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Malory and Skelton
51
Skelton’s morality play, Magnificence, probably from the 1520s, is
the only late mediaeval drama whose author is known. His range and
inventiveness have rather ironically counted against him, in that he
cannot be categorised with any other writer, or seen as a part of any
particular movement or trend.
Skelton’s individuality led him to invent his own style of poetic
writing – in short, rapid lines:
Tell you I chyll [chyll: shall]
If that ye will
A while be still
Of a comely gyll [gyll: girl]
That dwelt on a hill.
This helter-skelter verse form, close to the rhythms of speech and to the
spirit of the ordinary people’s lives it describes, was later called Skeltonics,
and remains unique. For, with the coming of the Renaissance, poetry
was to move towards a new self-consciousness and refinement, with
new forms, genres, and linguistic devices depicting the rhythms of life.
John Skelton was dismissed by George Puttenham in a parenthesis.
Although Skelton was ‘surnamed the poet laureate’, the author of The
Arte of English Poesie says, ‘I wot [know] not for what great worthiness’.
Puttenham prefers the subsequent ‘courtly makers’, and later critics
have tended to follow him. Skelton makes critics uncomfortable. He
remains a unique poet, one who links court life and low life as no
other writer of his time was able to do.
LANGUAGE NOTE
Prose and sentence structure
Two of the commonest methods used for linking clauses in English
are coordination and parataxis. In Old English this kind of
intersentential structure is the principal mode of ordering statements.
Co-ordination involves sentences which are linked by co-ordinating
conjunctions such as and, then or a comparable linking word; in the
case of parataxis, linking words are absent and the clauses are arranged
in a sequence which is understood to be connected. For example: