SOURCE: Schibanoff, Susan. “Taking Jane's Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers.” PMLA 101, No. 5 (October 1986): 832-47.

[In the following essay, Schibanoff claims that Phillip Sparrow is about readers and reading, and argues that the poem begins with a radical new reading in which the text “cues” readers to rewrite texts in their own images; goes on to deconstruct the text rewritten by the protagonist, Jane, and to show and how it was “cued” by her past reading; and finally disempowers Jane further by deconstructing her physical person and reconstituting her as a text.]

In a recent essay on Skelton's Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe (c. 1502-07), F. W. Brownlow observes that the poem “tends to be read more by Renaissance scholars than by medievalists” (6). If by “reading” we understand Brownlow to mean the act of publishing literary criticism or interpretation, his statement is accurate, as a perusal of the MLA Bibliography and others quickly demonstrates. Not only are Phyllyp Sparowe's modern “readers” usually Renaissance specialists, but most of them are men: the bibliographies list only one woman, Nan Cooke Carpenter, who has “read” Phyllyp Sparowe (59-66).¹ According to Stanley Fish, moreover, “it would not be an exaggeration to say that every man who reads Jane's lament falls in love with her” (J. Skelton's Poetry 112).

While there is an identifiably typical reader of Phyllyp Sparowe, there is also a characteristic way in which he reads the poem. Briefly put, the typical approach involves not reading substantial portions of the work. That is, the usual reader divides this 1382-line poem into two major parts: Jane's lament (1-602), in which the fictional character, Jane Scrope, grieves over the death of her pet sparrow; and the section that the author labels “The Commendacions” (845-1268), in which the poet Skelton praises Jane's beauty and virtue.² The remaining 356 lines of Phyllyp Sparowe, lines 603-844 and 1269-382, are frequently ignored altogether, left unread. And when they are read, they are often dismissed as an insignificant transition and an afterword or as examples of Skelton's bad poetic habits. Brownlow, for instance, calls the former passage (603-844) merely “a bridge between the poem's two parts [sic]” (12) and largely ignores the latter passage (1269-382), which he considers “not part of the poem proper” (18n16). Acknowledging (in Skeltonic style) that “a good third of [Phyllyp Sparowe] is consistently ignored and sometimes deplored,” Fish believes that we do the poet a favor by not-reading at least some of his poem: “It seems to me that the critical silence on [1269-382] is justified” because “Skelton had the disconcerting habit of attaching afterthoughts to his poems …” (J. Skelton's Poetry 98).

This way of reading—that is, not-reading—Phyllyp Sparowe underlies many and different interpretations of the poem,³ and it evidently influences the way that modern anthologists present the poem to general audiences. E. K. Chambers, for instance, prints two passages from Phyllyp Sparowe, both from sections typically regarded as the important parts of the poem, the lament and the commendations. And Helen Gardner further narrows the presentation to excerpts from the lament (New Oxford Book).

Doubtless, many “standard” or widely accepted interpretations of literary works ignore substantial parts of these works. “Critical silence” is, after all, an integral part of academic discourse; not-reading is a conventional tool and practice of reading, or literary criticism.⁴ Nevertheless, we are free to wonder what happens if we do read all of Phyllyp Sparowe. What happens if, instead of not-reading this work as a poem with two parts spanned by a bridge and supplemented by an afterword, we read it as a poem with four equally significant parts? What if, instead of not-reading lines 603-844 as a transition, we do read them, read them as the second section of the poem, the bibliography in which Jane reviews her extensive reading in the vernacular and offers us her own readings of medieval authors? (An exception is Lydgate, whom Jane not-reads, she candidly tells us, because he is too “diffuse” or difficult for her to fathom his meaning [806].) What if, instead of not-reading lines 1269-382 as an afterword, we do read them, read them as Jane's and other readers' last words, their rejection of the reading of Phyllyp Sparowe that Skelton insists is the correct one? If we not-read Phyllyp Sparowe, the poem is about the many things that Brownlow, Fish, and others say it is: the poet, goliardic poetry, rhetoric; childhood, innocence, experience; love, beauty, death, devotion. But, as I imply above, if we do read Phyllyp Sparowe, the poem is, quite simply, about reading and about readers.

It may be true that every literary or other work we manage to read fully and entirely—if such an act is possible—becomes a work about reading and about readers. Stanley Fish certainly makes the case for this view in “Interpreting the Variorum.” But Phyllyp Sparowe is about these subjects in a more specific and self-conscious way, and the four successive parts of the poem define and redefine them in a dynamic and dramatic fashion that eventually requires our examination of how we read (or notread) and of what interpretive community we have joined.⁵

The opening section of Phyllyp Sparowe, the lament, is best viewed, I believe, as a dramatic situation in which we are to understand that Jane, who has recently lost her pet sparrow, Phyllyp, to Gyb the cat, sits listening to the liturgical service of evening vespers, the office of the dead, as it is recited by a nun, Dame Margery. “Jane's meditation on Phillip's death (1-602),” as Brownlow outlines it, “follows the Vespers exactly, which consists of six psalms and their antiphons, the canticle Magnificat, and concluding versicles and prayers” (8). Although we can trace the progress of the entire liturgical service throughout the first part of Phyllyp Sparowe, we actually read—or hear—only incipits, first lines and phrases from its psalms, antiphons, and other materials (e.g., 1, 3, 64, 66, 95, and 97). By including only these key or cue lines, Skelton may well be reproducing exactly the text of the primer that he, Jane, and many earlier readers knew:

That some primers consist chiefly of illustrations and first lines is probably because the materials, made up mostly of psalms and hymns, were so familiar that people knew them from memory. Indeed, the use of cues instead of full texts is characteristic of medieval service books, a matter which now presents no small difficulty to scholars trying to work with them.

(Boyd 66)

As vespers continue in the background of the first section of Phyllyp Sparowe—we read the cues for successive parts of the service at lines 1-5, 64-66, 95-97, 143-46, and 183-85—Jane's attention moves back and forth between the liturgical text she hears or reads and her own situation or context, between the placebo, or office of the dead, and the death of her pet sparrow. While the primer's cues were intended to prompt the reader to recall a specific and unvarying text, the office of the dead itself does not serve this purpose. That is, when Skelton allows the office, designed to lament the death of a person, to prompt Jane's thoughts about her grief for a dead sparrow, he is making an entirely proper, even if somewhat humorous, use of this text, as Brownlow notes:

Dame Margery's … use of the prayer Deus, cui proprium est misereri et parcere (“O Lord, whose property it is to be merciful and to spare”) shows that the service is sung more for an actual death. 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 ([H. C.] White, p. 56); and the primers always included, besides the Hours of the Virgin and of the Cross, the Matins and Vespers of the Dead.

(9-10)

The public liturgical text is, in other words, quite naturally a cue or pretext for private thoughts and individual meditation, and Skelton exploits this situation skillfully to illustrate and explore the ways in which we all read—and rewrite—texts. Using humorous incongruity as his major device, he draws attention to how we “personalize,” or contextualize, what we read:⁶ there is constant ironic friction between what Jane reads, the office of the dead, and the text she creates from it, her lament for Phyllyp. The initial section of Jane's lament (1-64) illustrates this well. It opens with the cue words for the first psalm in the vespers sequence: the Dilexi quoniam, or the placebo (Vulgate, Psalm 114; King James Version, Psalm 116).⁷ In this psalm, the speaker suffers the affliction of grief (“the sorrows of death have compassed me and the perils of hell have found me”) and vows to “please the Lord in the land of the living.” Jane quickly transforms this text to fit her own context: in answer to the question “wherfore and why, why?” (6), asked by the grieving speaker of the placebo, Jane tells us why she herself grieves—“for the sowle of Philip Sparowe, / That was late slayn at Carowe / Among the Nones Blake” (7-9). Skelton manages the transition from liturgical text to Jane's context so smoothly and automatically that we barely realize what has happened. Having appropriated the text of the psalm to her personal situation, Jane next moves on quickly to rewrite it in her own—and Phyllyp's—image. The placebo cues her to recall, as the beginning of her own lament, the classical story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which Jane might have read in Ovid's Metamorphoses or in one of its many late medieval vernacular versions, such as Chaucer's Legend of Good Women or Gower's Confessio amantis. The grief and affliction of these two lovers, Jane is sure, were never half so great as her pain and suffering over the death of Phyllyp. Pyramus and Thisbe, we recall, ultimately killed themselves because Thisbe misread a bloody-jawed lion as a sign that her absent lover had been slain. Shakespeare later found comic potential in this tale of misreading and mistaken identity (A Midsummer Night's Dream), and Skelton also uses it humorously here as ironic anticipation. No sooner have we met Pyramus's supposed feline murderer than Jane introduces us to Phyllyp's actual one—Gyb the cat, who has recently feasted on her beloved pet sparrow. The mock-epic humor that results from the disparities between wild lion and nunnery cat reminds us of the larger incongruity operating here, that between the text Jane began reading, Psalm 114, and the text that she is now creating as her lament.

In having Jane rewrite the liturgical text and mentally journey from the placebo to Gyb the cat, Skelton is not suggesting that, like Thisbe, she misreads or misappropriates. Rather, the initial ironic humor serves to announce and emphasize that a major subject of Phyllyp Sparowe will be an examination of how we use texts as cues to create our own texts and how the act of reading is itself an act of rewriting. To demonstrate the seriousness of this subject, Skelton modulates the tone of his text from mock-epic humor to a more meditated sobriety as Jane's response to the first psalm of the vespers continues. Now Jane rewrites the liturgical text in a seemingly more appropriate and decorous fashion, for she is prompted to recall a Christian rather than a classical analogy, a fifteenth-century Marian lament that she refashions to reflect her own circumstances:⁸

                              Ihesu, so she sobbid,
                              O hir soone was bobbid
                              and of his lif robbid,
Saying þies wordis as I say þee,
“Who cannot wepe come lerne at me.”

(Brown 17)

                    I syghed and I sobbed
For that I was robbed
Of my sparowes lyfe.
O mayden, wydow, and wyfe,
Of what estate ye be,
Of hye or lowe degre,
Great sorowe that ye myght se,
And lerne to wepe at me!

(Phyllyp Sparowe 50-57)

Although we may still find that the incongruity between Christ's death and Phyllyp's demise produces a kind of mock-epic humor, we may now also recognize a more serious dimension to Jane's reading-rewriting of Psalm 114. Rewriting in her own image, an important part of which is her sex, Jane models her grief on that of two female mourners, Thisbe and Mary. As a reading woman, she has, in other words, rewritten the placebo, the psalm subtitled “the prayer of the just man in affliction,” to give herself the role of a female mourner. And Skelton has enormously empowered this fictional female reader to make a place for herself in the predominantly male world of textuality. In her text she can even transform Gyb, the familiar tomcat of earlier vernacular literature, into a female.

The pattern of rewriting that Jane establishes in response to the initial psalm of the vespers (1-64) continues throughout the first section of Phyllyp Sparowe. In particular, Jane's rewritten text, her lament, frequently displays a comic disparity from the text of the vespers and often “feminizes” it. For instance, the second section of her lament (65-94) is prompted by the second psalm of the vespers sequence (119; 120), known as the Ad Dominum, in which the speaker begs for his soul's deliverance from “wicked lips and a deceitful tongue.” In Jane's mind, however, this liturgical text cues the memory of Catullus's poem in which Lesbia's sparrow faces the terrors of Hades. Accordingly, Jane rewrites the Ad Dominum into a prayer for the deliverance of Phyllyp's soul from Pluto, Alecto, Medusa, Megaera, Proserpina, and, finally, from Cerberus, that “hellhounde / That lyeth in Cheynes bounde” (89-90). Again, multiple ironic parallels surface here: poor Phyllyp, who suffered at the cat's jaws in this life, must now avoid the dog's in his afterlife, decidedly more literal “wicked lips” than those of the Ad Dominum. Yet, also again, Jane's rewriting of the liturgical text has a serious dimension: she makes a place in it for herself as a woman by recalling that she mourns and fears for her sparrow as an earlier woman, Lesbia, did for hers.

Similarly, in the third and fourth sections of her lament (95-142; 143-82), Jane continues to feminize the text. For instance, the third psalm of the vespers, Levavi oculos (120; 121), prompts Jane to recall Andromache, who mourns for Hector at the end of the Iliad; and the fourth psalm of the vespers, De profundis (129; 130), reminds Jane of the female classical poet Sulpicia, who, like herself, Jane avows, would have difficulty recording all Phyllyp's virtues.⁹ Humorous incongruities between liturgical text and Jane's lament continue as well. For instance, the fifth section of Jane's lament relates to the fifth psalm of the vespers, the Confitebor tibi (137; 138), which ends with the plea to “despise not the works of thy hands.” Jane thinks of her own handiwork, the portrait of Phyllyp she stitched in her sampler, an image so lifelike that it complained of being stabbed by her needle, which indeed turned red, Jane was sure, with the sparrow's blood. Not out of spite, but out of fear, Jane threw away her handiwork and decided to pray for Phyllyp's soul instead of trying to revive it with “crafty magyke” like Medea's (204).

Although Skelton's own magic is evident enough in Jane's lament, the poet leaves the distinct impression that Jane herself is in command of the text she creates, that she possesses an artistic free will to select which cues in her reading she will follow and which she will ignore, and that she is at liberty to rewrite what she reads entirely in her own image. We may recall earlier fictional female readers who were given no such powers—for instance, the narrator of Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Women, who, initially at least, can find no place for herself in the world of male texts and wishes to change her sex to conform to that world; and Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who, unable to rewrite the texts her fifth husband reads to her, attempts to destroy them.¹⁰

Skelton continues to empower Jane specifically as a female reader—and, indeed, does so more overtly—in the second part of Phyllyp Sparowe, Jane's bibliography (603-844). As we listen to her review her reading in search of suitable material for Phyllyp's epitaph, we realize that she exercises considerable control over her reading through her gender-selective recollection.¹¹ Although, by her own admission, her reading is largely confined to vernacular texts, medieval romances in particular, Jane chooses to remember in most detail those with dominant female characters. In each category of her reading that Jane recalls, this principle of selection—of reading and not-reading—operates. She begins with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, of which she has evidently read the Knight's Tale, the Nun's Priest's Tale, and the Wife of Bath's Prologue. The first two she not-reads or dismisses quickly; Emily and Partelope presumably strike her as little more than pawns or distractions in these dramas of male competition and rivalry. The Wife of Bath's Prologue, however, she does read with some care (618-27). Jane's second and largest category is romance (628-723). She has read widely in all the major types, or “matters,” of England, of France, of Greece and Rome, of Britain (Arthurian). Those she recalls most specifically, however, feature women characters who play central roles in the plot, Guinevere, Isolde, and Criseyde. The other romances—of Gawain, Guy, Jason, Libeaus Desconus, Aymon, Judas Maccabeus, Julius Caesar, Paris and Vienne, Hannibal, Scipio—she passes over quickly. Her final category, “fables” and “historious tales,” repeats this pattern. Jane reads the story of the humble Penelope, Ulysses's wife, with more interest than she does the tales of such male worthies as Alexander the Great. Besides endowing Jane with the power of selective recollection, Skelton again gives her the overt ability to rewrite what she reads. Thus, for her, Chaucer's Knight's Tale is not a story about two suitors and their beloved that ends in comic resolution, as it is for its narrator and for many modern readers, but a “sad” story about three men, Palamon, Arcite, and Theseus.

If Skelton's depiction of reading as a form of selective rewriting went no further than this, Phyllyp Sparowe would still make a significant statement, one deserving our attention almost five hundred years later. But Skelton does go further, not merely telling or showing us what reading is to Jane but involving us in the conscious examination of how we are actually reading—that is, selectively rewriting—his poem. Jane's experience as a reader, in other words, becomes the artistic correlative of our experience in reading Phyllyp Sparowe. Just as the liturgical texts give her a set of cues that she rewrites into her lament, so that lament gives us a set of cues that we rewrite as we “read” Jane. And, for the moment at least, we are as empowered as Jane is to rewrite the text in our own images.

Skelton invites us to exercise our power as readers and to be aware of what we do by giving us in Jane's lament a text that contains a heterogeneous set of cues. To “make sense” of a text, as is our habit as literary critics, we must focus on selected cues and ignore others. Thus, Phyllyp Sparowe requires us both to read and to not-read, and even though I claim to read Skelton's work fully and entirely, I must, paradoxically, not read the work fully and entirely, in other words, not respond to certain cues. What I come to realize, of course, is that I and other readers, like Jane, make our choices of what to read and what to not-read according to our contexts, our values, assumptions, identities, and backgrounds. Thus, because Stanley Fish chooses to hold the “single assumption” that “at the center of a Skelton poem is the psychological (spiritual) history of its protagonist” (J. Skelton's Poetry 240), he ignores or not-reads certain cues in Phyllyp Sparowe and responds to those that allow him to rewrite the poem as a “comparative study of innocence and experience,” with innocence represented by a naive and charming child at whom experienced Skelton would have us smile gently and with whom male readers fall in love. This reading is certainly legitimate, and Fish himself notes that he creates and sustains it by not responding to a particular type of cue in the text, Jane's numerous statements that carry obvious “sexual implications” (111)—for example, lines 124-26, 164-67, and 343-48. But Fish would also have us understand that it is Skelton who “insists” that we not-read the cues that undermine this reading of Jane (112).

Here I must part community with my colleague; surely there are valid interpretations of Skelton's apparently incongruous mixture of cues other than the one Fish advances, that the poet “insists” we not-read whatever prompts a view of Jane as post-lapsarian. Is it not equally plausible that, by providing opposite cues, Skelton asks that we deliberately create our reading of Jane and recognize how and why we do so—that we observe which cues we respond to and why, which we ignore, when we read and when we not-read? I must also literally part community with my colleague by indicating that I belong to an interpretive community of readers different from his, one that holds no particular assumptions about what is at the center of Skelton's or any other Renaissance writer's poems but that does have some fairly definite suppositions about what bird poetry is and does and, more particularly, about what literary sparrows are and do. In other words, I am, in part, a medievalist, and this context leads me to respond to cues to which Fish and other typical readers of Phyllyp Sparowe usually do not and to read-rewrite Jane in a way very different from theirs. For me, she is not a naive child but a young woman who, while sitting primly and listening to evening vespers, imagines and rewrites herself as the bawdy alewife in the tradition of Elinour Rummyng, the Wife of Bath, Jean de Meun's La Vielle, or Ovid's Vetula. In exploring how I create my reading of Jane, I realize I possess the same freedom that she does to rewrite texts in her own image and according to her own context and that my colleagues do to read and not-read cues as they please.

As a medievalist, a Chaucerian in particular, I come to the Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe with an abundance of literary lore about birds. A bird is rarely just a bird in the literature of the Middle Ages; typically, it represents a human quality or attribute. Human-avian correspondences were well known in Skelton's day, for they had been collected in and popularized by numerous medieval bestiaries and such encyclopedic works as Alexander Neckham's De naturis rerum, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologiarum.¹² Beast fables, bird debates, parliaments, and other poems rely on such correspondences to make moralistic observations and social commentary. As Donald C. Baker says of the Parliament of Fowls, “Chaucer is no bird-watcher, he is a people-watcher” (436), and Chaucer's revelation of folly and intolerance depends on our seeing birds as symbolic or emblematic of human traits. For Chaucer and his contemporaries, as well as for us today, the crow represents garrulity, the goose foolishness, the dove peacefulness, and so forth.

And what of the bird of Skelton's poem, Jane's sparrow? Although it may now have lost the association it once had in the popular imagination, the medieval literary sparrow was firmly linked with the vice of lechery. Beryl Rowland documents the long history of this association, a history that continues well past Skelton's time into the Victorian-era music-hall refrain “Me old Cock-sparrow!” (Blind Beasts 10). Neckham, she notes, labels it libidinosa, Bartholomaeus considers the sparrow “full hot … and lecherous,” Chaucer calls it “Venus's son” and notes that the Summoner is “as lecherous as a sparrow” (Birds 157-60). In Skelton's day, Painter, Lodge, Nashe, and other poets and dramatists associate sparrows with lascivia, as does Shakespeare's Lucio in Measure for Measure: “This ungenitur'd agent will unpeople the province with continency; sparrows must not build in his houseeaves, because they are lecherous” (3.2.174-76). There is a pictorial tradition of lecherous sparrows as well. An early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, for instance, depicts the allegorical Lechery of the Parson's Tale as a human figure that rides on a goat and holds a sparrow. Later emblem writers continue this tradition, helping to lodge the sparrow's reputation in literary minds: Aldrovandi considers the sparrow the hieroglyph of libidinousness, and Cesare Ripa depicts Lascivia as a woman with a mirror accompanied by sparrows.

Are Jane and her bird, then, an emblem of lechery or just an innocent young woman and her charming pet? Lewis, Brownlow, Fish, and others have identified the cues in Skelton's text that allow them to read Jane as the little girl who lives in a “demure, dainty, luxurious, in-door world” (Lewis 138), a “naive and virginal world” (Brownlow 14). But readers who, like me, come to the text with Chaucer's epithet or Ripa's emblem in mind see other cues that prompt us to expect a scene set in a tavern rather than in a drawing room.¹³ These cues appear as early as Jane's initial rewriting of the text she reads—her allusion to Pyramus and Thisbe—and they persist until her farewell to Phyllyp.

The cues that initially prompt my atypical reading of Jane center on her apparent failure to find an accurate or compatible female literary model for her grief. Not only is Thisbe's lion quite different from Gyb the cat, but Thisbe herself differs from Jane in one obvious and major respect: she laments the death of a lover, not a pet. Is this difference, we must wonder, another example of Skelton's ironic humor or a more revealing indication that Jane would like to conceive of herself as a mature and sexually experienced woman? The question does not linger in our minds for long. jane soon moves to a less problematic and less provocative model for her grief: her love for Phyllyp becomes like a mother's love for a son, as expressed archetypally in the Marian lament for Christ's death. Although Jane adds the claim that her grief can serve as a model for both sexually experienced and inexperienced women—“O mayden, wydow, and wyfe … lerne to wepe at me”—her lament nevertheless retains the maternal tone of the Virgin's.

But soon Skelton's text again cues an atypical reading of Jane. As she continues to search for literary models in the third section of her lament, she hits on Andromache, Hector's wife, and once more we wonder why this “yong mayd” likens her love for Phyllyp to the erotic love between wife and husband. Our question is immediately reinforced in the lines that follow the analogy. Jane tells us that she taught Phyllyp to “kepe his cut” (“know his place”), and then she informs us what his “cut” is:

[He] wold syt upon my lap,
And seke after small wormes,
And somtyme white bred crommes;
And many tymes and ofte
Betwene my brestes softe
It wolde lye and rest.

(121-26)

Is the speaker an emblem of lascivia, we again wonder, or an innocent young maid? When Jane insists that this behavior of Phyllyp's is “propre and prest” (127), we must, of course, accept her view of the matter, even if doing so obliges us to overlook the final discordant cue in this section that Phyllyp “wold lepe and skyp, / And take [her] by the lyp” (139-40).

But the cues that prompt our atypical reading of Jane become unavoidable in the fourth section of her lament (143-82). This section opens with the De profundis, a psalm of penitential prayer for forgiveness of the speaker's iniquities. In rewriting this liturgical text, Jane alludes to the classical poet Sulpicia, whose poem “The Avowal,” in ironic contrast, features a decidedly unrepentant speaker:

Let other maids, whose eyes less prosperous prove,
Publish my weakness, and condemn my love. …
Know with a youth of worth the night I spent,
And cannot, cannot for my soul, repent!

And in ‘To Cerinthus” Sulpicia's speaker identifies “last night's coyness” as the only iniquity that requires penitence (Godolphin 347, 349). In like manner, Jane does not repent for her own or her pet's behavior when Phyllyp would leap on her while she slept and make “[her] often for to wake / And for to take him in / Upon [her] naked skyn” (165-67). In fact, she tells us repeatedly that the bird's familiarities with her were “no vyse,” “no Hurt,” “nothyng” but innocent: “God wot, we thought [it] no syn— / What though he crept so lowe?” (168-69).

This fourth section, which opens with an allusion to a female poet who, for Skelton's era, was unusually frank about sexuality, closes with Jane's own overt image of bawdiness. Jane tells us that Phyllyp had permission to roam her body as he would and

… seke and take
All the flees blake
That he coulde there espye
With his wanton eye.

(179-82)

As Marlowe's character Pride would later witness, fleas were a standard feature of goliardic verse because of the intimacies they might enjoy with the mistress's body: “I am like to Ovid's flea … I can creep into every corner of a wench” (Dr. Faustus 6.115-117; Lehane 44-55). The flea hunter Phyllyp may take equally wanton liberties with his mistress's body, and the speaker of Donne's “Flea” makes a similar attempt, until his mistress purples her nail in “blood of innocence” (Brumble; Gardner, J. Donne 174). Jane, who sits demurely listening to Dame Margery reciting evening vespers, no doubt thoroughly enjoys her secret fantasies of adulthood and sexuality, envisioning herself for the moment the image of lascivia: woman with sparrow—and fleas.

In the remainder of the lament, Jane puts the finishing touches on this new portrait, this new text, she creates of herself. As she reaches the height of her grief and the apex of her rage against the “false cat,” she recalls how Phyllyp would enjoy the most intimate physical contact with her—how he would

… go in at [her] spayre [slit in gown]
And crepe in at [her] gore [wedge-shaped panel]
Of [her] gowne before,
Flyckerynge with his wynges

(345-48)

—and how this memory of “prety thynges” stings her heart.¹⁴ In the final words of her lament, Jane at last openly acknowledges the sexuality that has been awakening throughout her text since her initial allusion to Thisbe. As she bids farewell to her beloved Phyllyp, she calls for his ascent into Jupiter's imperial heaven and wishes him sexual success, hoping that he may be able “To treade the prety wren / That is our Ladyes hen [,] / Amen, amen, amen!” (600-02). Jane's reference to sex here is both crude and humorous; it may remind us of Harry Bailly's blunt comment in the Canterbury Tales that Chauntecleer's creator, the Nun's Priest, would have been a “trede-foul” for sure had he been secular (B3451).¹⁵ Nevertheless, Jane's acknowledgment also testifies to her power and ability to rewrite the text of her self as she passes from childhood to maturity, from innocence to experience.

As we contemplate Phyllyp's ascent, we may recall the apotheosis of earlier literary characters—Chaucer's Troilus, for instance—and the comparison is both comic and serious. Unlike Troilus, who somberly rises above the “blynde lust” of earth to “despise this wrecched world” from the eighth sphere (5.1817-24), Phyllyp is to soar off into a paradise of earthly delights in heaven, and Jane's evident concern about this “prety cocke's” sex life with “our Ladyes hen” may surprise and amuse us. But perhaps more sobering, as well as flattering, is our recognition that both Jane and we have successfully rewritten the texts we have respectively been reading. Jane need not remain the innocent young girl some readers find her to be, confined to “a demure, dainty, luxurious, in-door world,” a “naive, virginal world.” Instead, with Phyllyp, she may break out of this world and soar beyond it, rewriting the text of her life from a convent liturgical service into a bawdy pseudoepic. And, like Phyllyp, we as readers have also reached the zenith of our power, for by responding to certain selected cues in the text and not-reading others, we have participated in creating a new Jane, that is, a new reading of Jane.

Sadly, however, we have short time to enjoy either the new Jane or our achievement as readers. By the end of her bibliography (834), Jane has altogether vanished from the text. And her disappearance marks the end of our gradually diminishing powers as readers: we must now recognize that what we thought was our freedom to rewrite and create was merely an illusion. Our journey to that nadir begins almost immediately after Phyllyp's ascent to the heavens when Jane describes herself at the beginning of her bibliography:

… [a] mayde
Tymerous, halfe afrayde
That never yet assayde
Of Elcyones well,
Where the muses dwell

(607-11)

This image does not fit well with the rewritten Jane we helped to create, the Jane who just boldly sent Phyllyp off to sexual bliss in Jupiter's realm. Instead, it reminds us of the Jane who began Phyllyp Sparowe with timorous and uncertain inquisitions, “Who is there, who?” Now Jane grows increasingly submissive and unable to cope—referring to herself as a “yong mayd” (770) who has a limited woman's wit (820-21)—and then vanishes from the text she is writing, dissolves into thin air. As Skelton informs us, she becomes a “feigned likeness,” imagine texta, an illusion; and her farewell to Phyllyp is a farewell to us as well:

Best of birds, beautiful one, farewell. Phyllyp, beneath that marble now you rest, who were dear to me. Always there will be shining stars in the clear sky; and you will always be stamped in my heart.

Through me, Skelton the laureate poet of Britain, these compositions could be sung under a feigned likeness [imagine texta]. She whose bird you were is a maiden of surpassing physical beauty: the naiad was fair, but Jane is more beautiful; Corinna was learned, but Jane knows more.

I recall it well.

(826-44)¹⁶

Although Jane's descent from self-created and -defined character to the poet's property as a “feigned likeness” seems rapid, the seeds of this dissolution have been sown much earlier, and the fruit is already evident at the beginning of the poem's second section, the bibliography. On the one hand Jane's bibliography exhibits a reader's power to exercise selectivity in reading and recalling texts, but on the other hand it demonstrates the powers the text and its author have over a reader. That is, we influence and rewrite what we read, and what we read also influences and, indeed, rewrites us. We are free to respond to and ignore—to read and not-read—cues in a text, yet our choices are, in turn, partly determined by what we have already read. This seemingly endless cycle of intertextuality is apparent in Jane's comments on the Wife of Bath's Tale at the beginning of her bibliography. One might say many things about this piece, but Jane considers only the way it affects those who read it, or the way it rewrites its female readers, changing wives who honor their husbands into wives who despise them and set them “at naught” (618-27). Although Jane, in her gender selectivity, has rewritten Chaucer's text, Chaucer's text (actually Skelton's reading-rewriting of Chaucer) has also clearly influenced and rewritten Jane: it is not by chance that she envisions herself as a sexually aware, bawdy woman in the first part of Phyllyp Sparowe. In part, she does so because her reading—tales of the bold Alysoun of Bath, the “lyght” Isolde, and “wanton” Guinevere and Criseyde—cues or determines what she reads and not-reads and, consequently, the ways in which she rewrites the text of her self. If Jane had read hagiography rather than romance, legends of Saint Cecilia rather than tales of “wicked wives,” we can only surmise that Phyllyp Sparowe would not have become a central character in her text.

As we begin to recognize that Jane is as much the product as the producer of her reading, we must also acknowledge that we are as much the creations as the creators of our readings. While I may exult, as I did earlier, in my freedom to create a reading of Jane that differs from that of the typical reader (i.e., the male Renaissance specialist), I also become aware that my rewriting is partly the product of my own earlier reading and all that it represents—education, training, culture. And the more we contemplate this phenomenon of intertextuality, perhaps the more we feel, as does Jane, that we have too “lytell skyll” (755) and that our wits are too “rude” (821) to create anything novel, beautiful, or truly individual and unique. In concluding her bibliography, Jane applies conventional humility topoi to herself as both a reader and a writer: she protests her inability to understand “diffuse” poets such as Ovid, Vergil, Plutarch, and Lydgate, and she apologizes for her inadequacies as a writer of Latin epitaphs. The best she can produce for Phyllyp is a piece of “playne and lyght” verse (823). The appearance of Jane's epitaph at this point memorializes more than the death of a pet bird; it may also commemorate the death of our illusions as readers that we possess creative autonomy to rewrite texts in our own images.

When Skelton drops his mask and steps to the front of Jane's epitaph, he claims her creation as his property and demands that we recognize how the text and the poet possess and control their readers. At the same time, Jane's disappearance from the text coincides with the nadir of our experience as readers of Phyllyp Sparowe, and we remain in this position throughout the third part of the poem, the “Commendacions.” In this section, we are required to witness a virtuoso display of authorial power replete with numerous pen-rattling flourishes; or, as Fish phrases it, here Skelton “parades his rhetoric almost flamboyantly” (J. Skelton's Poetry 115). Not only does the poet reproduce the Jane who has vanished from the text, but he re-creates her in his own image—as he would have her be—as a reminder and overt display of the power he has possessed all along. His Jane is neither the innocent child who opened Phyllyp Sparowe with her timid questions nor the bawdy alewife—woman with sparrow—this child imagined herself to be. Instead, he creates her as the courtly mistress, the literary concept of woman that combines innocence and experience, virginity and sexuality, and that writers of Skelton's era scripted again and again as the ideal for women. Furthermore, the new Jane seems no longer a lively, autonomous literary character but a delicately crafted text of the highest rhetorical artifice.

The third section of Phyllyp Sparowe, the commendations (845-1267), is based on a private devotion found particularly in English primers and books of hours. As Brownlow outlines it, this devotion is

… a Commendation of All Souls consisting of Psalm 119 [Vulgate 118], Psalm 138 [Vulgate 137], concluding versicles and responses, and the formula of commendation: Tibi, Domine, commendamus animam famuli tui N. et animam famulorum famularumque tuarum (“To thee, O Lord, we commend the soul of thy servant N. and the souls of thy servants both men and women”). This latter formula, which ends the devotion, naturally provides the last liturgical reference in the poem (l. 1241) [i.e., in the commendations]. Psalm 119 contains twenty-two eight-verse pairs called octenaries which the makers of the books of hours treated as eleven pairs. Skelton takes the opening verse of each pair of octenaries in succession and uses it to open a section of his “Commendacions.” … Each of the eleven sections of Skelton's “Commendacions” also has for response an English refrain and the couplet, “Hac claritate gemina / O gloriosa femina.”

(8-9)¹⁷

In, so to speak, taking a page from Jane's book, the primer, the poet of the commendations invites us to compare his use of it with her earlier use in the lament. Not surprisingly, the comparison is more flattering to the writer, Skelton, than to the reader, Jane.

We recall that in the first section of Phyllyp Sparowe the Latin verses from the primer precede and prompt Jane's vernacular lament. Although Jane rewrites the liturgical text, it holds the dominant initial and initiating position throughout her recitation of grief. Not so in Skelton's commendations. The poet subordinates the Latin verses from the primer, making them part of the refrain that follows each of the eleven sections of his poem. Not only does he enlist the Latin text in the service of his verbal creation, but he literally rewrites it, as Jane never does. Thus, for example, Skelton changes “Dominus” ‘Lord’ of the Psalms to “Domina” ‘Lady’ in his poem (e.g., 996, 1061, 1114). In a more extended fashion, he also rewrites the primer's Commendation of All Souls by incorporating the first Latin line of each pair of octenaries into his English and Latin refrain and by following this devotional verse with a second Latin verse from sources as varied as Scripture, lullabies of the Virgin, and Aquinas's Latin hymns. Thus, into the macaronic refrain (1054-62) that follows the fifth section of the commendations (1031-53), Skelton inserts the first verse of the fifth pair of octenaries (Psalm 118.65), changing “dominus” to “domina” (“Bonitatem fecisti cum servo tuo, domina” ‘Thou hast done well with thy servant, O Lady’ [1061]), and selects a line from a hymn of Thomas Aquinas sung at matins on the Feast of Corpus Christi to follow it (“Et ex praecordiis sonant praeconia” ‘and from his heart your praises ring out’ [1062]).

In his final use of the full refrain (1208-18) in the commendations, Skelton makes his practice of rewriting the primer's commendation overt. Here he couples the first verse of the eleventh and last pair of octenaries, Psalm 118.161 (“Principes persecuti sunt me gratis” ‘Princes have persecuted me for no reason’ [1215]), with Latin verses evidently of his own invention (“Omnibus consideratis / Paradisus voluptatis / Hec virgo est dulcissima” ‘All things considered, this sweetest of girls is a Paradise of delights’ [1216-18]). Compared with Jane the reader's rewriting of the primer, Skelton the poet's is an altogether different affair, if for no other reason than that he never allows humorous incongruity to characterize his version in the way it consistently does Jane's. His willingness and ability to dominate this text allow him to incorporate it almost seamlessly into his own literary creation. The appearance and format of the early printed editions of Phyllyp Sparowe reinforce this difference: between the Latin verses of the primer's office of the dead and Jane's lament, there is a visual break, typographical space, whereas between the Latin verses of the primer's commendation and the rest of Skelton's “Commendacions” there is no break (Skelton, Pithy n. pag.).

Not only does Skelton subordinate and appropriate the primer's devotional text to serve his poem, but he rewrites certain sections of Jane's earlier lament to claim both her text and her physical person as his property. In doing so, he evidently “masculinizes” Jane's text, just as earlier she “feminizes” what she rewrites. Specifically, Skelton refashions Jane's references to her body: he writes himself into—and Phyllyp out of—these comments. For instance, Jane's earlier bawdy remark that Phyllyp would

… go in at my spayre,
And crepe in at my gore,
Of my gowne before,
Flyckerynge with his wynges

the poet converts into a more decorous and courtly statement, over which he claims control:

Her kyrtell so goodly lased,
And under that is brased
Such plasures that I may
Neyther wryte nor say.

(1194-97)

Similarly, Skelton rewrites Jane's recollection of the “prety” kisses Phyllyp gave her “with his byll betwene [her] lippes” (359-62) into the more euphemistic observation that were he to kiss her “sugred mouth,” “it were an hevenly blysse” (1039-40). And whereas Phyllyp formerly had “leve to go / To pyke [her] lytell too” (175-76), it is now Skelton the poet who imagines himself taking such liberties: “How often dyd I tote [peer; peep] / Upon her prety fote?” (1146-47). Again, while it consoled Jane to think of Phyllyp ascending to the heavens “to treade the prety wren” (600), “it raysed [Skelton's] hert rote / To see [Jane] treade the grounde / With heles short and rounde” (1148-50). Fish remarks that there are “innumerable” parallels between Jane's text and Skelton's (J. Skelton's Poetry 120). As in the examples above, many of these parallels remind us of the author's power over the reader. They also remind us that, well before Skelton's time, authorship was largely regarded as a masculine prerogative, a phallic activity. Chaucer and his contemporaries yoked their oxen and “plowed their fields,” inseminating their texts, whereas Skelton equates the text with a female body, Jane's. And just as men of Skelton's era might claim ownership of female bodies, so this author claims proprietorship of Jane's text and arrogates to himself the exclusive control of her body.

In the passages Skelton rewrites from Jane's text, we observe components of the major rhetorical device that operates throughout his commendations: the effictio, the head-to-toe description conventionally used to praise the beauty of the courtly mistress in medieval and Renaissance poetry. By the Elizabethan period, the device had been so overused that Shakespeare could parody it in poems like “My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun.” Skelton does not burlesque the convention, but he does use it for something other than praising the beloved. He adopts it to create, as did Pygmalion, a physical image to fall in love with. This image is not of the child or the alewife but of the courtly mistress, the paradoxical combination of innocence and experience, Madonna and whore, so fascinating to the male imagination. As Skelton establishes his effictio of Jane, or re-creates her physically to serve his desires, we as readers reach our lowest point of disenfranchisement in Phyllyp Sparowe: we recognize that we are created by the authors whose texts we read, just as the “courtly” Jane is created by Skelton the poet.

In actuality, Skelton writes a dual effictio. The first creates Jane's physical person in the image he desires, and the second links her body to her text, over both of which Skelton claims control and proprietorship. The first effictio embodies Jane in the typical image of the courtly mistress, replete with gray eyes, cherry lips, small waist, and other physical attributes of the traditional literary figure. Conventionally, the description proceeds from head to toe, first praising Jane's face—eyes, lips, cheeks, chin (1014-77)—then her hands, fingers, and torso, and finally her feet, her “heles short and rounde.” Immediately on finishing this first effictio, Skelton begins a second one, ostensibly to praise Jane's accountrements, but now he rearranges the standard head-to-toe portrait to accomplish something else. He begins by observing how pleasing her hairstyle is and then, atypically, how gorgeously she wears her clothing and the “garterynge of her hose” (1176), a comment that should presumably conclude the description. But the portrait continues, and what we find in the terminal position of this effictio is the poet's praise of Jane's “goodly lased” kyrtell, her skirt or gown, which, he informs us, envelopes “such plasures” that he is not at liberty to say or write them. This passage, we recall, is one of those that Skelton rewrites from Jane's lament. Not only does Skelton claim Jane's text, he claims her body, and in doing so “masculinizes” her text. His modesty hiatus—his rhetorical refusal to describe the pleasures enclosed in her skirt—assumes that he has the right to do so but that good taste demands his silence. Thus, this inexpressibility topos, a form of “not-writing” akin to not-reading, powerfully asserts authorial rights over the reader. Jane's text-body belongs as fully to Skelton as, we realize, the reader always does to the writer and as, traditionally, female sexuality has to man.

In a final display of authorial power, Skelton deftly inserts both self-description and self-praise into his panegyrical portrait of Jane. As Brownlow notes, Skelton's use of the primer's Commendation of All Souls is ironic in the sense that the poet commends into the hands of God not the soul of Phyllyp but the “living person of Jane Scrope” (10). It is ironic in another respect as well, for Skelton, without overtly acknowledging his purpose, also commends himself and his poetic skill in undertaking the arduous task of giving adequate expression to Jane's beauty and virtue. This self-attention delays the encomium of Jane and, indeed, threatens to obscure it at times. Although Skelton announces early in the commendations that he will “enterpryse / Thorow the grace dyvyne / Of the Muses nyne / [Jane's] beauty to commende” (856-59), he waits some 150 lines before he begins to do so. In the meanwhile, he must first engage in an elaborate triple invocation—of the nine Muses, Arethusa, and Apollo—for the necessary poetic power to eulogize Jane; next he must fend off an attack of Envy, who is jealous not of Jane's beauty or virtue but of Skelton's poetic powers; and finally he must again invoke the aid of Phoebus Apollo for the requisite “goodly style” with which to extol Jane.

When Skelton does begin the “enterpryse” of the commendations, the praise of Jane's beauty, his self-absorption overshadows his subject, and we can get no clear image either of Jane or of her beauty (998-1013). We do, of course, eventually “see” Jane in the commendations, even if Skelton frequently blocks our view with his self-descriptions, humility topoi, and repeated invocations. Skelton's self-interpositions are so frequent, in fact, that we must ultimately realize that in certain respects Jane is Skelton. That is, the image he creates of her as courtly mistress has no objective reality; she is a text, and the text is the product of the poet's imagination and skill.

The final confirmation of the author's control over the text and the reader occurs in the last section of the commendations (1238-67). Just as Jane bids farewell to Phyllyp at the end of her lament, so Skelton also bids farewell, but not to Jane, nor to her beauty or virtue. Instead, he commends to God his poem (“this treatyse” [1252]), which creates the Jane of his fantasies. Not only does Skelton possess Jane in the sense that she is his text, but he demands the right to control and direct the way in which we read-rewrite his text. He informs us:

it were no gentle gyse
This treatyse to despyse
Because I have wrytten and sayd
Honour to this fayre mayd.

(1251-54)

Jane is worthy of his praise, Skelton insists, and we are to read the commendations as a panegyric, a poem that “famously proclame[s]” a woman who deserves to “be enrolde / With letters of gold” (1257-59). In claiming this ultimate power to dictate his readers' response to his work, Skelton apotheosizes himself as poet and dethrones his readers altogether. The verses that conclude his “Commendacions” explicitly laureate the poet and his subject-text and ignore the reader:

Through me, Skelton, the laureate poet of Britain, this girl is deservedly crowned with choice praises. I have sung of the beautiful girl than whom there is no one more beautiful; a beautiful girl preferable to any Homer might commend. Thus, it is pleasant occasionally to refresh hard labours; nor is my wisdom any less brief than this inscription. Only to please.

(1261-67)¹⁸

At the end of the commendations, Jane has been diminished from her initial status as a reader empowered to rewrite the primer's text to a text that Skelton creates according to his fantasies and desires. And, as readers, we too understand that we are the playthings of the text—that tradition, or culture, or actual authors and works rewrite us, determine how we read and not-read, and predispose us here to seeing Jane as the naïf or as the would-be alewife. As evidence that Skelton has now totally deconstructed and disassembled our power and autonomy as readers, reduced us to the status of text, his final and crowning achievement is to attempt to stabilize and control the future reading-rewriting of his poem. But Skelton does not let the matter rest there, ending Phyllyp Sparowe with his own apotheosis as poet. Instead, in the so-called afterword, the last section of Phyllyp Sparowe, he reconstitutes Jane into a character, again a reader who displays obvious freedom and autonomy, and he suggests why readers will always have the last word.

When Jane reappears in the “addicyon” of Phyllyp Sparowe, she causes Skelton great “perplexite” (1370). She is no longer the beautiful but silent and submissive text he had reduced her to in the commendations. Instead, she is again a real reader and, according to Skelton, an unruly one who has not only changed her mind about the value of his poem (1371-73) but rewritten it in precisely the fashion he had tried to prevent at the end of the commendations. Although there he dictated that readers find his poem honorable, Jane now reads-rewrites it as shameful (1284). Skelton's consternation over Jane's challenge to his absolute control of the text is so great, we are to understand, that he spends the best part of the “addicyon” conjuring Phyllyp to provide an explanation of this “perplexite.”

Phyllyp need not, of course, explain Jane's actions, for Skelton knows why she reemerges as a figure independent of the poet, why readers inevitably escape authorial control and have the last word. Once Skelton releases his poem into the flux of time—as he implicitly acknowledges he does by returning later to write the “addicyon”—he must surrender his total control over it. One phenomenon of the passage of time or history is the development of new and different ways of reading-rewriting and of new groups or communities of readers. As Skelton ruefully remarks, one new community (of jangling jays) now finds it fashionable to disparage Phyllyp Sparowe:

The gyse now a dayes
Of some janglynge jayes
Is to discommende
That they cannot amend. …
What ayle them to deprave
Phillip Sparowes grave?

(1268-75)¹⁹

Despite Skelton's attempt at the end of the commendations to control how readers would rewrite his text, he is doomed to failure once the text moves into history. On this frustrated and gloomy note, Skelton ends his poem; Phyllyp Sparowe closes with the poet's querulous and ineffectual curse on readers who “condemn the pious obsequies of a bird”: “Talia te rapiant rapiunt que fata volucrem: / Est tamen invidia mors tibi continua” ‘May the same fate which seized the bird also seize you! Yet death is continuous for you through envy’ (1381-82). It is not until years later (1520), in his Garland of Laurel, that Skelton finally acknowledges the foregone conclusion of Phyllyp Sparowe, that readers will in time always have the last word.²⁰ Although he still curses readers who oppose him, Skelton invites them to do what they will inevitably do—rewrite his poem:

Yet sum there be therewith that take grevaunce [at Phyllyp Sparowe]
And grudge therat with frownyng countenaunce;
But what of that? Hard it is to please all men;
Who list amende it, let hym set to his penne.

(Garland 1257-60)

Skelton's invitation at the end of the Garland of Laurel is, in essence, a belated laureation of the reader, a recognition that the reader will always have the last word. Yet, as is so often the case with Skelton, the invitation is something else as well. The acknowledgment of readers' liberty contains a reminder of the restrictions that operate within communities of readers: Skelton invites men to take up their pens and rewrite Phyllyp Sparowe, just as he earlier refers to male readers when he calls his critics jangling jays. Perhaps he uses the term men generically. Nevertheless, it prompts our recognition that Jane frees herself from authorial control and Skelton's fantasies and rematerializes as a reader not by exerting her individual—female—will but by joining an interpretive community whose rereading of Phyllyp Sparowe shapes her objections to it. The jangling jays (including, quite possibly, the actual Alexander Barclay, monk of Ely) protest that the poem is, in Skelton's word, a “derogacyon,” an immoral and scurrilous piece. Jane evidently subscribes to that view, for, Skelton tells us, she feels shame that his poem has ruined her “goodly name” (1282-89). In joining the community of readers that liberates her from Skelton's authorial control, Jane must ironically submit to another “masculine” set of controls, those that rewrite Phyllyp Sparowe as offensive or disgraceful. To free herself, she must, in other words, reject a part of herself, condemn her celebration of her own awakening female sexuality as shameful.

The ending of Phyllyp Sparowe, this conclusion to which I bring it here, is a mixed moment for me. Jane can be free, but, it seems, only at the expense of her wholeness. And although Skelton allows Jane to feminize her texts, to read and not-read according to her sex, he seems to conclude that her only real power lies in her reading as a typical reader of her community does, that is, like a man. Or does Skelton reach this conclusion? Could he have envisioned that Jane's rudimentary efforts to find a place for herself in what she reads would eventually take the form of an entire interpretive community devoted to achieving the inclusion of women's experience in the reading of texts?²¹ Or could he have foreseen this “atypical” essay, in which I choose to read all of Phyllyp Sparowe, that is, to read it in my own image as a poem about another female reader's experience rather than to not-read it as a goliardic poem and portrait of the male artist? Who does have the last word here? Or does our real freedom as readers lie in the hope that there never is a last word, that it is always possible to make yet one more “addicyon” to the text?²²

And so I offer here one addition to my own text to acknowledge the way that one of my readers—a consultant specialist for PMLA—read the manuscript of this article. Several months after I thought I had finally written its last words, my reader recommended that I give it a different envoi, one (like this) that would examine the question of Skelton's attitude toward Phyllyp Sparowe or, more generally, of the claim I was making about his intention. In other words, as I read the question, could Skelton really have meant to say what I say he does in this article? My answer is both yes and no—or, more precisely, yes and therefore no.

Yes, a modern reader can validly interpret Phyllyp Sparowe as Skelton's statement that the activity of reading is a kind of rereading or rewriting, a “personalizing” or “periodicizing” of the text that may involve not-reading or even misreading or reading into. The validity I claim is both textual and historical, that is, based on what I construe to be evidence from within the poem and from outside the poem. The poem itself offers a patterned sequence of rereading and rewriting: first, Jane personalizes the liturgical text as she reads herself and her situation into it; next, Skelton the poet rereads and rewrites Jane's text in the image of his own wishes and desires; and finally, Skelton tells us, the jangling jays misread the text altogether. Years later, by inviting anyone dissatisfied with Phyllyp Sparowe to take up the pen and amend the poem, Skelton overtly acknowledges that readers rewrite the texts they read.

Historically, there is nothing surprising or unusual in what I claim to be Skelton's view of reading or in his acknowledgment of readers' power. Both, in fact, are quite conventional, and we may readily find precedent for them in Skelton's own reading. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, rereads and rewrites—personalizes or periodicizes—the ancient story of the Trojan War in no less radical a fashion than Jane rereads and rewrites her liturgical text. Homer would no more recognize Chaucer's “medievalized” tale of the comic misadventures and doleful end of a lovesick knight than Sister Margery would identify the source of Jane's portrait of the woman with sparrow and fleas. To regard this type of rereading as anachronism is itself, ironically, an anachronism, and it perhaps reflects a modern view of reading as a depersonalized, hence powerless, activity. That Skelton and his predecessors did not hold this view of reading is apparent in the various authorial topoi they persistently repeat: again and again, they apologize for their lack of wit or skill or eloquence; they retract and condemn whatever it is they have written that might offend or merely displease; and they invite readers to augment, delete, or rewrite in whatever way seems fitting. And although these authors often write enthusiastic dedications to the specific readers who order and pay for their works, begging this audience for its continued readership, they shrewdly hedge their bets in such topoi as the “farewell, book,” which contains the authorial command to the text to escape the vagaries of readers and rereadings by ascending straightway to that blissful eternal realm where last words are last words.

By the same token, however, if Phyllyp Sparowe can really be about what I claim it can, then, no, Skelton could not have known how I would specifically reread and rewrite his poem. The reason is not that I have chosen to reread Phyllyp Sparowe from the point of view of a phenomenological and feminist critic or that these literary approaches are too modern or otherwise incompatible for Skelton to fathom. Indeed, as Skelton himself tells us, he was equally unable to fathom how an interpretive community of his own day, the moralistic jangling jays, could reread his work as it did. Instead, Skelton could not have intended to say what I specifically claim he does because, as Phyllyp Sparowe depicts, reading is a unique and idiosyncratic experience, as well as a highly circumstantial, contextual, and political one. And therein, of course, lie its beauty and its danger, its ability both to liberate and to oppress, as it does Jane and as it does us all.

Notes

1. Katherine Miller Proppé, however, does discuss Skelton's use of patristic ideas about women in Phyllyp Sparowe. For summaries of her dissertation see DAI 35 (1975): 5358 A-5359B and Kinsman, J. Skelton … Bibliography 134-35.

2. All Skelton quotations (and translations of his Latin verses) are from Scattergood's edition.

3. Prior to Brownlow and Fish, the dominant modern approach to Phyllyp Sparowe was to read it as a goliardic poem and to focus on the poet and his use of liturgical and other Latin sources (blasphemously parodic or otherwise), hence the preoccupation with the more Latinate parts of the poem, the lament and commendations (e.g., Berdan 214; Gordon 121-34; Green 20-22; Henderson 6; Lloyd 45-59; Pollet 49-57). Underlying this approach may be Skelton's early reputation as a “libertine eccentric” (A. S. G. Edwards 8), precursor of the “roguish” John Donne. Another major approach (which may have begun in Coleridge's characterization of the poem as “exquisite and original,” repeated by Dyce in the early “standard” edition of Skelton [l: xlix]) treats Phyllyp Sparowe as “our first great poem of childhood,” stylistically an “almost perfect” poem; this view is preoccupied with the lament, for it is primarily there that we see the “little girl” and hear her “small reed-like voice” (Lewis 138). Miscellaneous other readings (e.g., those by H. L. R. Edwards; Kinsman, “Phyllyp Sparowe”; McConchie; Swart) also devote most of their attention to the lament or commendations, as Fishman indicates in his summary of recent Skelton studies (92). One exception is Targan, who does “read” lines 603-844; see my note 11.

4. In this sense, my “not-reading” is the opposite of Laing's “no-thing” and Iser's theory of reading as gap filling (Iser 165-69). At the opening of “Reading Ourselves,” an essay that won the 1984 Florence Howe Award, presented by the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages, Schweickart brilliantly analyzes an example of what I call not-reading. Additional examples may be found in Schibanoff, “Early Women Writers.”

5. I borrow the interpretive-community concept from Fish (“Interpreting”), as modified by Kennard to consider the effect of “nonliterary as well as literary influences” (“Convention” 71).

6. Or the way we “fantasize” what we read, in Holland's phrase, re-creating the text according to our “own identity theme[s]” (818). See also Tompkins 210-11.

7. Subsequent references to the Psalms give the Vulgate numbering first, the King James Version second. All quotations are from the Vulgate (Douay Version).

8. Kinsman notes the reminiscence (J. Skelton: Poems 144n53-57), and Brownlow suggests additional parallels (11n11).

9. Neither Kinsman (J. Skelton: Poems 144-45n148) nor Scattergood (407n148) is certain which of two possible Sulpicias Skelton had in mind: the classical poet who wrote love poems of “warmth and frankness” or the poet whom Martial praises as the author of poems of “honourable love.” Below I make the case for the former Sulpicia.

10. As I note elsewhere, however, both these fictional female readers do devise strategies to include themselves in what they read, although their methods differ from Jane's (Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold” 87-101).

11. Cf. Targan, who also discusses Jane's reading but feels that Jane “seldom” has control over it or, for that matter, over any of her other thought processes and statements (77).

12. The impulse to catalog human-avian correspondences (and their literary usages) continues in modern times; see, e.g., Harrison; Harting; McConchie; Rowland, Birds and Blind Beasts.

13. Skelton may well have had Chaucer's and Ripa's images in mind, too, for the the “bird mass” in Phyllyp Sparowe (386-570) relies on many traditional correspondences (e.g., the peacock and pride), although I do not wish to imply here that this approach to the text is the only “correct” one.

14. Jane's recollection also reminds us that Phyllyp's success in gaining propinquity contrasts with the failure of the literary lover of the fourteenth-century Harley lyric “A waile as whit as whalles bon”:

    Ich wolde ich were a brestlecock,
    a bountyng oþer a lauercok,
    swete byrd! Bituene hire curtel ant hire smok
    y wolde ben hyd.
    I wish I were a songthrush
    a bunting or a lark,
    sweet bird! Between her gown and her smock
    I would be hid.

    (Brook 41; cited by McPeek in his discussion of Catullus and sparrow poetry in England [55-74])

15. Bailly's comment is, of course, in a decidedly more locker-room tone than Jane's, for the host has just finished “blessing” the priest's “breche” and “every stoon.”

16. Skelton's text here is in Latin and French, as follows:

    Flos volucrum formose, vale!
    Philippe, sub isto
    Marmore iam recubas,
    Qui mihi carus eras.
    Semper erunt nitido
    Radiantia sydera celo;
    Impressusque meo
    Pectore semper eris.
    Per me laurigerum
    Britanum Skeltonida vatem
    Hec cecinisse licet
    Ficta sub imagine texta.
    Cuius eris volucris,
    Prestanti corpore virgo:
    Candida Nais erat,
    Formosior ista Joanna est:
    Docta Corinna fuit,
    Sed magis ista sapit.
    Bien men souvient.

17. As Scattergood's recent edition makes clear, the “opening” octenary verses that Brownlow mentions actually conclude, not begin, the various sections of Skelton's “Commendacions.”

18. Skelton's text here is in Latin and French, as follows:

    Per me laurigerum Britonum Skeltonida vatem
    Laudibus eximiis merito hec redimita puella est:
    Formosam cecini, qua non formosior ulla est;
    Formosam potius quam commendaret Homerus.
    Sic juvat interdum rigidos recreare labores,
    Nec minus hoc titulo tersa Minerva mea est.
    Rien que playsere.

19. One of these “jayes” was no doubt the Benedictine monk Alexander Barclay, whose Ship of Fools (written in 1509) concludes with an oblique attack on Skelton:

    I write no jeste ne tale of Robin Hode
    Nor sowe no sparcles ne sede of viciousnes;
    Wisemen loue vertue, wylde people wantonnes;
    It longeth not to my scyence nor cunnynge
    For Phylyp the Sparowe the Dirige to singe.

    (Jamieson 2: 331)

20. By this time, Barclay had evidently attacked Skelton again, calling him a graduate of “stinking Thaïs” in his Eclogues of 1514 (B. White 165). A. S. G. Edwards notes other contemporary criticism of Skelton (6-7).

21. On modern feminist literary criticism as inclusive rather than exclusive, see Kennard, “Personally Speaking” 145. Happily, the interpretive community of feminist critics is now so large and diverse that I must acknowledge the particular portion that over the last several years has aided my own thinking about the reading-as-a-woman tradition. In addition to the works cited elsewhere in these notes, I am especially indebted to Arlyn Diamond's pioneering discussion of “women's Chaucer” and to Judith Fetterley's work on the “resisting reader.” The work of Culler, Gilbert and Gubar, and Kolodny has also been important.

22. Or, as Florence H. Ridley, alluding to Virginia Woolf, phrases it, there never is a “final answer” to the questions the text raises (105).

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