sees or on what happens to him, as well as his decisions, are intoned in a similar key; they are made tentatively, almost always with a qualifying "me thoughte," or similar phrase revealing hesitation and unwillingness to commit himself as to the truth and reliability of his own vision. Even at the end, when he sees his enemies approaching to slay him, his quality of thinking remains tentative:

Significant, too, in creating the special environment of this poem, is the poet's strategic interweaving of monologue, description, and gesture with carefully spaced, graduated scenes of revelation. Events move to and away from Dread, the seven courtiers play scenes in front of him which he must creep forward, as on a stage, to overhear, and all of the characters gesticulate and speak as if in a theater. These scenes, however, which operate chiefly to delineate the seven rogues by showing their representative sins at work, never for a moment remove the real focus of the poem from the narrator-poet, for it is he who interprets them, filters them through his own sensibility, gives them the stamp of his terror and timidity, and their cumulative effect, both for him and for us, is increasingly to isolate him in the awareness of his dilemma.

Dread exists, in fact, like the Bowge of Court itself, in a kind of suspension between reality and sheer illusion; throughout the narration he seems to be hesitating, hanging between his initial decision to play the game with these people and his increasingly horrified recognition of the kind of world which they inhabit. This indecisiveness, coupled with his muffled fear, accounts for the peculiar floating quality of the poem: events, images, characters rise as if from a vacuum and pass as if unattached to anything, even to an unequivocal point of view. The apprehension and uncertainty of Dread's divided and confused mind act as a kind of stained glass through which the reality it both faces and avoids is reflected, and give to the poem its distinct and cumulative atmosphere of muted and sinister intensity.

Dread seems to me, then—and largely through him the poem—a striking instance of Skelton's imaginative development and renewing of medieval formulas. Other elements in the poem, however, lead to other and to more characteristic and recurrent Skeltonic problems. Most obtrusive and thorniest of these is the question of Skelton's technique of literary realism, projected in this poem and in the others we are considering chiefly, though not entirely, through the satirical portraits. I take it we need not argue the old, standard biographical snares, whether or not the people and situations were drawn from life, whether or not he really met an historical Alianora Romyng, and similar questions, and that we may concentrate only on the relevant textual ones. Almost every critic praises Skelton for just this realistic dimension in his work, for the freshness, vigor, and density of realistic detail with which he invests his low life characters and scenes in all three poems, the ability with which, for example, he revivifies the old tradition of ale-wife poems in Elinor Rumming and carries the courtiers and vices of the Bowge of Court and Magnificence out of the traditional context of the Deadly Sins and applies conventional terminology to secular purposes. If I am dissatisfied with this judgment, it is mainly because it bypasses questions raised by the method intrinsic to these portraits and situations, questions which are not answered by invoking vague concepts like tradition or even by speaking generally of a pervasive influence from Chaucer and Langland.

The phenomenon which the realistic materials of these poems seem to me to reveal is nothing less than an immense and scarcely to be exaggerated reliance on very limited and definite portions of the work of the two great fourteenth-century English poets. This reliance may take the form of direct and circumstantial borrowing of descriptive details; it may involve taking the name, moral cast, or psychological structure of a character from them; it may be a question of a revealing phrase in Skelton suggesting that certain lines of association recalled for him parts of their poetry so vividly that he echoed it almost automatically; or it may even be a question of the ordonnance of a poem being directly dependent on structural motifs in their work.

I take as instances first several of the rogues of the Bowge of Court and the corresponding vices οf Magnificence. The most obvious of these is Favell, a figure coming directly of course from Langland's field full of folk and, in Skelton as in Langland, flattering through his "faire speche."⁴ Again, from the same poem, the two allegorical figures, Suspect and Disdain, derive their details of symbolic realism directly from Langland's Invidia, whose various disfigurements are set forth in the confession scene:

These details, the paleness, palsy, the biting of the lips, the body corroded with envy, have given to Skelton's vignettes virtually all of their circumstantial realistic life. The initial description of Suspect,

and Dread's first glimpse of him,

as well as his description of Disdain,

provide their own obvious documentation.

Invidia's confession does service again and again in Skelton, though perhaps not elsewhere so successfully as here. The long monologue of Cloaked Collusion in Magnificence represents the virtual wholesale importation of the psychology of envy as it had been conceived by Langland. Here the influence is so all-pervasive that only fairly extensive quotation of the two relevant passages can effectively illustrate Skelton's procedure. Langland's lines are as follows:

Eche a worde that he warpe was of an addres tonge,
Of chydynge and of chalangynge was his chief lyflode,
With bakbitynge and bismer and beryng of fals witnesse;
This was al his curteisye where that euere he shewed hym.

…..

I haue a neighbore neyze me I haue ennuyed hym ofte,
And lowen on hym to lordes to don hym lese his siluer,
And made his frendes ben his foon thorw my false tonge;
His grace and his good happes greueth me ful sore.
Bitwene many and many I make debate ofte,
That bothe lyf and lyme is lost thorw my speche.
And whan I mete him in market that I moste hate,
I hailse hym hendeliche as I his frende were;

…..

And of mennes lesynge I laughe that liketh myn herte;
And for her wynnynge I wepe and waille the tyme,
And deme that hij don ille there I do wel worse;

…..

"I am sori," quod that segge "I am but selde other,
And that maketh me thus megre for I ne may me venge.
Amonges burgeyses haue I be dwellynge at Londoun,
And gert bakbitinge be a brocoure to blame mennes ware.
Whan he solde and 1 nouzte thanne was I redy
To lye and to loure on my neighbore and to lakke his chaffre."

The monologue of Cloaked Collusion retains the confessional attitude (it is perhaps worth noting that both characters are wearing clerical garments), though certainly Skelton's context is not an explicitly religious one. But the monologue clearly follows the model provided by Langland:

And though I be so odyous a geste,
And euery man gladly my company wolde refuse,
In faythe, yet am I occupyed with the best;

Ful fewe that can themselfe of me excuse.
Whan other men laughe, than study I and muse,
Deuysynge the meanes and wayes that I can,
Howe I may hurte and hynder euery man.

…..

Comberaunce and trouble in Englande fyrst I began;
From that lorde to that lorde I rode and I ran,
And flatered them with fables fayre before theyr face,
And tolde all the Myschyef I coude behynde theyr backe,
And made as I had known nothynge of the case,—
I wolde begyn all Myschyef, but I wolde bere no lacke.
Thus can I lerne you, Syrs, to bere the deuyls sacke;
And yet, I trowe, some of you be better sped than I
Frendshyp to fayne and thynke full lytherly.
Paynte to a purpose Good Countenaunce I can,
And craftely can I grope howe euery man is mynded;
My purpose is to spy and to poynte euery man;
My tonge is with Fauell forked and tyned.
By Cloked Colusyon thus many one is begyled.
Eche man to hynder I gape and I gaspe;
My speche is all Pleasure, but I stynge lyke a waspe.
I am neuer glad but whan I may do yll,
And neuer am I sory but whan that I se
I can not myne appetyte accomplysshe and fulfyll
In hynderaunce of Welthe and Prosperyte.
I laughe at all Shrewdenes, and lye at Lyberte.
I muster, I medle amonge these grete estates;
I sowe sedycyous sedes of Dyscorde and debates.⁵

Comparison of the two passages reveals that the accents in Skelton are, as in Langland, on envy not only as an internal state but as an active way of life, though predictably Skelton prunes away a good deal of the earlier poet's proliferation of rich, evocative detail, and the effect is thinner, more abstract, and more naively didactic.

A final note on Skelton's use of Invidia in these poems should point out his rather incongruous brief reappearance, quaking hands and all, in the portrait of the unfortunate Maude Ruggy in The Tunning of Elinor Rumming:

Maude Ruggy thyther skypped:
She was vgly hypped,
And vgly thycke lypped,
Lyke an onyon syded,
Lyke tan ledder hyded:
She had her so guyded
Betwene the cup and the wall,
That she was there wythall
Into a palsey fall;
Wyth that her hed shaked,
And her handes quaked:

Ones hed wold haue aked
To se her naked:
She dranke so of the dregges,
The dropsy was in her legges;
Her face glystryng lyke glas;
All foggy fat she was;
She had also the gout
In all her ioyntes about.⁶

Here, though, it should be noted that Invidia is given the thick lips and tanned, leathery skin of Langland's Avaricia, a casual, loose, and seemingly haphazard jumbling of items appropriate to Skeltonics, with their affinity for the irresponsible accumulation of physical details.

Another example revealing roughly the same process of derivation will perhaps suffice. Skelton's portrait of Riot, the seedy, impoverished, lecherous court hanger-on in the Bowge of Court, is one of his most complex and interesting. Here the primary source for the details of the physical description is the confession scene of Avaricia in the Visio. The borrowing is so close and so precise that parallel quotations are instructive:

But although Langland's Avaricia has given him his clothes and his ill health, I am in complete agreement with John Holloway that Chaucer's Pardoner is his real spiritual ancestor. The headlong, spasmodic rhythm of the monologue, the disorderly, nonsequential gestures and almost hysterical ejaculations impart a total effect very much like that of the Pardoner's self-revelation.⁸

This monologue offers another curious and revealing Chaucerian motif. Riot's advice to Dread includes the admonition,

Plucke vp thyne herte vpon a mery pyne,

in which one hears the echo of Placebo's flattery of January in the Merchant's Tale,

Youre herte hangeth on a joly pyn.9

This is precisely similar to an instance noted long ago by F. P. Magoun,¹⁰ who observed that the remark made by the prince Magnificence to Courtly Abusion in their discussion of women,

A, I haue spyed ye can moche broken sorowe,11

might well have derived from January's remarks on the widows whom he did not wish to marry,

They conne so muche craft on Wades boot,
So muchel broken harm, whan that hem leste.¹²

There seems to me no doubt whatsoever about the influence, but again it is the mode of operation of that influence which is most interesting. Such echoes, occurring with so little change and in such parallel contexts, indicate the way Skelton's poetic mentality worked when it approached these recurrent problems of realistic representation: it employed static models—certain situations and lines—taken from his reading, and it made constant, perhaps even automatic, associations of such problems with analogous problems and solutions in Chaucer and Langland. Moreover, and equally important for our understanding of Skelton, the same models—especially Invidia, Avaricia, the Merchant's Tale, and the Wife of Bath¹³—which served him in 1499 were still serving him, and in the same way, some twenty years later, just as his vocabulary of denunciation reveals, as a valuable essay on Magnificence has recently put it, that "the whole system of psychological, ethical, and political ideas conveyed by the terms underlies not the play and the satires alone but the whole career of Skelton."¹⁴

We can watch the operation of this derivative technique in another dimension of Skelton's work also; in the structure of these poems, in their disposition of materials, we find again diligently applied the lessons Skelton learned from his medieval masters. Before the turn of our century, Albert Rey commented in passing that the "hypothesis that Langland's Piers Plowman furnished the original idea of the Bowge of Court might well be produced," and he noted the similar societies of the poems, grouped respectively around Lady Meed and Lady Fortune.¹⁵ Since then other critics have also observed the probable influence of the House of Fame on this and on other Skelton poems,¹⁶ and it has become almost a commonplace to link Glutton's tavern in the Visio with Elinor's in Leatherhead, for Skelton's whole conception of the tavern scene, the women's names, the analogous activities, especially the single most distinctive piece of realism,¹⁷ in short, almost everything "realistic" reveals a direct adaptation from Langland.¹⁸

The case of Magnificence is subtler but discloses the same pattern of borrowed structural motifs, even of ideological scaffolding. The fundamental thematic opposition of the morality, that of Measure to Liberty, is established in the debate which opens it, and what follows is little more than an exemplum of the abuse of the conclusions of the debate. Ramsay, whose edition of Magnificence held for so long an oracular position in Skelton studies, could do no better than to attribute the source of this opposition to Aristotle, and he hoped that the then lost Speculum Principis of Skelton would hold the answer to the "introduction of the quite new conception of Liberty to put over against Felicity,"¹⁹ but although his edition has recently come in for some long-overdue criticism, no one has yet observed, I believe, that the mysterious source is again simply Piers Plowman in another of its myriad appearances. The triumvirate of the earlier poem, Reason, Conscience, and Lady Meed, and their relationship with the nameless king, have their counterparts in Skelton's Measure, Felicity, and Liberty in their ideal relationship to the prince, Magnificence. The philosophical, political, and ethical status given Reason are not only paralleled in Measure, but each is called upon to settle the debate, in the one case between Conscience and Meed, in the other between Felicity and Liberty; each is made the first coun selor of the king-prince, each is given dominion over the others. In adapting Conscience to his more secular situation, Skelton reduced Felicity to an almost purely materialistic symbol, and, unlike Conscience, he functions in the debate largely as a yes-man.

But perhaps the most interesting contribution of Piers Plowman to the aligning of relationships, and incidentally the answer to Ramsay's puzzle, is that of the inconstant and wayward Lady Meed to the inconstant and wayward Liberty. The two characters occupy the same neutral position, neither essentially good nor bad, but only potentially so according to the uses to which they are put. As defined by their contexts, however, they show a natural affinity for evil and incline inevitably toward manipulation by its agents. Hence, the necessity, emphasized throughout both poems, of keeping them under careful observation and stern control.²⁰

The deliberate parallelism in the two debate situations is so sustained throughout and is made so apparent by their resolutions that again quotation is useful. In each case the king or prince has been awakened to the perilous qualities natural to Meed or to Liberty, and in each case he has selected the two advisers who are to reign with him. The closing lines of this episode in Piers Plowman are as follows:

Skelton's lines are much more repetitious, but a specimen will suffice to reveal the resemblance:

MAGN. Conuenyent persons for any prynce ryall.
Welthe with Lyberte, with me bothe dwell ye shall,
To the gydynge of my Measure you bothe commyttynge;
That Measure be mayster, vs semeth it is syttynge.

MEAS. Where as ye haue, Syr, to me them assygned,
Suche order I trust with them for to take,
So that Welthe with Measure shalbe conbyned,
And Lyberte his large with Measure shall make.

FEL. Your ordenaunce, Syr, I wyll not forsake.

LYB. And I my selfe hooly to you wyll inclyne.

MAGN. Then may I say that ye be seruauntys myne.
For by Measure I warne you we thynke to be gydyd;
Wherin it is necessary my pleasure you knowe:
Measure and I wyll neuer be deuydyd,
For no dyscorde that any man can sawe;
For Measure is a meane, nother to hy nor to lawe,
In whose attemperaunce I haue suche delyght,
That Measure shall neuer départe from my syght.

FEL. Laudable your Consayte is to be acountyd,
For Welthe without Measure sodenly wyll slyde.

LYB. As your grace full nobly hath recountyd,
Measure with Noblenesse sholde be alyde.

MAGN. Then Lyberte, se that Measure be your gyde,
For I wyll vse you by his aduertysment.

FEL. Then shall you haue with you Prosperyte resydent.

MEAS. I trowe Good Fortune hath annexyd vs together,
To se howe greable we are of one mynde.²¹

As striking as the imitation, of course, is the difference in poetic effect; the mechanical, automatic quality of the debate in Magnificence contrasts strangely with the passion and even the humor of Langland's poem where, in spite of the not infrequent conceptual ambiguity, the movement of the Meed-Conscience debate is urgent and real; that of Liberty-Felicity is a monotonous shuttling back and forth from one speaker to another, a continual rhetorical amplification of initially simple points. Moreover, all the arguments in Skelton are intellectually one-dimensional and static. The devices so carefully manipulated, repetition, metrical patterning, rhyme variations and similar stylistic ornaments,²² reveal that quality which W. H. Auden probably had in mind or at least suggested when he spoke of Skelton's "best poems, with the exception of Speke Parrot," being "like triumphantly successful prize poems."²³ Their subtlety is extrinsic; in the movement of the language itself we feel little urgency, intellectual or otherwise.

Similarly, one notes the prominence of proverbs in this play and elsewhere in Skelton's work. John Holloway, in commenting on this phenomenon, has remarked that "To notice Skelton's reliance on the proverbial expression is not to notice a literary trick or a literary routine, but to notice, at its most easily point, the essential quality of what was creative in his mind.'"²⁴ With this I should agree, and if I find the element less impressive than he does, that is of no consequence. Still, it is at least worth distinguishing Skelton's use of it a little more carefully, for he clearly does not use the proverb, as Chaucer so frequently does, for example, as a manipulated literary device within the texture of the poem, capable of making a nexus for a complex of meanings. Nor does he, like Langland, employ the proverb critically and tentatively, as one of the many roads by which truth may be approached and tried, but never asserted. In Skelton the proverb or maxim is most likely to appear, with startling insistence and aggressive simplicity, at a climactic point in a poem. The self-styled "argument" of Measure, for example, is simply a catalogue of rhetorical parallelisms, a hypnotically repetitious string of proverbs and maxims:

Where Measure is mayster, Plenty dothe none offence;
Where Measure lackyth, all thynge desorderyd is:
Where Measure is absent, Ryot kepeth resydence;
Where Measure is ruler, there is nothynge amysse.
Measure is treasure; howe say ye, is it not this?²⁵

(It is perhaps not irrelevant to remark here that Felicity's brief responses to Measure's long speeches, often linked to them by rhyme, are so pat as to be almost antiphonal, thereby intensifying the atmosphere of make-believe which prevails throughout the debate.) In short, the proverbial element in Magnificence, and not infrequently in Skelton's other work, acts as an assimilated part of the very ideology on which the poem rests, and one sees in its functioning a characteristic strategy: it provides, like his other derivative materials, a field of easy and immediate judgment, with again the tendency to make a simple and direct connection between a problem and a pre-established solution.

A brief summary is now perhaps in order. I have tried to demonstrate that in three of Skelton's major poems, those in which he was most concerned with building fictional frameworks that demanded low-life scenes and figures, he relied in precise, deliberate, and extensive ways on the poems of his two great English predecessors, Chaucer and Langland. It should perhaps be stressed again that this reliance was not simply a matter of "tradition," the inevitable process of literary continuity, but involved a direct, concrete, and specific influence upon his poems by their poems. The area in which this influence operated was primarily that of realistic representation, and the method was that of relevant association. When confronted with the need to represent envy or some similar quality, either in its psychological state or in its symbolic physical manifestions, as in the varying cases of Suspect and Disdain in the Bowge of Court, Cloaked Collusion in Magnificence, or just the abstract "odyous Enui" in Philip Sparrow,²⁶ Skelton turned to the confession of Invidia in the Visio of Piers Plowman. When lechery in a seedy court sycophant had to be depicted, whether in Riot's advice to Dread or in the conversation about women between Courtly Abusion and Magnificence, Skelton was reminded of the quintessential moral degeneracy and callousness of the Merchant's Tale, and particularly of the analogous conversation of January and Placebo. Both the lady in the monologue of Counterfeit Countenance and Elinor Rumming had, by the same logic, to draw upon the inspiration of the Wife of Bath, and the events in Elinor's tavern had to be patterned on those of Glutton. Sometimes, of course, the connection was not especially predictable, as in the case of Maude Ruggy, who borrows from Invidia and Avaricia. Again, the derivations are sometimes rather complex; in Riot, for example, Avaricia, the Pardoner, and January-Placebo meet in one.

Skelton's debts, however, were not confined solely to problems of characterization and to the activities of the tavern; in all three poems they also involved structural and even ideological borrowings. In the Bowge of Court the poetic structure was determined at least in part by the House of Fame, by the whole Chaucerian use of the persona, and by the tableau of Lady Meed and her corrupters in the field full of folk. In Magnificence the entire scaffolding of ideas which underlies the most important figures and their interrelationships is derived from the Meed-Conscience-Reason debate in the Visio; the monologues of the vices, in addition to their circumstantial debts to Chaucer and Langland, may well represent an attempt at a pattern somewhat like that of the confessions of the Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman, just as the surface organization of The Tunning of Elinor Rumming into passus may similarly represent another result of Langland's influence.

It is more than probable that much additional documentation of this kind is to be found throughout Skelton's work, but we have enough, I believe, to permit us to draw a few tentative conclusions. I wish at all costs to avoid incurring the suspicion that I have assembled this material as a kind of exposure of Skelton's plagiaristic sins, for whatever inferences may be deduced from such evidence are clearly not so simple. That Skelton is an "original" poet, whatever that may mean to different critics, is hardly a point to prove or refute. His adaptation of traditional forms and formulas to his own purposes, his innovations in language and experiments in prosody, the stirrings and murmurings we do sense in him of changes to come in ideas and perspectives, the passion of his denunciation, which was perhaps the most directly personal quality in him, all of these are certainly there. Still, whatever final values we may assign to Skelton's work, we should at least be sure that those values are founded on accurate reading. We cannot really go on asserting his lack of "real predecessors,"²⁷ his refusal to "approach experience with preconceptions,"²⁸ and praising his fresh, unacademic delight in the real world, when it is frequently the very academic, cautious skill in filling out his own defects through borrowing and adapting the work of his predecessors which is his most impressive attribute. Such evidence as we have, it seems to me, points to a glaring disparity between Skelton's, medieval immersion and his own secularized, non-introspective, antisymbolic, abstract sensibility. At the heart of his retreat into extremes of rhetorical rigidity, on the one hand, and Skeltonics, which have their own kind of rigidity, on the other, and of his willingness to surrender so much to the eyes and language of others, lay a peculiar impersonality, just as behind all of his overt ebullience and nervous energy was a profound intellectual inertia. Perhaps he thought that many areas of experience and the world had been interpreted and definitively glossed by the giants who had gone before; what remained for Skelton was something else. Fortunately, literature has many worlds and there are many ways of writing interesting poems, but if part of the vexing problem of Skelton is, as I remarked at the beginning of this essay, the problem of approaching a poetic imagination which is both original and supinely imitative, we shall approach it better if we know something of the way that imagination worked.

Notes

¹The Poetical Works of John Skelton. ed. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols. (London, 1843), is still the standard edition for most of Skelton's work and will be the source for all quotations from or references to these poems in this essay, unless otherwise noted.

² For Langland I have in mind those lines from Piers Plowman where the corrupt attendants of Lady Meed are on the point of being dispersed and Dread stands at the door eavesdropping; see William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, Together with Richard the Redeless, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1886), I, B, II, 205-209. All citations of Langland in my text are from the first volume of this edition. For Chaucer it is principally the situation in the House of Fame with the rout surrounding Lady Fame crying for largesse which influenced the beginning of the Bowge of Court and the crowds surrounding Lady Fortune begging favor; see especially, in The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1933)—hereafter cited as Works—ll. 1282-87, 1307-15, 1356-67 of the House of Fame. There are also a number of parallels between the role of Dread in Skelton's poem and Chaucer's manipulation of the poet-dreamer in the House of Fame. There is a much fuller discussion of these matters in my unpublished dissertation, "John Skelton and the Tradition of English Realism" (Yale, 1957), pp. 51 ff. I have not thought it necessary to reproduce here the arguments and evidence concerning Dread and his origins because A. R. Heiserman's Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961; pp. 42-51) has produced roughly the same evidence, thereby rendering further documentation of this particular point superfluous. Judith Larson, in her recent article, "What Is The Bowge of Court?" (JEGP. LXI [1962], 288-95), has suggested other possible items of Chaucerian influence, chiefly from his translation of the Roman de la Rose and from the Book of the Duchess.

³ L1. 3-6. See Dyce, 1, 30-50, for the text of The Bowge of Court.

⁴ See especially ll. 134-35 and 147; for Langland note especially B, II, 41, and B, II, 64.

⁵ Ramsay, ll. 703-709, 715-37; Dyce, ll. 713-19, 725-47. Since R. L. Ramsay's celebrated edition of this morality, Magnyfycence, A Moral Play by John Skelton. EETS, extra ser., XCVIII (London, 1908 [1906]), is in general the more available text, I shall base my quotations and line references on it rather than on Dyce. For the possible convenience of some readers, however, I shall give the line numbers of both.

⁶ For the text of The Tunning of Elinor Rumming see Dyce, I, 95-115.

⁷ Albert Rey (Skelton's Satirical Poems in Their Relation to Lydgate's "Order of Fools." "Cock Lorell 's Bote," and Barclay's "Ship of Fools" [Bern, 1899], p. 28) comments, "Langland's Auaricia is likely to have lent him some features, at least covetousness also has two bleared eyes and a lousy hat."

⁸ This point is discussed more fully in my Yale dissertation of 1957 (see above, n. 2) and in John Holloway's valuable essay, "Skelton," Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet, read 26 February 1958 and published in the Proceedings of the British Academy: 1958 (London, 1959), p. 92.

⁹ Chaucer, Works, E 1516. I owe the discovery of this item, and very much more not so easily documented, to Professor E. Talbot Donaldson, of Yale, who first perceived the immense debt of Skelton to Chaucer and Langland and set me working on it some time ago.

¹⁰ F. P. Magoun, '"Muchel Broken Harm,' C.-T., E 1425," Anglia, LIII (1929), 223-24.

¹¹ Ramsay, 1. 1587; Dyce, 1. 1606.

¹²Works. E 1424-25.

¹³ Skelton's description of Elinor Rumming, ll. 64-79, is fairly clearly based on Chaucer's description of the Wife in the General Prologue, Works, A 449-458. And the monologue of Counterfeit Countenance in Magnificence, when it touches on the subject of pride and hypocrisy in women (Ramsay, 452-65; Dyce, 458-70), reverts to the language originally intended for the Wife at the beginning of the Shopman's Tale—Works, B 1201-1209.

¹⁴ William O. Harris, "Wolsey and Skelton's Magnyfycence: A Reevaluation," SP, LVII (1960), 111-12.

¹⁵Skelton's Satirical Poems, p. 58.

¹⁶ See above, n. 2. That Skelton knew the House of Fame very well indeed is hardly a recent discovery, however; see, for example, for its detailed influence on the Garland of Laurel Albert S. Cook, "Skelton's 'Garland of Laurel' and Chaucer's 'House of Fame,'" MLR, XI (1916), 9-14.

¹⁷ Compare B, V, 346-51, with Elinor Rumming, ll. 565-79.

¹⁸ One wonders if Elinor Rumming was not also influenced by the confession of Avaricia in those lines where he speaks of setting up his wife in the brewery trade; see B, V, 219-27. But for the most part the materials of Elinor Rumming are drawn from Glutton's confession, especially B, V, 310-26, 344-51. Ian A. Gordon, in John Skelton, Poet Laureate (Melbourne and London, 1943; p. 76), was the first, I believe, to note that Langland's "picture of the ale-house in the sketch of gluttony gave Skelton the form of the poem."

¹⁹ Ramsay, p. Ixxiii. See F. M Salter, "Skelton's 'Speculum Principis,'" Speculum, IX (1934), 25-37, for a reprint of the text of this treatise.

²⁰ T. P. Dunning's Piers Plowman: An Interpretation of the A-Text (Dublin, 1937; pp. 69-112) gives a long and interesting analysis of the theological significance of Meed and of her episodes with the king, Conscience, and Reason.

²¹ Ramsay, ll. 173-99; Dyce, ll. 175-201.

²² Ramsay, pp. li-lxxi, gives an exhaustive account of the versification of Magnificence, of the types of poetic lines employed, and of its use of metrical variations. His enthusiasm over the mechanical complexity of these variations, however, led him to rather simple value judgments; see pp. lxv-lxvi: "The possession of so rich a scale of metrical variations, far richer than any other morality can boast, gave Skelton the opportunity of making subtle and effective distinctions in characterizing the tone of different scenes and characters; and the studied care with which this is done is perhaps the play's best title to be considered a work of conscious art." A rather different point of view is suggested by J. E. Bernard, Jr., The Prosody of the Tudor interlude, Yale Studies in English, XC (New Haven, 1939), pp. 35-39; see especially p. 39: "The most striking feature of John Skelton's dramatic prosody is the disregard of all the Latin he learned. He follows the English tradition alone in his tetrameter couplets and in his rime royal…. Quite unlike the original methods of prosodie treatment, the varying of verse in Magnificence is extrinsic. There is no connexion between character and verse or between theme and verse…. On the whole, the use of couplets and rime royal seems to be owing only to the dramatist's desire to talk to his audience with more or less concentrated zeal. It betrays a lack of interest in character as such, and even in morality as such, morality play though this is."

²³ W. H. Auden, "John Skelton," The Great Tudors, ed Katherine Garvin (London, 1935), p. 62.

²⁴ "Skelton," p. 96.

²⁵ Ramsay, ll. 121-25; Dyce, ll. 122-26.

²⁶ Dyce, 1, 78, ll. 902-49.

²⁷ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 143.

²⁸ Alan Swallow, "John Skelton: The Structure of the Poem," PQ, XXXII (1953), 35.