THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘delectable’ and whose language is ‘well alowed ... pleasaunt, easy and playne’, fails the test of true modern
expressiveness, and her elegy is finally written in Latin ‘playne and lyght’. As his self laudatory poem The Garlande
or Chapelet of Laurell suggests, Skelton himself was happy to balance the mass of his English works against a body
of internationally acceptable poems in Latin. He was also inordinately proud of the tributes accorded to him by the
universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Louvain for his
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command of classical rhetoric, and tended to sign himself as ‘Poete Laureate’. As a priest and as a former tutor to
Prince Henry it was proper that he should have sought to express himself in the language of learning and elevated
international communication, yet he remained confident enough of certain residual qualities in his native tongue to
employ it for his extraordinarily direct, abusive, and rumbustious satires on contemporary manners.
Despite the vividness of his art, Skelton is a poet who found it difficult to be succinct in his structures and chaste
in his choice of words, deficiencies which did not endear him to later sixteenth-century critics. He rejoices in scurrility
and in the rhythmic immediacy of ballads and folk-poetry. In Agaynst the Scottes (1513), for example, he abuses
Scotland for its challenge to the authority of Henry VIII and rubs Scottish noses in their signal defeat at Flodden
(‘Jemmy is ded | And closyd in led | That was theyr owne kynge. | Fy on that wynnyng!’, ‘Are nat these Scottys | Folys
[fools) and sottys | Such boste to make, | To prate and crake [boast], | To face, to brace, | All voyde of grace’). Closer
to home, in Speke Parrott, he adopts the persona of a polyglot parrot, a ‘byrde of Paradyse, | By Nature devysed of a
wonderowus kynde’, and turns finally to an attack on the paltriness of an English court over which the King towers
nobly like some kind of moral colossus (‘So manye bolde barons, there hertes as dull as lede; | So many nobyll bodyes,
undyr on dawys [simpleton’s) hedd; | So royall a kyng, as reynythe uppon us all - | Syns Dewcalions flodde, was nevyr
sene nor shall’). Skelton’s intensest bile was, however, reserved for attacks on Henry VIII’s powerful minister,
Cardinal Wolsey, notably in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (1522). Not only does the narrator famously suggest an
improper contemporary confusion between ‘the kynges courte’ and Wolsey’s more sumptuous palace at Hampton
Court, he also directly warns of the dangers of the Cardinal’s political presumption: ‘he wyll play checke mate | With
ryall [royal] majeste | Counte himselfe as good as he; | A prelate potencyall | To rule under Bellyall [Belial]’.
The so-called ‘Skeltonic metre’ (if it is indeed metric) takes its name from Skelton’s clever repetitions of
tumblingly breathless short lines with two or three accents and an indefinite number of syllables. At times these
recurring rhymes seem little better than mere doggerel; at others, readers are faced with a popular verbal and
rhythmic energy which could be described as a kind of proto-rap. In the case of Phyllyp Sparrowe Skelton can suggest
a series of hopping, twittering bird-like jerks. In The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge (c. 1520) the irregularity of his
metre playfully evokes the atmosphere of an untidy inn, the effects of an unsavoury but potent beer, and the
quarrelling, tumbling rush of Elynour’s customers. In Collyn Clout (c. 1522), a poem narrated by an unsophisticated
pauper, Skelton seeks to typify his own verbal art:
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For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rayne-beaten,
Rusty and mothe-eaten,
Yf ye take well therwith
It hath in it some pyth.
Collyn Clout speaks roughly, vividly, indelicately, old-fashionedly, but by no means unlearnedly. His eloquence has
little to do with the established rules of rhetoric or the supposed courtliness of Latinate lyricism. He attacks the abuses,
vices, and hypocrisies of the secular clergy as Langland and Chaucer had before him, but he also deliberately
heightens certain specific modern circumstances (including reference to the ‘brennynge sparke | Of Luthers warke
[work]’). Despite his often radical alertness to the problems inherent in the early Tudor Church and commonwealth,
and despite his delight in the resources of the English language, Skelton remained a literary conservative, a poet
content with agile variations on established vernacular traditions rather than one who opened his art to the challenge
of extraneous influence.
It is a somewhat over-simplified reading of literary history to see Skelton merely as a dogged upholder of a
tradition that was rapidly becoming defunct and his younger contemporaries, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey (?1517-47), as the genteel leaders of an imported, progressive avant-garde. All three poets
were innovators in their distinctive ways; all three were bred in a similar Latinate, as opposed to Italianate, culture; all