, 'bar… up the fame' of men, events and peoples of the past, like Aeneas, Caesar, Pompey, the Jews, the Greeks, the Trojans, or the fame of mythical personages, like the 'god of love' or Pluto and Proserpina. So far as is known, Chaucer never wrote for patrons, but his followers—Hoccleve, Lydgate, Ashby, and the like—appear to have sought readily the favour of the great and powerful, and in return provided the kind of verses which were asked for: apart from any material benefits which may have been forthcoming, to have a famous patron provided some assurance of acceptability and eminence for the poet. Frontispieces to presentation copies of poems which show the poet kneeling before the patron become common. So too do headings like the following to the copy of Lydgate's Guy of Warwick from BL MS Harley 7333 fol. 33r: 'Here now begynnebe an abstracte out of the Cronicles in Latyn made by Gyrarde Comubyence the worpy Croniculer of Westsexse, and translated in to Englishe by Lydegate daun Iohan at be requeste of Margarite Countas of Shrowesbury Lady Talbot fournyval and Lisle of the lyf of the most worþy knyght Guy of Warwike, of whos blood she is lyneally descended'.²⁴ The fame of one's ancestors and hence the fame of one's family and one's own fame may be procured and perpetuated in poetry.

Skelton's earliest datable poem is written firmly within this tradition. In Upon the Dolorus Dethe … of the … Erie of Northumberlande he seeks to 'make memoryall' for Henry Percy, the Fourth Earl, murdered by tax rebels at Topcliffe, near Thirsk, in 1489. He appeals to Clio, the muse of history, to help his 'elect uteraunce' by refreshing his 'homely rudnes' and adverts to the idea that poetry of this sort preserves fame:

Of noble actes auncyently enrolde
Of famous princis and lordes of astate,
By thy report ar wonte to be extolde
Regestringe trewly every formare date …

Whether Skelton was commissioned to write this poem is difficult to tell, but he offers his services to the son of the dead earl in a prefatory Latin verse: 'Ad libitum cuius ipse paratus ero'. And an elaborately written and rubricated copy of the poem is preserved in BL MS Royal 18. D. ii, a sumptuous Percy manuscript.²⁵ Thereafter, from time to time, but especially after 1512-13 in his capacity as orator regius, Skelton writes in praise of Henry VIII to memorialize his achievements and those of England. So when Skelton thinks of his own fame in The Garlande of Laurell it is partly in these terms: it depends on the mutual interest of those celebrated in poetry and the poet who celebrates them. The Countess of Surrey and her companions feel bound to 'rewarde' Skelton with an embroidered garland of laurel (779) to signal his pre-eminence as a poet because he has in the past celebrated the fame of ladies:

… of all ladyes he hath the library,
Ther names recountyng in the court of Fame;
Of all gentylwomen he hath the scruteny,
In Fames court reportyng the same"…

In his turn he has to thank them, at the prompting of Occupacyon, with a series of lyrics 'In goodly wordes plesauntly comprysid'. The whole process is then perpetuated 'in pycture, by his industrious wit' by 'maister Newton', presumably a painter or illuminator. Skelton's frequent allusion to those who appear to be his patrons—the Percy family, Henry VIII, the Howards, and latterly Wolsey—was no doubt in part a recognition of kindnesses received or expected, but it may well also have had the function in his mind of establishing his fame by associating him with the famous.

However, the fourth aspect of the poet's claim to fame as treated in The Garlande of Laurell—the expenditure of labour over a long time to produce a body of work which will be read—is probably the most important to Skelton. The formula 'Idleness is to be shunned' is a favourite topic of the exordium among classical authors. Seneca's warning, 'Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepulta' (Idleness without studies is death and a sepulture for a living man), was often quoted, and the practice of poetry came to be seen as a virtuous cure for sloth.²⁶ On one occasion Chaucer uses the idleness topic in a prefatory position: the Second Nun sees the telling of the life of St Cecilia as a way to avoid 'ydelnesse' by means of 'leveful bisyness'.²⁷ But the idea also occurs in the House of Fame: the seventh company ask for Fame but the goddess instructs Eolus to blow 'a sory grace' for them from his black trumpet because they are 'ydel wrechches' who will 'do noskynnes labour. Fame without labour is impossible, and for a poet labour consists of producing poems which will be read by posterity and recognized.

Chaucer worries about the stability of his texts at the end of Troilus and Criseyde: the 'gret diversite / In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge' may cause the metre of his book to be ruined or its sense misunderstood (v, 1793-8). He curses his scribe Adam for his incorrect copying and complains that he has to 'rubbe and scrape' the parchment in correction of Adam's versions of his texts. These complaints may to some extent be traditional²⁸ and the second is deliberately amusing, but behind the comedy lies a deep concern for the lastingness of his works. And doubtless it was this same motive—the wish to establish his fame by ensuring his identification with certain works which he hoped would last—that caused Chaucer to include lists of his works in his writings. None of the lists is very formal or complete and all are contextualized by disparaging reservations about the poet's achievement. In the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women it is said that 'he kan nat wel endite' though he has written a great deal about love. According to the Man of Law, 'thogh he kan but lewedly / On metres and on rymyng craftily', Chaucer has told, in one place or another, all the seemly stories there are to tell—and he lists some of Chaucer's works about women. And in the Retractions to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer, in his own person, asks that God 'foryeve me the synne' of his secular writings which, nevertheless, he names along with those works which he feels are morally sound and need no apology. In his habitual, self-deprecating way Chaucer talks himself down, but at the same time seeks to establish his fame, for the first time in English, by associating his name with a defined body of work.

Chaucer's followers pick up and develop these ideas, too. The idleness topic is frequently used—poignantly by George Ashby, who wrote while in the Fleet Prison, 'Thus occupying me'.²⁹ Yet one of its most assiduous users was Caxton, than whom there can have been few more active men of letters. In his Prologue to the 1483 edition of the Game of Chesse he mentions that he undertook the translation 'in eschewyng of ydlenes',³⁰ and in the Prologue to Charles the Great (1485) he asks God for grace so that he may 'laboure and occupye myself vertuously that I may come oute of dette and dedely synne'.³¹ Most interesting, however, in his Prologue to the Golden Legend (c. 1481) which begins with a quotation from Jerome, 'Do alweye somme good werke to th'ende that the devyl fynde the not ydle', and in a lengthy passage he adds quotations from a number of other authorities to the same effect.³² Most of the Prologue is based on the introduction to the French version of the work which Caxton was using, but he adds a certain amount—notably an extensive but incomplete list of translations made before 1482 which justify the way he has spent his time. Though he worries, like Chaucer, about 'dyversite and chaunge in language'³³ and though he worries about his own literary capacities, he has faith in the virtues of hard work and productivity.

And so too does Skelton. The Quene of Fame makes the point to Dame Pallas that Skelton will have to be banished from her court 'As he that aquentyth him with ydilnes' unless he can give a convincing account of his productivity. In response, Occupacyon reads off an enormous list of his works which, nevertheless, is said to be merely a selection 'in as moche as it were to longe a process to reherse all by name that he hath compylyd'. It is in many ways an odd list. Not all the descriptions of extant works are very accurate, and a great many of the works are evidently lost.³⁴ Perhaps some never existed at all, and it may be that the list is partly parodie. Chaucer's lists included items which, to a sixteenth-century reader such as Skelton as to a twentieth-century reader, must have appeared lost: 'Origenes upon the Maudeleyne', 'the book of the Leoun', and so on. It may be that Skelton invented his own 'lost' works in emulation of Chaucer. Yet he shows no uneasiness about the lastingness of his achievement: the stability of print was, no doubt, reassuring to him. Indeed, this very stability imposed its own pressures and responsibilities: 'Beware, for wrytyng remayneth of recorde' warns Dame Pallas. On one occasion, in the person of Jane Scrope, Skelton complains that the English language is 'rude', 'cankered', and 'rusty', and that it is difficult to find the terms in which to write 'ornatly' (VII, 774-83). But this doubt about the capacity of the language for eloquence did not extend to fears about durability. At the end of The Garlande of Laurell, Skelton reassures his 'littill quaire' that though it is written in English and not Latin that does not mean that people will not read it:

That so indede
Your fame may sprede
In length and brede.

His fame is assured through the multiplication of readers of his works—a point he makes in other places.³⁵

It seems clear, therefore, that Skelton saw himself, in much the same way as his contemporaries saw him, as a poet whose lasting fame was secure: he had status because of his laureation, poetic identity because he belonged to a definable historical tradition which embraced classical authors and his illustrious English predecessors, a role as perpetuator and memorialist of the famous, and a body of work to his credit that was likely to be read down the ages. Yet, for all this, he is sufficiently self-aware and self-critical to realize that there were aspects of his poetry that might cause his fame to be questioned, and in The Garlande of Laurell he expresses these doubts.

They principally concern his satires and polemical verses. When questions are raised, Dame Pallas interprets the Quene of Fame's reservations about accepting Skelton into her court as having to do with the fact that he does not always write in the style of courtly compliment and that he is therefore 'sum what to dull'. In order to defend him she seeks to broaden the notion of what are acceptable forms of poetry, and to justify his use of more demotic styles. The lines:

And if so hym fortune to wryte true and plaine,
As sumtyme he must vyces remorde,
Then sum wyll say he hath but lyttil brayne …

express similar misgivings to lines in the opening of Collyn Clout:

Or yf he speke playne
Than he lacketh brayne.

What is being referred to here is the low style of direct invective used by Skelton in his later satires, which, he affirms in Collyn Clout, may be 'tattered and jagged', but, nevertheless, is of some substance: 'it hath in it some pyth'.³⁶ A few lines later Dame Pallas refers to the indirect Galfridian manner of political prophecy:

A poete somtyme may for his pleasure taunt
Spekyng in paroblis, how the fox, the grey,
The gander, the gose, and the hudge oliphaunt,
Went with the pecok ageyne the fesaunt …

This is the mode of some lines of Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (XX, 118-22), which he may have in mind here, and for most of Speke Parott, where Skelton defends himself by saying that metaphor and allegory shall be 'his protectyon, his pavys and his wall', presumably against charges that he has defamed and slandered those he writes about. The disadvantage of this style is its obscurity and difficulty. At the end of Speke Parott, Galathea asks in desperation for a change of style of the poem: 'Sette asyde all sophysms, and speke now trew and playne', and this and other remarks indicate that Skelton had some sense that his readers found it hard to understand. In The Garlande of Laurell Dame Pallas defends this manner by affirming that those who are 'industryous of reason' will find in 'suche an endarkid chapiter sum season', but even she admits it is 'harde'.³⁷

Skelton is also concerned about the fate of satirists: Dame Pallas recalls the banishment of Ovid by Augustus Caesar and the threats to Juvenal, perhaps by Domitian, because he 'rubbid sum on the gall'. She defends Juvenal by saying, 'Yet wrote he none ill', but she later admits that in this sort of writing it is difficult to satisfy everybody: " '… harde is to make but sum fawt be founde'. These examples are adduced to help defend Skelton, 'to furnisshe better his excuse'. And, indeed, throughout his work he is conscious of his role as a controversialist, and aware that there are those who disagree with what he writes. The traditional prayer of the medieval poet:

I aske no more but God, of his mercy,
My book conserve from sklaundre and envy …³⁸

takes on an added force in Skelton's writings. Though it is not always possible to identify them, his enemies are not vague figures, for he often feels it necessary to answer specific charges. He writes a reply to the 'dyvers people' who thought his verses on the death of James IV at Flodden tasteless (XII 'Unto Dyvers People … '). Similarly, he appends to Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? some lines 'Contra quendam doctorem/Suam calumpniatorem'—a doctor of canon law evidently, who has not been further identified. Some of his enemies are, however, known by name. In 1509 Barclay attacked Phyllyp Sparowe for its 'wantones'³⁹ and Skelton wrote a 115-line reply which is appended to the poem in the printed editions: he notes in the account of Phyllyp Sparowe in The Garlande of Laurell that some 'grudge' at his poem 'with frownyng countenaunce' and includes the reply, closing with the line 'Est tamen invidia mors tibi continua'. And among the writers who are called upon to approve his laureation there is at least one former opponent who appears not to have entirely forgiven him:

… a frere of Fraunce men call Sir Gagwyne,
That frowned on me full angerly and pale

—Robert Gaguin, with whom Skelton had earlier engaged in polemical exchange.⁴⁰ For a controversial writer fame does not imply universal approval, and it is Skelton's consciousness of this which, no doubt, caused him to ponder at length the case of Aeschines, defeated in controversy by Demosthenes in 330 BC. He is allowed a place in her court, according to the Quene of Fame, because he provoked Demosthenes to great works, because he was overcome by no one but Demosthenes, and because of his subsequent acknowledgement of Demosthenes' superior ability: 'though he were venquesshid, yet was he not shamyd'. There is generous inclusiveness in Skelton's conception of fame, particularly in relation to satirists and polemicists.

But Skelton's view of poetry was also an extremely inclusive one, and one which conferred a dignity and an importance on poetry and poets which was far greater than Chaucer or most of his followers ever felt able to give it. Poetry embraced everything and the poet's realm was everywhere. In the paradisal garden of the Quene of Fame performs no courtly entertainer and no love poet, but the Carthaginian bard Iopas who sang before Aeneas in Dido's palace, and, as in Aeneid, 1, 740 ff., he sings of the whole cosmic order, 'Of Atlas astrology, and many noble thyngis … Of men and bestis, and whereof they begone … ', to which, as A. C. Spearing has acutely pointed out,⁴¹ Skelton adds a line of his own which suggests that his subjects include the whole moral order also: 'How wronge was no ryght, and ryght was no wronge'. The poet is privileged to speak of all things.

It is a large claim but Skelton develops and goes beyond it in ' A Replycacion', his last extant poem. Here he undertakes to defend the Christian faith against heresy by means of satirical verse and in the course of his poem he also finds himself defending the right of poets to deal with theological matters,⁴² for which he uses the impeccable authority of Jerome who, in his letter to Paulinus prefacing the Vulgate, had praised the poetry of the psalms of David:

Than, if this noble kyng,
Thus can harpe and syng

With his harpe of prophecy
And spyrituall poetry,
And saynt Jerome saythe,
To whom we must give faythe,
Warblynge with his strynges
Of suche theologicall thynges,
Why have ye than disdayne
At poertes, and complayne
Howe poetes do but fayne?

What is more, says Skelton, those who disparage the 'fame matryculate/Of poetes laureate' do wrong, because poetic inspiration comes from God, and it is this which causes poets to write:

… there is a spyrituall,
And a mysteriall,
And a mysticall
Effecte energiall,
As Grekes do it call,
Of suche an industry
And suche a pregnacy,
Of hevenly inspyracion
In laureate creacyon,
Of poetes commendacion,
That of divyne myseracion
God maketh his habitacion
In poetes whiche excelles,
And sojourns with them and dwelles.

By whose inflammacion
Of spyrituall instygacion
And divyne inspyracion
We are kyndled in suche facyon
With hete of the Holy Gost,
Which is God of myghtes most,
That he our penne dothe lede,
And maketh in us suche spede
That forthwith we must nede
With penne and ynke procede …

Skelton fuses classical and Christian ideas about poetic inspiration in this comprehensive defence. It rests on a well-defined tradition but probably takes its immediate origin from Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium XIV, 7: 'Thus poetry, which ignorant triflers cast aside, is a sort of fervid and exquisite expression, in speech or writing, of that which the mind has invented. It proceeds from the bosom of God, and few, I find, are the souls in whom this gift is born, indeed, so wonderful a gift it is that true poets have always been the rarest of men. This fervor of poetry is sublime in its effects: it impels the soul to a longing for utterance …⁴³ And this inspiration, given to the few, rare poets, operates whether they write for 'affection', 'sadde dyrection', or 'correction'—that is to say, it encompasses satire. It is hard to imagine how a Christian poet could make a more complete vindication of his practice: the poet partakes of the divine, and this validates all aspects of his art.

In The Garlande of Laurell Skelton tries to come to terms with his poetic lineage, particularly with Chaucer, and to establish a claim to fame by justifying a career spent in the service of poetry. Skelton is not unaware of possible criticisms of past writers: according to Jane Scrope, Gower's English is 'old / And of no value told'; Lydgate is difficult and 'some men fynde a faute / And say he wryteth to haute'. Skelton's references to Chaucer, however, are always admiring, though it is equally clear that he recognizes how different he is. In Seneca's terms Skelton resembles him 'as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original'.⁴⁴ And that he should be more assertive than Chaucer is perhaps not surprising. In the House of Fame, if the Egle is to be believed, poetry is for Chaucer something to be indulged in 'when thy labour doon al ys', a bookish, essentially solitary, pastime which keeps him in ignorance of 'tydynges' from far and near in the world at large. And though this may not be the whole truth, it is at least part of it: Chaucer recognizes the marginal nature of poetry and the poet in his society, though he is uneasy about it and takes some, albeit hesitant, steps to change things. Skelton, in a way that was becoming common, confident of the allembracing relevance of poetry and confident also of his capacities and status as a poet, seeks to put himself at the centre of things, whether the sphere is social, political or spiritual. Part of Skelton's self-respect, indeed, derived from his status as a poet. When he defends himself in verse against Sir Christopher Gameshe⁴⁵ he says on one occasion: Ί am laureat, I am no lorell' and, no doubt pleased with the pun, elaborates on it later:

A kynge too me myn habyte gave
At Oxforth, the universyte,
Avaunsid I was to that degre;
By hole consent of theyr senate,
I was made poete lawreate.
To cal me lorell ye ar to lewde …

Skelton had acquired a way of thinking in which it was inconceivable for a 'laureate' to be a 'lorell' (= worthless person, wretch). The dignity of the poet's calling enhances and validates the dignity of the individual. The essentially modest claims for their status and art characteristic of most Chaucerian poets are insufficient to contain this.

Notes

¹John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven and London, 1983). References and quotations are from this edition.

² 'Skelton, Petrarca e l'amore della gloria nel The Garland of Laurel', Annali Islituto Universitario Orientale Napoli, Sexione Germanica 5 (1962), 135-63, repr. in La Poesia di John Skelton (Napoli, 1963).

³ 'John Skelton and Burgundian Letters', in Ten Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations, ed. Jan van Dorsten (Leiden and London, 1974), pp. 1-29.

⁴Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 14JO-1550 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 165.

⁵ 'Skelton's Garland of Laurel and Chaucer's House of Fame', Modern Language Review, 11 (1916), 9-14.

⁶ See Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), pp 161-3. Many of the ideas on fame and poetry which I use were suggested by this comprehensive survey.

⁷ See, for example, the remarks in The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols. (London, 1843), vol. 1, p. xlix. See also H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London, 1949), pp. 22-3 for a similar judgement.

⁸Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 22-30. 1 am much indebted to this fine account of the poem. See also the interesting article by Vincent Gillespie, 'Justification by Good Works: Skelton's The Garland of Laurel'. Reading Medieval Studies, 7 (1981), 19-31.

⁹ See The Lyfe of Our Lady. ed. J. Lauritis, R. Klinefelter and V. Gallagher (Pittsburg, 1961), lines 1628-34. See also Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, ed. Derek Brewer, vol. 1, 1385-1837 (London, 1978), p. 46.

¹⁰ See Troy Book. ed. H. Bergen, 4 vols., EETS. e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London, 1906-20) III, 4534-59. See also Chaucer: The Critical Heritage vol. 1, p. 48.

¹¹Caxton 's Own Prose, ed. N. F. Blake (London, 1973), p. 61. See also Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 76.

¹² ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1970).

¹³ A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge, 1976), p. 214 says he deals 'patronisingly' with them. See also Stanley Eugene Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven and London, 1965), pp. 231-2. Compare the interesting account of Richard Firth Green, 'the lavish praise which fifteenth-century writers heaped on Chaucer, Gower, and, later, Lydgate was rarely completely disinterested; living poets were manifestly raising their own stock by venerating their predecessors' (Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980) p. 208.

¹⁴ See H-J. Molinier, Essai Biographique et Littéraire sur Octavien de Sainl-Gelays: Évêque d'Angoulême 1468-1502 (Rodez, 1910), pp. 58-9. See also Pierre Jodogne, 'Les Rhétoriquers et l'Humanisme' in A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Humanism in France at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance (Manchester, 1970), pp. 160-1.

¹⁵The English Language in Medieval Literature (London, 1977), p. 14. See also pp. 21-7 for other relevant comments on this problem.

¹⁶Hoccleves Works, ed. F. J. Fumivall, EETS, es. 61, 72 (London 1892-7), III, II. 1961-2. See also Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 62.

¹⁷Caxton s Own Prose, p. 80

¹⁸ See Skelton: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (London, 1981), pp. 44-5.

¹⁹Ibid. pp. 49-53.

²⁰Ibid. pp. 46-7.

²¹Ibid. pp. 47-8.

²² See A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, ρ 243.

²³ For the background to the idea of poetry as perpetuation, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1953), pp. 476-7.

²⁴ See The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. ed. H. N. MacCracken, 2 vols. EETS, o.s. 107, 192 (London, 1911-34), vol. 2, p. 516.

²⁵ On this poem see my essay 'Skelton and the Elegy', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 84 C10 (1984), 333-47; and for some interesting comments on the manuscript see Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 83-90.

²⁶ On this topic see Curtius, European Literature, pp. 88-9, whence I derive the example from Seneca.

²⁷ On the background to this Prologue, see Richard Hazleton, 'Chaucer and Cato', Speculum. 35 (1960), 357-80.

²⁸ See R. K. Root, 'Publication before Printing', PMLA, 28 (1913), 417-31. For a famous instance see Petrarch's complaint in Epistolae de Rebus Senilium, v, i, in Franciscus Petrarcha, Opera (Basel, 1581), pp. 790-2.

²⁹George Ashby's Poems, ed. Mar y Bateson, EETS, e.s. 76 (London, 1899), p. 12.

³⁰Caxton 's Own Prose, p. 88.

³¹Ibid. p. 68.

³²Ibid. pp. 88-9.

³³Ibid. p. 80.

³⁴ For a comprehensive survey, see R. S. Kinsman and Theodore Yonge, John Skelton: Canon and Census. Renaissance Society of America: Bibliographies and Indexes No. 4 (New York, 1967).

³⁵ See, for example, the epigraphs to Speke Parott: 'Lectoribus auctor recepit opusculy huius auxesim. / Crescet in immensem me vivo pagina presens / Hinc mea dicetur Skeltonidis aurea fama.' [By his readers an author receives an amplification of his short poem. The present book will grow greatly while I am alive; thence will the golden reputation of Skelton be proclaimed]. See also Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? 29-30: 'Hec vates ille / De quo loquntur mille' [About these things the famous bard of whom a thousand speak] This is repeated at the end of the poem.

³⁶ For the deliberately rustic nature of Collyn Clout see R. S Kinsman, 'Skelton's Colyn Cloute: The Mask of Vox Populi', in Essays Critical and Historical dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), pp. 17-23. For the literary antecedents for this style see A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961), 208-43.

³⁷ For the stylistic affinities of Speke Parott see Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, pp. 126-89.

³⁸The Court of Sapience, ed. E. Ruth Harvey (Toronto, 1984), lines 69-70.

³⁹ This comes in Ά brefe addicion to the syngularyte of some new Folys' added to his Shyp of Foles: see Skelton: The Critical Heritage p. 46. In 1519 the grammarian William Lyly attacked Skelton as 'neither learned nor a poet' (see ibid. p. 48).

⁴⁰ See also Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? 718-41. For Skelton's dispute with this man see H. L. R. Edwards, 'Robert Gaguin and the English Poets 1489-1490', Modern Language Review, 32 (1937), 430-4. Another enemy appears to have been Rogerus Stathum, referred to by means of a number code in The Garlande of Laurel 742-65; he is also called Envyous Rancour, but so far as is known was not a poet.

⁴¹Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, p. 246.

⁴² For the background to this problem see Curtius, European Literature, pp. 214-27, and for the sixteenth-century development of some of these ideas John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), pp. 14-19, 209-31.

⁴³ Quoted in the translation of Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry (Princeton, 1930), pp. 39-42.

⁴⁴Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales LXXXIV, 7-8 "'… quomodo filium, non quomodo imaginem"… ' from Seneca ed. and trans, by Richard R. Gummere, 10 vols. (Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge: Mass., 1970), vol. 5, pp. 280-1.

⁴⁵ For the background to these poems see Helen Stearns Sale, 'John Skelton and Christopher Garnesche', Modern Language Notes, 43 (1928), 518-32.