SOURCE: Spearing, A. C. “Skelton: The Bowge of Court.” In Medieval Dream-Poetry, pp. 171-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

[In the following excerpt, Spearing claims that with The Bowge of Courte, Skelton offers a new and frightening use of the medieval dream-poem, as it depicts the everyday reality of court to be a nightmare from which there is no awakening.]

The Bowge of Court is John Skelton's earliest surviving major work, dating from 1498, yet it already brings a number of innovations to dream-poetry. The spot where the narrator falls asleep is identified more specifically than ever before as a real place, Powers Key at Harwich (34-5);¹ as Dreamer, the narrator acquires the identity of a personification, Drede (fear, anxiety); and the setting of the dream is on board a ship—though admittedly it is an allegorical vessel, the Bowge of Court (court rations). In the brief waking section at the beginning, Skelton introduces himself as a would-be poet, who wishes he could emulate the great allegorical writers of the past. They clothed truths in ‘coverte termes’ (10), but he has no such power ‘to illumyne’ (20); and so his perplexity wearies him and he falls asleep. It is autumn, at a time when the moon, ‘full of mutabylyte’ (3), rules over men and smiles scornfully ‘At our foly and our unstedfastnesse’ (6). This prepares us for a dream which can be seen as a somnium coeleste, albeit of the lowest kind (since the moon's is the lowest of the heavenly spheres), and which will deal with mutability and human folly and unsteadfastness. Moreover, autumn is in general a time of frequent dreams, which tend to be meaningless insomnia or nightmares, according to John of Salisbury.² Are we to expect a dream about folly or a foolish dream? The familiar ambiguity in the status of dreams is already hinted at in the opening lines. But the dream's leading image is clearly provided by the Dreamer's waking experience; he falls asleep on the quayside of an important port, and so it is natural enough that he should dream about the arrival and departure of a ship.

In a further prologue within the dream (36-126), before the ship sets sail and the poem's action commences, the symbolic significance of its contents is made clear, partly by the Dreamer's own experiences and partly by an authoritative but anonymous voice. The traditional love-allegory has undergone a sharp modification. There is, it is true, a great lady, Dame Saunce-Pere (Without Equal), whose chief gentlewoman is Daunger, and who sits

In a trone wiche fer clerer dyde shyne
Than Phebus in his spere celestyne,
Whoos beaute, honoure, goodly porte,
I have to lytyll connynge to reporte.

(60-3)

But Saunce-Pere is present not as the object of the Dreamer's love, but as the owner of the ‘shyppe, goodly of sayle’ (36) which has just arrived at the port. She is engaged in trade, a chancy occupation—hence the inscription on her throne, ‘Garder le fortune que est mauelz et bone’ (67). (Take care of fortune, which is both bad and good)—and the Dreamer finds her by following merchants who are flocking to see her ‘royall chaffre [merchandise]’ (54). The allegory of love, then, has become an allegory of trade. But the trade in turn is that of courtly life under the absolute monarchy of the Tudors. The merchandise is favour, which all eagerly seek, including the Dreamer, who tells Daunger he has come ‘to bye some of youre ware’ (79). He has ‘but smale substaunce’ (94), but another gentlewoman, Desyre, lends him the ‘precyous jewell, … Bone aventure [good luck]’ (97-8) to help him make his way to favour. However, she warns him that it is essential to make a friend of the steerswoman of the ship, that ‘Fortune’ who is named on Saunce-Pere's throne. The Dreamer along with the other merchants rushes to seek Fortune's friendship, and she, of course, ‘promysed to us all she wolde be kynde’ (124). Thus we are given to understand in this explanatory prologue that life on the ship is an emblem of court life; and indeed the mutability of the moon and Fortune was nowhere more sharply felt than at the early Tudor court (to which Skelton belonged). But life at court is no more than a special case of life in the world, over which Fortune had been shown as ruling capriciously in visionary writings from Boethius onwards; and life in the world was traditionally imaged as a vessel tossed by a stormy sea, as in The Kingis Quair. There can be no doubt that this dream is set, like those in the tradition of Winner and Waster, not in a heavenly other world but on earth.

Like many dreamers before him, Skelton is at a loss in the strange realm of his dream. We have already been told that among the merchants at the port ‘coude I none aquentaunce fynde’ (45), and he continues to be alone and friendless on the crowded ship. On it he meets ‘Full subtyll persones in nombre foure and thre’ (133)—a number which may suggest some analogy with the seven deadly sins. The first is Favell, the flatterer, who assures him that he is in high favour with Fortune, and that while Favell is on his side, ‘Ye maye not fall’ (170); and yet his assurances are already undermined by the hint that ‘here be dyverse to you that be unkynde’ (161). The Dreamer cannot quite rely on his ‘doubtfull doublenes’ (178), and his uncertainty is increased when he overhears a conversation in which the second subtle person, Suspycyon, asks whether they were speaking of him, and he and Favell agree to abandon Drede. Suspycyon warns him against Favell, and tells him that ‘here is none that dare well other truste’ (202). His third acquaintance is Hervy Hafter (Dodger), an inquisitive gossip, who once more congratulates him on having Fortune's favour, and once more undermines his assurance with ‘I praye to God that it maye never dy’ (271). Now the Dreamer overhears a second conversation about himself, between Hervy and Disdayne, in which Disdayne shows his envy that this mere newcomer has achieved such favour that ‘It is lyke he wyll stonde in our lyghte’ (305), and they agree to pick a quarrel with him. Disdayne does so, asking him threateningly,

Remembrest thou what thou sayd yesternyght?
Wylt thou abyde by the wordes agayne?

(323-4)

Up comes a fifth courtier, Ryote, tawdry in dress and squalidly knowing in conversation, boasting of how he lives on his mistress's immoral earnings. Next the Dreamer witnesses a third secret conversation, between Disdayne and Dyssymulation, but this time he cannot hear what they are saying, though he ‘dempte [judged] and drede theyr talkynge was not good’ (426). He sees to his horror that Dyssymulation has two faces in his hood, a knife in one sleeve and a golden spoon of honey in the other. Dyssymulation commiserates with the Dreamer on the envy of which they are both victims, and utters many threats without ever making quite clear at whom they are directed or how they will be carried out. Lastly the Dreamer is greeted by Disceyte, who hints almost unintelligibly at a plot against him. Drede is by this time thoroughly terrified, imagines that he sees ‘lewde felawes here and there’ (528) coming to slay him, and desperately attempts to throw himself overboard; at which the dream comes to an end. He had thought at first, along with the other merchants, that

Favoure we have toughther than ony elme,
That wyll abyde and never frome us fall,

(129-30)

but now he has learned just how deceptive the favour of the court is, and he ends in terror, despair and attempted suicide.

The Dreamer is not a complete innocent; he can, for example, see through the ‘grete gentylnes’ (176) of Favell to the ‘doubtfull doublenes’ behind it. But he soon gets entirely out of his depth, and the sense of the loss of any solid ground under his feet, the inability to find a reliable truth in any direction, and the growing and all-too-justified paranoia, are clearly developed out of the situation of the naive and bewildered dreamer in earlier poems such as The House of Fame. There the naivety was in relation to a heavenly other world; here, more frighteningly, it relates to this world. The Dreamer is not being carried through the skies by an eagle, or confronted by an angry Cupid; he is an inexperienced and eager courtier, who finds reality itself dissolving into something unpredictable and threatening. As C. S. Lewis has written, ‘The subject is a perennial one—the bewilderment, and finally the terror, of a man at his first introduction to what theologians call “the World” and others “the racket” or “real life” … almost any man in any profession can recognize most of the encounters …’³ It is worth noting, however, that the Dreamer is considered specifically as a courtier; unlike Chaucer's dreamers after The Book of the Duchess, he is not a court poet, at least while he is dreaming. (Skelton does not take on that role as dreamer until his later poem, The Garland of Laurel, by which time he had a reputation as a poet and a career to look back on and quizzically justify.) One scholar has asserted that ‘Dread is, we know, a poet’, and that ‘the purpose of the poem is to consider … the possibility, for the poet, of moral action’.⁴ But it is only in the waking sections that the narrator is seriously treated as a poet. In the opening stanzas, as we have seen, he is a poet longing to emulate the allegorical writers of the past, but lacking the ability to do so; and his waking fears of making an unsuccessful attempt, as one

That clymmeth hyer than he may fotynge have;
What and he slyde downe, who shall hym save?

(27-8)

offer an analogy to the experience of the dream, though his aspiration and fall there belong to a different realm. And the moment he woke from the dream, he ‘Caughte penne and ynke, and wroth this lytyll boke’ (532); thus, like Chaucer in The Parliament of Fowls, he found that his dream provided him with ‘mater of to wryte’, and solved his earlier dilemma. But the identity he acquires in the dream, as Drede, belongs to his experience as courtier, not as poet: there is no consideration in The Bowge of Court of ‘the possibility, for the poet, of moral action’. As Renaissance courtier, Drede has naturally some acquaintance with literae humaniores, and so Dyssymulation can flatter him by saying, ‘I knowe your vertu and your lytterkture’ (449). But a joke made by Hervy Hafter about his melancholy appearance—

Tell me your mynde, me thynke ye make a verse,
I coude it skan and ye wolde it reherse

(244-5)

—surely depends for its full effect on our awareness of a separation between Skelton as poet and Drede as courtier.

In becoming Drede, Skelton takes his place in an allegory of court life. Usually, with a scrupulousness uncommon in those dream-poems such as the Roman de la Rose and The Book of the Duchess where there is no complete separation between poet and dreamer, he remains within the limited point of view of Drede. Thus he takes care to explain how he can overhear the sinister whispered conversations with which he is surrounded: ‘And I drewe nere to herke what they two sayde’ (182, 296) is a line repeated twice, and his inability to overhear what passes in the third conversation, between Disdayne and Dyssymulation, marks a stage in his collapse into helplessness and despair. Moreover, by a most unusual development in personification-allegory, the Dreamer as Drede is not merely an observer and victim, but has an occasional part to play in the action as seen by the other personifications. For example, he tells us that the seven ‘subtyll persones’ did not welcome his early attempts to join in their amusements, because ‘They sayde they hated for to dele with Drede’ (146). Part of the horror of his dream-experience is that he is trapped in a state of fear so deep-rooted as to have become an identity, which makes him from the beginning as unattractive to the other figures in his dream as they are to him.

In this and other respects, Skelton seems to have tapped the experience of nightmare with a convincingness unknown in most earlier dream-poetry. His poem feels like an account of an autumnal insomnium; but at the same time it implicitly claims throughout to be more than a sleeping fantasy, and to tell the truth about life at court. Its final stanza makes explicit the ambiguous status of dreams which was hinted at in the opening lines:

I wolde therwith no man were myscontente;
Besechynge you that shall it see or rede,
In every poynte to be indyfferente,
Syth all in substaunce of slumbrynge doth procede.
I wyll not saye it is mater in dede,
But yet oftyme suche dremes be founde trewe:
Now constrewe ye what is the resydewe.

(533-9)

The challenge offered by a dream-poem to its audience is familiar, but the nature of the dream itself has made the dilemma unusually sharp. We are left to decide for ourselves not just whether this dream is heavenly vision or subjective fantasy, but whether it depicts the everyday reality of our own world or is a mere paranoiac nightmare. The only acceptable answer to the poem's challenge is that it is both: it asserts that the real life of the court is a nightmare, from which there can be no escape by waking up. This is a new and frightening use for the dream-poem.

Notes

1. Ed. Robert S. Kinsman, John Skelton: Poems (Oxford, 1969). Kinsman, evidently following A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961), p. 17, finds an earlier analogy in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes; but that is not a dream-poem.

2. Policraticus, p. 90. Cf. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire p. 32.

3. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 135.

4. S. E. Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven, 1965), pp. 68 and 79, n. 9. Cf. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, p. 63: ‘the narrators of such satires are by convention anxious writers’.