SOURCE: "The Twittering Machine: Skelton's Ornithology of the Early Tudor State," in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 103-35.

If he was nothing else, John Skelton was certainly one of the most obstreperous English poets; his literary gifts were inseparable from a bottomless and apparently free-floating aggression. Henry VIII employed him briefly as a writer of vituperative verses against the French and Scots and then to entertain the court in a display of "flytyng," a crude form of poetical name-calling. Yet the self-styled orator regius remained a marginal figure at court, and in his resentment he composed a series of vicious and ill-considered satires against the powerful Cardinal Wolsey, even taking a few swipes at Henry himself. Just as abruptly he then changed face and put himself in Wolsey's employ to write attacks on Protestant heretics and a rebellious Scots duke. Yet Wolsey witheld the promised reward of an ecclesiastical living, and the poet never succeeded in making nastiness anything more than an intermittently profitable vocation. Even after his death Skelton was regarded largely as a bundle of quirky and unassimilable energies. Despite his priestly calling, his name soon became attached to a collection of "merry tales," according to which he kept a woman in his church at Diss, fathered a bastard, defecated on a sleeping friar, and otherwise distinguished himself for piety and devotion.¹ Wordsworth complimented him as "a demon in point of genius,"² but Pope simply dismissed him as "beastly Skelton."

In matters of poetic influence he was no less difficult. Skelton portrayed his own genius as both autogenerated and prodigious; he describes himself as England's incomparable "phoenix" in Ware the Hawk, and he seems largely to have arrogated to himself the titles of poet laureate and king's orator. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis correctly observed, he had "no real predecessors and no important disciples."³ His turbulent verse owed little to the polish of Chaucer and even less to the dullness of fifteenth-century predecessors such as Hoccleve or Lydgate.⁴ His influence on English verse was just as small as its influence on him. It is true that he enjoyed brief fame as a prophet of the Reformation and that Spenser borrowed the name of Skelton's Colin Clout for his Protestant pastorals. Yet no important successors took up Skelton's distinctive verse form, doubtless finding it too colloquial, too jarring, and too deeply imprinted with his personality. Skelton also developed a bitter hatred for the Erasmian humanism that began to take hold in the early sixteenth century. He was a vigorous participant in the so-called Grammarians' War of 1519, during which he and his fellow "Trojans" defended the old scholastic method of learning Latin against the humanist innovations of the "Greeks."⁵ Skelton deemed it absurd that

Platus with his comedies a chyld shall now reherse,
And medyll with Quintylyan in his Declemacyons,
That Pety Caton can scantly construe a verse,
With, "Aveto" in Greco, and such solempne salutacyons,
Can skantly the tensis of his conjugacyons;
Settyng theyr myndys so moch of eloquens,
That of theyr scole maters lost is the hole sentens.
(Speke Parottf)⁶

Skelton even exchanged insulting Latin verses with the humanist grammarian William Lily. Here, as elsewhere, his conservative instincts put him on the losing side, and in rejecting humanism he cut himself off from the future of Renaissance verse. Skelton's relative uninterest in "eloquens" also probably impeded his career as a court poet.⁷ It sometimes seems as if Skelton tried to write himself out of literary history by sheer force of will. His career testifies to the fact that a poet can indeed be too original.

Skelton's idiosyncracies have caused problems for critics trying to fit him into the scheme of cultural periodization which characterizes traditional literary history. Ian Gordon delineated the problem in 1943 when he wrote that "Skelton fell between two periods, the receding Middle Ages and the advancing Renaissance, without being a part of either." Reverting, Pope-like, to the vocabulary of the monstrous, Gordon calls Skelton "a Mr. Facing-Both-Ways" and adds, "Seldom has a poet borne the marks of a transition age so clearly as Skelton."⁸ In John Skelton's Poetry (1965), Stanley Fish nuances Gordon's formulation but does not fundamentally alter it. "Skelton's poetry," he writes, "gives us neither the old made new nor the new made old, but a statement of the potentiality for disturbance of the unassimilated. It is a poetry which could only have been written between 1498 and 1530, when the intrusive could no longer be ignored as Lydgate had ignored it and before it would become part of a new and difficult stability as it would after 1536."⁹ Fish's formulation suggests that Skelton's poetry is historically determined, or at least bounded; yet the agent of this determination is, paradoxically, a gap or hiatus between periods. It is as if Skelton sailed his lyrical boat by the force of a vacuum. A. C. Spearing conveys a similar sense of paradox, arguing that "Skelton's attitude is more, not less medieval than Chaucer's," yet finding that the difficulty and poetic manner of Speke Parott strongly anticipate The Waste Land.¹⁰ The problem here is Skelton's seemingly perverse refusal to act like a "transitional" figure. He was the only poet of really considerable talents writing at the beginning of the sixteenth century and was therefore in a perfect position to bridge the gap between medieval and Renaissance poetics. Yet he seems somehow to have sensed his literary-historical mission and then mischievously to have dodged it. Or perhaps his mission was to dodge it, to occupy the transitional space in such a way as to reveal a dramatic gap or break between periods, and even to scramble the linear model that underlies this history.

One way around this problem is to look for influences outside of the literary canon and thus to situate Skelton's poetics in a larger cultural field. Some scholarly work has elucidated Skelton's poetry by demonstrating both the formal and thematic influence of church liturgy and by considering Skelton's vocation as poet-priest.¹¹ A very different approach has traced Skelton's career as failed or frustrated courtier and read his work in relation to the political events of the 1520s. These two paths intersect, of course, especially when Skelton begins his series of satires against Cardinal Wolsey. Yet they have not so much resolved the problems of Skelton's difficult transitional status as they have displaced and enlarged them. For the Christian interpreters have produced a conservative and strongly "medieval" Skelton, the orthodox and devoted priest who fights for traditional church and aristocratic privileges and against the encroachments of the early Tudor state. But the courtly Skelton is a more recognizably modern figure—self-promoting, dissatisfied with his duties in a rural parish, lacking strong convictions or social allegiances, willing to use his literary talents in any way that will serve his own ambitions.¹² Skelton's alleged social role thus splits as well into irreconcilably "medieval" and "Renaissance" components.

This is, clearly, the moment to wheel a Marxist theoretical apparatus onstage and triumphantly announce its ability to sublate these contradictions within a larger totalizing movement. I will not do so, however, because Skelton's poetical career signifies in its most interesting way when it remains fissured. It is these Skeltonic gaps and discontinuities that I want to articulate more precisely, by posing them in relation to the rise of the absolutist state and its role in reorganizing the late feudal polity.

Cultural Territoriality in Ware the Hawk

It has long been recognized that the absolutist state played a decisive part in the transition to capitalism, though precisely what this part was has been the subject of extended debate. Marx and Engels held that absolutism represented a balance of political power between the feudal ruling class and the emergent bourgeoisie and that it prepared the way for capitalist production by carrying out many of the functions of primitive accumulation.¹³ Nicos Poulantzas rejects the first half of this thesis and develops the second in order to argue for the relative autonomy of the absolutist state, as I discuss in the Introduction. Perry Anderson takes a somewhat different (though not irreconcilable) approach, contending that absolutism reorganized the rule of the nobility in response to certain mutations in the late feudal economy:

Feudalism as a mode of production was originally defined by an organic unity of economy and polity, paradoxically distributed in a chain of parcellized sovereignties throughout the social formation. The institution of serfdom as a mechanism of surplus extraction fused economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion at the molecular level of the village. The lord in his turn typically owed liege—loyalty and knight—service to the seigneurial overlord, who claimed the land as his ultimate domain. With the generalized commutation of dues into money rents, the cellular unity of political and economic oppression of the peasantry was gravely weakened, and threatened to become dissociated (the end of this road was "free labor" and the "wage contract"). The class power of the feudal lords was thus directly at stake with the gradual disappearance of serfdom. The result was a displacement of politico-legal coercion upwards towards a centralized, militarized summit—the Absolutist State. Diluted at village level, it became concentrated at "national" level.¹⁴

Yet while Anderson argues that the absolutist state reorganized the conditions of feudal class rule, he does not hold that it was in any simple sense the instrument of the landowning classes. For one thing, the whole process was overdetermined by the interests of the mercantile bourgeoisie.¹⁵ For another, political centralization was achieved at the expense of baronial power, beginning with Henry VII's "primitive accumulation" of state power after the Wars of the Roses.¹⁶ The emergence of absolutism thus dislocated the structural conditions of feudal rule; insofar as it protected the economic interests of the landlord class, it did so by drastically reducing their independent political authority. By de- and reterritorializing the parcelized sovereignty of feudalism, the absolutist state dissolved its own concrete implication in a structure of pyramidized dependency in order to represent the ruling groups. "The sovereign commanded authority not as the person residing at the apex of the hierarchy," John E. Martin notes, "but as the detached symbolic representative of the unity of the landlord class."¹⁷ The state thereby achieved a relative autonomy with respect to the class it represented and could claim to act in the interests of the nation as a whole.

The relations between state and church in the early Tudor period—of central importance to Skelton's career—were largely determined by absolutism's rearticulation of class rule, for the church represented a significant fraction of the landlord class. It owned about one-ihird of the land in England, enjoyed a jurisdiction at least partially independent of the king's law, and exercised an especially rigorous, conservative, and tenacious form of feudal land-ownership.¹⁸ The crown viewed the church as at once a desired source of wealth, an impediment to political centralization, and even a potential source of sedition (aristocratic families often furnished monastic leaders). The Dissolution was therefore prompted by political as well as economic considerations.¹⁹ Even before the Dissolution, however, the Tudors made significant efforts to restrict the independent jurisdiction of the church, for the most part by attacking sanctuary rights. The privilege of sanctuary was "purely secular and jurisdictional," according to Isabel Thornley, that is to say, purely an effect of the church's political authority as feudal landowner, "but long before the Tudor period had opened, circumstances had given it a false ecclesiastical cover," and this enabled the church to retain its protective jurisdiction after similar rights had already been taken from lay persons.²⁰ Sanctuary was both a symbolic and a real affront to royal jurisdiction, and one that could be exploited for seditious purposes.

Significantly, Henry VII's first major assault on the sanctuary privilege was designed to suppress a threat of political revolt. In 1486 when the Yorkist Thomas Stafford was dragged from sanctuary and taken to the Tower, the King's Bench ruled that "sanctuary was a common-law matter in which the Pope could not interfere … and that the privilege did not cover treasonable offenses."²¹ As Henry VIII's lord chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey continued this assault on church privilege by dissolving some monasteries and further restricting rights of sanctuary.

For all privileged places
He brekes and defaces,
All placis of relygion
He hathe them in derisyon.

So wrote Skelton in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (1522). If the jurisdictional privilege represented by sanctuary was, in one sense, indistinguishable from secular forms of par celized sovereignty, its "false ecclesiastical covering" nevertheless imparted a significant ideological difference, for sanctuary was not perceived as just another expression of feudal landownership. It was, rather, invested with a sacred character, and its inviolability was thus hedged about with the massive ideological resources of the medieval church. It is largely for this reason that sanctuary outlived secular forms of independent jurisdiction. Indeed, I think it is fair to view sanctuary as the ideological paradigm for such jurisdiction, and thus to say that the distinction between "sacred" and "profane" ground provided an ideological undergirding for the entire feudal system of parcelized sovereignties. This is why attacks on sanctuary were of political as well as cultural or religious significance, and why the early Tudor state directed such considerable energies toward incorporating the church in its jurisdiction.

The traditional account of Skelton's life and career places him in a simple and unitary relation to this process: as a vigorous, life-long opponent. According to this account, Skelton was for most of his career a client of the Howard family. They in turn belonged to a group of conservative lords opposed to Wolsey, whom they blamed for the execution in 1521 of Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham and a relative by marriage of the Howards.²² The anti-Wolsey satires, in this view, grew in part from the patronage of a group of powerful northern lords frustrated by the loss of influence over the king and angered by the death of an ally on possibly trumped-up charges of treason. If this version is correct, Skelton would be in the employ of powerful victims of Tudor centralization. At the same time, he was a priest, whose work was deeply influenced by Christian liturgy and belief, and he therefore felt a more purely personal and religious objection to Wolsey's attacks on church privilege.²³ The anti-Wolsey satires were all prompted in part by Wolsey's dissolution of some monasteries in 1521. They were, moreover, written from the confines of the Abbey at Westminster, where Skelton had lived since 1518 and where he enjoyed the relative protection of sanctuary.²⁴ By combining political loyalty to a group of aggrieved feudal lords with personal dependence on and fervent religious belief in the church's rights of sanctuary, Skelton allied himself in every conceivable fashion with the conservative forces fighting the consolidation of absolutist rule.

Recently, however, this portrait of Skelton has been subjected to a devastating revisionist critique by Greg Walker. He finds no evidence for a Howard-Wolsey feud in the 1520s; on the contrary, the Howards seem to have been loyal and happy supporters of Wolsey's handling of crown policy. Further, the theory that they were patrons of Skelton is based on spurious suppositions and misdatings of poems.²⁵ There is reason to doubt the sincerity of Skelton's religious convictions as well, for he clearly viewed his move to a rectory at Diss in Norfolk as a calamitous falling off from his earlier position at court, where he had served as a Latin tutor to the young Prince Henry. When Henry ascended the throne, Skelton sent his former pupil a desperate letter describing himself as "a man utterly doomed to oblivion and, so to say, dead in his heart" and then compared his exile to Ovid's.²⁶ In any case, he aban doned Diss forever at his earliest opportunity and never resumed his priestly duties.²⁷ The notion that the anti-Wolsey satires were prompted by sincere outrage is challenged by the reversal in 1523, when Skelton turned around and wrote not only on behalf of Wolsey but in apparent collaboration with him.²⁸ "He seems to have swiftly considered the advantages to be gained from aligning himself with his erstwhile target," writes Walker, "compared them with the less certain gains to be won by continuing his wooing of patronage from the city [of London], and promptly thrown in his lot with Wolsey."²⁹

In place of the conservative and somewhat romantic image of Skelton as defender of church and nobility Walker offers a rather less flattering image of the poet as a self-serving mercenary whose rise was inhibited by misjudgments and ineptitude. He makes a largely compelling case for viewing the satires not as expressions of prophetic wrath but as a search for patronage and advancement, first from the king and then, failing that, from among the prosperous and disaffected citizens of London. This Skelton is neither a sworn enemy of absolutism nor a reliable defender of it but someone who is ready to profit from it if given the chance.

Walker successfully destroys many of the historical assumptions that underlie the traditional view of Skelton, but his own version isn't quite coherent either. He argues, for instance, that Speke Parott attempts to profit from apparent tensions between Henry and Wolsey in order to secure royal patronage.³⁰ Yet if this is the case, how does one explain lines such as "Bo-ho [Henry] doth bark wel, Hough-ho [Wolsey] he rulyth the ring" (130)? Even someone as eccentric as Skelton couldn't possibly expect to please the king with language like this. It also seems likely that Skelton's ultimate reconciliation (or cooperation) with Wolsey was at least partly determined by ideological commitments as well as by considerations of personal gain, for his poetic assignments on Wolsey's behalf involved writing satires against foreign invasion (Skelton was, if nothing else, a sincere xenophobe) and religious heresy. A residue of the "old" Skelton thus persists despite attempts to banish him. The fact is that no fully coherent or unified account of his career is possible. Skelton is neither the conservative prophet nor the self-serving courtier, neither the consistent opponent nor the consistent parasite of the Tudor court, but someone who oscillates erratically between these positions, and whose career is therefore full of strange folds and detours. His poetry is obsessed with the changes in the late feudal polity wrought by absolutism, but his reactions to them are shifting and contradictory. Skelton's historical significance can be read primarily through his internal divisions and fissures if he is understood as a kind of relay or switching station through which conflicting social energies are routed.

Ware the Hawk was composed while Skelton was rector at Diss, presumably around the time he wrote Phyllyp Sparowe (1505?). This period witnessed Skelton's peculiar and somewhat inexplicable "break" with the conventional formulas of late medieval lyric. The poem, which exemplifies the beginnings of Skelton's distinctive poetics, describes and denounces the actions of a neighboring priest who becomes so involved in his hawking that he pursues his prey right into Skelton's church. There the hawks tear a pigeon apart on the holy altar and defecate on the communion cloth, while the priest himself overturns the offering box, cross, and lectern. The poem vents its rage at the desecration of holy places, flinging both crude and pedantic insults at the offending priest.

Ware the Hawk directs its anger at an act of profanation which it understands primarily as the violation of a boundary or territory; it condemns those who

Skelton's church is, of course, the literal as well as the metaphorical "ground" of faith; the hawking priest offends not only because he has intruded on divine territory but because he has intruded on Skelton's territory. "For sure he wrought amys / To hawke in my church of Dys" (41-42, my emphasis). I do not wish to suggest that the concept of the holy place merely expresses property rights, either for Skelton or in general. But the sanctity of the medieval church, which was articulated within the feudal structure of parceled sovereignty, represents Skelton's primary experience of this structure. Certainly the violation of the church's boundaries in Ware the Hawk seems to threaten its sovereignty:

Or els is thys Goddis law,

…..

Thus within the wals
Of holy church to deale,
Thus to ryng a peale
Wyth his hawkys bels?
Dowtles such losels
Make the churche to be
In smale auctoryte.

For Skelton, the whole hierarchical taxonomy of late medieval culture is interwritten with the church's territorial sanctity. When this is broken, all other structures collapse like a house of cards.³¹

These objections are not particularly novel in themselves. The interest of Skelton's poem arises from its formal reaction to the trespass, for Ware the Hawk responds to the violation of a politico-religious territory by subjecting itself to a strict rhetorical territoriality. The poem is meticulously constructed according to what Stanley Fish aptly calls the "machinery of the artes praedicandi." After a formal exordium (prologus), "the text is punctuated by eight hortatory exclamations (Observate, Deliberate, Vigilate, Deplorate, Divinitate—probably for Divinate—Reformate, and Pensitate) which correspond to the development of the thema as taught in the manuals."³² The conspicuous rhetorical formalism of the poem clearly represents a kind of reaction formation to the disturbance of the church's boundaries; the anarchic trajectory of the hawk finds its answering principle in an exaggerated reterritorialization by the poet, thus producing a striking—and, for Skelton, characteristic—cohesion between political and rhetorical topographies. This coincidence of spaces produces brilliant formal effects in Phyllyp Sparowe and offers the privileged means by which Skelton transcodes history into literature.

But an additional element transforms the nature of the poem's process. Stanley Fish describes Ware the Hawk as "a burlesque in the Chaucerian tradition." Both the incident itself and Skelton's indignation, Fish argues, are ironized; despite its obsessive formalism, the poem's rhetoric constantly undercuts itself, thereby dissolving the seriousness of the priest's offense.³³Ware the Hawk may not be as thoroughly ironic as that, but a festive excess of rhetoric certainly renders the poem and its defensive reterritorialization highly ambivalent. A gay destructiveness delights in the violation of boundaries and in the consequent evaporation of the authority constituted by them. At least part of Skelton's imagination both enjoys and extends the profanities committed by the neighboring priest, who, the poet claims,

The pleasurable onomatopoeia of "dowves donge downe" exemplifies the festive counterlogic of Ware the Hawk, which can enjoy polluting even that final cultural territory, the space of the blessed sacrament. The poem's very title, which seems at first to mean "beware the hawk" and thus to make a defensive or warning gesture, was actually "a proverbial cry used to encourage the hawk to obtain its prey."³⁴ It is as if Skelton had marshaled the forces of rhetorical territoriality in a mock-defensive gesture, the better to overthrow all boundaries in one totalizing motion….

Speke Parott and the Delegation of Speech

Speke Parott, the first of Skelton's anti-Wolsey satires, does go considerably farther than Phyllyp Sparowe in maintaining a quarrel with state authority. Written in 1521, when Skelton was already residing in sanctuary at Westminster, Speke Parott both develops and dramatically revises the poetics of Phyllyp Sparowe. A bird is once again the center of attention, but this bird is very much alive—immortal, in fact—and is no longer merely the subject but the speaker of the poem:

My name ys Parott, a byrde of Paradyse,
By Nature devysed of a wonderowus kynde,
Deyntely dyetyd with dyvers delycate spyce,
Tyll Eufrates, that flodde, dryvythe me into Ynde,
Where men of that contre by fortune me fynde,
And send me to greate ladyes of estate;
Then Parot moste have an almon or a date.
A cage curyowsly carven, with sylver pynne,
Properly payntyd to be my coverture;
A myrrour of glasse, that I may tote therin;
These maydens full meryly with many a dyvers flowur
Fresshely they dresse and make swete my bowur,
With "Speke, Parott, I pray yow," full curteslye they sey,
"Parott ys a goodlye byrde and a pratye popagay."

Wythe my beke bente, and my lytell wanton iye,
My fethyrs fresshe as ys the emerawde grene,
Abowte my necke a cerculett lyke the ryche rubye,
My lytell legges, my fete both fete and clene,
I am a mynyon to wayte apon a quene;
"My propyr Parott, my lytell pratye fole."
With ladyes I lerne and goe with them to scole.

With his "lytell wanton iye," Parott is clearly a ladies' bird, just as Phyllyp Sparowe was.⁵³ One of the literary models for Speke Parott is the Epistres de l'amant verd by Jean Lemaire de Belges, a series of despairingly erotic letters from a pet parrot to his departing mistress. Yet even from these opening lines it is clear that Skelton's Parott, unlike Lemaire's, is primarily autoerotic. He lovingly enumerates his own body parts, "totes" in his mirror, and seems to value the ladies of the court mostly because they make much of him. Parott thus appropriates not only speech but sexuality as well; in his disturbing autonomy he is like a strange hybrid of Phyllyp and Jane.⁵⁴ Parott's sexuality is not entirely innocent, however, and his is given to knowing, phallic innuendo.⁵⁵

Not only sexually but more generally, Speke Parott may be said to rewrite Phyllyp Sparowe into a song of experience. Parott has fallen from Paradise, "that place of pleasure perdurable" (186), which may in part be identified with Phyllyp Sparowe's realm of "rien que playsere." Parott is a polyglot who both embodies and masters the curse of Babel. "Yn Latyn, in Ebrue, and in Caldee, /In Greke tong Parott can bothe speke and sey" (25-26)—as well as in French, Spanish, Dutch, and several English dialects. And he employs this multilingualism together with dense layers of figure to protect himself in the dangerous world of court:

But of that supposicyon that callyd is arte,
Confuse distrybutyve, as Parrot hath devysed,
Let every man after his merit take his parte;
For in this processe, Parrot nothing hath surmysed,
No matter pretendyd, nor nothyng enterprysed,
But that metaphora, alegoria withall,
Shall be his protectyon, his pavys [shield] and his wall.

But allegory is not the only means of defense on which the poem relies. A. C. Spearing has suggested that Parott's cage may represent the confinement and relative safety of the sanctuary of Westminster.⁵⁶ I say "relative safety" because one of the poem's satirical targets is Wolsey's assaults on sanctuary rights: "So myche sayntuary brekyng, and prevylegidde barryd—/ Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr sene nor lyerd."⁵⁷ In every way, the world of Speke Parott is therefore more dangerous, covert, and sinister than that of Phyllyp Sparowe, and accordingly, Parott is a cannier type of bird.

In its rambling course, Speke Parott criticizes numerous evils in the early Tudor polity, for almost all of which it blames Thomas Cardinal Wolsey. As Greg Walker has observed, Skelton's satires almost entirely abjure social analysis in favor of ad hominem attacks⁵⁸ against a man who seemed to embody in his person the entire machinery of the Tudor state. Nor was Skelton alone in this perception. The Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustiani described Wolsey as a man "of vast ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the same business as that which occupies all the magistracies, offices and councils of Venice, both civil and criminal, and all state affairs are likewise handled by him let their nature be what it may."⁵⁹ Even more than Henry VIII, Wolsey represented the concentration of administrative and jurisdictional power carried out by early absolutism. Not only did he run most of the governmental apparatus as lord chancellor, but in 1518 he was granted vast ecclesiastical powers when he was named papal legate a latere. Wolsey used his new authority to reorganize and interfere with the government of every diocese, "appointing his own protégés, regardless of the rights of patrons, and setfting] up legatine courts to which he summoned men from all over England,"⁶⁰ in addition to dissolving monasteries and attempting to curtail rights of sanctuary. By centralizing diocesan government and subjecting it to the interests of the crown, Wolsey helped prepare the way for the Tudor state's more formal rule of the church. It is Wolsey, far more than Henry, who embodies for Skelton the centralizing force of early Tudor absolutism.

Superficially, Speke Parott seems to react to Wolsey as Phyllyp Sparowe reacted to its own despotic signifiers: by de- and reterritorializing into autonomous parcels. Parott even devises a name for this poetic mode—"confuse distrybutyve" (198)—and describes the recombinatory method that produces it:

Suche shredis of sentence, strowed in the shop
Of auncyent Aristippus and such other mo,
I gader togyther and close in my crop,
Of my wanton conseyt, unde depromo
Dilemata docta in pedagogie
Sacro vatum,⁶¹ whereof to you I breke;
I pray you, let Parot have lyberte to speke.

Parott's "wanton conseyt" works according to the mechanisms of poetic imagination I described in Chapter 1, atomizing and scrambling received texts so as to decode them ideologically. The poem thus registers a tension between Parott's role as a conscious and unified speaker who is an apparent source of speech and his position as mere relay or switching station in an uncontrolled and seemingly random field of language-flows. The figure of the parrot, a bird who memorizes "scraps of sentence" and repeats them unexpectedly, offers a striking image for the decontextualizing labor of poetic imagination. The more speech that is fed into Parott, the more uncanny and disconcerting he becomes: "Thus dyvers of language by lernyng I grow." Unlike those of Phyllyp Sparowe, the textual fragments shuttled through Speke Parott are not even subjected to the constraints of a consistent poetic voice or persona; Parott shifts abruptly between languages and dialects, like a tape recorder gone mad:

Ulula, Esebon, for Jeromy doth wepe!
Sion is in sadness, Rachell ruly doth loke;
Midionita Jetro, our Moyses kepyth his shepe;
Gedeon is gon, that Zalmane undertoke,
Oreb et Zeb, of Judicum rede the boke.
Now Geball, Amon and Amaloch—"Harke, harke,
Parrot pretendith to be a bybyll clarke!"

Yet the slippery, obscure, and seemingly aleatory surface of the poem conceals a dense allegorical coherence. While "some folys say ye arre furnysshyd with knakkes, / That hang togedyr as fethyrs in the wynde" (292-93), they lack the learning to construe the poem's message—so says the first of the envoys that Skelton attached to Speke Parott in an attempt to explain it to an uncomprehending audience.⁶² Recent commentators have unveiled most of the poem's linguistic, scriptural, and allegorical mysteries and found a coherent, detailed attack on Cardinal Wolsey. Once interpreted, the poem reveals not incoherence but, if anything, a hypercoherence verging on paranoia that traces almost all of England's social, political, and religious disorders back to this one source. It is around the cardinal as fetishized signifier that all the poem's allegorical codes crystallize and congeal, thus establishing a stark dialectic between de- and reterritorialization. What Phyllyp Sparowe distributed between two parts of the poem Speke Parott enacts simultaneously, at once flying apart to avoid capture and recomposing itself to direct all its obsessive force at a single target.

The formal and linguistic strategies of Speke Parott, though they owe more than a little to some of Skelton's earlier works, are both honed and transformed by the poet's engagement with real political authority. Wolsey, in fact, confronts Skelton with a very specific model for the relation between language and power: that of delegation, the transfer of juridical or administrative authority by means of speech or language. Wolsey had recently become the recipient of two different forms of delegated power. Having already been appointed papal legate in 1518, he was then sent by King Henry to Calais for a series of diplomatic negotiations in the fall of 1521. Wolsey's ostensible purpose was to mediate between French and imperial forces in order to avoid a war into which England would be drawn by treaty, but his real purpose was to arrange a secret agreement with the imperial delegates for a combined assault on France. In any case, Wolsey brought the Great Seal of England with him to Calais as a sign of his plenipotentiary powers—an event of some symbolic importance.⁶³

Delegation is itself a complex symbolic act in that the delegate becomes an actual bearer of authority but only by representing or standing in for the delegating power. Paradoxically, the act of delegation can grant a certain autonomy if delegates are asked to exercise their own judgment; yet ultimately their decisions must all serve the interests of another, so that they are at once both actant and symbol. Delegation as speech act, the sending forth of the delegate to act on behalf of another, is a real linguistic transfer or exchange of power but one that is bounded by the relation of representing or signifying. It serves as a linguistic conduit for centralized power, allowing it to extend its operations and jurisdiction over a wide territorial field. Delegation is therefore a characteristic mode of propagating authority within despotic, absolutist, or bureaucratic states.

That Wolsey tended to drive the tensions or complexities of delegation into open contradiction was, I think, part of his fascination for Skelton. Wolsey accumulated enormous jurisdictional and administrative authority in the course of his various duties, and if this allowed him to carry out the will of his superiors more fully, it also threatened to destabilize or overturn the relations of power that bound him to them. England's papal legate was well known to covet the papacy himself and had already engaged in unsuccessful machinations to attain it. "Hyt ys to fere leste he wolde were the garland on hys pate," warns Parott. As to secular power, the Venetian ambassador observed that "the Cardinal, for authority, may in point of fact be styled ipse rex,"⁶⁴ and Speke Parott likewise warns Henry that his indulgence allows Wolsey to "rule the ring." Skelton apparently took advantage of some tensions that developed between king and lord chancellor during the course of the Calais negotiations to launch his satire, though in the end he misread both these and the true nature of Wolsey's mission.⁶⁵Speke Parott thus finds an opening for satire in the assumption that Wolsey has arrogated so much power that he betrays his diplomatic tasks.

It is in relation to Wolsey's position as unreliable or usurping delegate, I believe, that the persona of Parott takes on his full satirical force. Parrots, of course, are known for repeating only what their masters teach them. Incapable of independent thought, they can only mimic the words of others, and they thus represent a simple and absolute relation between language and authority. The parrot is pure linguistic instrument, subject to another, without understanding, unable to argue back. "Speke Parott," the phrase that titles Skelton's poem, suggests an absolutist brand of linguistic delegation which determines both the moment and the content of speech. Accordingly, Parott can be a shameless flatterer of authority:

In Englysshe to God Parott can supple:
"Cryste save Kyng Herry the viiith, owur royall kyng,
The red rose in honour to flowrysshe and sprynge!"

"With Kateryne incomporabyll, owur royall quene also,
That pereles pomegarnat, Cryste save her nobyll grace!"

In one sense, then, Parott's role is to debase or degrade Wolsey's position as delegate. Skelton's satire relies on an implicit parallel between Parott's position as poetic persona, speaking only the words that his creator supplies, and the lord chancellor's role as mere instrument or tool of royal policy: "A narrow unfethered and without an hed, / A bagpype without blowynge standeth in no sted." In one sense the arrow is Wolsey, whose flight has taken him from England to Calais, and Skelton reminds him that without his "head" (Henry) and "feathers" (presumably, diplomatic finery and status), the lord chancellor is useless and impotent.⁶⁶ But this image also figures Skelton's poem as satirical arrow, with its feathered persona and guiding poetical author or "head." However much he may plume himself on his borrowed authority, Skelton suggests, Wolsey is just a trained bird, provided with a few phrases to utter on behalf of another. Like Parott, Wolsey is only a vain and lascivious "popagay."

The notion of parroting, incidentally, connects the satire of Wolsey with another, apparently unrelated part of the poem: Skelton's attack on humanist methods of language instruction. Wolsey was known to have sponsored the "Greeks" at Oxford, and this in itself was sufficient provocation for Skelton's attack.⁶⁷ But what Speke Parott objects to more specifically is humanism's divorce of speech from content or "matter" and hence from understanding. The child who can say "'Aveto' in Greco, and such solempne salutacyons," yet "Can skantly the tensis of his conjugacyons" seems uncomfortably like a parrot who can repeat phrases without knowing what they mean or how to use them. Skelton regarded humanist education as a degrading form of linguistic delegation producing servile and ignorant speakers, a reflection of its hated patron.

If the parrot symbolized a flattering and obedient form of imitation, however, another and somewhat contradictory tradition viewed it as a wanton, mischievous, or satirical speaker, "roughly comparable to the court jester who offers garbled scraps of wisdom in snatches of foreign tongues, an outspoken revealer of confidences, indulged because he is not responsible for his sometimes telling juxtaposition of random phrases."⁶⁸ The seemingly mechanical repetition of speech which makes parrots seem so subservient from one perspective can also make them appear uncanny or disturbing from another. Maybe they really are independent intellects whose phrases aren't random. In mimicking us, do they mock us? Skelton's articulate Parott raises just this doubt; he derives more than a little of his satirical energy from his ability to twist and garble various kinds of speech, thus rendering them either strange or risible. Parott embodies repetition as alienation, where it gives birth to the illusion of a weirdly autonomous mind. Parott is "wanton"; he demands "lyberty to speke" and thus appropriates a power that was seemingly only lent to him. In this, of course, he also represents Wolsey, another mouthpiece or verbal instrument who (Skelton thinks) has gotten out of hand. Like Parott, Wolsey is a delegated speaker who mysteriously becomes a source of speech and authority.

Through its feathered persona, Speke Parott adopts a complex and contradictory stance toward linguistic delegation. In some respects the poem enacts a kind of latent pun on the word: it "delegalizes" speech, not only by investing it with unofficial or seditious meanings but, more fundamentally, by collapsing the law of speech, by disarticulating or decoding those linguistic structures that make language a reliable conduit for the transmission of authority. Here Parott plays his crucial role as a language machine run amok, switching suddenly from shrewdness to frenzy, from wisdom to foolery, shuttling textual fragments and lingusitic flows in unpredictable directions, oscillating unexpectedly between communication and mechanical sound production. Parott dislocates the speaking subject, referring to himself by name and in the third person, as if he were elsewhere, not in this voice that emerges from his body. Parott, in fact, does for language what Jane Scrope does for sexuality, snatching it from the stroke of a despotic signifier.

But Speke Parott is not Phyllyp Sparowe, and thus while it traces lines of flight from power it also tries to mount a counterattack by harnessing the force of delegation for its own purposes. If Greg Walker's reading of the poem is accepted—and I think it should be, at least in part—then Speke Parott is Skelton's attempt to regain royal favor by exploiting what he thought to be Henry's serious dissatisfactions with Wolsey's diplomatic efforts. The poem is thus an unsolicited barb loosed on Henry's "behalf" and a proleptic resumption of Skelton's post as orator regius, the title by which he identifies himself at the poem's end. The second envoy, dated three days after Henry sent a letter recalling Wolsey from Calais, rejoices over the apparent failure of the lord chancellor's mission, and contrasts what it takes to be Skelton's new poetic delegation with Wolsey's failed diplomatic one:

Passe forthe, Parotte, towardes some passengere;
Require hym to convey yow ovyr the salte fome;
Addressyng your selfe, lyke a sadde messengere,
To owur soleyne Seigneour Sadoke, desire hym to cum home,
Makyng hys pylgrimage by Nostre Dame de Crome:
For Jerico and Jerssey shall mete togethyr as sone
As he to exployte the man owte of the mone.

Skelton's poetic missive steps in for Henry's letter recalling the failed and wayward ambassador; just as Parott is sent to speak for his author, so Skelton believes himself now to be speaking for the king. The only problem with this royal delegation is that it was entirely fictive, an autodelegation. Relying on gossip and rumor, Skelton was uninformed of Wolsey's real mission at Calais and was apparently taken by surprise when the king welcomed and thanked the returning lord chancellor.⁶⁹ Ironically, then, it was Skelton, not Wolsey, who abused the power of delegation by appropriating royal powers of speech while only posing as the representative of authority. If he thought Wolsey capable of almost magical powers of usurpation, mightn't this be in part because his own career was based on the usurpation of titles, those of poet laureate and king's orator?

At the same time that Skelton puts his pretended authority as orator regius up against the secular power of the lord chancellor, however, he also invokes a second, prophetic delegation with which to berate the worldly cardinal. The poem's prophetic voice and vocation emerge most clearly in the final envoy, where a complaint against contemporary abuses is joined to an implicit threat of divine retribution:

So many thevys hangyd, and thevys neverthelesse;
So myche presonment, for matyrs not worth a hawe;
So myche papers werying for ryghte a smalle exesse;
So myche pelory pajauntes undyr colowur of good lawe;
So myche towrnyng on the cooke-stole for every guy-gaw;
So myche mokkyshe makyng of statutes of array—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr, I dar sey.

…..

So many trusys takyn, and so lytyll perfyte trowthe;
So myche bely-joye, and so wastefull banketyng;
So pynchyng and sparyng, and so lytell profyte growth;
So many howgye howsys byldyng, and so small howse-holdyng;
Such statutes apon diettes, suche pyllyng and pollyng—

…..

So many vacabondes, so many beggers bolde,
So myche decay of monesteries and relygious places;
So hote hatered agaynste the Chyrche, and cheryte so colde;
So myche of my lordes grace, and in hym no grace ys;
So many holow hartes, and so dowbyll faces;
So myche sayntuary brekyng, and prevylegidde barryd—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr sene nor lyerd.
(477-83, 491-95, 498-504)

Skelton's jeremiad nicely balances a sense of social dissolution with an awareness of the increasing centralization and severity of royal power, so that his depicted polity is at once anarchic and totalitarian. If only empirically, he manages to grasp the dynamic of primitive accumulation. But this contradictory state is also that of his poem and its two delegations. For as orator regius, Skelton attempts to recall the aberrant and excessive Wolsey in the name of the king, and thus to restore the political order of the kingdom. From this perspective Henry is viewed as a "mercyfull" ruler, the embodiment of a feudal or limited monarchy, and emergent absolutism is mistakenly regarded as the product of a renegade lord chancellor. As prophet, however, Skelton stands apart from all political authority. Now he seems to promise not the restoration of a lost order but the loss of all order, for "Dewcalyons flodde" suggests a divine punishment that would both complete and literalize the dissolution of the late feudal polity.

The de- and recoding operations of Skelton's later poetics are thus tied to two incompatible concepts of poetic delegation, explaining, I think, the sometimes contradictory stance of Speke Parott, which seems on the whole to criticize Wolsey on behalf of the king, yet sometimes inexplicably attacks Henry as well. As papal legate and lord chancellor Wolsey was able to effect a preliminary subordination of church to state, and this double role was reflected in an unacceptably "worldly" manner. Skelton, by contrast, endures an unstable alternation between his delegated roles, and this constitutes his divided experience of early absolutism. Ironically, however, his most fully elaborated statement on the prophetic nature of poetry occurs in his final work, "A Replycacion" (1528), written on behalf of the formerly reviled Wolsey, whom it fulsomely praises. This final turn of Skelton's career has proven to be a puzzling one, at least to those who thought that Skelton had fought a principled and even dangerous battle against the lord chancellor. It certainly suggests a mercenary or at least an opportunistic side to his character. This development is foreshadowed, however, by Skelton's own poetical birds, all of whom have undergone some degree of taming. Even the irascible Parott "must have an almon or a date" and probably isn't too choosy about where he gets it. Yet it is also unfair to privilege "A Replycacion" just because it was Skelton's last poem. Had he lived, the poet might well have turned wild once more and bitten the hand that fed him.

Notes

¹Merrie Tales … by Master John Skelton (1567), in Shakespeare Jest-Books, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (1864; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, [196?]), 2:1-36.

² In a letter to Allan Cunningham, 23 November 1823, quoted by Arthur B. Kinney in John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 206.

³ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 143.

⁴ In a fine discussion of Skelton's place in literary history, A. C. Spearing maintains that "Skelton is the only English poet … [of his age who] wants something more than to be Chaucer" and that this larger desire paradoxically enables him to develop Chaucer's work. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 234. For an argument that the dullness of fifteenth-century poetry was a consciously adopted literary and political strategy, see David Lawton, "Dulness and the Fifteenth Century," ELH 54 (1987), 761-99.

⁵ For a description of the Grammarians' War see William Nelson, John Skelton. Laureate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 148-58.

⁶ All quotations of Skelton's poetry are taken from John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

⁷ Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 48.

⁸ Ian A. Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate (Melbourne, Aus.: Melbourne University Press, 1943), pp. 9, 45.

⁹ Stanley Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 249.

¹⁰ Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, pp. 229, 265. Spearing's very suggestive reading of the transition from medieval to Renaissance poetics is based on a similar structure of anticipation. Briefly, Spearing argues that Chaucer really became the first "Renaissance" poet as a result of influences he picked up on his travels to Italy. His English successors then re-medievalized what they found in Chaucer, so that the literary history of the fifteenth century progresses, in a sense, backward.

¹¹ F. L. Brownlow, "The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), 5-20; Kinney, John Skelton.

¹² Walker, John Skelton.

¹³ See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), pp. 15-17.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 19.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 20-24.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 119.

¹⁷ John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 109.

¹⁸ "In England the religious foundations made extensive use of labourrent and demesne production, they tended to persist with labour-services longer, to manage their estates more carefully and to supervise production more thoroughly, and to defend their rights of labour-service more tenaciously, than any other type of feudal landlord." Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 253. Also see G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (2d ed.; London: Methuen, 1974), p. 103.

¹⁹ J. Thomas Kelly, Thorns on the Tudor Rose: Monks, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), p. 3.

²⁰ Isabel D. Thornley, "The Destruction of Sanctuary," in R. W. Seton-Watson, ed., Tudor Studies (London: Longmans, 1924), pp. 183-84.

²¹ Elton, England under the Tudors, pp. 21-22.

²² Walker, John Skelton, p. 5.

²³ Kinney, in particular, argues this line (John Skelton).

²⁴ Walker, John Skelton. p. 88

²⁵ Ibid., chap. 1.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 42.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 151.

²⁸ Ibid., chap. 6.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 190.

³⁰ Ibid., pp. 53-100.

³¹

The Gospels, vessels and vestments, a hawk with its bells and unreasoning animals and other such things are all the same to you. (Scattergood trans.)

³² Fish, Skelton's Poetry, p. 89.

³³ Ibid., pp. 89-98.

³⁴ Kinney, John Skelton. p. 83.

³⁵ 53 Cf. Phyllyp Sparowe 182: "With his wanton eye."

⁵⁴ Compare Phyllyp Sparowe 175-76—"Phyllyp had leve to go / To pyke my lytell too"—with Speke Parolt 107—"With my beke I can pyke my lyttel praty too."

⁵⁵ See Fish, Skelton's Poetry, p. 146; and F. L. Brownlow, "The Boke Compiled by Maister Skelton, Poet Laureate, Called Speake Parrot," English Literary Renaissance 1 (1971), 21.

⁵⁶ Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 269.

⁵⁷ Cf. also 124-25: "And assilum. whilom refugium miserorum, / Non phanum, sed prophanum, standyth in lytyll sted [And asylum, formerly the refuge of wretches, is not a sanctuary but is to be made secular]" (Scattergood trans).

⁵⁸ Walker, John Skelton. pp. 85-86, 132.

⁵⁹ Sebastian Giustiani, quoted ibid., p. 162.

⁶⁰ Kinney, John Skelton. pp. 133-34.

⁶¹ "Whence I bring forth arguments in a sacred school of poets" (Scattergood trans).

⁶² Walker, John Skelton, p. 91, says that the poem's obscurities baffled its original readers.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 79-80.

⁶⁴ Quoted ibid., p. 173.

⁶⁵ Ibid., pp. 73-78, 80-89.

⁶⁶ The headless arrow also has another, more specific reference During the negotiations at Calais the emperor Charles asked Henry to send six thousand English archers in fulfillment of his treaty obligations. Henry and Wolsey disagreed over whether the archers should be sent at all while the negotiations were still proceeding, and they then quarreled bitterly over who should "head" them. See J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 86. The issue of the archers marked the first serious breach between Henry and his negotiator and raised the issue of which of the two was the other's "head." Thus I read the image of the arrow as referring both to the specific subject of the quarrel and to Wolsey in his role as delegate.

⁶⁷ Nelson, John Skelton, p. 182.

⁶⁸ Fish, Skelton's Poetry, p. 135.

⁶⁹ Walker, John Skelton, p. 93.