SOURCE: Halpern, Richard. “John Skelton and the Poetics of Primitive Accumulation.” In Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint, pp. 225-256. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Halpern explains that Skelton lived in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism—which Karl Marx described as a process of “primitive accumulation”—and says that Skelton's works, particularly Phillip Sparrow, displays a utopian response and a counter-movement to that cultural movement and ideology of the newly powerful state.]

I

Defying the best efforts of critics, John Skelton has valiantly resisted all attempts to provide him a secure place within the English literary canon. Even among minor Renaissance poets he remains quirky and marginalized, partly because of the conjunction of attributes that led Alexander Pope to dub him “beastly.” The satires display a brutish energy for obscure vituperation while The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming is a paradigm of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed “grotesque realism”: swine, hags, chickens, feces, snot, drool, and ale fly about and combine in every conceivable fashion. C. S. Lewis compared Skelton's distinctive meter with “the form used by every clown scribbling on the wall in an inn yard.”¹

In the end, though, Skelton's disturbance of historical, not biological, species has caused the most trouble. Lewis insists that Skelton “has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands outside of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual, a man we have met” (143). More specifically, Skelton cannot be fitted within the scheme of cultural periodization which characterizes traditional literary history. Ian Gordon delineated the problem in his 1943 study when he wrote that “Skelton fell between two periods, the receding Middle Ages and the advancing Renaissance, without being a part of either.”² Reverting, Pope-like, to the vocabulary of the monstrous, Gordon calls Skelton “a Mr. Facing-Both-Ways,” adding that “seldom has a poet borne the marks of a transition age so clearly as Skelton.”³ His position as a missing link has no doubt contributed to Skelton's relative obscurity, since neither the Renaissance nor the medieval “camp” feels quite comfortable in adopting him.

Lewis and Gordon ascribe Skelton's historical unassimilability partly to his perverse and obstreperous individualism (as though one could transcend history by sheer force of will or personality), partly to the “transitional” nature of his historical moment. I shall concentrate primarily on this latter aspect, because the terms in which the problem of Skelton has been posed tell us less about the poet himself than about the inadequacy of certain schemes of cultural periodization.

Interestingly, the articulation of the problem has changed very little since Gordon's day. In John Skelton's Poetry (1965), Stanley Fish nuances Gordon's formulation but does not fundamentally alter it:

Skelton's poetry 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 1536.⁴

Once again Skelton occupies a kind of historical vacuum, and once again (as it had for Lewis) this shifts the focus of attention from the historical to the subjective: “[W]e shall examine a poetry in which the accidents of history provide the raw material for a drama which is essentially interior.”⁵

While Gordon describes Skelton as bearing “the marks of a transition age,” both he and later critics find it difficult to formulate the concept of transition, if by this we mean a passage, development, or mediation from one historical stage to another. What they call transition is actually a gap between the end of medieval poetry (ca. 1480) and the beginning of Renaissance poetry (ca. 1536). Fish's chronology has a certain local validity, to which I shall turn, but I would argue that the temporal hiatus he posits is really the displacement of a theoretical gap, specifically the inability to theorize a transition.

This in turn results from the empiricist periodizations that the transition must bridge; without a theory of history, critics can only list sets of empirical phenomena whose unarticulated conjunctions are dubbed “medieval” on the one hand, “Renaissance” on the other. Thus the lyric poetry of the later Middle Ages is marked by scholasticism, the formalism of late medieval rhetoric, and an otherworldly, devotional stance, while Renaissance poetry arises from the influence of humanism, the reinvigoration of classical rhetoric, and an interest in the secular. On this level the gap described by Fish does appear; he brilliantly describes Skelton's partial break from a rhetorical tradition that was largely played out, as well as his ambivalence toward a humanism that at that time was emergent but not yet dominant in England.

The barrier to conceptualizing this transition entirely from within literary history, however, is the fact that the dominant structuring forces of the transition are not to be found within literary history but rather in the larger sociohistorical field. Gordon adjoins cultural developments to political, economic, and social ones—the rise of a wealthy commercial class, the consolidation of absolutist monarchy, the Reformation—but these elements merely contribute to a larger series, not to a complexly articulated totality. Not only is the problem of transition unresolvable under these conditions, but history itself tends to atomize into what Fish calls “accidents.”

In reality, then, Skelton reveals the scandal of literary history, not the other way around. To begin to come to terms with his poetry thus requires us to formulate a history that can accommodate him. This does not mean to reduce him, to eradicate his genuine originality in conformity to an iron law, to find a history of which he is the “normal” expression. It means to construct a field against which the eccentricity of his productions can at least be mapped and understood. For history, like nature, abhors a vacuum; the same movement that eliminates the gap between historical “periods” will also eliminate that other (and not unrelated) gap between empirical or “accidental” history and an individual subject conceived as the site of a monadic, interiorized drama.

II

The local and practical task of describing Skelton's transitional poetics has as its necessary condition, then, the construction of an adequate concept of the transition itself. Clearly Skelton stands on the brink of that major cultural revolution we know as the Renaissance. Yet this is in turn situated within a larger and more fundamental historical process: the transition from the feudal to the capitalist modes of production, which Marx described as a process of “primitive accumulation”:

The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labor. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own two feet, it not only maintains this relation but reproduces it on a constantly expanding scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.⁶

In short, “primitive accumulation” denotes the process by which the feudal petty producer was converted into the “free” wage laborer, that is, freed from the politico-juridical bonds of feudal relations, but also separated from the means of production by which he could support himself. The story by which this was accomplished—the deracination of the peasantry by enclosure, engrossment, and the commutation of dues, the destruction of the petty artisan by usurer's capital and merchant oligarchies—is too familiar to need recounting here. So is the story of the other half of primitive accumulation: how merchant's and usurer's capital created a concentrated hoard of money that could be used to hire the newly proletarianized workers as wage labor.⁷ As Marx makes clear, however, the process of primitive accumulation does not stand between two modes of production; rather it creates the elements of capitalist production from within the structures of feudalism.⁸ Primitive accumulation is in this sense nothing other than late feudalism, distinguished primarily by a large-scale monetarization of the feudal economy.⁹

The spread of money relations under late feudalism led to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have termed the “deterritorialization” of the feudal party.¹⁰ Perry Anderson describes the effects of this process on the state:

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 leige loyalty and knight service to the seignurial 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 the village level, it became concentrated at the “national” level.¹¹

If the overcoding¹² of local feudal jurisdiction by the state was, in one sense, the outcome of conflicts within the feudal nobility, it was in another sense a way of centralizing feudal exploitation. By deterritorializing the feudal polity, the absolutist state produced a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position.”¹³ In England this process was accomplished by the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, beginning with Henry VII's “primitive accumulation” of state power after the Wars of the Roses.¹⁴

At this same time, moreover, the spread of feudal commerce and merchant's capital dissolved local and particularistic barriers to trade. The development of commodity production tended to decode¹⁵ productive relations and further deterritorialize the polity, though within strict limits set by the dominant (feudal) relations of production.¹⁶ Together with the overcoding operations of the state (with which it was allied), merchant's capital effected what we may call a primary deterritorialization of the feudal polity. While it could not, and did not seek to, totally dissolve the parcellized sovereignty that characterized feudalism, it reorganized feudal territories within an increasingly unified economic field and thus complemented the overcoding operations of the state which subjected these territories to a unified legal and political apparatus. The period of primitive accumulation thus laid the groundwork for the fuller deterritorialization that would accompany the dominance of industrial capital.

III

Comparing the beginning of Skelton's life, sometime around 1460, with its end in 1529 helps to measure the pace of transition during this period. Actually, Skelton's life lacks an origin, at least one that is accessible to us. The problem arises not from a dearth of documents on John Skelton, but from an abundance of them: “Systematic inquiry reveals about two hundred and fifty Skeltons during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of whom one hundred or so are named John. Some twenty of these are found in London in the poet's time, about half a dozen in the neighborhood of the court.”¹⁷ This documentary excess of Skeltons, none of whom can be conclusively identified with the poet, may be taken as emblematic of the fragmented, incomplete, and parceled condition of the contemporary administrative machinery. But it is not just that the real John Skelton has eluded identification; in a certain historical sense he really does not exist. For the centralized apparatus that will definitively record the identity of its subjects also produces this identity in a new way. The administered subject is not just the trace or recording of a prior subject. It is a new thing.¹⁸

Identification of Skelton's birth, or lack of same, contrasts profitably with the traditional account of his death in 1529—at Westminster, where he sought sanctuary from the state he had so fearlessly ridiculed in his later satires.¹⁹ The Church, of course, had had its own autonomous and sovereign “parcels” within the feudal polity, of which the right of sanctuary was an expression.²⁰ But even as Skelton wrote satires against him, Cardinal Wolsey was trying to dissolve the power of sanctuary within the extended sovereignty of the absolutist state.²¹

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

(1089-92)²²

So wrote Skelton in Why Come Ye Not to Court? (1522). In the final section of Speak Parrot (1521?), where Parrot is urged to “speke now trew and plaine,” he lets fly a catalogue of abuses which situates the violation of sanctuary within the political and economic processes of primitive accumulation:

So many thevys hangyd, and thevys neverthelesse;
So myche presonment, for matyrs not worth a hawe;
So mych 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 mokkkyshe makyng of statutes of array—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr, I dar sey.
So many trusys takyn, and so lytyll perfyte throwthe;
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 statues apon diettes, suche pyllyng and pollyng—
          …
So many vacabones, 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 dowbill faces;
So myche sayntuary brekyng, and prevylegidde barryd—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr sene nor lyerd.

(477-83, 491-95, 498-504)

Like some later critics, Skelton juxtaposes rather than articulates the social transformations at work in his day. Yet a certain logic of adjacency connects the violation of sanctuary with the proliferation of Tudor laws, and furthermore connects these developments with an increasing concentration of wealth. Parrot's speech recalls Raphael Hythlodaeus's anatomy of abuses in Book 1 of Thomas More's Utopia, but here the focus of analysis is more ethical than social. For Parrot (and Skelton), these social phenomena are bound together by the moral category of “excess”—excessive wealth, poverty, power, pride—and the resultant politics are therefore conservative, consisting primarily of a desire to restore the restraint and reciprocity that characterized feudal social relations. Yet even while it displaces social contradictions onto an ethical space, the category of “excess” allows the social process to be grasped as a totality, albeit an ideological and expressive one. The tentacular reach of “excess” enables Skelton to conceive, in at least a rudimentary way, of a globalized process of primitive accumulation.

But the topical politics of the later satires, interesting as they are, are not my primary concern here. For the process of deterritorialization, which reaches an explicit crisis for Skelton in the sanctuary question, informs even his nonpolitical works. Political topography forms a subtext against which all of Skelton's poetical practice defines itself, and this practice in turn generates a politics that does not entirely coincide with his explicitly stated beliefs, but rather provides a radical and utopian counterpoint to them.

IV

While this essay will focus primarily on Phillip Sparrow, unquestionably one of Skelton's masterpieces, we will enter that work by way of another, “companion” poem. Ware the Hawk was composed while Skelton was rector at Diss, presumably around the time when he wrote Phillip Sparrow (1505?). This period witnessed Skelton's peculiar and somewhat inexplicable “break” with the conventional formulas of late medieval lyric. Ian Gordon wrote that “With the change from London to the country parish came a revolution in Skelton's thought and poetry”:

The respected priest, courtier and royal schoolmaster broke out into the most disrespectful of verses and continued on his outspoken way for almost a couple of decades, undeterred by criticism or disparagement, writing with the fervour of a man who had at last found a mission in life. It was as if the headmaster of Eton turned to Communist pamphleteering.²³

Gordon's witticism, I think, has a figural logic that exceeds its intent. Like the pamphleteering headmaster, Skelton ludicrously betrays his social class, and in so doing seems to leap forward into an as-yet nonexistent social formation; or rather, drags it back into his own, with all the scandal that inevitably attends prophecy. The reasons for Skelton's “conversion” remain obscure. Maurice Pollet suggests that Skelton was dissatisfied at being sent from the royal court at London to the “backwater” of Diss. Perhaps, then, the break resulted from Skelton's experience of having his social mobility rerouted by the state machine.²⁴ In any case, the break was neither final nor definitive. Skelton remained an enthusiastic supporter of Henry's imperial policies, crowed after the suppression of the Scots rebellion, and took a vain delight in his titles of orator regius and poet laureate. Nevertheless, his poetry shows a new strain that will culminate in the satires against Wolsey and the court.

Ware the Hawk, which exemplifies the beginnings of Skelton's distinctive poetic, describes and denounces the actions of a neighboring priest who becomes so involved in hawking that he pursues his prey right into Skelton's church at Diss. 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 while 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

                                                  playe the daw
To hawke, or els to hunt
From the auter to the funt,
Wyth cry unreverent,
Before the sacrament,
Wythin the holy church bowndis,
That of our fayth the grownd is.

(8-14)

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.²⁵ 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 parcellized sovereignty, represents Skelton's primary experience of this structure, its ideological paradigm.²⁶ 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
With his hawkys bels?
Dowtles such losels
Make the church to be
In smal auctoryte.

(130, 134-40)

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.²⁷

None of this, however, is particularly novel in itself. 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.”²⁸ 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 movement of reterritorialization by the poet, thereby producing a striking—and, for Skelton, characteristic—cohesion between political and rhetorical topographies. This coincidence of spaces produces brilliant formal effects in Phillip Sparrow and offers the privileged means by which Skelton transcodes history into literature.

But an additional element transforms the nature of the poem's process: Ware the Hawk is “a burlesque in the Chaucerian tradition.” Both the incident itself and Skelton's indignation are highly ironized; despite its obsessive formalism, the poem's rhetoric constantly undercuts itself, thereby dissolving the seriousness of the priest's offense.²⁹ Thus, we may add, the poem's defensive reterritorialization is also ironic, or at least ambivalent. A gay destructiveness in Ware the Hawk delights in the violation of boundaries and in the consequent evaporation of the authority constituted by them. Skelton's imagination both enjoys and extends the profanities committed by the neighboring priest, who, the poet claims,

                                        wysshed withall
That the dowves donge downe myght fall
Into my chalys at mas,
When consecrated was
The blessyd sacrament.

(182-86)

The pleasurable onomatopoeia of “dowves donge downe” exemplifies the festive counterlogic of the poem, which can enjoy the pollution even of that final cultural territory, the blessed sacrament.³⁰ 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.

V

Like Ware the Hawk, Phillip Sparrow is set in a chapel and concerns a bird whose presence disrupts the sanctity of the church. The first part of the poem takes place at Carrow Abbey, where Jane Scrope, a young woman, composes a fanciful elegy for her pet sparrow.³¹ Against the backdrop of the Vespers of the Office of the Dead, Jane produces a rambling discourse, sometimes reminiscing about Phillip—their physical intimacies, his endearing habits, his death at the hands (or paws) of Gib the cat—sometimes engaging in reveries that arise from his death (she imagines Phillip's journey to the classical underworld, organizes a fanciful bird mass for him, tries to write a Latin epitaph). Parallels in theme and content suffice to suggest that the poem continues the project of Ware the Hawk, particularly with regard to the question of rhetorical territoriality. Lewis's evaluation of the poem is pertinent:

It is indeed the lightest—the most like a bubble—of all the poems I know. It would break at a touch: but hold your breath, watch it, and it is almost perfect. The Skeltonics are essential to its perfection. Their prattling and hopping and their inconsequence, so birdlike and so childlike, are the best possible embodiment of the theme. We should not, I think, refuse to call the poem great.³²

The fragility of the poem, its tendency to break apart when handled, constitutes an important element of its form; Lewis shrewdly connects this to the birdlike wandering of its discourse, the “inconsequential” arrangement of its topics.

A sense of the poem's method can be gotten from an opening passage in which Jane enumerates her fears for Phillip's soul:

          Of God nothynge els crave I
But Phyllypes soule to kepe
From the marees depe
Of Acherontes well,
That is a flode of hell;
And from the great Pluto,
The prynce of endles wo;
And from foule Alecto,
With vysage blacke and blo;
And from Medusa, that mare,
That lyke a fende doth stare;
And from Megeras edders,
For rufflynge of Phillips fethers,
And from her fyry sparklynges,
For burnynge of his wynges;
And from the smokes sowre
Of Proserpinas bowre;
And from the dennes darke
Where Cerberus doth barke,
Whom Theseus dyd afraye,
Whom Hercules dyd outraye,
As famous poetes say;
From that hell-hounde
That lyeth in cheynes bounde,
With gastly hedes thre;
To Jupyter pray we
That Phyllyp preserved may be!
Amen, say ye with me!

(67-94)

This lengthy quotation was necessary to convey the peculiarly agglomerative style of the poem, in which literary references, authors, myths, or, elsewhere, body parts or kinds of birds are collected into unstructured catalogues. Phillip Sparrow exhibits that interest in literary copia which characterizes the roughly contemporary works of Rabelais and Erasmus, and in which a superfluity of reference seems to obey its own autonomous laws. While invoking an epic tradition, Skelton's allusions do not contribute to a unified or allegorical whole as in the works of Dante and Spenser. Rather, they seem inert and ornamental, collected into hoards that serve no larger design. By analogy, one might designate this copia as a primitive accumulation of poetic material. Certainly there is something suggestive about the fact that Renaissance literary copia flourished under the political and economic dominance of merchant's capital. Such connections must be made with care, however; I shall return to this one later.

While both the internal ordering of catalogues and their succession in the poem follow a loosely associative flow, and on a dramatic or characterological level produce something like a “stream of consciousness,” yet individual catalogues exhibit a strong topical coherence. In the passage quoted above, mythological figures collected from the classical underworld obey no evident pattern of disposition, but they do draw fairly clear boundaries between catalogical sections of the poem. The resultant parceling of Phillip Sparrow recalls the rhetorical divisions that characterized Ware the Hawk and indeed forms one of the many correspondences between the two poems. Yet the formal partitioning of Phillip Sparrow is of a much more complete and radical kind. In Ware the Hawk, the headings of each section announce the divisions of the thema. Thus, at the same time as they divide the poem, they organize its parts into a global rhetorical scheme. The rhetorical headings thus form a kind of sectional exoskeleton for an otherwise unified discourse. Indeed, they imbue the sections with the appearance of a necessary order, since the development of the thema follows an established sequence.

In the first part of Phillip Sparrow, however, the topical parcels are genuinely autonomous and do not unite the poem into a rhetorical whole. Although some of the topoi draw on established literary practices and subgenres—such as the heroic katabasis and the medieval bird mass—yet these derive from different and often incommensurable traditions (a fact that becomes an explicit concern of Jane's when she thinks of composing an epitaph for Phillip) and are furthermore interspersed with such heterogeneous materials as Phillip's erotic wanderings, his reactions to various bugs, and Jane's fantasies about torturing the cat. While the poem is punctuated by overheard scraps of the Office of the Dead, these do not organize Jane's discourse; rather, the poem fragments and absorbs the mass.

This parceled form complements a neutralization of cultural authority, in which it also plays a role. When Phillip Sparrow is substituted for the hero of the classical katabasis in the passage quoted above, the comic disproportionality of the bird tends to dissipate the grandeur of the epic machinery. Thus C. S. Lewis describes the poem as “mock-heroic, though the term must here be stretched to cover the mock-religious as well,” and goes on to compare it with The Rape of the Lock.³³ Yet Phillip Sparrow's innocent destruction of authority must be clearly distinguished from parody or satire. Pope depicts the inversion of epic authority precisely in order to reassert it as the measure of a contemporary decadence. His poem thus depends on maintaining hierarchical differences, while Skelton's poem collapses and neutralizes them. Like Jane herself, Phillip Sparrow does not mock cultural authority because it is ultimately indifferent to it. Thus the poem must also be distinguished from those forms of inversion through degradation which characterize the popular culture of the time, and which Bakhtin has so brilliantly described. Skelton does employ methods of festive degradation elsewhere, most notably in Eleanor Rumming, but also in Ware the Hawk, where the church's spirituality is degraded and materialized when the hawk defecates on the altar (defecation being a recurrent element in festive degradation), and where sacred icons and implements are literally inverted in an emblematic representation of “the world turned upside down.”

Unlike Ware the Hawk, which displays an ambivalent conflict between orthodox and heterodox, hierarchizing and degrading tendencies, Phillip Sparrow simply neutralizes both. The poem's resistance to parody or blasphemy is all the more surprising given the opportunities offered by its impromptu mass for a dead bird. But while the poem draws on traditions associated with goliardic parodies of the mass, it never engages in such parodies itself.³⁴ This in turn results from the failure of the mass (or any other text) to overcode the poem. For to write either a serious or a farcical mass requires that the mass be taken as a formal and ethical paradigm that the text will then necessarily reflect, either in direct or inverted form. In either case, the liturgy would impose the same kind of order on Phillip Sparrow that Skelton's rhetorical schema imposes on Ware the Hawk. But its failure to do so typifies the nature of the poem: any number of potential master codes may operate in localized parcels of the text, but none succeeds in establishing either a temporary or a global dominance.³⁵ Nor is there any form of dominance that is distributed among an “oligarchy” of master codes or texts.

We have seen how the absolutist state partly deterritorializes the parcellized sovereignty of feudalism, recoding local structures so as to produce the centralized and ultimate form of the feudal polity. Skelton engages this process by establishing a correspondence between political and literary territoriality—in effect, by reviving in its fullness the concept of the literary topos. Having done so, however, he does not produce in Phillip Sparrow a representational inversion of the polity, a “world turned upside down,” or, if you will, a pyramid standing on its head. Rather, he throws the deterritorializing machine³⁶ into reverse; in response to centralized sovereignty, the poem radically relocalizes its own structure and neutralizes cultural authorities. The result can only be described as parceled anarchy in a poem whose autonomous localities resist hierarchical organization both in respect to one another and in respect to their own internal forms. This is obviously not a mere reflection of an historical process, but a utopian strategy within its field.

VI

A complementary though in some sense contradictory logic pervades the libidinal register of the poem, where parcellation gives way to a process of decoding. A territorial field is still at stake, though here it is not directly the form of the poem but rather the human body with its sociosexually inscribed regions. The first publication of Phillip Sparrow caused something of a scandal, owing in part to its boldness in depicting what is clearly an erotic relationship between Jane Scrope and her sparrow. To some degree this was simply a result of reviving and extending a Catullan tradition in inappropriate circumstances; but the “beastly” transgressions on both Skelton's and Jane's parts contribute to a larger program of erotic decoding,³⁷ one that bears a visible relationship to the politics of the poem's form.

While Phillip Sparrow returns intermittently to the topic of Jane's and Phillip's physical intimacy, the most extended passage on this matter is the first:³⁸

          For it wold come and go,
And fly so to and fro;
And on me it wolde lepe
Whan I was aslepe,
And his fethers shake,
Wherewith he wold make
Me often for to wake
And for to take him in
Upon my naked skyn.
God wot, we thought no syn—
What though he crept so lowe?
It was no hurt, I trowe.
He dyd nothyng, perde,
But syt upon my kne.
Phyllyp, though he were nyse,
In him it was no vyse;
Phyllyp had leve to go
To pyke my lytell too,
Phillyp myght be bolde
And do what he wolde;
Phillip would seke and take
All the flees blake
That he coulde there espye
With his wanton eye.

(159-82)

Fish's reading of this and the other erotic passages is instructive, based as it is on the presumed contrast between a sophisticated male reader and the charming but naive figure of Jane:

[W]e are aware, as [Jane] is not, of the sexual implications of her demonstratio's:. … It is perhaps difficult to read these lines without questioning her innocence, but we make the necessary effort and accept her demurral: … It is, however, a conscious effort, and Skelton insists that we make it. If his poem is to succeed, we must be continually aware of the distance between what Jane in her innocence would intend and what we would interpolate.³⁹

Fish thus arrives at choice partially justified by the text itself: either Phillip's wandering are innocent, or they arouse Jane sexually. Or again (if I am reading Fish correctly), there is a sexual component Jane is not aware of, though “we” (mature, male readers) know it is there. But what exactly do we “know” that Jane does not? That the relationship is erotic and therefore transgressive. But if we take Jane at her word, she does not deny that Phillip's actions may be erotically pleasurable, only that there is anything wrong with this. Nothing has been transgressed (“It was no hurt, I trowe,” “In him it was no vyse”). Recourse to Freudian negation ignores the fact that Jane's denials are secondary and formal compared with the pleasurability of the erotic narrative. Fish's analysis is not explicitly psychoanalytic, but it does rely on a supposed latency, the pressure of a not-said.

A “transgressive” reading would garner its strongest support from the passage's thematic parallels to Ware the Hawk: just as the hawk's errant flight leads it to violate the sacred territory of the church, so Phillip's wanderings violate the sacred territory of the virgin's body, which doubles with the sanctified host as a holy and hence forbidden ground. Phillip's search for fleas provides a delicate, comic, and titillating parallel to the passage in which the priest's hawk murders pigeons on the sacred altar. In both cases, animal instinct proves sublimely indifferent to the boundaries of cultural taboo. But while Ware the Hawk summons up at least a mock-horror at this outrage, Phillip Sparrow regards only its pleasures (emblematically, the poem's opening word is placebo, its closing phrase rien que playsre).⁴⁰ Phillip's libidinal nomadism does not transgress the sociosexual inscriptions of the body, therefore; rather it erases them, and thus decodes the body's territoriality.

Phillip Sparrow can thus be understood best in terms of the anoedipal, schizophrenic sexuality described by Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Oedipus: a regime in which desire flows (or rather, break-flows) between machinic part-objects, unchanneled by oedipal law and the rule of the phallus. It is thus inappropriate to view Phillip as a “phallic symbol,” a substitute for a genital satisfaction that is lacking.⁴¹ For this is to fall into the teleology of the Oedipus, to interpret the desiring production of part-objects as the secondary effects of a dominant, “mature,” and genital sexuality, governed by the unitary structures of the phallus. Jane's body is composed of desiring-machines—the toe, the knee, the tongue, the breast—all of which produce pleasure, and all of which are connected not by the globalizing stroke of the Oedipus (which would organize the parts into a whole inscribed with taboos), but only by Phillip's random and nomadic wandering, which is the movement of desire itself.⁴² This process has no telos—reproduction or even genital orgasm—nor does it hide or repress anything, nor does it substitute for something lacking; it is simply a decoded and polymorphous flow of desire.

Here it is well to recall Deleuze and Guattari's observation that “global persons do not exist prior to the prohibitions that found them,” prior, that is, to their establishment as structural points on the oedipal triangle, which is in turn constituted by subjugating the diverse break-flows of desire to the law of the phallus or castration (78). In her libidinal functioning, then, Jane should not be regarded as a unified subject but as the site of polyvocal and decoded flows. Her desiring-production resists subordination to the Oedipus in much the same way that the parceled anarchy of the poem resists subordination to the unitary rule of a master code. The utopian and schizophrenic alternative to overcoding thus proceeds simultaneously on political, sexual, and formal levels. Yet while mutually implicated, these levels do not bear an expressive relation to one another; the “same thing” does not happen on each. Formally, the poem reterritorializes itself into autonomous parcels, while its libidinal register is characterized by a deterritorialized nomadism, not autonomy but an unchanneled flow between part-objects. This deterritorialization does not, however, correspond to that carried out by the state; it does not unify the body in order to subject it to the rule of the despot. If the libidinal flows have their historical counterpart, it is to the vagrancy of the deracinated classes, that dangerously destructuring flow that it was the function of the state to recode.

VII

We have thus far discussed separately the issues of poetic form and of Jane's desiring-production; but these two converge, for Jane desires to be a poet, and a good third of her discourse concerns her attempt to write an epitaph for Phillip. Here Jane fulfills her eminently practical critique of the metaphysics of lack, as all her supposed deficiencies conclusively evaporate. In particular, this section of the poem turns on a witty and, for Jane, quite conscious contradiction between an abundance of poetic material and the “lack” of a disposing style. On the one hand, Jane falls most completely into the alibi of insufficiency, and on the other she refutes it in the practice of her discourse:

          Yet one thynge is behynde,
That now commeth to mynde:
An epytaphe I wold have
For Phyllyppes grave.
But for I am a mayde,
Tymerous, halfe afrayde,
That never yet asayde
Of Elyconys well,
Where the muses dwell:
Though I can rede and spell,
Recounte, reporte and tell
Of the Tales of Caunterbury
Some sad storyes, some mery,
As Palamon and Arcet,
Duke Theseus, and Partelet;
And of the Wyfe of Bath,
That worketh moch scath
When her tale is tolde
Amonge huswyves bolde,
How she controlde
Her husbandes as she wolde,
          …
          And though that rede have I
Of Gawen, and Syr Guy,
And can tell a great pece
Of the Golden Flece
How Jason it wan,
Lyke a valiaunt man;
Or Arturs round table,
With his knightes commendable.

(603-23, 628-35)

And so on. In the succeeding list of “though” clauses her productivity reaches its zenith as she reels off a miniature encyclopaedia of classical and medieval fables. But then the “though” clauses reach their conclusion, at which point there appears the “lack”:

          Though I have enrold
A thousand new and old
Of these historious tales,
To fyll bougets and males
With bokes that I have red,
Yet I am nothyng sped,
And can but lytell skyll
Of Ovyd or Virgyll
Or of Plutharke,
Or Frauncys Petrarke,
          …
          For as I tofore have sayd,
I am but a yong mayd,
And can not in effect
My style as yet direct
With Englysh wordes elect.

(749-57, 769-73)

What Jane has, then, is matter—enough to “fyll bougets and males”—but she cannot “direct” her “style.” Here, for purely tactical reasons, the poem does succumb to a phallic symbolization. A “bouget” is a pouch, bag, or wallet; the word, related to “bulge,” comes from the Latin bulga, a leather bag or a womb. A “male” is also a leather bag or wallet, but the word lends itself to witty associations with the testicles.⁴³ Jane thus bulges with the necessary matter for a poem but cannot “direct” her “style”; that is, she cannot subject her materials to a unitary disposition or mode of expression. But also, she cannot direct her stylus or writing-stick, with its all-too-obvious symbolization: she cannot wield the phallus, she is a maid, she lacks that with which she could subject her materials to a unifying stroke. Jane thus comes to “know” herself in the void of castration.

Yet Jane's lack is ironized, not because she eventually manages to scribble a few Latin verses, but because she has been speaking prodigious poetry all along. Her lack is assigned to her only retroactively, as a kind of phallic ressentiment, by the ideal of a unified style that her own productivity continuously exceeds and overflows. The strength of her practice defeats the weakness of her alibi; thus the momentary but intensely phallic symbolization of the passage was not only provisional but in some deeper sense derisory. Like the defensive reterritorialization of Ware the Hawk it was invoked only in order to accomplish a more thorough decoding.

Just as Phillip Sparrow avoids a unity of form, then, so it avoids a strict unity of style. While Jane is granted a characteristic voice, the poem opens by celebrating polyvocality:

Pla ce bo,
Who is there, who?
Di le xi,
Dame Margery,
Fa, re, my, my.
          Wherfore and why, why?
For the sowle of Philip Sparowe,
That was late slayn at Carowe
Among the Nones Blake.
For that swete soules sake,
And for all sparowes soules
Set in our bede rolles,
Pater noster qui,
With an Ave Mari,
And with the corner of a Crede,
The more shal be your mede.

(1-16)

From this initial chaos of voices a provisional order can be derived. The Latin is from the Office of the Dead, which Dame Margery, a senior nun, recites. A whispered exchange of voices between Jane and someone else in their attempt to ascertain who is singing mass and why gives way to Jane's long and private devotion for Phillip.⁴⁴ Yet the dramatic coherence of the scene does not prevent a linguistic confusion. On the one hand, language seems about to disintegrate; the Latin, first broken into syllables, cedes to the nonsense syllables of the gamut and then to asyntactical fragments. Even the first English phrases form an imperfect and confused dialogue. On the other hand, phrases enter into promiscuous and “forbidden” connections, allowing the reader to construe statements like “Di le xi, / Dame Margery” (“I have loved Dame Margery”). This linguistic babble is abetted by the initial confusion of the speakers themselves.

Phillip Sparrow thus arises from a primordial and demiurgic language, break-flows of discourse which lack a defining subject or speaker.⁴⁵ Even the dramatic situation can be construed only post festum and imposed only imperfectly on this original chaos—a term I use advisedly, for the opening of the poem must be read as a rewriting of the first verses of Genesis, paradoxically superimposed on the Office of the Dead. From this prima materia of discourse emerges the voice of Jane and its encyclopaedic prolixity. But this is a genesis of a different kind from the Biblical one, for no ordering logos issues forth from a paternal deity to still the waters. In place of the divine command fiat lux comes the placebo: this universe will obey only the order of jouissance. No Father, no Law, no State, no overcoding Phallus, no organic Form. Both the placebo and the dilexi expel their completing dominus,⁴⁶ thus excluding Lordship, though this is not felt as a lack. For chaos does not admit of voids; only structures have spaces for a lack.

And yet Phillip Sparrow is, in some sense, founded on the void, specifically that left by the disappearance of its namesake. Elegy is supremely the genre of lack; Jane's creativity may seem intended to refill a universe that has been hollowed out by her sparrow's disappearance. But Jane lacks Phillip only in the sense that she lacks a style. As the extraordinary digressiveness of the poem shows, Jane's verbal cosmos is not “sparrow-centric.” Which is only to say once again that Phillip is not the phallus; his disappearance does not overcode the text.

In fact, it does the opposite. The death of a sparrow recalls not only Catullus's poem, but—especially in this liturgical context—Jesus' words to his disciples: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father” (Matth. 10:29). The providential fall of the sparrow symbolizes the total saturation of the cosmos by God's law, its complete structuration down to the smallest portion; in short, the totalizing efficacy of the logos. Yet the poem neutralizes this like so many other signs, for Jane's grandiose execrations on Gib the cat, and her comic hope that

          Phyllyp may fly
Above the starry sky,
To treade the prety wren
That is our Ladyes hen

(598-601)

only reinforce our sense of the triviality and meaninglessness of the event. The desymbolization of Phillip's death thus destructures the poem's universe instead of reordering it. What has disappeared is not a phallus but a lynchpin, and the removal of this “weak link” allows an entire structure to collapse.

VIII

To return to an earlier point: it is only in reference to the poem's destructuration that its “primitive accumulation” of materials can begin to be understood. We are still dealing with an analogy here, for the structures of material production do not express themselves directly in literary production. Still, this is an analogy of which the poem takes account when Jane compares her stored fables to the bulging contents of a wallet or purse. Even here the analogy to money is ambiguous: do these catalogues represent a hoard or a sudden disbursement? If they form a hoard, how does the poem intend to invest it? Does it await the arrival of a new productive regime?

Temptations to cultural allegory abound here: the poem sings Vespers for the evening of medieval culture, recites the Office of the Dead for a disintegrating mode of production. Significantly, Jane possesses the fables and authors of the medieval tradition, but lacks the stylistic models of Renaissance poetry—Vergil, Ovid, Petrarch. Perhaps the poem sees itself as occupying a void after all, hoarding its materials while an old poetry dies out and a new one awaits birth. It is not impossible that Skelton plays with an allegory of this sort, but its suggestions of a poetic vacuum should not be taken any more seriously than should the other alibis that the poem delivers up.

The poem's “primitive accumulation” becomes clearer if we compare its disposition of poetic raw material with that of another and very different work. The Faerie Queene is in many ways the antitype of Skelton's poem precisely because it strives to be expressive of the structures of absolutist monarchy, both in its doctrine (“For truth is one and right is only one”) and in its structure. The globalizing allegories, the subordination of materials to master narratives, produces a totalized form that in turn reflects the total rule of the state. Even though Spenser is equivocal toward the state's power, and even though the poem accommodates an oppositional logic of free errancy and dissemination, still, these are always articulated in relation to the idea of a totalized whole, which is thus always preserved in its countermovements by a kind of Hegelian “negation of the negation.”

So too for the poem's use of raw materials. Like Phillip Sparrow, The Faerie Queene also has encyclopaedic tendencies, but its materials are articulated within the allegorical structure of the work so as always to produce a “surplus meaning” of either elaboration or contradiction. By contrast, the parceled and partly decoded form of Phillip Sparrow deprives its materials of symbolic resonance precisely by rejecting an overarching structure. If in one sense this frees an unchanneled discursive flow, in another it imparts a certain inertness to mythic and generic materials. Neither decoded flows nor autonomous parcels are conducive to meaning; hence interpretive or hermeneutic questions are out of place here. We can only observe what the poem does, how it engineers countermovements to the historical process of primitive accumulation.

IX

This, at least, applies to the poem's first part. But Jane's discourse makes up only half of the original poem; the second half, consisting of Skelton's “commendations” of Jane, follows far different rules.⁴⁷ Drawing on materials from the cult of the Virgin and on the formulae of courtly love poetry, Skelton constructs an intense but sometimes routinized praise of his beloved.

The first and second halves of the poem exhibit clear stylistic contrasts. As Fish observes, “Artificiality and innuendo replace the ingenuousness of the first section,” where Jane's monologue was “conspicuously free of the studied stylization of aureate rhetoric.”⁴⁸ Jane's speech contains primarily figures of amplification and few of the “difficult figures,” but “the statistics reverse themselves in the commendations.”⁴⁹ Meanwhile, Jane's digressiveness is replaced by Skelton's fidelity to his subject. In general, a more restrained and frugal economy of style pervades the second part.

Setting sophistication against naivete, difficulty against simplicity, and male against female in this way, the second half of the poem quite clearly tries to master the first, as evidenced by the rather disquieting entrance of Skelton's authorial persona. At the end of Jane's section, when she finally manages to write an epitaph for Phillip in “Latyne playne and lyght,” Skelton suddenly manifests himself in the midst of her compsition:

Per me laurigerium
Britanum Skeltonida vatem
Hec cecinisse licet
Ficta sub imagine texta.

(834-37)

[It was permitted that this should be sung by me, Skelton the laureate poet, in the guise of a fictive image.]

By this epiphanic entrance, Skelton disperses the imaginary voice of Jane and appropriates the whole of the poem for himself. Not only the second half, but also Jane's discourse was an effect of Skelton's rhetorical mastery, which henceforth becomes the poem's ultimate referent.⁵⁰ The Skelton-persona thus reorganizes the poem's territoriality so that it is entirely expressive of his rule.

Not surprisingly, “Skelton's” poetry emphasizes symmetry and stasis, and reduces Jane to the commonplaces of the medieval blazon: her face is as white as orient pearl, her cheeks are like rose buds, her lips are like cherries, her mouth is “sugred” (1031-40). Her otherwise formalized appearance does contain a blemish, though, which draws the poet's most sustained attention:

          Her beautye to augment
Dame Nature hath her lent
A warte upon her cheke,
Who so lyst to seke
In her vysage a skar
That semyth from afar
Lyke to a radyant star,
All with favour fret,
So properly is it set.

(1041-49)

The wart is a random excrescence, a surd element that resists the poet's efforts to cleanse and spiritualize his beloved. Hence it must be subjected to the most strenuous kind of poetic sublimation and, more important, fixed within a structure. The wart is

          set so womanly,
And nothyng wantonly,
But right convenyently,
And full congruently,
As Nature cold devyse,
In most goodly wyse.

(1067-72)

As if the wart were threatening to wander or had already reached its position by an aleatory movement, Skelton makes it into a fixed locus of chaste fascination, and thus into an antitype of Phillip, the libidinal nomad. The wart transgresses no boundaries on a body that has been precisely and definitively inscribed.

This thematic project of overcoding Jane has its formal counterpart in the structural and stylistic unity of the second part. While the commendations are formally divided by the periodic repetition of a refrain, yet the regions produced thereby are essentially homogenous, as they were in Ware the Hawk. The second part of Phillip Sparrow thus truly forms a whole, into which it tries to incorporate, retroactively, the first part as well.

Yet despite his initially absolutist claims, the Skelton-persona's powers are not unlimited, for his rhetorical mastery of Jane balances an equally powerful erotic submissiveness. Each repetition of the refrain incorporates different paraphrases of the Psalms, such as Quomodo dilexi legem tuam, domina! (“How I have loved your laws, o mistress!”) and Legem pone mihi, domina, in viam justificationem tuam! (“Set laws down for me, mistress, in your just ways!”). Skelton addresses Jane as if she were a sixteenth-century leather lady and asks her to bind him down. Unlike Phillip, the poet will walk only in “just ways”; the second part of the poem is a virtual web of obligations, decorums, entreaties, restrictions, and taboos.

It is clear, then, that the Skelton-persona does not emerge merely to master Jane. She also ironizes his neurotic obsessiveness, his sadistic instrumentality, his stiff formalism, his emptiness of invention. “Skelton” unwittingly illustrates his shortcomings in his very first English phrase, when he promises to devote his “hole imagination” to praising his mistress. If this persona organizes things into wholes, he also reduces them to holes. Nor are the two terms of the pun disparate, for “Skelton” unifies by draining the copiousness of localized difference. The phallic organizer who pretends to totalize and complete the poem proves to be precisely the space of its “hole” or lack.

X

But if the second half of Phillip Sparrow does not entirely succeed in subsuming the first, neither is its attempt to do so completely neutralized. At best the poem achieves a balance of forces; “Skelton” reveals the fragility of Jane's poetic, the susceptibility of its anarchic logic to a subsequent structuration and mastery. The project of the poem's first part is thus shown to be utopian in a bad sense as well. Radical as they are, the poem's localizing and destructuring movements depend on a localized freedom, the private imaginings of a young woman whose daydreams flow unimpeded only because they confront nothing outside of themselves. Here is the truth of Lewis's remark that Phillip Sparrow is “indeed the lightest—the most like a bubble—of all the poems I know.” Not just the structural soundness but the utopian logic of the poem proves evanescent.

It is no accidental irony that the opening word of the poem—placebo—also designates a flatterer or sycophant. Thus the very sign that announces the poem's flight from absolutism also suggests its possible capitulation to it. In later and more dangerous days, Skelton would chastize those who

                    occupy them so
With syngynge Placebo,
They wyll no farder go.
They had lever to please
And take theyr wordly ease
Than to take on hande
Worshypfully to withstande
Such temporall warre and bate
As now is made of late
Agaynst holy churche estate,
Or to maynteyne good quarelles.

(Colin Clout, 906-16)

These lines may be taken as a retrospective critique of Phillip Sparrow as well, which did “no farder go” than to outline a regime of pleasure. Of course, there was no way to withstand the “temporall warre” that not only dissolved the autonomy of “holy church estate” but ushered in a whole new historical era. The deterritorializing process of primitive accumulation was to be thorough enough that Skelton's oppositional project could take form only within its limits; hence the logic of his poetry becomes clear only by way of reference to a total process of transition it had tried to switch into machinic reverse.

Notes

1. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 136.

2. Ian A. Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1943), 9.

3. Gordon, John Skelton, 45.

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

5. Fish, Skelton's Poetry, 26.

6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 874-75.

7. See, for instance, Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. (1947; New York: International Publishers, 1963), chaps. 2-5.

8. See Etienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism (especially part 4, “Elements for a Theory of Transition”) in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 199-308.

9. This is true of primitive accumulation as a concept. Historically, it took place alongside the emergence of capitalist relations and may be said to have ended when capitalism became the dominant (though still not exclusive) mode of production.

10. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), especially 222-40.

11. Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, New Left Books, 1974), 19. Since feudalism was characterized by the unity of the direct producer with the means of production, the ruling class could not appropriate an economic surplus from the production process itself (as in capitalism) but only by means of direct politico-legal coercion—hence the “unity of economy and polity” Anderson attributes to feudalism. See also Nicos Poulanzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso Editions, 1978).

12. “Overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 199). To “overcode” is to subject unorganized or locally coded elements to a global master code. In the case of the absolutist state, this included replacing particularized and often incommensurable local jurisdictions with a unified national code of law—a process that was not merely a rewriting but an operation of power as well. In this it examplifies the process of overcoding in general, as applied to political, economic, linguistic, or sexual fields.

13. Anderson, Absolutist State, 18. While this essay will treat the deterritorializing actions of the absolutist state primarily in spatial and “formal” terms, it should be kept in mind that these are merely the expressions of class struggle.

14. Under Henry VII,

    Centrallized royal government was exercized through a small coterie of personal advisers and henchmen of the monarch. Its primary objective was the subjugation of the rampant magnate power of the preceding period, with its liveried gangs of armed retainers, systematic embracery of juries, and constant private warfare. … Supreme prerogative justice was enforced by the use of the Star Chamber, a conciliar court which now became the main political weapon of the monarchy against riot and sedition. Regional turbulence in the North and West (where marcher lords claimed rights of conquest, not enfeoffment by the monarch) was quelled by the special councils designed to control these areas in situ. Extended sanctuary rights and semi-regalian private franchises were whittled down; liveries were banned. Local administration was tightened up under royal control by vigilant selection and supervision of JPs; recidivist usurper rebellions were crushed. … The royal demesne was greatly enlarged by the resumption of lands, whose yield to the monarchy quadrupled during the reign; feudal incidents and custom duties were likewise maximally exploited.

    (Anderson, Absolutist State, 119)

15. “Decode,” in this sense, does not mean to interpret a message or elucidate its code, as in the practice of cryptography. Instead it means to erase or dissolve a code. The “decoding” of feudal productive relations meant the destruction of their concrete social imbrication (in, e.g., the particularistic obligations of feudal land tenure or the paternalism of the guild system) and their replacement by the abstraction of the wage contract.

16. While the succeeding analysis emphasizes the progress of deterritorialization and decoding rather than their limits, these latter must be kept in mind in order to avoid serious theoretical difficulties. In particular, it must not be thought that commodification and trade were by themselves capable of “dissolving” feudalism. If merchant's capital tended to rework local production into a larger web of market relations, yet as a system of “profit upon alienation” it remained dependent on feudal territoriality. Merchant's capital was “continually speculating with the maintained territorialities, so as to buy where prices are low and sell where they are high” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 227). Moreover, since feudal production did not allow for the extraction of a surplus from the production process itself, merchant capital could exploit the direct producer only by means of territorial monopolies over the flow of raw materials and finished goods (this was expressed politically by the rule of the “merchant oligarchies” in the towns). Thus while merchant's capital could accommodate itself to the overcoding of the feudal polity carried out by the absolutist state, it came into conflict with the total deterritorialization demanded by capitalist production—hence the tendency for merchant's capital to align itself with the monarchy against the manufacturing bourgeoisie. The full decoding of productive relations had to await the arrival of abstract labor and the wage contract, while the full deterritorialization of the polity (expressed, e.g., in the movement for “free trade”) demanded a situation in which profit could be derived, not from the marketplace directly, but from the productive process itself. This condition was met only by industrial capital.

    Even the commutation of dues, which Anderson stresses, did not of itself dissolve feudal relations in agriculture (For a detailed discussion of this question, see Dobb Development of Capitalism, ch. 2.) At stake here is the conflict between the Smithian view that the market economy alone destroyed feudalism, and the Marxist view that a change in the productive relations was decisive, with trade and money playing only a catalytic role.

17. Maurice Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, trans. John Warrington (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1971), 6.

18. See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141-60.

19. Strictly speaking, the account is not true. Skelton resided at Westminster at his death, but he had by that time reconciled himself with Wolsey and was back in the court's good graces. On the other hand, Skelton had made some use of sanctuary privilege following the publication of Colin Clout, and, for similar reasons, left London entirely to stay with aristocratic families in the North in 1523 (Pollet, Poet of Tudor England, 130-62).

20. Privilege of sanctuary was “purely secular and jurisdictional, but long before the Tudor period opened, circumstances had given it a false ecclesiastical color” (Isabel D. Thornley, “The Destruction of Sanctuary,” in Tudor Studies, ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London: Longmans, 1924), 183-84. The Church, which held about one-third of the land in England, enjoyed a jurisdiction at least partially independent of the king's law. See G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (1955; London: Methuen, 2nd ed. 1974), 103.

21. The fact that Wolsey rather than Henry initiated these policies is beside the point, since it is not the monarch but the state that is at question here. Yet Wolsey allowed Skelton to resolve his ambivalence toward the state into an imaginary dyad, heaping execrations on the lord chancellor while fawning on the king. Nor was Skelton alone in this. Wolsey was, to be sure, more the “type” of the state functionary, and he in fact ran England's domestic and foreign affairs during this period. By taking on the new functions of the state, he allowed the king to remain the object of feudal loyalty.

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

23. Gordon, John Skelton, 21, 26.

24. Skelton was Prince Henry's tutor at court until the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. At that point, when Henry became heir apparent to the throne, another tutor was found for him as part of a general shake-up at court. While older legends that Skelton left in disgrace have been refuted, and while there is no evidence that he was unhappy at Diss, still the rectorship must have seemed disappointing after his former position. In any case, once Henry acceded to the throne Skelton was anxious to be recalled to court. He sent the young king a copy of the Speculum Principis, which he had written for him in 1501, and included two poems. “These he had linked together with an identical prayer, repeated in each case: ‘May Jupiter Eretrius grant that I languish not by the Eurotas.’ He was comparing his sojourn at Diss to Ovid's exile.” Pollet, Poet of Tudor England, 60.

25. “For sure he wrought amys / To hawke in my church of Dys” (41-42, my emphasis).

26. “[W]hile protective jurisdictions in the hands of laymen slowly dwindled and disappeared, except in special cases, those held by abbots and bishops were left in their integrity.” Thornley “Destruction of Sanctuary,” 84. Significantly, Henry VII's first major assault on sanctuary privilege was designed to suppress a threat of political sedition. In 1486, the Yorkist Thomas Stafford was dragged from sanctuary and taken to the Tower. The king's bench then ruled that “sanctuary was a common-law matter in which the Pope could not interfere … and that the privilege did not cover treasonable offenses.” (Elton, England under the Tudors, 21-22).

27.                                         [E]vangelia,
    Concha et conchelia,
    Accipiter et sonalia,
    Et bruta animalia,
    Cetera quoque talia
    Tibi sunt equalia

    (311-16)

    [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.)]

28. Fish, Skelton's Poetry, 89.

29. Fish, Skelton's Poetry, 89-98.

30. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: “The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible … in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity” (62).

31. There was a real Jane Scrope, with whom Skelton was apparently infatuated. She, her sisters, and her mother took up residence at Carrow Abbey in 1502, after her stepfather, Sir John Wyndham, was beheaded by order of the king for his (rather distant) association with a Yorkist conspiracy. While the widow's move to Carrow was made for reasons of economy rather than security, the whole affair casts a political shadow over the poem's formal and ideological project. For the most detailed account of Jane Scrope, see H.L.R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 102-14.

32. Lewis, English Literature, 138.

33. Ibid., 139.

34. This, at least, is the opinion of Fish (Skelton's Poetry, 102-3) and of F. L. Brownlow (“The Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe and the Liturgy,” ELR 9 [Winter 1979]: 5-20, especially 9-10). Gordon insists that the poem is parodic, in the spirit of the Goliards, but even he wavers on this point (John Skelton, 132-33), and in any case, Brownlow makes a much stronger argument.

35. Brownlow, who has done the most careful study of liturgical influences on Phillip Sparrow, writes that “the liturgical frame gives the poem an objective, external form, but it does not have the internal, organic unity of form we are trained to recognize. … The wholeness of the poem is like the wholeness of the liturgy it imitates, being a wholeness of tone and purpose rather than of form” (“Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe,” 6). I would go one step further and claim that the liturgy fails to provide a consistent external form as well as a consistent tone or purpose.

    Taking another tack, Stanley Fish analyzes the form of the poem not in terms of the liturgy but in terms of Ciceronian and medieval rhetoric. While he isolates certain local rhetorical structures, though, he fails to elevate any rhetorical schema into an overarching master code (Skelton's Poetry, 98-125).

36. Here and elsewhere, “machine” must be taken in its broadest sense to avoid both analogy and anachronism.

37. See note 15.

38. But see also the following:

              [M]y byrde so fayre,
    … was wont to repayre,
    And go in at my spayre [opening or slit in a gown],
    And crepe in at my gore [part of a skirt]
    Of my gowne before,
    Flyckerynge with his wynges!
              …
    How pretely it wolde syt
    Many tymes and ofte,
    Upon my finger alofte!
    I played with him tytell-tattyll,
    And fed him with my spattyl,
    With his byll betwene my lippes,
    It was my prety Phyppes!
    Many a prety kusse
    Had I of his swete musse.

    (343-48, 354-62)

39. Fish, Skelton's Poetry, 111-12.

40. The latter phrase ends the original poem, not counting the “adicyon” that was tacked on after 1509.

41. R. W. McConchie argues that the poem “develops the bawdy possibilities of Phillip, especially the phallic ones, through the innocent voice of Jane herself. … Clearly Phillip is a kind of sexual surrogate, and more particularly a phallic symbol” (“Phillip Sparrow,” Parergon 24 [August 1979]: 31-35). This is a masterful bit of oedipal ideology: since Phillip gives erotic pleasure, he must be a “surrogate” or “symbol” for the phallus. In other words, all sexuality is phallic.

    Interestingly, some of the contemporary texts that McConchie cites to prove his case actually refute it. For instance, a madrigal by Gascoigne (E. H. Fellows, English Madrigal Verse, 1588-1632, 3rd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], 358-59) clearly refers back to Skelton's poem, but alas, here Phillip is female:

    She never wanders far abroad,
              But is at home when I do call.
    If I command she lays on load
              With lips, with teeth, with tongue and all.

    (17-20)

    In Magnificence, Skelton himself uses the phrase “Phillip Sparrow” to refer to a woman (l. 1562). Thus the tradition sometimes portrays Phillip as feminine and as a “symbol” of oral, not phallic, sexuality. Or rather, the conjunction of name and attributes tends to confuse sexual difference.

    Phillip's sexual ambiguities help to lay bare the real mechanisms of jealousy behind the Catullan sparrow tradition. If the sparrow were really only a sexual surrogate or phallic symbol, then the male poet could easily displace it (being the bearer of the “real thing”). But it is the bird's non-phallic characteristics—its wanderings, its gentle oral stimulations—which make it potentially more satisfying to women than men are. If anything, the sparrow rewrites men as surrogates for women and thus signals the repressed (or not so repressed) possibility that female sexuality is essentially lesbian.

    The male poet's (or critic's) tendency to read the sparrow as a phallic rival thus exemplifies the very thing whose absence makes the sparrow such a dangerous rival in the first place. The interpretative fixations of the Oedipus merely reproduce the genital fixations of “normal” male sexuality; despite the surface despair that it generates, to see the sparrow as a phallic rival is actually comforting to the male, because it opens up a possible line of identification and displacement via the reductive teleology of the Oedipus. This is not to say that Phillip never assumes a phallic role, but merely that the poem never privileges this particular symbolization over others.

42. Interestingly, Skelton claimed to have translated a work from French into English entitled “Of Mannes Lyfe the Peregrination.”

43. Chaucer's castrated (?) Pardoner carries a compensatory “walet … in his lappe, / Bretful of pardoun, comen from Rome al hoot” (General Prologue, 686-87), and this wallet is referred to a few lines later as his “male.”

44. Brownlow (“Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe,” 9-10) provides some invaluable explanatory material:

    There is no parody of the service at all. It pursues its own course, sung by a nun called Dame Margery. Only in Jane's mind is it a service for her sparrow. In the Middle Ages the Office of the Dead was frequently recited as an addition to the Divine Office, and in religious communities it was (and is) prayed as a suffrage for a deceased member. … Jane, in the priory church, following the service in her primer, transforms it into something quite different; but in doing so she is fulfilling, like Dame Margery, a proper liturgical role. For it was customary for lay people to use their primers for private devotion during the recitation of either the Divine Office or the Mass.

45. Speak Parrot, which Pollet calls “offensively polyglot” (Poet of Tudor England, 121), employs a similarly fragmented and various language.

46. Placebo Dominus in regione vivorum (Ps. 114:9). Dilexi quoniam audies Domine vocem deprecationis meae (Ps. 114:1).

47. “In the second part of the poem, Vespers being ended, Skelton speaks in his own voice. Using the same book of devotions he ‘commends,’ not the departed soul into the hands of God, but the living person of Jane Scrope” (Brownlow, “Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe,” 10).

48. Fish, Skelton's Poetry, 114.

49. Ibid., 116-17.

50. See ibid., 112-16.