SOURCE: Holloway, John. “Skelton.” In The Charted Mirror: Literary and Critical Essays, pp. 3-24. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.

[In the following essay, Holloway offers an overview of Skelton's best-known works to show how the poet drew upon and sometimes transformed the work of his predecessors, and finds that the most definitive features of his verse are its “amplitude, immediacy, rhythmic vitality,” and embodiment of life's vibrancy and change.]

To discuss Skelton effectively is to do more than elucidate the past on its own terms, and for its own sake. There is no constraint on anyone to do more than this, and to think that there is, is to think like a barbarian. But if a critic finds that his subject empowers him to do more, he ought to say so. Although Skelton was writing more than 450 years ago, there are certain respects in which his poetry offers us enlightenment and guidance in the literary and cultural problems which confront us today. To seize on the essence of his poetry is to be wiser for our own time. Were that not so, I should perhaps have left the subject of Skelton to others, because I find it congenial but do not find it reassuringly easy.

The problems of today upon which this poet casts light may be indicated by two quotations: one from Mr Robert Graves and one from Bernard Berenson. Mr Graves, writing in 1943 on the development of modern prose, referred to the ‘eccentrically individual styles’ of Meredith, Doughty, James, and others, and added, ‘many more styles were invented as the twentieth century advanced and since there was keen competition among writers as to who should be “great” and since it was admitted that “greatness” was achieved only by a highly individual style, new tricks and new devices multiplied’.¹ Forty years before this, Berenson in his essay on the decline of art pointed out how modern European culture, ‘mad for newness’ as he put it, has committed itself to a ritual of unremitting dynamism. ‘We are thus perpetually changing: and our art cycles, compared to those of Egypt or China, are of short duration, not three centuries at the longest; and our genius is as frequently destructive as constructive.’²

Modern English literature surely illustrates what Berenson referred to. The unremitting search for a new way with words, a new kind of hero, a new device for carrying matters a stage further, a new model from some past writer or some foreign literature—these features of the scene are familiar. The search for newness is not itself new, and probably no age has been quite without it. Naturalizing foreign models was an integral part of Chaucer's achievement (though very far of course from the whole of it). But the question is not one merely of innovation; it is of a growing need for constant innovation, and a sense that however often the game of change is played, we are always soon back with what is played out and old-fashioned.

This attitude to writing seems to have become established in England in the course of the sixteenth century. There is a well-known passage in Bacon's De Augmentis Scientiarum, written towards the close of his life, in which he adverts to the playing-out first of the vogue for Cicero, then of the vogue for Seneca, shortly before, and shortly after, 1600. More to our immediate purpose is a passage from Puttenham's Art of English Poetry of 1589. Puttenham was himself the author of the best and best known manual of a new poetry, which was learning amply from ancient and from foreign models, and which had for many years been coming to dominate the English literary scene. The following passage not only illustrates how Puttenham saw Skelton as the last of the bad old days, and Skelton's immediate successors as those who laid the foundations for the new and stylish; it also points unconsciously forward, in several turns of phrase, to the derivativeness, the vacuous grandiosity, the empty ingenuity, which have plagued us intermittently ever since:

Skelton (was) a sharp satirist, but with more rayling and scoffery than became a Poet Lawreat, such among the Greeks were called Pantomimi, with us Buffons, altogether applying their wits to scurrilities and other ridiculous matters. Henry Earle of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyat, betweene whom I find very littel difference, I repute them … for the two chief lanternes of light to all others that have since employed their pennes upon English Poesie, their conceits were loftie, their stiles stately, their conveyance cleanely, their termes proper, their meetre sweete and well proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their Maister Francis Petrarcha.³

Ever since the time of these two indistinguishable lanterns of light, imitating one's master naturally and studiously, or finding a new master, or going one better than the old master, have figured prominently, in English verse; and whether the end sought has been stateliness and loftiness, or cleanness and propriety, or sweetness and naturalness, the underlying ideas of a regulation of poetry or a reform of poetry have seldom been far distant.

To take Skelton as representative of something different from this tradition, and as instructive on account of the difference, is not to see him merely as an illiterate extemporising buffoon. He has been seen in these terms in the past, but modern scholarship has made the view quite untenable. Skelton was one of a group of Latinists—the proto-humanists we might call them—whom Henry VII drew into his service, and of whom Polydore Vergil is perhaps the best known.⁴ He was an accomplished rhetorician, and his employment of the figures of rhetoric is as deliberate (if somewhat more intelligent) as that of his contemporary Stephen Hawes.⁵ His best known poem, Phyllyp Sparowe, is a kind of reverent burlesque of the ritual of the Mass in accordance with established medieval convention;⁶ and in the description of his heroine in this poem, we can recognize the two places, and no more, where Skelton the poet abandoned the literary model, for the sake one supposes of the real girl.⁷ That model was the first specimen descriptio in Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, and this work was as much the medieval poetic handbook as Puttenham's work was the Elizabethan one. Skelton's own disclaimer ‘though my rhyme be ragged’,⁸ is itself something of a literary convention: his first modern editor, in 1843, pointed out that Sir David Lindsay and Spenser say the same of their own verse. William Caxton notices that in his translation of Diodorus Siculus Skelton wrote ‘not in rude and old language but in polished and ornate terms craftily’, and it is essentially the same kind of compliment as Caxton pays elsewhere, justly, to Chaucer (‘crafty and sugared eloquence’), and as Spenser's spokesman E. K. was later to pay to the ‘well trussed up’ verse of Spenser. Skelton was a learned, a professional writer, conversant with his craft and art, an aureate poet as well as a laureate one.

There is always a danger, however, that in registering the qualities of a poem which have been laboriously and scrupulously brought into focus by scholarship, we become blind to the qualities which were never in need of such focusing, because they sprang off the page at us. This is a vital point for Skelton. One of his shorter poems, which begins: Knolege, aquayntance, resort, fauour with grace, has been described as ‘an ecphrasis in the aureate manner of Lydgate’⁹ so it is: we can easily see that it conforms to a literary recipe, and there is little to see in it besides. A companion piece is in part very similar. Also an address to a woman, it closes with an appeal to her to observe the conventional courtly code. It opens with the literary convention at its limpest and most stilted:

The auncient acquaintance, madam, betwen vs twayn,
          The famylyaryte, the formar dalyaunce,
Causyth me that I can not myself refrayne
          But that I must wryte for my plesaunt pastaunce

But Skelton's tongue is in his cheek; this poem is rapidly transformed; its subject—a wife who has been playing fast and loose with her husband—turns into a hectic stable-yard scene, and a horseman struggling with a mare that has the devil in her, ‘ware, ware, the mare wynsyth wyth her wanton hele!’, ‘Haue in sergeaunt ferrour (farrier)’. The violence and confusion veritably explode what was only a mock-decorous poem. It is not, of course, the first English poem to explode the convention in which it is ostensibly written; but to explode a literary convention it is necessary to obtain a powerful charge drawn from outside convention.

What this is may be seen, perhaps, by turning to the most misjudged of all Skelton's poems, The Tunnying of Elynour Rummyng. To say that the tradition of this rough, vernacular poetry has been lost, is not to say everything about it; but is certainly to point towards the difficulty which this poem has created for one critic after another. Henry Morley saw it as ‘a very humble rendering to simple wits of the repulsive aspects of intemperance in women’;¹⁰ Miss E. P. Hammond refers to its wallowing coarseness;¹¹ even Professor Lewis seems to see the problem as one of tolerating ugliness for the sake of the liveliness, and expresses his preference for the Scottish poem Christis Kirk on the Grene, which he praises for melody, gaiety, and orderliness, and which attracts him through its occasional underlying lyricism.¹²

To experience these feelings about Elynour Rummyng is to wish that it were different in kind from what it is, rather than better in quality. This picture of a morning in a low country ale-house is if anything less coarse than Langland's superb account of Gluttony in the ale-house, in Piers Plowman,¹³ and melody and gaiety are as far from Skelton's purpose as they were from Langland's. Indeed, to mention Langland is at once to become aware that Skelton's piece is no thoughtless extemporisation, but has its literary antecedents. Its subject, and its attitude to that subject, were both recurrent in medieval writing;¹⁴ and it is possible that Skelton's poem, with its old and ugly ale-wife whose customers are all old and ugly women, is even a kind of calculated counterpart to a poem by Lydgate, the Ballade on an Ale-Seller, in which (to express oneself in modern terms) a bold and handsome barmaid attracts an exclusively male clientele. In Lydgate's poem, we certainly have orderliness, the order of the ballade; and we have a literary, even sometimes a lofty diction. But they are quite out of key with the subject; and

With your kissyng thouh that ye do plesaunce
          It shall be derrer, er thei do ther way
Than al ther ale, to them I dar wel say

—that is perhaps the best that Lydgate's poem can do: a hasty glimpse of fact, a trite moral, a reader nonplussed with tedium.

The ugly side of Elynour Rummyng is simply an honest reflection of the poverty and primitiveness which were the staple of life for a rural peasantry in England at that time, as they doubtless are still for rural peasants over most of the planet. If we find coarseness, it is not through identifying what Skelton is trying to make of his material, but through plain unfamiliarity with the material itself. In a now almost unknown poem of just after Skelton's time (happily almost unknown, for in the main it is very bad), we can glimpse those same conditions, but they peer through despite the poet's almost admitted inability to render them. The poem is Copland's Hie Waie to the Spitale Hous, and the passage is that which describes the beggars and vagrants as the Watch sees them at night:

But surely, every night here is found
          One or other lying by the pound
In the sheep cotes or in the hay loft
And at Saint Bartholomew's church door full oft
And even here alway by this brick wall
          We do them find, that do both chide and brawl
And like as beasts together they be throng
          Both lame and sick and whole them among,
And in many corners where that we go,
          Whereof I greatly wonder that they do so.(15)

Copland virtually confesses, with that disastrous last line, how his facts defeat him. Skelton's poem is in another world; or rather, his ale-wife with her skin that is ‘grained lyke a sacke’, her customers who tie their hair up in a shoe-rag when they come to pawn their crocks for ale, her pigs that wander in and out of the bar and scratch themselves on the furniture, take us back with exuberant vitality into the real world.

This extraordinary vividness, where many find vividness an embarrassment, has prevented readers from grasping the full range of the poem, as a record of fact. Elynour Rummyng is not, as it has been called, a ‘purely objective’ record of peasant reality.¹⁶ It is not a moralizing poem, but it is full of an awareness of the essential humanity of the scene it depicts, and of a such comprehension of this (a comprehension neither harsh nor slack and casual) as is the only foundation for significant moralizing. It is easy to miss this subtler side to the poem; but it is there, in the customers who

                    lothe to be espyde,
Start in at the backe syde,
Ouer the hedge and pale,
And all for the good ale.

It is there in those who sit glumly because they have nothing to barter for ale, and can only drink as much as they can chalk up on the beam. It shows in the differences among what customers bring to barter: some the reasonable merchandise of the prosperous peasant, some the last thing in the house or the last thing that they ought to part with. Once we are conscious of these aspects of the poem, even the character of Elynour herself takes on a new light. Her shocked indignation when one of the customers falls over and lets her skirts fly up is a genuine and convincing turn of peasant character. Some of the customers ask for drink and have no money. Skelton writes:

Elynour swered, Nay,
Ye shall not beare away
My ale for nought,
By hym that me bought!

This does not merely contrast the bargains which men and women strike, with that which Christ struck: it brings them disquietingly, revealingly together. With these things in mind, one can see that the opening description of Elynour herself has a somewhat similar deeper significance. It clearly resembles one of the most humane and moving passages in the whole of Chaucer's writings, the Reve's Prologe:

For sikerly, whan I was bore, anon
Deeth drough the tappe of lyf and leet it gon;
And ever sithe hath so the tappe yronne
Til that almoost al empty is the tonne.

Incidentally, the elderly Reeve's ‘grene tayl’ may have its connexion with ‘Parot hath a blacke beard and a fayre grene tale’ in Skelton's Speke, Parot, a poem which I shall discuss later. But there is a clear detailed link with Elynour Rummyng too. Chaucer's Reeve says:

But ik am oold, me list not for pley for age;
Gras tyme is doon, my fodder is now forage
This white top writeth myne old yeris.

Skelton uses just this idea of fresh plants and dead forage, and when he does so, it is difficult not to see both Chaucer's direct influence, and the general quality of his insight into human transience:

Her eyen …
… are blered
And she gray hered …
Her youth is farre past:
Foted lyke a plane
Leged lyke a crane;
And yet she wyll iet,
Lyke a jolly fet …
Her huke of Lyncole grene,
It had been hers, I wene,
More then fourty yere;
And so doth it apere,
For the grene bare thredes
Loke lyke sere wedes,
Wyddered lyke hay …

As against this poem, Christis Kirk on the Grene is gay boisterous comedy with something even of slapstick; and to compare it with Skelton's poem is to bring out not the defects, but the distinctiveness, and the depth of the latter.

Miss M. M. Gray has pointed out that the spirit of poems like Christis Kirk on the Grene is not typical of the Scottish poetry of its period.¹⁷ If The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng is related instead to such poems as Tydingis fra the Sessioun, which is by Dunbar, or The Devillis Inquest, which is almost certainly not so, a quite new kind of difference emerges. In The Devillis Inquest we find:

‘Be Goddis blud,’ quod the taverneir,
‘Thair is sic wyine in my selleir
Hes never come in this cuntrie.’
‘Yit,’ quod the Devill, ‘thou sellis our deir,
With thy fals met cum downe to me.’

This is not a Chaucerian movement of thought; it is a vision which concentrates on the evil in the fact, sees it intensely, and is directed by uncompromising though sternly controlled indignation. One side of reality is brought into a clear focus by a cold and masterly economy of language. This is still a link with Chaucer, but it is not Skelton's kind of link. With rare exceptions, Chaucer's firm linguistic line, his masterly economy, do not serve purposes like these, but less severe ones. Dr Edwards, discussing Skelton's lyrics, wrote: ‘He possessed none of Chaucer's smiling acceptance of men and women as they are.’¹⁸ Even as an account of Chaucer, that might need a little amendment; but what is relevant for the moment is that it distinguishes too sharply between Chaucer and Skelton.

In my view Elynour Rummyng is the most significant of the poems which Skelton wrote in the short metre which has been named after him. Philip Sparow has great grace and charm, but its chief character is to be an endearing poem, and one which deserves a rather higher place in our affections than it does in our minds as a whole. What may be found in it is not far from what may readily be found elsewhere, and its principle of organization lacks the vitality and distinctiveness of what integrates Elynour Rummyng, the single scene of the poem itself as that is brought progressively into focus.

Colyn Cloute and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte can by no means be passed over altogether, and if I pass them over for the moment, it is in order to give emphasis to a more general point. The poems which Skelton wrote in short lines, rhyming consecutively—in ‘Skeltonics’—are usually thought of as his most distinctive and most interesting ones. Long ago, this idea supplied Isaac D'Israeli with a cumbrous joke and a mixed metaphor: ‘Whenever (Skelton's) muse plunges into the long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream.’¹⁹ The idea reappears implicitly in what has surely been the most influential of recent pronouncements on Skelton, Mr Graves' poem John Skelton,²⁰ which is itself written in a kind of Skeltonics, and which catalogues most of ‘helter-skelter John's’ short-line poems, without any reference to his other works. And when Professor Lewis writes²¹ ‘the things that Mr Graves gets out of Skelton's work are much better than anything Skelton put in’, he is clearly not taking issue with this conception of Skelton, even if it is not entirely clear that he is endorsing it.

This notion of what most distinguishes Skelton is erroneous; the Skeltonics are what stand out if we survey only the externals of his work, if our findings are a little too much like what a computer could find if Skelton's poems were fed into it. Some of the most remarkable qualities of Skelton's work are obscured and concealed by his short line. It is in what D'Israeli misleadingly called ‘the long measure of his heroic verse’ that these qualities are most abundantly manifested; and when this is realized, Mr Graves's

What could be dafter
Than John Skelton's laughter?
What sound more tenderly
Than his pretty poetry?

falls short of adequacy.

Skelton's The Bouge of Court is widely recognized as a poem which gives a new individuality to a conventional form, that of the dream-poem; but this is perhaps to praise that work on too easy terms. References to Skelton's avoidance of ‘the conventional arbor’²² or statements like ‘for the first time the medieval vision is given a strictly local habitat’²³ ignore such things as the opening of the Kingis Quair: King James of Scotland's sleepless night, with his book at his bedside and the matins bell to disturb him. With this, one might perhaps take Henryson in his study mending the fire and taking strong drink to keep out the cold before he settles down to write The Testament of Cresseid. The distinction of Skelton's poem lies less in any simple change in its mechanical organization, than in something which is woven intimately into its texture. Among the various allegorical figures whom Skelton meets as passengers when he boards the ship, from which the poem takes its title, that of Riot is perhaps the best known.

Wyth that came Ryotte, russhynge all at onces,
          A rusty gallande, to-ragged and to-rente;
And on the borde he whyrled a payre of bones,
          Quater treye dews he clatered as he wente;
Now haue at all, by saynte Thomas of Kente!
And euer he threwe and kyst I wote nere what:
His here was growen thorowe oute his hat.
Thenne I behelde how he dysgysed was:
          His hede was heuy for watchynge ouer nyghte;
His eyen blereed, his face shone lyke a glas;
          His gowne so shorte that it ne couer myghte
          His rumpe, he wente so all for somer lyghte;
His hose was garded wyth a lyste of grene,
Yet at the knee they were broken, I wene.

This account, as a whole, is more than ‘a brilliant sketch of the seedy, jazz-humming early Tudor roué’ as it has been called;²⁴ and it displays more than ‘a genius for satirical portraiture’²⁵tout court. The affinity with Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale may be partial, but it is unmistakable. The note of pathos, of tragedy in Riot's high spirits and gay tatters is not, surely, the mere interpolation of a modern mind. ‘Counter he coude O lux vpon a potte,’ Skelton writes: it is the medieval hymn O lux beata trinitas that Riot counters. We are never—even if only through the oaths that come incessantly throughout this poem—allowed to forget the religious dimension in which all these essentially human and mortal figures have their being. ‘… by that Lorde that bought dere all mankynde, I can not flater, I muste be playne to thē’; ‘by that Lorde that is one, two, and thre, I haue an errande to rounde in your ere’ (an echo of Chaucer echoing Dante). This note might not be clear as irony, were it not for the constantly scriptural note, also sounding ironically, of the rest:

Loo, what it is a man to haue connynge!
All erthly tresoure it is surmountynge.

and

Nay, naye, be sure, whyles I am on your syde,
Ye may not fall, truste me, ye may not fayle

and

Maystress, quod I, I haue none aquentaunce,
That wyll for me be medyatoure and mene

—all these illustrate something which is sustained so much without intermission through the poem, that in the end it is quite inescapable. Skelton is leading us to see these figures—figures ‘for whome Tybourne groneth both daye and nyghte’—as erring mortal creatures in the fullest sense; in fact his compassionate comprehension is if anything more in evidence here, and more sombrely and solemnly in evidence, than it was in Elynour Rummyng.

Something else is in evidence also. Skelton's insight into men's behaviour, exact and humane as it was, could not but equip him with real power for dramatization. English literature seems to have reached fully dramatic writing only with difficulty: perhaps because this demands a sense of realistic detail, a power of comprehension and selection which is more than realism, and also (if it is to be in verse) an appropriately developed metrical vehicle. Chaucer mastered it even as early as the Hous of Fame; most English medieval plays only strive towards it. In The Bouge of Court it is otherwise. Dyssymulation, for example, tells the poet that the people in the court are all malicious gossips. Then he makes an exception of himself:

For all be it that this longe not to me,
          Yet on my backe I bere suche lewde delynge:
Ryghte now I spake with one, I trowe, I see;
          But, what, a strawe! I maye not tell all thynge.
By God, I saye there is grete herte brennynge
Betwene the persone ye wote of, (and) you.

These lines are typical, and to read them is to find oneself in almost total contact with the movement of a living mind as it works its way from word to word.

Contrast that moment in Stephen Hawes' Example of Vertue when the poet meets Dame Sensuality riding on a goat. If we have any hopes that her arrival will infuse a little vitality into the poem, the poet extinguishes those hopes with stunning celerity:

‘Nay,’ said Discretion, ‘that may nat be’
‘No,’ said I, ‘in no maner of wise
To her request will I now agree
But evermore her foul Lust despise …’

‘So forth I went …’ Hawes' next stanza baldly opens. That is a phrase which recurs throughout his poem: each time it marks an evasion of reality, a giving up by the poet before material he cannot handle.

By contrast, the personifications of The Bouge of Court have a vivid vernacular life. So have those in Magnyfycence. Among Skelton's works for acting, this is the only one (apart, probably, from a recently discovered and uninspired fragment) which survives.²⁶ For all that it is too intricate and much too long, some of the dialogue of this play is remarkable for the period in which it was written or indeed for long after. One example is the scene in which three of the characters in the play recognize a fourth through his disguise, and then pretend that he is a priest, and maul at his clothes:

CLOKED Colusyon:
Knowe they not me, they are to blame
Knowe you not me, syrs?
FANCY:
No, in dede.
CRAFTY Conveyaunce:
Abyde, lette me se, take better hede:
Cockes harte, it is Cloked Colusyon
CL. Col.:
A, syr, I pray God gyve you confusyon!
FAN.:
Cockes armes, is that your name?
C. Count.:
Ye, by the masse, this is euen the same,
That all this matter must vnder grope.
CR. Con.:
What is this he wereth, a cope?
CL. Co.:
Cappe, syr; I say you be to bolde.
FAN.:
Se, howe he is wrapped for the colde:
Is it not a vestment?
CL. Col.:
A, ye wante a rope.
C. Count.:
Tushe, it is Syr Johnn Double cloke
FAN.:
Syr, and yf ye wolde not be wrothe—
CL. Col.:
What sayst?
FAN.:
Here was to lytell clothe.

This is essentially—a point to which my argument will revert—a colloquial, a vernacular kind of drama. But it is written with a fine sense of action upon the stage, and with real shrewdness and insight into how men can behave.

Yet vivid dialogue is not what gives Magnyfycence its essential significance. After all, the most that can be said of it on that score is that it points forward, hesitantly and intermittently, to the comic dialogue of Shakespeare. In some other qualities also (its overtly political setting, and perhaps its emphasis on Aristotelian ideas of the good ruler and of virtue) this work looks forward; but in its most deeply significant qualities it does not. Miss Dodds has pointed out that although the moral of the play for Magnyfycence himself is Measure, the Aristotelian Golden Mean, it is not that for the audience.²⁷ For the audience the moral is the more deeply traditional idea of universal Mutability:

A myrrour incleryd is this interlude,
This lyfe inconstant for to beholde and se;
Sodenly riches, and sodenly pouerty,
Sodenly comfort, and sodenly adversyte …

With these lines, and the quite new note that they strike, we reach the core of Skelton's achievement. The idea is that upon which Chaucer ends his Troilus and Criseyde, and the lines are from a rhyme-royal stanza, which is Chaucer's metre in Troilus also. But what Skelton writes in the two whole stanzas which follow is a collection of gnomic sayings, having the structure of thought and the rhythm of language of an essentially proverbial wisdom—in this case, the basic idea, that life is suddenly one thing, and then suddenly its opposite.

I have not seen any explicit recognition of how much Skelton's work owes to proverbial language, and in doing so, to the whole way of life and cast of mind which finds its expression in proverbial language; although the first modern edition of his work is full of information on this very subject. Here the short line poems are relevant once again. ‘Such apple-tree, such fruit’; ‘loth to hang the bell / About the cattes neck’; ‘hearted like an hen’; ‘not worth a leek’; ‘as wise as Waltham's calfe’; ‘all is fish that cometh to net’; ‘we may blow at the coal’; ‘Mock hath lost her shoe’; ‘… it is a wily mouse / That can build hys dwellyng house / Within the cat's ear’—it is not a matter merely of Skelton's using proverbial wise sayings. His verse draws on the proverbial kind of expression for a good deal of its vivid metaphorical wealth, and for something of its whole attitude to its subject—bold yet unassuming, essentially down-to-earth. It uses the clichés of ordinary people (which are not clichés at all, because instead of making the mind gloss over the plain facts, they bring it abruptly up against them) but it is using these in order to assimilate the whole idea which ordinary people form of reality. 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 recognizable point, the essential quality of what was creative in his mind. It is the same quality which shows, if we consider the use that he made of the authors on whose work he draws. Juvenal in his eighth satire, for example, had written:

                                                            quo, si nocturnus adulter
Tempora Santonico velas adoperta cucullo

Skelton almost certainly has this passage in mind when he attacks Wolsey in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte. But what he writes is:

Ye may weare a cockes come;
Your fonde hed in your furred hood,
Holde ye your tong, ye can no goode:

Juvenal's line embodies penetrating diagnosis of a fact, and an attitude of angry superiority to it; Skelton replaces this by the common sense, and the impudence towards the great, of the plain man.²⁸ In the Garlande of Laurell there is an account of how the Phoenix consumes itself in the fire. Skelton probably had a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XV, in mind. But he adds something of his own about this Phoenix:

                                                                                          her wynges betwene
She bet vp a fyre with the sparkis full kene.

Perhaps it is not fanciful to suggest that this comes nearer to an early morning scene in Skelton's own Norfolk parsonage, than it does to Ovid. Again, when Skelton in the same poem describes the bard Iopas singing his song in the garden of the Muses, he follows the closing lines of the first book of the Aeneid; but there is nothing in Virgil which corresponds to the lively turn of thought, humorous rather than witty, whereby Skelton's Iopas, in his songs about the constellations, includes

                    that pole artike which doth remayne
Behynde the taile of Vrsa so clere

and there is nothing in Virgil, beyond a plain ‘rainy Hyades’, which could produce the vividness in Skelton's homely touch of the Hyades' ‘misling eye’.

Thus, Skelton's manner of drawing on proverbial language and of drawing away from literary models both show the essential quality of his mind. So, more important perhaps, do his rhythms. Dr Nelson argues that of all the various progenitors which have been suggested for Skelton's short-line verse, the brief chiming cadences of Latin rhyming prose are the most likely.²⁹ In this he seems clearly right. It is much more open to question, though, whether he is right in suggesting that the transition from prose to verse was, in Skelton's case, one towards smoothness and regularity. Across Skelton's short lines there seems often to be an irregular longer rhythm; one which is essentially a long spoken rhythm, the angry accelerating tirade brought to a halt by an emphatic rallentando and pause. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte, ll. 65-81, seem to be a good illustration of this. If this is so, it is yet another example of how Skelton adapts what is literary in origin to vehement speech and to the cast of mind which lies behind that kind of speech.

However this may be, a parallel trend is quite indisputable in the case of Skelton's longer metre. His long lines, it is true, can sometimes be seen almost as two short ‘Skeltonic’ lines combined into one: but that is by no means the whole of the story. The convention that the poet should disparage his own work may have been why Skelton makes one of the characters in Magnyfycence say that his big speech—really a dramatic chorus—will be ‘In bastarde ryme after the dogrell gyse’. But again, that is not the whole story. Ramsay, in his admirable Introduction to Magnyfycence, made it clear that Skelton's long line, even in the rhyme-royal sections of this poem, is not the regular five-stress line of Chaucer at all, but a four-stress line, which never carries the sense on from line to line; which is marked by constant alliteration; which may vary in length from seven to fourteen syllables; and which (in its ampler forms) centres round a very emphatic central pause. The result is a loose and exceedingly flexible verse form, which can vary from almost naïve spareness to great amplitude and copiousness, which has as its metrical unit not the foot at all, but the self-dependent phrase, and which is such as we might expect, in fact, if the sense of rhythm which we have in Langland were to be forced into expression through a Chaucerian rhythmic form. It is essentially a metre dominated by the speaking voice, as against a metre which dominates the voice. Here is one part of its connexion with proverbial utterance, and the cast of mind which goes with that. Another part is how it resists enjambement—each line makes a separate statement—and how it naturally falls into two parts around its central pause, for this is also common in proverbs. (Many hands, light work; if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.)

Skelton may be the master of this metre, but he did not invent it. A fifteenth-century poem like ‘Lex is layde and lethyrly lukys’³⁰ falls not only into the metre, but also into the gnomic quality, the macaronics, and the general attitudes, which are common in Skelton:

Veritas is demytt to hange one the ruyde,
Verecundia was drownytt at the laste fluyde,
So that few freyndes may a man fynde,
ffor rectum iudicium commys so farre be-hynde.
ffraus is fykyll as a fox, and reuys in this lande
ffuror is hys freynde, as I vnderstande …

Another poem of this general period is especially interesting, because it shows the attitude of mind which tended to force a poet into using the stress metre. Like Skelton's Ancient Aqueyntaunce, it begins as a deceptively decorous compliment to a lady, and turns into a ribald and telling palinode against her. As it makes this transition in attitude, its rhythm changes from smooth, regular rhythm by feet, to an abrupt Skeltonic rhythm of the half-line and the independent phrase.³¹ The poem opens:

O mosy Quince hangyng by your stalke
The whyche no man may pluk away ner take

but by the time it is speaking out, as it were, we find lines like:

My louely lewde masterasse take consideracion
I am so sorrowfull there as yet be absent
The flowre of the barkfate(32) the fowlyst of all the nacion
To loue you but a lytyll hit myne entent.

Counterfeit Countenaunce's chorus speech, to which I referred just now, is essentially in this stress-rhythm also; and it is this which enables it to move, with great freedom and ease, out of abrupt and lively dialogue into what is almost a rhetoric of moral denunciation. It opens with a light rhythm like

Fansy hath cachyd in a flye net
This noble man Magnyfycence

and little by little, in a kind of flux and reflux, it is amplified into lines like

Counterfet preaching and byleue the contrary
Counterfet conscyence, peuysshe pope holy:
Counterfet sadness, with delynge full madly;
Counterfet holyness is called ypocrysy;
Counterfet reason is not worth a flye;
Counterfet wysdome, and workes of foly;
Counterfet countenaunce every man doth occupy:

In fact, the general recurrent movement of this play is to modulate from dialogue to this kind of moralistic verse, solemn yet essentially popular and traditional in both its style and its attitudes.

This same kind of poetry is constantly breaking through the ‘literary’ tedium of The Garlande of Laurell:

He is not wyse ageyne the streme that stryvith;
          Dun is in the myre, dame, reche me my spur;
Nedes must he rin that the deuyll dryuith;
          When the stede is stolyn, spar the stable dur;
A ientyll hownde shulde neuer play the kur;
It is sone aspyed where the thorne prikketh;
And wele wotith the cat whose berde she likketh.

But it is in Speke, Parot that these qualities of Skelton's work are most important, for that extraordinary poem is surely his masterpiece. Historically, this poem marks not only Skelton's hostility to Wolsey, and those policies of Wolsey which were inescapably bringing the whole traditional order to an end, but also Skelton's general hostility to the growing Erastianism of the time,³³ and his now final abandonment of London and the Court, for the great conservative family of the Earl of Surrey. Indeed, everything which shows Skelton's place in the culture of his time seems to converge in this poem. Morality based upon the Bible and the people's proverbial wisdom goes here with an essentially vernacular use of language throughout, with a distinctive development of the polyglot macaronic kind of writing (a popular and goliardic mode rather than a literary one), and with a structure, perhaps, somewhat like those commonplace books which passed from hand to hand in the country houses of the time and contained, as Dr Person writes, ‘poetry and prose, English, Latin, or French, long poems and scraps, religion and science, devotional and satiric works, riddles and proverbs’.³⁴ Yet out of this gallimaufry, Skelton has made a poem which (though a chaos from a mechanical standpoint) is imaginatively perhaps the most unified of his works. It is unified in the persistent vivid presence and exceedingly distinctive tone—the tone of one who threatens and is himself in danger—of the parrot itself. Above all it is unified in the gathering power and directness of the attack as this gradually breaks through the speaker's prudence, and at last converts his glancing blows into the finale: a fierce and solemn denunciation of Wolsey himself:

So braynles caluys hedes, so many shepis taylys;
          So bolde a braggyng bocher, and flesshe sold so
                    dere;
So many plucte partryches, and so fat quaylles;
          So mangye a mastyfe curre, the grete grey houndes
                    pere;
          So bygge a bulke of brow antlers cabagyd that yere;
So many swannes dede, and so small revell;—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde, I trow, no man can tell.

We scarcely need to trace Wolsey's father the butcher in these lines, nor the Tudor greyhound, nor the swan of the Duke of Buckingham. The passionate, unflinching, comprehensive grasp of reality, and embodiment of it in an idiom wholly the writer's own, are unmistakable. If we think that we are not in the presence here of poetic greatness, it is because there is a kind of poetic greatness which we have not learnt to know.

To make this claim is not to make every claim. Nothing in Skelton has the poignancy, strangeness, and deep compassion of the scene in Henryson's poem where Cressid the leper begs an alms of Prince Troilus, and his memory of her swims half way to the light, but then goes back into darkness. Skelton has nothing of the imaginative brilliance of Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satire of the Thrie Estatis, in the opening words of Sensualitie:

Luifers awalk, behald the fyrie spheir,
Behauld the naturall dochter of Venus.

This is not going far afield. But what we do see in Skelton is one quite distinctive kind of excellence. A variety of vernacular traditions, a vernacular kind of insight, a metre and a rhythm which had for long had contact with vernacular expression—all these are things that come together in Skelton's verse. Once again George Puttenham, cicerone of the new and more literary poetic which succeeded Skelton and put him out of favour, settles that matter for us (though he settles less than he thinks) when he ridicules

small and popular musickes song … upon benches and barrels heads where they have none other audience then boys or countrey fellowes that passe them in the streete, or else by blind harpers or such like taverne minstrels that give a fit of mirth for a groat, and their matters being for the most part stories of old time … also they be used in Carols and rounds and such light or lascivious Poemes, which are commonly more commodiously uttered by these buffons or vices in plays then by any other person. Such were the rimes of Skelton … in our courtly maker we banish them utterly.³⁵

To accept this view of Skelton as essentially in contact with the apprehension of life of the ordinary man is not to accept what Puttenham thought it meant: that his work was crude and artless. I hope I have shown how he drew upon, or sometimes transformed, the work of his predecessors or models. His rhythmic spontaneity and flexibility is in fact a high technical achievement, towards which we can see him working from The Bouge of Court on to Speke, Parot. But when we open our minds to what is most distinctive of the truly literary quality of his verse, what we find is amplitude, immediacy, rhythmic vitality, a suggestion of embodied power for growth. What Henry James called ‘felt life’ seems to operate in the texture of his language with a quite special freedom and directness; and when that language moves, as it often does, beyond plain speech, it moves in a different direction from that which is conspicuous in Donne, say, and the poets who followed Donne: it moves less towards wit and argumentation through figurative language, than towards the proverbial gnomic solemnity of the traditional and popular mind. The result is no mere mirror of life, no mere Skeltonic realism, but something of an embodiment of life's permanent contours and essential vitality. Much may be absent from Skelton, but this, with the deep refreshment which it brings, is not absent.

When a literature—like our own—is old, and has been forming and re-forming for centuries, and has been reacting with other literatures for centuries also, there is a strong tendency for your courtly maker or his counterpart to predominate, and for writers generally to seek and expect success through naturally and studiously imitating their master Francis Petrarch or whoever may be the Francis Petrarch of the hour. We cannot but recall at this point the views of Graves and Berenson, which I quoted earlier, about multiplying tricks and devices, achieving a highly individual style, perpetually changing, displaying genius which is as frequently destructive and constructive. ‘What has not been done? What is left to do?’ seems more and more insistently to become the cry. Perhaps this cannot but tend to happen, as the centuries go by, and the past tends to weigh down, more and more, upon the present. But in Skelton, although he had the interests of a serious poet, and although his civilization was old rather than young, something else has happened. In his work, the dominance of artistry by reality is peculiarly thorough-going, peculiarly intimate and genuine. This may or may not be the balance which we find at the very pinnacle of artistic achievement; but I think it is one which we greatly need to contemplate, and to learn from, today.

Notes

1. The Reader over Your Shoulder (1943), p. 120.

2. Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1938 edition), p. 331.

3. op. cit., I. xxxi; ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, 1936, p. 62.

4. W. Nelson, John Skelton (1939), pp. 4-59.

5. V. L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance (1941), pp. 37-9.

6. See, e.g., Ian A. Gordon, John Skelton (1943), pp. 122 et seq.

7. See the introduction to Skelton's translation of the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus (ed. F. M. Salter and H. H. L. Edwards, 1956; E.E.T.S. original series 229, p. xxxix).

8. Colyn Cloute, l. 83.

9. Salter and Edwards, ed. cit. p. xxxvii.

10. English Writers, Vol. 7 (1891), p. 190.

11. English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (1927), p. 337.

12. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), p. 138; p. 106.

13. C Text, Passus VII, ll. 349-441.

14. Cf. R. L. Greene, Early English Carols (1935), No. 419 (‘The Gossips' Meeting’); Greene compares this with the ‘Good Gossippes Songe’ in the Chester play of the Deluge, but this is too short and slight to have much in common with Skelton's poem.

15. Quoted from A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (1930), pp. 4-5.

16. W. L. Renwick and H. Orton, The Beginnings of English Literature to Skelton (second ed., 1952), p. 114.

17. M. M. Gray, Scottish Poetry from Barbour to James VI, Introduction (1935 edition, p. xvii); these remarks relate specifically to another similar work, Peblis to the Play, but also generally to the humourous poems in the Bannatyne and Maitland MSS. which stand out (like Christis Kirke on the Grene) for their ‘boisterous merriment and rough-and-tumble’.

18. H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton (1949), p. 53.

19. Amenities of Literature (1841), Vol. II, p. 69.

20. Poems (1914-26), pp. 6-8.

21. op. cit., p. 143.

22. Nelson, op. cit., p. 78.

23. Edwards, op. cit., p. 62.

24. Edwards, op. cit., p. 63.

25. Nelson, op. cit., p. 82.

26. See the article by G. L. Frost and Ray Nash, ‘Good Order’: A Morality Fragment, S.P., 1944, p. 483.

27. Madeleine Hope Dodds, ‘Early Political Plays’ (Library, Series III, Vol. 4, p. 393).

28. Juvenal, Satires, VIII, 144-5; Why Come Ye Nat to Courte, ll. 1232-4. It should be noticed that at l. 1224 Skelton has quoted verbatim part of l. 140 of the Eighth Satire.

29. op. cit., pp. 90 et seq.

30. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century (1959), No. 176, p. 269.

31. Henry A. Person (ed.), Cambridge Middle English Lyrics (1953), No. 49, p. 40.

32. Tanner's vat.

33. See J. M. Berdan, ‘Speke, Parrot’; MLN, Vol. 30 (1915), p. 140.

34. Person, op. cit., p. iv.

35. op. cit., ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 83-4.