John Skelton, 1460-1529

Like most people I found my way to John Skelton because of Robert Graves. Because Skelton wore a gown embroidered with the name Calliope and kept a pet sow, and because he invoked the triple goddess on occasion, Graves was convinced he was a muse poet, which he might well have been. Skelton was a priest, a country priest who had children by a local woman. When taken to task for this he ridiculed the hypocrisy of his congregation and pointed out that having sex and having children was part of God’s design and could be no sin. He liked to drink. Like Aristotle he “Played the taws on the bottom of a king.” That is, he was Henry the Eighth’s Tudor. He was also the bitter enemy of Cardinal Wolsey; his most obscure and greatest foray into macaronic satire, Speke Parot, is directed at him, as is Why Come Ye Nat to Court. Erasmus, who praised folly, praised him in a letter to Thomas More, but that probably was because Skelton was the only Englysshe poet he had ever heard of. For his part Skelton wasn’t much interested in their Greke based Humanist revolution, though he wanted to preserve the church against The Reformation. That is not the same thing as protecting it from reformation.

Skelton is scurrilous. He invented a verse form known as Skeltonics. Here is an example from Elynour Rummynge, about a woman who runs a disreputable local bar:

Her lothly lere

Is nothing clere,

But ugly of chere,

Droupy and drowsy,

Scurvy and lowsy;

Her face all browsy,

Comely crynklyd,

Woundersly wrynklyd,

Lyke a rost pygges ear,

Brystled with here.

He goes on like this for page after page. Even then it was a violation of good taste. If the Elizabethans wanted to mock someone as an old fashioned rube they would have him speke in Skeltonics. But Skelton was brave. He attacked the most powerful men of his age and allied himself with the Howards, the perennially endangered Dukes of Norfolk, one of whom, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (son of the Duke) was a sort of Hotspur, also a fine poet, inventor of Blank Verse, (his translation of parts of The Aeneid is great), and was the last man executed by order of Henry the 8th (who lay in a coma). They didn’t have time to behead his father, who was also in the tower, where he remained until the death of Edward the 6th brought Bloody Mary to the throne.

Some wenches come unlased

Some huswives come unbrased,

Wyth theyr naked pappes,

That flyppes and flappes,

It wygges and it wagges

Lyke tawny saffron bagges;

He had his serious side:

in Colin Clout(yes, Spenser’s Shephard Poet is named for him) he attacks the priests who enrich themselves at the expense of the people:

Some say ye sytte in trones,

Like princeps aquilones,

And shryne your rotten bonys

With perles and precyous stonys.

But howe the commons gronys,

And the people monys,

For priests and for lonys

Lent and never payde,

But from daye to daye delayde,

The communewelth decayde.

The last lines I guess could have been written by Pound.

I read Skelton for pleasure, for his antic language, his irresponsible rhyming, his attraction to low life, his humanity, his lack of pretension and his silly, apparent egotism, as he toots his own horn, constantly reminding the reader that he is a Laureate, that he does indeed understand Greke and Hebrew (sort of, just sort of). He was a serious poet yes, but not afraid to be a clowne, and many of his most serious thoughts were dangerous thoughts and thus hidden in the motley of a clowne. He’s also enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. Everyone who discovers him discovers a strangely modern poete. After all, hip hop artists rhyme compulsively, attack power, play the clowne and brag about how bygge their dicks are. If that’s not poetry I don’t know what is.