John Skelton

John Skelton, Selected and Edited by Greg Walker, Everyman, J. M. Dent, London, 1997.

Too scurrilous to be a part of the Great Poetic Tradition of Wyatt, Surrey and Spenser, yet too evidently learned and brilliant to be dismissed as a mere wordsmith, … too early for the first pre-natal flutterings of the Renaissance, Skelton is generally seen, if he is seen at all, as a transitional figure, interesting more for what he points towards than what he offers in his own terms. Yet he is in himself almost a complete history of the verse of his period, moving from the typically ‘medieval’, heavily conventional, aureate style of his first memorial poems and love lyrics to the distinctively eccentric mode of his later satires and longer poems, characteristically written in the ‘Skeltonic’ verse form which he made his own. (Introduction, viii)

Skelton’s poetry is almost always occasional in the sense that it is prompted by a particular event, moment, place, or person. It is the white heat of personal animosity that prompts the vitriolic invective of his poems… (viii)

The passion and vitriol of these later satires has led many readers to assume that Skelton’s hatred of Wolsey was real and intense, and that the picture of Henrician England which he paints is realistic. The truth seems to have been rather different, however. For as soon as Skelton saw that Wolsey was not about to fall from favour, and that his poetic assaults were not finding favour with his intended royal audience, he abandoned the project and began to write for, rather than against Wolsey. His next poems were indeed dedicated to the cardinal in fulsome terms. Having found that he could not win patronage by beating Wolsey, Skelton seems to have decided to join him instead, and turned his satiric pen against the enemies of the realm and the evangelical reformers who threatened the Church. (x)

I trust to quit you ere I die.

(Womanhood, Wanton, Ye Want, pg. 3)


Your key is meet for every lock,
Your key is common and hangeth out;
Your key is ready, we need not knock,
Nor stand long wresting there about;

(Womanhood, Wanton, Ye Want, pg. 3)

The rivers rowth, the waters wan;
She spared not to wet her feet;
She waded over, she found a man
That hassled her heartily and kissed her sweet:

(Lullay, Lullay, Like a Child, pg. 4)


Whose jealousy malicious maketh them to leap the hatch:

(The Ancient Acquaintance, pg. 5)


Dreaming in dumps to wrangle and to wrest:
He findeth a proportion in his prick song,
To drink at a draught a large and a long.
/
Nay, jape not with him, he is no small fool,
It is a solemn sire and a sullen;
For lords and ladies learn at his school;
He teacheth them so wisely to solf and to faine,
That neither they sing prick song nor plain:
This doctor Devious commenced in a cart,
A master, minstrel, a fiddler, a fart.

(Against a Comely Coystrowne, pg. 11)


What can it avail
To drive forth a snail,
Or to make a sail
Of an herring’s tail;

(Colin Cloute, pg. 73)


For he lacketh wit;
And if that he hit
The nail on the head,
It standeth in no stead;
The devil, they say, is dead,
The devil is dead.

(Colin Cloute, pg. 74)


And if ye stand in doubt
Who brought this rhyme about,
My name is Colin Cloute.
I purpose to shake out
All my cunning bag,
Like a clerkly hag;
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.

(Colin Cloute, pg. 74-75)