Introduction

There are obvious difficulties in any attempt to present John Skelton’s critical heritage. As Patricia Thomson has reminded us in the case of another sixteenth-century poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, there were virtually no ‘masters of criticism’ before the Restoration.(1) It is not until the publication of the second volume of Warton’s ‘History of English Literature’ in 1778 — nearly 250 years after Skelton’s death — that we find the first extended evaluation of the poet. Before that, the materials for an understanding of the changing critical appreciation of Skelton are highly fragmentary. One has, in the main, to rely on passing allusions, brief comments, and such inferences as can be adduced from the evidence of Skelton’s influence on the literature of his own and subsequent generations.

It is the fragmentary nature of much of Skelton’s critical heritage that poses the greatest problem. Indeed, much of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century material I have been able to assemble can only be termed criticism by the most elastic use of the term. Dispassionate, or even considered, judgments of his work are (at best) very rare. The chief problem is that Skelton’s reputation, both during his own lifetime and subsequently, has been inextricably bound up with controversy, personal, political and aesthetic. Comparatively little of the early comment on his work is free from this identification of Skelton with partisan causes of various kinds.

But in some ways it is this very tendency to attract controversy that makes Skelton’s reputation such a rewarding subject for study. By focusing on this particular figure it is possible to follow, in a revealing way, fluctuations in literary taste from the sixteenth century through to our own age. When one attempts to trace the vicissitudes of his critical status, Skelton emerges as a valuable representative figure, reflecting changing aesthetic and cultural responses to certain forms of literary expression, notably satiric and popular verse.

Much of the subsequent controversy about Skelton is mirrored in the contemporary responses to his work. Initially, for his contemporaries he seems to have been a symbol of all that was surpassing in English scholarly achievement and poetic excellence. Caxton, in the earliest recorded comment on Skelton, in the Preface to his translation of the ‘Aeneid’ (1490), links Skelton’s scholarship and his poetic skills and uses them as a way of vindicating the reliability of his translation (No. 1):

For hym I knowe for suffycyent to expowne and englysshe euery dyffyculte that is therein … And also he hath redde the ix. muses and vnderstande theyr musicalle scyences and to whom of theym eche scyence is appropred. I suppose he hath dronken of Elycons well.

Even though this passage smacks rather of a publisher’s blurb, it none the less affords a revealing insight into Skelton’s contemporary reputation. At the age of (probably) little more than thirty his name could be invoked with the apparent expectation that it would provide a guarantee of the merits of Caxton’s edition.

Other evidence exists to confirm this contemporary view of the ‘scholarly’ Skelton. Caxton’s Preface touches on some of it. We are told that Skelton has already translated ‘the epystlys of Tulle’ (now lost) and ‘the boke of dyodorus syculus’, a weighty universal history. (2) And he had been ‘late created poete laureate’ at Oxford, a distinction primarily of academic significance. Similar awards were to follow from the universities of Louvain and Cambridge, probably in 1492 and 1493 respectively. And about 1496 he was appointed royal tutor to the future Henry VIII, (3) a position which was to provide new opportunities for didactic and scholarly writing. (4)

Praise for this aspect of Skelton’s achievement is reiterated in the comments of Erasmus who met him on his visit to England in 1499, while Skelton was still a member of the royal household. Erasmus acclaims him as ‘that incomparable light and ornament of British letters’ in his prefatory comments to a poem in honour of Prince Henry (No. 2a).

But from this point Skelton’s reputation as a scholar seems to cease to concern his critics. It is not until the nineteenth century, in the comments of James Russell Lowell (No. 46), that we hear any more praise of Skelton as scholar.

For it seems evident that by 1499 Skelton has already begun to acquire a significant reputation as a poet. Few of his poems can be dated with certainty before this year — only his ‘Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland’ (1489) and his allegorical ‘Bouge of Court’ (1498) — but his poetry was evidently known, at least in some degree, by Erasmus when he visited England in 1499. There survives in a manuscript in the British Library, MS Egerton 1651, a poem headed ‘Carmen Extemporale’ (No. 2b) by Erasmus in praise of Skelton’s verse. Dated Autumn 1499, it lauds Skelton in the most fulsome terms. He is said to surpass Orpheus and is compared to Virgil. His talents are said to come from Calliope, the chief of the muses. The praise is extravagant and wholly disproportionate to what appears to have been Skelton’s poetic achievement at this time. To some extent at least Erasmus’ encomium must be seen as the effusion of a courteous visitor to the court of Henry VII, disinclined to afford any possibility of offence to his powerful hosts.

To some extent — but Erasmus’ acclaim cannot be wholly discounted. For there does seem to be evidence that within the next ten years Skelton had established himself as one of the leading contemporary English poets. Before turning to that evidence it may be helpful to speculate a little on how Skelton came to achieve such popularity.

Only one of his works had been printed by 1500, and no more appear to have been printed until about 1513. And it must be borne in mind that printings of early books were generally extremely small. How then would Skelton have been read by Caxton, Erasmus and those other contemporaries whom we will consider next? There is no simple answer to this question. But it is worth recalling that, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the printed book (first brought to England by Caxton) was not yet firmly established as the most potent force for the dissemination of literature. It would, indeed, have been most probable that Caxton had read Skelton’s ‘Tulle’ and ‘dyodorus syculus’ in manuscript. The latter work, in fact, survives now only in that form (in a copy in Trinity College, Cambridge). There are other circumstances tending to support the view that manuscript circulation was probably more influential in the dissemination of Skelton’s earlier works than were printed books. Chief among these is the actual milieu in which he created many of his earlier works. For at this period of his life Skelton was mainly associated with the King’s court and with courtly circles. Within such circles much of his verse was doubtless produced for specific local occasions, most obviously ones requiring entertainment. For example, the comic lyric ‘Mannerly Margery Mylk and Ale’ survives only in a manuscript (British Library MS Add. 5465) together with its music. And ‘Against Garnesche’ was a ‘flyting’ written at ‘the kynges most noble commaundement’; we gather this from the only surviving contemporary copy which is again a manuscript (British Library MS Harley 367). The work itself is a comic, satiric attack on one of King Henry VIII’s courtiers. Skelton’s place within this courtly milieu may well have defined the manner and extent of the dissemination of a number of his earlier works, serving to restrict them, in the main, to a relatively small audience most of whom encountered his works in manuscript. Such an intimate relationship between poet and audience was in no sense untypical in the early sixteenth century. It is worth recalling that, a generation later, none of Wyatt’s poems and only three of Surrey’s appeared in printed form during their lifetimes.

Such circumstances make the growth of Skelton’s poetic reputation particularly striking. For example, ‘The Great Chronicle of London’ (c. 1510) links him with ‘poettis of such ffame’ as Chaucer and his own contemporaries Thomas More and William Cornish (No. 4). The allusion to Skelton is a brief one. But that in itself seems suggestive of the status of Skelton’s poetic reputation and credentials needed no further documentation.(5)

Others were equally ready to link Skelton with great poets of the past. Henry Bradshaw, in two saints’ lives written around 1513, ‘The Life of St. Radegunde’ and ‘The Life of St. Werburge’, links Skelton with both Chaucer and Lydgate in terms which are designed to suggest an equality amongst them (No. 5). These laudatory references are interesting for several reasons. Although few of Skelton’s works can be confidently dated within the period 1500–13, it would seem on the evidence of Bradshaw’s praise praise that he was probably writing quite extensively during this time. This is the more noteworthy since between approximately 1503 and 1512 Skelton seems to have left the court for relative exile as rector of Diss in Norfolk. And yet his works seem to have been circulating sufficiently extensively for a monk in the north of England (Bradshaw lived in Chester) to have been familiar with them.

In Skelton’s middle years, when he returned to court c. 1512 after his years of exile at Diss, there seems to be a change in the nature of his audience and in the manner in which his works circulated. It is from this time that Skelton’s works began to achieve a more general circulation in print as he was called upon to fulfil his newly designated role as ‘orator regius’ (the King’s orator). His ‘Ballade of the Scottish Kynge’ (c. 1513) was the second of his works to be printed — after a fifteen year hiatus since ‘The Bouge of Court’. This was followed by ‘Elynor Rumming’ (1521), ‘The Garland of Laurel’ (1523), ‘Dyuers Ballettys Solacious’ and ‘A Comely Coystroun’ (both published c. 1527, but including material written much earlier), and ‘A Replycacion against certain scholars’ (c. 1528). The decision to print these particular works suggests a desire to give wide dissemination to particular aspects of Skelton’s achievement, in particular to those most closely identified with the ‘orator regius’: that is, those works which stress courtly attitudes or ‘establishment’ positions. ‘The Ballade of the Scottishe Kynge’ and ‘A Replycacion’ are both ‘public’ works proclaiming orthodox political positions. ‘The Garland…’ and ‘Dyuers Ballettys…’ demonstrate a concern with courtly attitudes and values. It is only in ‘Elynor Rumming’ and ‘A Comely Coystroun’ that Skelton’s distinctive comic/satiric vein achieved print during his lifetime. This was doubtless because their humour and satire were directed at targets of little or no political significance. Skelton’s great political satire on Wolsey, ‘Colin Cloute’ has come down to use in what are probably its earliest forms in two fragmentary manuscripts (British Library MSS Harley 2252 and Lansdowne 762). It seems that such works were felt to be too volatile in subject matter and treatment for a publishers to risk circulating them in print, at least while author and subject were still alive.

There is earlier evidence of contemporary sensitivity to the subject-matter of Skelton’s verse. It is ironic that the only one of his contemporaries with whom Skelton is linked by Bradshaw is the poet and translator Alexander Barclay — ‘religious Barkeley’ or ‘preignaunt Barkley’ as he is called. For it was Barclay who, a few years previously, had struck the first controversial note concerning Skelton’s reputation. In his poem ‘The Ship of Fools’ (1509) he introduces a tersely dismissive comment on Skelton’s ‘Philip Sparrow’. ‘Wyse men loue vertue, wylde people wantones’, he claims, placing Skelton’s poem firmly on the side of ‘wantones’ together with the ‘lest … [and] tale of Robyn hode’ (No. 3). This is the first criticism of Skelton’s ‘wantonness’ or ‘lewdness’. What Barclay means by such terms is not altogether clear. But it is interesting that he should equate Skelton’s works with such popular literature as the ‘tale of Robyn hode’. Such equations were to recur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Skelton the scholar all too quickly became a Skelton synonymous with popular and folk literature, with all the attendant implications of licence and disorder. It is particularly ironic, in the present instance, that such criticism should be levelled at ‘Philip Sparrow’, the one poem of Skelton’s which future generations were to admire with barely a dissenting voice.

The basis for Barclay’s disapproval of Skelton is not known, but it seems not to have been limited to his dislike of ‘Philip Sparrow’. He wrote a work entitled ‘Contra Skeltonum’ (‘Against Skelton’) which has not survived. (6) And there is a passage in one of his ‘Eclogues’ which may perhaps be an attack on Skelton; it reads in part: (7)

Another thing yet is greatly more damnable,
Of rascolde poetes yet is a shamfull rable,
Which voyde of wisedome presumeth to indite,
Though they haue scantly the cunning of a snite:
And to what vices that princes moste intende,
Those dare these fooles solemnize and commende.
Then is he decked as Poete laureate,
When stinking Thais made him her graduate.

A passage in Barclay’s ‘Life of St. George’ (1515) contains a disapproving reference to ‘he which is lawreat’ which may also refer to Skelton. (8)

Presumably Barclay’s gibes are responses to comments of Skelton’s own, now unfortunately lost. One can only speculate on their content. Certainly Skelton seems to have been eager to involve himself in controversy with his fellow writers. An indication of this is provided by the verses of William Lily, the grammarian (No. 6). Again, we lack the verses of Skelton’s which engendered them, but the virulence of Lily’s attack bears testimony to the force of the former’s satire. It is unwise to attach too much importance to such an attack in the critical tradition, especially given the lack of any clear context in which to evaluate it. But together with Barclay’s comments, Lily provides the first hint of controversy surrounding Skelton’s reputation. These are the first intimations of what is to follow in reaction against Skelton’s satiric mode later in the century.

But the final known contemporary judgment of Skelton casts no shadows across his reputation. Robert Whittington, another grammarian, wrote a poem in praise of Skelton which was published in 1519. Whittington was a fellow laureat of Oxford, and possibly also a friend of Skelton’s so his praise must be taken with a pinch of salt. Moreover his poem, whilst lengthy, is too generalized in its response to Skelton’s work to be of much assistance in establishing the critical heritage. He is praised elaborately for his rhetorical skill, which is said to surpass that of such stock figures of rhetorical excellence as Demosthenes and Ulysses, and is finally addressed as ‘culte poeta’ and ‘Anglorum vatum gloria’ (No. 7).

This note of acclaim seems to exhaust the contemporary judgments of Skelton. Already, however, in the relatively small body of critical comment available from his own lifetime, it is possible to discern something of the diversity of responses that Skelton was subsequently to prove capable of exciting. The polarities of critical discussion, of praise and disapproval, were already firmly established before his death.

One can only speculate on the lack of any critical commentary on Skelton during the final decade of his life. It may well be connected with his involvement in political controversy during the 1520s, particularly with his attacks on Cardinal Wolsey, the King’s chief advisor. Although he and Wolsey were subsequently reconciled, it may be that those in a position to comment on Skelton’s talents found it safer, both for themselves and for him, to remain silent.

This is speculation, as is so much of our attempt to understand the relationship between poet and audience in Tudor England. But even on the meagre evidence that does exist it seems safe to assert that Skelton’s situation as poet contrasts strikingly with that of his late medieval predecessors and of other early sixteenth-century poets. Some of his late medieval predecessors were able personally to supervise the copying and dissemination of their poems. The ‘Confessio Amantis’ of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century contemporary John Gower underwent several revisions in this way. Certain fifteenth-century poets were able to go even further and act as their own ‘publishers’. Such writers as Thomas Hoccleve and John Capgrave copied their works themselves and supervised their circulation. There is, in contrast, no evidence of such a developed, or even a particularly organized, manuscript tradition of Skelton’s works. Most of those works for which manuscripts survive exist in unique copies, none of which can be directly connected with Skelton himself. This also contrasts with the textual situation of sixteenth-century courtly poets such as Wyatt and Surrey, whose works had a solely manuscript circulation during their lifetimes. Unlike them, Skelton’s works did not have an audience restricted to a narrow coterie in which works could be manageably passed from hand to hand in manuscript without requiring any more permanent or extensive dissemination.

This is partially due to the fact that the growth in Skelton’s reputation coincided with the development of printing in England. As I have indicated, there was a steady increase in the demand for his works during the latter part of his life, a demand which could not be adequately met by manuscript copying. This demand was itself doubtless a result of the diversity of Skelton’s literary productivity, ranging as it did from courtly verse to low comedy, from orthodox political affirmations to politically volatile satire. Skelton was the first English writer whose works excited interest across a wide social spectrum during his own lifetimes. Interest continued to grow after his death in 1529. This is evidenced by the numerous posthumous sixteenth-century editions of his works.

But even so, there is no significant critical comment on his work between the 1520s and the 1550s. It seems that the evident interest in Skelton was expressed in other forms than direct critical statement. In particular, the biographical or pseudo-biographical tradition of Skelton probably began to emerge even before his death with the publication of the ‘Hundred Merry Tales’ in 1525; number 41 concerns Skelton. This tradition was both crystallized and given new impetus by the publication of the ‘Merry Tales’, attributed to Skelton, in 1567. (9) It led to the development in verse and prose of the figure of the libertine eccentric who had married in defiance of the Church and defended his own paternity in the face of his parishioners’ disapproval — most of which may not be far from the truth. The influence of this biographical tradition and its remarkable vitality can be seen in the various jest-book accounts of Skelton, such as those in ‘Tales, and quicke answers, very mery, and pleasant to rede’ (n.d.) (10), as well as in the form of anecdotes in such works as John Parkhurst’s ‘Ludicra sive Epigrammata’ (1573) (11) and John Chamber’s ‘A Treatise against Judicial Astrologie’ (1601). (12) In its most extreme elaboration and degeneration ‘Dr Skelton’ appears in the jest-biography ‘The Life of Long Meg of Westminster’ (1620) as the lover of the eponymous heroine to whom he speaks in his ‘mad merry vain’. (13) In other forms the biographical tradition saw the linking of Skelton with another jest-figure, Scoggin. I will return to this point.

Another important indication of the esteem in which Skelton was held can be found in the number of imitations his work seems to have inspired. Even before his death his influence can be detected in Roy and Barlow’s ‘Rede Me and Be Nat Wrothe’ (1528). (14) And in the 1530s and 1540s the playwright John Heywood was clearly influenced by Skelton. (15) Indeed, the distinctive Skeltonic verse seems quickly to have gained popularity, especially for polemic purposes. Several controversial tracts survive in this verse form from the 1540s and 1550s and other works continue to be written in Skeltonics until near the end of the century. As late as 1589 a poem on the Armada appeared entitled ‘A Skeltonicall Salutation’ and was actually written in Skeltonics. These are not the only indications of Skelton’s influence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But before discussing such indications it is helpful to look at the actual critical commentary on Skelton’s works following his death.

The first writer to offer any such discussion was the scholar, book collector, religious controversialist and playwright, bishop John Bale. Bale, in fact, left several accounts of Skelton in his various biographical and bibliographical compilations. In his first biographical register of English writers, ‘Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum’ (1548), he includes only a brief comment on Skelton among the final additions to his book: ‘Skeltonus poeta laureatus sub diuerso genere metri edidit’ (Skelton, poet laureat, composed in various kinds of verse’). (16) But in his manuscript work, the ‘Index Britanniae Scriptorum’, he offers a much more extensive account. (17) This latter account appears with only minor variations in his ‘Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae’ (1557). This account (No. 8) provides the first biographical sketch of Skelton and the first posthumous description of the canon of his works. Bale also offers some critical comments, most of them basically sympathetic to Skelton. He is compared favourably with Lucian, Democritus and, most interestingly, with Horace, with whom he is identified by virtue of his capacity to utter criticism from behind a mask of laughter. Indeed, Bale lays particular stress on Skelton’s satiric and controversial roles. As a controversialist himself, Bale was perhaps more readily able to offer a sympathetic discussion of Skelton than many of his critics.

For Bale, Skelton was primarily a satirist, attacking reprehensible abuses. This view recurs, albeit in a more vivid and fantastical form, in William Bullein’s comments in his ‘Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence’ (1564). The only satires he singles out for comment are those against ‘the cankered Cardinall Wolsey’. But his opinion of Skelton is, by implication, very high. For Skelton is linked in Bullein’s grouping once more with Chaucer and Lydgate, joined now by the third of the triumvirate of famous medieval poets, John Gower (No. 9).

This praise, however, pales in comparison with the elaborate compliments offered by Thomas Churchyard in his poem prefacing the publication of Skelton’s ‘Pithy, Pleasaunt and Profitable Works’ in 1568. This poem (No. 10) places Skelton against a wide-ranging literary tradition. After invoking classical and European traditions through references to Marot, Petrarch, Dante, Homer, Ovid and Virgil, Churchyard goes on to maintain that

But neuer I nor you I troe,
In sentence plaine and short

Did yet beholde with eye,
In any forraine tonge:

A higher verse a staetly style
That may be read or song

Than is this daye in deede
Our englishe verse and ryme

English literary history is then recounted: ‘Piers Plowman’, Chaucer, Surrey, Vaux, Phaer and Edwards are all mentioned before Churchyard turns to Skelton, ‘The blossome of my frute’. But his actual comments are disappointingly feeble. Skelton is ‘Most pleasant euery way,/As poets ought to be’. The most distinctive feature of his observations is the fact that once again the satiric vein is singled out: ‘His terms to taunts did lean’. To some extent Churchyard’s poem is merely a blurb, a puff for the edition it precedes. But, it does confirm a sense of Skelton’s achievement consistent with the views of Bale and Bullein.

Indeed, others were perfectly ready to sustain Churchyard’s view of Skelton as one of the pre-eminent poets of past or present. In his poem ‘The Rewarde of Wickedness’ (1574) Richard Robinson describes a visit to Helicon where, after seeing Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Chaucer, he comes upon ‘Skelton and Lydgat’ with Wager, Heywood and Barnaby Googe. A similar encounter takes place in the anonymous poem ‘A poore knight his Pallace of private pleasures’ (1579). There the narrator visits the ‘camp’ of Cupid where he encounters many great poets including (once again) Homer, Virgil and Ovid together with Hesiod and Euripides. He also sees Chaucer, ‘the cheafest of all English men’, and also ‘There Goure [Gower] did stand, with cap in hand, and Skelton did the same’. Both poems link Skelton, as did Churchyard, with the greatest writers of classical and English literary tradition.

This was the high point of sixteenth-century acclaim. Henceforward, the favourable view both of Skelton’s satire and of his poetic status was increasingly questioned, either directly or by implication. The comments of John Grange, for example, in his ‘Golden Aphroditis’ (1577) praise Skelton in a curiously backhanded manner, talking of his ‘wryting of toyes and foolish theames’ and his ‘gibyng sorte’ (No. 11). But Grange was, none the less, sufficiently affected by Skelton to echo and even borrow from his works. (18) In the same year, Holinshed in ‘The Laste volume of the Chronicles’ speaks rather patronizingly of ‘John Skelton, a pleasant Poet’. (19) And less than ten years later, in 1586, William Webbe also damns him with faint praise as a ‘pleasant conceyted fellowe’ (No. 12). Both Grange and Webbe do, however, continue to pay perfunctory tribute to Skelton as a satirist. But in the light of what is to follow it is significant that Grange speaks of Skelton’s ‘ragged ryme’ as appropriate for his satiric mode.

For, in 1589, the first wholesale assault was made on Skelton’s reputation, an attack which primarily took issue with just such questions of Skelton’s satiric propensity and metrical idiosyncrasy. Puttenham’s ‘Arte of English Poesie’ (No. 13) contains an explicit denigration of these aspects of his poetic achievement. As a satirist he is ‘sharpe’ but with ‘more rayling and scoffery than became a Poet Lawreat’. Indeed, he is linked with those who among the Greeks ‘were called Pantomimi, with vs buffons’. It may be that in this judgment Puttenham was influenced by the jest-book figure of Skelton, the lively, sometimes coarse buffoon of the ‘Merry Tales’. A more obvious factor is Puttenham’s preference for more ‘courtly’ poets such as Surrey, Wyatt, Vaux, Phaer and Edwards. Whereas less than two decades previously Skelton had been compared favourably with several of these figures, now he is contrasted with them to his disadvantage.

Of greater critical interest was Puttenham’s denigration of Skeltonic metre as the work of a ‘rude rayling rimer … all his doings ridiculous’. Such criticism is an attack on the most distinctive feature of Skelton’s verse technique, his use of ‘Skeltonics’ — short, irregularly stressed lines, characterized by extended rhymes. For Puttenham this was the style of the ‘common people’ which he rejected in favour of the ‘concord’ of the ‘courtly maker’. The terms of Puttenham’s criticism were to affect subsequent views of Skeltonic verse from the 1590s and into the early decades of the seventeenth century. Its effect can be detected, for example, in Gabriel Harvey’s various references to Skelton in the 1590s. He tends to present him as a grotesque figure who, like his own enemy Greene, would ‘counterfeitan an hundred dogged Fables … and most currishly snarle … where [he] should most kindly fawne and licke’ (No. 14b). Elsewhere, Harvey depicts Skelton as a ‘madbrayned knave’ (No. 14a) of bizarre predilections, as a melancholy fool and a poet of limited technical skill. (20) Others in this period place similar stress on his alleged metrical infelicities. Hall, in 1598, speaks of his ‘breathlesse rhymes’ (21) — but does nevertheless seem to have been influenced by Skelton in his own satiric writings. (22) And Francis Meres, in ‘Palladis Tamia’, also published in 1598, reiterates almost verbatim Puttenham’s strictures on Skelton’s verse. (23)

Others were even more explicit in stating their disapproval of Skeltonics. For example, William Browne in the first ecloque of ‘The Shepherd’s Pipe’ (1614) complains that ‘Skeltons reed’ does ‘iarre’ (No. 20). Also Nicholas Breton in 1612 ‘Cornu-copiae or Pasquils Night Cap’ talks of Skelton’s ‘ruffling rimes’ which are ‘emptie quite of marrow’, before going on to join the small band of critics who can find something unpleasant to say about ‘Philip Sparrow’ (No. 18).

This disapproval of ‘Philip Sparrow’ is the more remarkable since admiration of this poem seems to have endured even during this relatively low ebb in Skelton’s critical fortunes. One indication of this regard is the number of poets who appear to have been influenced by it. Both Gascoigne (in ‘Weeds’, 1575) and Philip Sidney (in ‘Astrophel and Stella’, 1591) produced imitations of the poem. Its influence can also be found in parts of Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’. Shakespeare alludes to it in ‘King John’. And manifestations of this influence by imitation were to continue into the seventeenth century. John Bartlet in his ‘Book of Airs’ (1606) produced a version of ‘Philip Sparrow’ as did such later poets as William Cart-wright, Richard Brome and Robert Herrick. (24)

Other works of Skelton’s failed either to excite much comment or exert any influence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The chief example of such failure is the poem ‘Colin Clout’, which was, on the evidence of separate editions produced, the single most popular work of Skelton’s during the sixteenth century. (25) But it seems to have been rarely singled out for comment or imitation. The most famous indication of its influence is Spenser’s introduction of the figure Colin Clout into various poems, notably The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579).(26) Otherwise there is little apart from a friendly, but qualified, reference by Drayton (No. 16c) to indicate any on-going interest in the poem.

There are, however, some more generalized indications of Skelton’s reputation and influence to be detected in the drama of the period. Both Christopher Marlowe, in ‘Dr Faustus’ (1604), and Ben Jonson, in ‘The Devil is an Ass’ (c. 1611), introduce passages into their plays which reveal a discernible Skeltonic influence. (27) Jonson includes Skelton as a character in his masque ‘The Fortunate Isles’ (1625), where he is linked with the jest-book figure of ‘Scogan’ (otherwise ‘Scoggin’). Before this the figure of Skelton had made another dramatic appearance in Anthony Munday’s ‘The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon’ (1601). Here as on previous occasions Skelton is identified with the Robin Hood of folk literature. Skelton appears initially ‘in propria persona’ and again later in the play as Friar Tuck. In the latter guise he speaks passages in Skeltonics — until Little John pleads with him: ‘Stoppe master Skelton: whither will you runne?’ (28) Skelton may also have appeared, again linked with Scoggin, elsewhere in the drama of the period. (29)

The general tendency of these appearances is to identify Skelton with a comic, low world of popular culture. This identification takes two distinct forms. First, there is the use of Skeltonics in a way which generally tends to suggest tediousness and clumsiness, and their inappropriateness for serious verse. Secondly, there is the identification between Skelton and Scoggin (also Scogin, Skogan). The origin of the identification between the two figures is obscure, but appears to have begun soon after Skelton’s death. (30) The actual figure of Scoggin appears to have been based on a confusion involving the fourteenth-century Henry Scogan, a friend of Chaucer, and the legendary John Scoggan, sometimes claimed to have been Henry VII’s fool. Nor is it clear how these two identities first became intertwined one with another and subsequently with that of Skelton. But the equation seems to have been an attractive one for writers and critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is one that served to further diminish Skelton’s claim to consideration as a serious poet.

But the general disparagement of Skelton seems to have attracted special attention to one particular work, ‘The Tunnyng of Elynor Rumming’. This bawdy tale of an ale-wife was viewed as epitomizing the work of the ‘low’ Skelton and excited a considerable amount of comment in consequence. Some comment was denigrating. Nashe, writing in 1600, speaks rather contemptuously of the ‘rifferaffe of the rumming of Elanor’. (31) Arthur Dent’s ‘The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven’ (1601) links ‘Ellen of Rumming’ with other ‘vaine and friuolous bookes of Tales, Iestes, and lies’, equating the poem with contemporary jest-books and other popular works which are dismissed as ‘so much trashe and rubbish’ (No. 15). More subtle, but equally critical, on somewhat different grounds, is the use of Skelton’s poem in Ben Jonson’s masque ‘The Fortunate Isles’ (1625). (32) In this masque Skelton appears as a character (‘skipping Skelton’) together with his comic alter ego Scogan and speaks lines adapted from ‘Elynor Rumming’. (33) His function as character and as speaker of his own verses is clearly a comic and/or burlesque one. He earns the approval of Merefool, a character who, as his name suggests, represents values which are rejected in the total context of the masque. Skelton and his poem become, for Jonson, representative of certain kinds of literary values which he chooses to dismiss, values which seem to see the poem as synonymous with vulgar and inept versification. (34)

Elsewhere there are some comments which express admiration for the poem, either directly or indirectly, because it is possible to identify it with popular literature. ‘Elynor’ is echoed in ‘The Cobbler of Canterbury’ (1590), a collection of droll tales. (35) It is also mentioned with approval in a later adaptation of that work, ‘The Tinker of Turvey’ (1630). In the Preface to the latter the Tinker encounters an ale-wife: (36)

I asked her who brewed that nectar, whose malt-worm so nibbled at my pericranium, and she said herself, for old Mother Eleanor Ruming was her granddam and Skelton her cousin, who wrote fine rhymes in praise of her high and mighty ale.

Others were even more positive in their praise. Drayton, for example, describes ‘Ellen of Rumming’ as one of the ‘English bookes … that ile not part with’, linking it with such other favourite works as (once again) ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Bevis of Hampton’ (No. 16a). (37)

The single most extensive manifestation of the appeal of ‘Elynor Rumming’ during this period is in the burlesque poem ‘Pimlyco, or Runne Red-Cap’ (1609), a work which examines both Skelton and his poem. Concerning the latter, the anonymous author finds much to praise. Although he recognizes that ‘Elynor’ may be ‘of so base account’, by virtue of its ‘low’ subject-matter, he can find precedents in Virgil and Ovid to justify the exploration of humble themes (No. 17):

Since then these Rare-ones stack’d their strings,
From the hie-tuned acts of Kings
For notes so low, less is thy Blame….

The author is clearly drawn to the ‘liuely colours’ of Skelton’s poem; he goes on to quote most of the first 250 lines of it.

However, affection for Skelton’s poem does not appear to extend to Skelton himself. He is seen as belonging to an age ‘when few wryt well’ and is linked to other (unnamed) contemporary poets who have only ‘empty Sculles’. Clearly the response to ‘Elynor Rumming’ is, in this instance, an ambivalent one. The author seems intrigued by the dichotomy (as he sees it) between Skelton’s status in his own time as poet laureate and the nature of the poetic subject-matter that won him his status. Although he finds the subject-matter attractive it seems to him inadequate for such status.

This sense that Skelton is not a poet to be taken seriously emerges elsewhere in the early seventeenth century. Michael Drayton, for example, had an evident affection for Skelton’s works. His praise of ‘Elynor Rumming’ and ‘Colin Clout’ has already been mentioned. He was sufficiently influenced by Skelton to attempt a ‘Skeltoniad’ and other poems in Skeltonics. (38) But elsewhere he reveals a defensive attitude towards Skelton’s verse. In his ‘Ode to Himselfe and the Harpe’ he suggests that ‘tis possible to clyme … although in SKELTON’s Ryme’ (No. 16b). The comment seems to reflect a contemporary doubt about the viability of the Skeltonic verse form as a vehicle for serious poetry. Similar doubts are expressed by Humphrey King in his ‘An Halfe-penny-worthe of Wit …’ (1613) when Skelton is joined with other ‘merry men’ whose verses are suitable only for unserious subjects, such as tales of ‘Robin Hoode/And little John’ (No. 19).

The prevailing critical perspective on Skelton during the early seventeenth century offers only a trivialized view of his art. His main claim to interest then was in his depiction of low life. (39) The attitude of ‘Elynor Rumming’ appears to have been especially influential. It was the last of Skelton’s works to be reprinted during the seventeenth century, in the famous edition of 1624, with a picture of Elynor the ale-wife herself and prefatory verses by the ghost of Skelton lamenting the current state of English ale. (40)

This view of Skelton as the irresponsible madcap achieves its fullest and most unsympathetic presentation in ‘The Golden Fleece’ by ‘Orpheus Junior’. (41) The exact nature of this curious work resists summary definition. Published in 1626, it is an odd combination of historical complaint and travel literature. Near the end of the third part, Skelton and Scoggin appear to interrupt a sonnet by St David in praise of Charles I. They are identified as ‘the chiefe Advocates for the Dogrel Rimers by the procurement of Zoilus, Momus [figures of division and protest] and others of the Popish Sect’ (p. 83). (42) There follows a three-way exchange in verse between St David, Scoggin and Skelton (pp. 84–92). On the next day, however, the latter confess their faults and are censured by Lady Pallas (p. 93). The burden of her strictures is an attack on the satiric style and mode as embodied in these two figures. She argues that ‘a simple course Poeme inriched with liuely matter and iuyce, ought to be preferred before an heroicall swolne verse pust vp with barme or froth of an inconsiderate wit’ (p. 94). In other contexts the argument might serve to defend critically such a poem as ‘Elynor Rumming’. But here the thrust of the attack is directed at the notion of satiric writing, ‘For it is easier to finde faults, then to mend them, to pull downe a house, then to build one vp’ (ibid.). And ultimately ‘all scoffing companions, and base ballet Rimers’, including Scoggin and Skelton, are banished from Parnassus (p. 95).

In ‘The Golden Fleece’ the current elements of criticism of Skelton tend to converge. Here appears the comic grotesque figure of the ‘biographical’ tradition, demonstrating his predilection for lewd verse and also functioning as the divisive satirist (recalling the ‘Pantomimi’ criticism of Puttenham). Whilst the account is in no sense critical, it does indirectly reveal a great deal about contemporary critical thinking.

After this point, comment on Skelton tends largely to disappear. An indication of this lack of interest is provided by ‘A Banquet of Jests’ (1639) which talks of Skelton’s ‘meere rime, once read, but now laid by’ (No. 22). (43) But the future trend had already been anticipated in the comments of John Pits in his posthumously published ‘Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis’ (1619). Much of his account of Skelton is biographical, probably deriving from Bale. But his value judgments appear to be his own (p. 701):

Lingua enim periculosum loquacibus malum. Sermo salsus saepe vertitur in mordacem, risus in opprobrium, iocus in amaritudinem, et dum tibi videre false submonere, carpis acerbe.

His language had dangerous evil in its utterances. His nimble speech was often turned into jest, laughter into opprobrium, mirth into bitterness, and while he would pretend to be submissive, he spoke cruelly.

Once again Skelton the satirist is dismissed. And the disapproval of some of his works seems to have led to a general disinclination to read any of them. A little later, in 1622, Henry Peacham is more succinctly dismissive of Skelton’s claims as a poet. In ‘The Compleat Gentleman’ (No. 21) Skelton is treated in the course of a survey of English poetry as ‘a Poet Laureate, for what desert I could neuer heare’.

Henceforward, criticism of Skelton becomes primarily biographical. This tendency in the critical tradition is exemplified by the works of Fuller and Anthony à Wood. Admittedly both were writing what were primarily biographical reference works, but, even allowing for that fact, their choosing not to discuss Skelton as a creative artist is striking. Fuller’s ‘Worthies’, published in 1662 (No. 24), is not altogether unsympathetic to Skelton, but he is seen solely in biographical terms. His life is presented in dramatic contours — the satirist with ‘wit too much’ fighting against larger forces than he is capable of resisting. In this drama there is no sense of Skelton’s verse. None of his works is mentioned. Skelton the man is the sole figure of interest.

In à Wood’s ‘Athenae Oxonienses’ (1691–2) there is not even that dimension of interest. A Wood lists references to various John Skeltons and gives an account of the canon (which is probably not based on any first-hand knowledge). But the only comment on the verse is sharply disapproving: ‘…yet the generality said, that his witty discourses were biting, his laughter opprobrious and scornful, and his jokes commonly sharp and reflecting’ (p. 21). The terms of à Wood’s criticism strikingly recall Pits’s earlier comments. It seems doubtful whether à Wood had actually read Skelton.

Elsewhere there is abundant evidence of a more general neglect. No editions of Skelton’s works were published between 1624 and 1718. Hence it is not surprising that the only copy of his poems that James Howell could find in 1655 was an extremely battered one ‘skulking in Duck-Lane, pitifully totter’d and torn’. Nor is it surprising that Howell should have found little merit in Skelton’s poems, apart from a few lines of ‘quaint sense’, for (as he notes) ‘the Genius of the Age is quite another thing’ (No. 23). And Samuel Holland in ‘Wit and Fancy in a Maze’ (1656) felt it necessary to gloss the mere mention of Skelton’s name — and to do so in highly inaccurate terms. After observing that ‘Skelton, Gower, and the Monk of Bury [Lydgate] were at Daggers-drawing for Chawcer’ (p. 102), he adds a marginal note to Skelton’s name: ‘Henry 4. his Poet Lawreat, who wrote disguises for the young Princes’.

What infrequent discussions there are damn the works with faint praise. Edward Phillips in 1675 presents Skelton as ‘accounted a notable Poet … when doubtless good Poets were scarce’. He then proceeds to attack Skelton’s style (‘miserable loos, rambling’) and his ‘galloping measure of Verse’. Like Howell, Phillips can only discover Skelton ‘in an old printed Book, but imperfect’ and can only give a very selective account of the canon (No. 25). His comments demonstrate the absence of serious critical interest in Skelton during the late seventeenth century. Such faint influence as can be perceived manifests itself in the odd attempts at Skeltonic imitation as those in ‘The Old Gill’ (1687) (44) and by John Bunyan in his ‘Booke for Boys and Girls’ (1686). (45)

Various other references to Skelton during the latter part of the seventeenth century confirm the evidence of critical neglect. William Winstanley’s account in ‘Lives of the Most Famous English Poets’ (1687), pp. 42–3, is merely a conflation of the accounts of Phillips and Fuller, and has no independent value. There is slightly more interest in a brief passage in Thomas Rymer’s ‘Short View of Tragedy’ (1693), since Rymer makes there the earliest comment on Skelton the dramatist, contrasting his work unfavourably with the devotional drama of Europe. But, as with other seventeenth-century critics, it is doubtful whether Rymer had read much Skelton, since his only Skelton citation is from the poem ‘Why Come Ye Not to Court?’, which he refers to as a drama. (46)

From this point there follows a lengthy period of silence broken only by two reprints, that of ‘Elynor Rumming’ in 1718 (to which I will return) and the 1736 reprint of the 1568 edition, the first collected edition of Skelton’s works for over 150 years. This collected edition seems to have prompted the most famous of all critical denigrations of Skelton. Alexander Pope in his ‘Imitations of Horace’ (1737) made his dismissal of ‘beastly Skelton’ (No. 27a). Elsewhere Pope is equally dismissive: ‘there’s nothing in them [Skelton’s poems] that’s worth reading’ (No. 27b). Pope’s responses to Skelton climax the contempt and neglect that constitute this phase of Skelton’s critical heritage. Even Dr Johnson’s subsequent dismissive criticism of Skelton’s lack of ‘great elegance of language’ appears quite positive by comparison (No. 29).

Yet even before Pope the tide had begun to turn. Almost the first sign of renewed interest was the reprinting in 1718 of ‘Elynor Rumming’, (47) the first edition of any of Skelton’s works since 1624. The Preface to this edition has been justly described by its discoverer as ‘of some importance in the history not merely of Skelton’s reputation but even of eighteenth century critical tastes’. (48) Skelton is praised for his ‘just and natural Description’. Those who would wish to object to the lowness of the poem’s subject-matter or its antiquity are met by the affirmation that it merits the attention of ‘Persons of an extensive Fancy and just Relish’ who may appreciate ‘a Moment’s Amusement’ (No. 26). Once again, ‘Elynor Rumming’ becomes a critical touchstone. But here an unusual degree of critical independence is apparent in the evaluation of the work, a willingness to articulate criteria for admiration amid the general atmosphere of distaste and neglect.

Other approving voices, of equally independent spirit, were to follow. The reprinting of the poems in 1736 appears to have brought Skelton to the notice of Mrs Elizabeth Cooper. In ‘The Muses Library’ (1737) she hails him unequivocally as ‘The Restorer of Invention in English Poetry!’. Her acclaim is subsequently somewhat qualified by her feeling that he was ‘much debas’d by the Rust of the Age He liv’d in’, particularly in his verse forms — thus harking back to a preoccupation of much pre-Restora-Restoration criticism. But elsewhere she shows further evidence of her highly individual judgment. She is the first critic to single out for particular praise ‘The Bouge of Court’, ‘a Poem of great Merit’ which is worthy of comparison with ‘the inimitable Spencer [sic]’. Mrs Cooper had clearly read at least some of Skelton’s poems with a measure of care and a freshness of insight which evidently had some influence on her own age (No. 28). For, a little later, Theophilus Cibber in his ‘Lives of the Poets’ (1753) (49) reprints her comments with only minor additions — although without any acknowledgment of his source.

However, such a spirit of admiration as that displayed by the 1718 editor and Mrs Cooper is not evident in the first extensive critical appraisal. In 1778 Thomas Warton, critic and poet, published the second volume of his monumental ‘History of English Poetry’, a work which marks the beginning of modern Skelton criticism (No. 30). It cannot be said that Warton is particularly sympathetic to Skelton. In his introductory biographical sketch he notes Skelton’s ‘ludicrous disposition’ and further announces at the outset of his discussion that ‘It is in vain to apologise for the coarseness, obscenity, and scurrility of Skelton, by saying that his poetry is tinctured with the manners of his age. Skelton would have been a writer without decorum at any period.’ Warton goes on to compare him unfavourably with Chaucer and to note some of the disapproving comments of the late sixteenth century. His essential conclusion is also disapproving in accord with the critical temper of his own age: ‘[Skelton’s] genius seems better suited to low burlesque, than to liberal and manly satire.’

Elsewhere, Warton does find particular passages he can single out for praise, including (once again) the ‘Bouge of Court’ where Skelton shows himself ‘not always incapable of exhibiting allegorical imagery with spirit and dignity’. But the main stress in Warton’s discussion falls on the variable quality of the verse: ‘No writer is more unequal than Skelton.’ The lack of sympathy with Skelton’s achievement is evident. Warton is temperamentally an antiquarian, always ready to be deflected from his discussion into by-ways of curious knowledge — the biography of the earl of Northumberland, medieval tapestries, macaronic verse (omitted in No. 30). But his work, for all its limited sympathy and understanding of Skelton’s verse, is of genuine importance. It forms the first extended criticism of Skelton’s poetry buttressed by any analysis and illustration. Even Warton’s antiquarian tendencies have their value; he is able to provide the only account of Skelton’s play ‘The Nigromansir’, now lost. (50) With Warton there is, for the first time in the critical heritage, an attempt at a reasoned analytical approach to Skelton’s work which also endeavours to look at the totality of his oeuvre. Whilst the results of this approach do not lead to any more favourable response to Skelton, there is at least an attempt to control and limit instinctive prejudice by reason and scholarship.

Warton’s example did not make itself quickly felt. The continued willingness to disparage Skelton is reflected in a review of his ‘History’, which, commenting on Skelton, observes: ‘Yet even in [his own] age Skelton’s manner was deemed gross, illiberal and obscene; and now all will agree with Pope in styling it beastly.’ (51) Little more than a decade later Philip Neve dismisses Skelton as a ‘rude and scurrilous rhymer’. The only merit in Skelton Neve is prepared to acknowledge is the ‘justness of his satire’ in his attacks on Wolsey (No. 31). The shadow of earlier critical postures still lay long over current attitudes. Just as the review of Warton is influenced by Pope, so Neve recalls the biographical accounts, particularly that of Fuller, of the previous century.

In the early nineteenth century, the tempo of critical interest began to quicken a little. In 1810 Chalmers reissued the 1736 edition of Skelton as part of his collected edition of the English poets. This edition formed the subject of an unsigned review by Robert Southey in the ‘Quarterly Review’ for 1814 (No. 32), which deals in part with Skelton. After criticizing Chalmers’s choice of copy text and his editorial procedures generally, Southey proceeds to a brief but forcefully argued defence of Skelton as satirist. He is compared to Rabelais, and Southey concludes that Skelton was ‘one of the most extraordinary writers of any age or country’. Some years later, 1831, Southey reiterated his critical support for Skelton in the introduction to the texts of ‘Colin Clout’ and ‘Philip Sparrow’ included in his ‘Select Works of the British Poets’. There he argues that the poems are ‘worthy of presentation, as illustrating in no common degree, the state and progress of our language, and the history of a most important age, and for their intrinsic merit also’ (p. 61). In both comments Southey offers a broader critical response to Skelton than hitherto, encompassing editorial and philological concerns (particular problems in relation to Skelton) and also offering a widened historical sympathy. His comparison between Skelton and Rabelais (also reiterated in the ‘Select Works’) was to prove particularly influential, and was made again and again during the nineteenth century.

But in the shorter term Southey’s review of Chalmers seems to have had the effect of stirring up renewed interest in Skelton. This interest is evidenced in part by the comments of William Gifford, editor of the ‘Quarterly Review’ and a friend of Southey’s, who included an approving comment on Skelton in his edition of ‘The Works of Ben Jonson’ in 1816 (No. 33). Gifford showed himself familiar with at least some earlier criticism and with the ‘stupid’ 1736 edition. Himself a scholar and satirist, he praises Skelton’s scholarship and defends him against the charge that his satire is vulgar.

A less whole-hearted spirit of admiration can be found in the comments of another poet, Thomas Campbell, in his ‘Specimens of the British Poets’ (1819). Campbell takes particular issue with the views of Southey: ‘it is surely a poor apology for the satirist of any age to say that he stooped to humour its vilest taste, and could not ridicule vice and folly without degrading himself to buffoonery’ (No. 34). The continuity of earlier attitudes can also be found in the first North American edition of Skelton’s works in the same year. Ezekiel Sanford in his ‘Life of Skelton’ prefaced to this edition is willing to praise his ‘originality’, but his Skeltonics are denied the title of poetry, being seen as making his poetry ‘excessively monotonous and dull’ (No. 35).

But in other quarters there were continuing indications of a renewed interest. The first edition of his play ‘Magnificence’ to appear since the sixteenth century appeared in 1821, published by the aristocratic bibliophiles of the Roxburghe Club. The following year saw the publication of what was, in effect, an anthology of Skelton in the ‘Retrospective Review’. The conclusion of this article presents a response to his work which is remarkably sympathetic:

In judging of this old poet, we must always recollect the state of poetry in his time and the taste of the age, which being taken into the account, we cannot help considering Skelton as an ornament of his own time, and a benefactor to those which came after him.

Yet in such a response the note of patronage is still very apparent; when all has been said, Skelton is still, to the author, chiefly ‘a fit subject for the reverence and the researches of the antiquarian’ (No. 36).

Even so, the appreciation of Skelton as a vital, important poet was continuing to grow in the early part of the nineteenth century, particularly among his fellow poets. Within a year of the appearance of the ‘Retrospective Review’ article Wordsworth characterized him as ‘a demon in point of genius’ (No. 37a). This may be taken as a considered judgment. For Wordsworth left evidence of his own study of Skelton in a sonnet which echoes part of ‘The Garland of Laurel’. (52) And in the 1830s he lent encouragement to Dyce in the preparation of his edition, discussing with him at some length such questions as Skelton’s genealogy and bibliography. (53)

In the 1820s comes Coleridge’s enthusiastic (albeit inaccurate) praise of ‘Richard Sparrow’ in his ‘Table Talk’ (No. 38a). Such praise is reiterated in his posthumously published notes on Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ where the work (now correctly titled) is admired as ‘an exquisite and original poem’ (No. 38b).

It is tempting to speculate on the role of Robert Southey in this renewed appreciation of Skelton, particularly by nineteenth-century poets. Southey was, of course, course, associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Gifford, all of whom praised Skelton after he had written on him. Campbell’s comments were an explicit response to Southey’s praise. It was Southey’s 1814 review of Chalmers’s edition which prompted Dyce to undertake his monumental edition of Skelton’s poems. (54) And, as will become apparent, traces of his influence can be discerned in later nineteenth-century criticism. All in all, Southey’s work towards the critical rehabilitation of Skelton seems to have been an important but largely unremarked feature in the history of Skelton criticism.

Southey’s pioneering work of reclamation foreshadowed the more extensive and more favourable critical examinations of the 1840s. The first of these was by Isaac D’Israeli in his ‘Amenities of Literature’ (1840). This was the most extensive attempt yet made to vindicate Skelton from the harsh criticisms of posterity (No. 40). The often vilified Skeltonic is hailed as ‘airy but pungent’. Skelton himself is seen as ‘too original for some of his critics’, particularly Puttenham and Pope. And D’Israeli seeks to justify Skelton’s ‘personal satires and libels’ as worthy of modern study on the grounds that they transcend their occasion: ‘for posterity there are no satires nor libels. We are concerned only with human nature’. D’Israeli comes closer than any previous critic to perceiving the fact (if not the exact nature) of the satiric persona in Skelton: ‘He acts the character of a buffoon; he talks the language of drollery…. But his hand conceals a poniard; his rapid gestures only strike the deeper into his victim.’

D’Israeli’s judgments were independent and forcefully argued. He formulates the extensive grounds for the appreciation of Skelton that had hitherto been adumbrated. Other equally independent minded critics shared his enthusiasm. Two years later, Skelton won the support of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In an article in the ‘Athenaeum’ she found herself attracted by his ‘strength’ and his ‘wonderful dominion over language’ which is ‘the very sans-culottism of eloquence’. Those qualities of his satire which had previously earned critical disapproval are singled out by Mrs Browning for admiration. Skelton is, for her, ‘the Juvenal of satyrs!’ whose eccentric metrics are justified by their subject-matter. In a different vein, the ‘Bouge of Court’ earns admiration. And (pace Dr Johnson) Skelton is presented as an ‘influence for good upon our language’ (No. 41). Thus with breathless compression does Mrs Browning present her fresh and vigorously expressed opinions, opinions which challenge much of received thinking about Skelton.

But amid the signs of an excited rediscovery of Skelton’s poetry there were those critics who still adhered to earlier critical views. Henry Hallam’s ‘Introduction to the Literature of Europe…’ published in 1837 speaks of his ‘original vigour’ but dismisses his ‘attempts at serious poetry’ as ‘utterly contemptible’ (No. 39). Agnes Strickland interpolated a biographical judgment of Skelton into her life of Katharine of Aragon (1842): he is adjudged a ‘ribald and ill-living wretch’. No mention is made of his poetry (No. 42).

Entrenched habits of response died hard. But any justification for such casually dismissive criticism was undercut by the appearance in 1843 of Alexander Dyce’s two-volume edition of ‘The Poetical Works of John Skelton’. This edition was a remarkable achievement which has still not been superseded. It includes complete texts of all works which there seemed grounds for attributing to Skelton, with editorial apparatus and extensive annotation — the latter providing the first serious effort to lift the veil covering the many obscurities of Skelton’s verse. The work was prefaced by authoritative surveys of Skelton’s life, reputation and early influence. Dyce’s ‘Skelton’ is a tour de force of nineteenth-century scholarship, the foundation upon which all modern study of Skelton rests. As the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ put it in reviewing his edition in 1844: ‘In the whole catalogue of English poets there was not one whose work called more loudly for an editor than Skelton, nor could they have fallen into abler or more careful hands.’ (55)

Contemporary reviewers were not slow to perceive the value of Dyce’s pioneering work. His edition provided the occasion for a lengthy article in the ‘Quarterly Review’ in 1844 (No. 43) which was, in effect, the first attempt at an overall systematic and sympathetic critical survey of Skelton’s works. Most of the major works are discussed including the ‘Elegy on the Duke of Northumberland’, ‘Philip Sparrow’, ‘Elynor Rumming’, ‘The Bouge of Court’, ‘Magnificence’, ‘Colin Clout’ and ‘Why Come Ye Not to Court?’. Serious attempts are made to deal with some of the major critical problems concerning Skelton. He is vindicated from the attack of Pope through a comparison between his own satiric role and that of Swift. And, as for Mrs Browning, Skelton’s vitality proves attractive. He is ‘the only English verse-writer between Chaucer and the days of Elizabeth who is alive’. Qualities which had previously earned disapproval are now praised as necessary functions of his poetic raison d’être: ‘His whole value is, as a vulgar vernacular poet, addressing the people in the language of the people’. Indeed, considerable stress is placed on the role in his verse of ‘the popular expression of a strong popular feeling’ possessing a fundamental ‘truth’. In acclaiming Skelton as ‘the father of English doggerel’ the ‘Quarterly Review’ is not offering a pejorative judgment, but is rather responding to his oeuvre with sympathy and a constructive historial sense. The ‘Quarterly Review’ article provides a fitting accompaniment to Dyce’s edition, presenting a detailed demonstration of the essential interest and importance of Skelton’s verse.

This article is the more remarkable since in general the response to Dyce’s enormous labour of scholarship was not great. In critical terms the results were negligible. But his edition may have had some effect in extending awareness of Skelton’s work to North America. It may not be coincidental that shortly after his edition appeared it is possible to detect the first signs of Skelton’s influence there. Melville, for example, may conceivably have been affected by ‘Philip Sparrow’ in the course of the composition of his novel ‘Mardi’ (written in 1847–8). (56) And around 1855, James Russell Lowell produced an American edition of Skelton based on Dyce. (57) Lowell has left the earliest testimonials to Skelton’s excellence by a major American critic. He described Skelton at one point as the one ‘genuine English poet [of] the early years years of the sixteenth century’ (No. 46a). On another occasion, he joins the line of critics who had found ‘Philip Sparrow’ worthy of admiration (No. 46b). But these are, admittedly, faint signs. There are few indications of serious American interest in Skelton before the twentieth century.

The situation was not significantly different in other parts of the world. Some foreign critics were conspicuously unsympathetic. A virulent response came from the French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine. Taine seems to follow the ‘Quarterly Review’ writer in stressing Skelton’s commitment to ‘life’, but aligns himself fundamentally with those, like Hallan and Strickland, who were repelled by the nature of that life and its alleged failure to achieve a meaningful formulation in art: ‘beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish’ (No. 44).

It is rare, in fact, to find a nineteenth-century critic who had studied Dyce’s edition with profit and could approach Skelton with the requisite historical and critical sympathy. An attempt that is particularly striking in its efforts to meet these demands is an unsigned article in the ‘Dublin University Magazine’ for 1866 (No. 45). It attempts to see Skelton in the context of his age, against the contemporary social, religious and political background. Seen in such a context Skelton’s satires become profoundly and significantly serious. ‘Elynor Rumming’, for example, ‘is the saddest of Skelton’s works; there is no relenting, no hope in it…. Like Hogarth’s “Progress,” it pictures infatuated man under the sway of passion, recklessly sacrificing his all to morbid propensities’. But not all of Skelton’s achievement is distorted by such didactic solemnity. He is compared intelligently with Butler, Swift and (ironically) Pope, as well as at length with Rabelais. And there is a perception of the link between Skelton’s satire intention and the aesthetic of his verse. It is observed of ‘Colin Clout’ that

Skelton’s metre is all his own; the words spring from line to line like so many monkeys, pointing, grinning, chattering, howling, biting. The similes have that pitiless pungency which Butler afterwards evinced. The whole is breathless and fierce as a panther’s attack.

Beneath the rhetoric there is demonstrated a sense of the energy and force of Skelton’s satire, justifying the contention that ‘In Skelton the satire of the age reached its acme, and after his disappears. He raised it to intense poetry, melting and modelling it with the fire of his original genius’.

Such a detailed defence and sustained enthusiasm for Skelton is unusual, especially when linked to an attempt to place him in an historical perspective which explains and justifies his satiric activity. Indeed, the very vigour with which it prosecutes its critical concerns places it apart from the general trend of commentary on Skelton in the later nineteenth century. Elsewhere, if he was no longer denigrated, he was not afforded such extended attention.

The prevailing attitudes are represented in the comments of John Churton Collins (No. 47). In 1880 he included a brief selection of Skelton’s works in T. H. Ward’s anthology ‘The English Poets’. In his Introduction to this selection Collins reflects current critical orthodoxy concerning Skelton. He compares him (yet again) with Rabelais, praises ‘Philip Sparrow’ and ‘Elynor Rumming’, the latter for its ‘sordid and disgusting delineation of humble life’ in the manner of Swift and Hogarth. Also singled out for comment are ‘the complete originality of his style … the variety of his powers … the peculiar character of his satire … the ductility of his expression’. The chief value of such remarks (unsupported as they are by any analysis) is that they distil what were then felt to be the distinctive features of Skelton’s achievement. Collins presents Skelton as a figure who is acceptable and explicable largely in terms of his relationship to a tradition of satiric realism, particularly identifiable with the eighteenth century.

Critical discussion seems to have been satisfied to accept Skelton in such terms during the rest of the century. Critical comments are few. Augustine Birrell, the critic and essayist, commented in an aside in his essay on Poets Laureate that Skelton ‘was a man of original genius’. (58) In 1897, James Hooper offered a survey of Skelton’s critical reputation in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’. (59) But the main activity had become scholarly, rather than critical, and was taking place in Europe, particularly Germany, rather than in the English-speaking world. Beginning in 1881 with H. von Krumpholz’s study of ‘Magnificence’, there followed a series of literary, linguistic and textual studies that provided the first serious attempts at a scholarly examination since Dyce’s edition. (60)

This trend towards scholarly study continued into the early years of the twentieth century. A number of studies were undertaken by the American professor, J. M. Berdan. (61) A few German and English scholars also made contributions, the most notable being R. L. Ramsay’s edition of ‘Magnificence’, published by the Early English text Society in 1908. But there are scant traces of any critical interest.

This apparent lack of interest was ended by an upsurge of critical concern for Skelton from the 1920s, not expressed by professional critics or scholars but by a generation of young poets who perceived the relevance of Skelton to their own craft. Chief among these was Robert Graves, who spearheaded the revival of interest. Graves seems to have first read Skelton in 1915 or 1916 (he has left conflicting accounts). (62) The earliest clear evidence of his response is his poem ‘John Skelton’ included in ‘Fairies and Fusiliers’, published in late 1917. (63) The poem concludes on this note of affectionate admiration:

But angrily, wittily,
Tenderly, prettily,
Laughingly, learnedly,
Sadly, madly,
Helter-skelter John
Rhymes serenely on,
As English poets should.
Old John, you do me good!

‘Old John’ seems to have become Graves’s particular poetic mentor during the 1920s and 1930s. One indication of this is that between 1921 and 1938 ten of Graves’s books are prefaced by quotations from Skelton. (64) And Skeltonic influence can be found in a number of his poems, most notable in his longest single poetic work ‘The Marmosite’s Miscellany’ where the indebtedness to Skelton has been made explicit. (65)

This is not the place, however, to attempt to assess Skelton’s influence on Graves’s poetic oeuvre. It is sufficient to note that it has been pervasive. But few literary critics have reiterated their feelings about Skelton’s achievement with such frequency and eloquence. In this regard he enjoys an important role in Skelton’s twentieth-century critical heritage. For over forty years he has vigorously championed the claims of Skelton’s genius and encouraged others to do likewise.

The earliest of his critical comments that I have been able to discover occurs in an article on Neglected and Recently Rescued Poets in 1920. There he observes that Skelton ‘is, I suppose, the most submerged of the poets who held the undisputed laurels of their day’. (66) Subsequently, Graves strove to bring Skelton to the surface. Scattered through his works from the 1920s to the 1960s are various comments and analysis of Skelton’s work. In 1925 Graves published an enthusiastic review of Richard Hughes’s edition. (67) In the same year he included an analysis of ‘Speak Parrot’ in ‘Poetic Unreason’ (pp. 171–3). He returned to Skelton in the following year in his essay on The Future of Poetry where, with Shakespeare, he is proclaimed as ‘one of the three or four oustanding English poets’. (68) The next year, 1927, saw the publication of Graves’s own little selection with a combative preface announcing it as ‘the first popular pamphlet of [Skelton’s] verse since Elizabethan times, and is intended to call attention to the astonishing power and range of the truest of our neglected poets’. (69) And in 1931 he published the review article of Philip Henderson’s edition (No. 51).

Graves’s interest in Skelton seems to have declined during the 1930s and 1940s. (70) But from the late 1940s he shows a renewed concern with Skelton’s poetic status. There is an admiring passage in ‘The White Goddess’ (1948). (76) ‘The Common Asphodel’ in the following year praises Skelton as ‘the last of the classically educated English poets who could forget his Classics when looking at the countryside and not see Margery Milke-Ducke as Phyllis and Jolly Jacke as Corydon’ (p. 255). In ‘The Crowning Privilege’ (1955) Graves asserts that Skelton ‘showed a stronger sense of poetic calling than almost any of his successors’ (p. 12). This is a theme to which he returns in his most extensive critical discussion in his ‘Oxford Addresses on Poetry’, where he maintains that ‘the earliest and clearest example of the dedicated poet is John Skelton’, who forms the subject of the first of his addresses.

Graves speaks at the beginning of this Oxford address of his first discovery of Skelton: ‘What heightened my shock of delight was that nobody else, it seemed, had felt as I did about him during the past four centuries.’ This echoes the earlier, almost proprietorial concern for Skelton’s reputation which informs his ‘Adelphi’ review:

The first and most enthusiastic modern rediscoverer [of Skelton] was, let me say at once, myself; and if I had not done so much to create a demand for a Complete Skelton this book would not be here for me to review.

Here we see Graves bringing to bear his own distinctive understanding of the complexities of technique involved in an adequate appreciation of this neglected poet:

Why has Skelton been forgotten so long? It has not been merely because of his reputation for beastliness — Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais has always been deservedly popular among the educated class. It is that he has always been too difficult, not only in his language, so full of obsolete words, but in his metres, which became unintelligible as soon as the iambic metre and syllable counting overcame the native English style of writing musically in stresses.

It is primarily on the grounds of their failure to comprehend the complexities of Skelton’s metrics that Graves attacks the work of the other editors, Richard Hughes (‘the sort of book that needed only an intelligent scribe’) and more especially Philip Henderson. Henderson is severely handled for his treatment of scansion, his inconsistent modernization and his imperfect scholarship. Graves’s treatment of Henderson’s edition is harsh and even unfair. The questions he raises in his review about a modern understanding of Skelton’s text are not ones for which a dogmatic dismissal of Henderson are appropriate — as Henderson himself was quick to point out. (72) But the importance of Graves’s essay is that it does raise such questions, albeit in an unduly ad hominem manner, questions which are fundamental to an informed appreciation of Skelton’s art.

Graves’s excited rediscovery of Skelton is found not only in his own often expressed admiration. His influence also served to direct other young poets towards Skelton. Chief among these was Richard Hughes, Graves’s former schoolboy protégé. One manifestation of Hughes’s own admiration for Skelton was his select edition of his poems which was (as we have seen) to earn Graves’s disapproval. But Hughes’s Introduction (No. 48), like Graves’s own work, is marked by a new technical appreciation of Skelton’s verse. Indeed, he argues that ‘simply as a rhythmical technician [Skelton] is one of the most accomplished the language has even known’. Both Graves and Hughes implicitly challenge earlier views of Skelton as interesting primarily on historical grounds, as a satirist and commentator on his age. Instead, Skelton is now presented as intrinsically important; his satiric function is de-emphasized. Hughes argues that ‘Skelton is a poor satirist compared with his powers as a poet’ and contends that his chief achievement lies in ‘the value of his original work’.

Evidence of this new critical perspective can be found elsewhere. Louis Golding, the American poet and critic, urged the value of his prosodic achievement: ‘This poet is significant almost entirely in virtue of such of his poetry as is written in his own inalienable metre, written … in the “Skeltonic doggerel”.’ (73) The ‘historical’ Skelton of earlier criticism was being replaced by Skelton the technician. The admiration for Skelton’s doggerel was again taken up by another poet, Humbert Wolfe, in 1929. Using Churton Collins as his whipping boy, Wolfe is prepared to make enthusiastic claims for Skelton as versifier: ‘Doggerel! I wish that we had more English poets capable of writing it’ (No. 50).

This re-evaluation of Skelton’s achievement continued to gain impetus. In June 1929, Edmund Blunden published a long article in the ‘Times Literary Supplement’ to mark the 400th anniversary of his death (No. 49). Blunden was another friend of Graves. Indeed, he links himself explicitly to the earlier work of critical ‘recovery’ undertaken by Graves and Hughes. He is prepared to confront the problem of earlier hostility to Skelton shown particularly in Pope, Warton and Strickland, as well as the technical and historical difficulties facing a modern reader of his verse. Blunden also raises the question of Skelton’s character, which has, he asserts, ‘been scribbled upon with an indolent vaingloriousness’. His defence against all these criticisms and problems is to insist on the essential accessibility of Skelton’s verse to a modern reader: ‘for our part we observe that a great deal of his writings is as natural in style and as clear in significance as could be wished’. And he proceeds to develop this defence through an examination of several of the major works including ‘The Garland of Laurel’, ‘Colin Clout’, ‘Philip Sparrow’ and ‘Magnificence’.

Blunden’s other main concern is to continue the work of his fellow poets in vindicating Skelton as metrist. He praises Skelton’s ‘metrical independence’, his ‘volleying succession of rapid rhythms’ and the fact that his verse is ‘founded on a decisive feeling for accent’. And his campaign against the ‘philosophical and cloistered iambic’ leads to comparisons with Butler and Byron in his ‘audacity and urgency’.

The importance of Blunden’s essay in the rehabilitation of Skelton is readily apparent. It was published as a front-page article in a major literary weekly, offering both a wide-ranging vindication of the man and a detailed discussion of some of his major works. Such sympathetic exposure in a leading journal of wide circulation and influence was a sign of the more friendly critical temper of the times.

There were also further indications that Skelton was beginning to emerge from the admiration of a small but discriminating coterie to gain a more general interest. In 1931 Dent brought out a commercial edition of Skelton’s poems — the first complete edition since Dyce’s. It was edited by yet another young poet, Philip Henderson, and although his work, as we have seen, was criticized by Graves it is still in print and remains the text in which most readers now encounter Skelton. With modernized orthography and moderate annotation, Henderson places Skelton within the compass of the general reader of poetry.

Specialist scholarly activity had not been idle either. the 1930s saw a steady stream of significant Skelton research led by the work of L. J. Lloyd, William Nelson, I. A. Gordon and H. L. R. Edwards, which collectively constituted the first major attempt at clarification of the life and works since Dyce’s edition. (74)

But in terms of the critical tradition one piece of work written during the 1930s stands out. W. H. Auden’s essay John Skelton was written for inclusion in the anthology ‘The Great Tudors’, first published in 1935. It is clear the views he expresses there are the product of an extended interest in Skelton, his earlier prose and verse both suggest that Auden had studied him with some care. (75) But the fruits of this study achieve their fullest, and best, critical expression in the essay reprinted here (No. 52), abounding in fresh and stimulating insights focused into a balanced assessment.

Predictably, as with the other twentieth-century poets who have studied Skelton, Auden is especially concerned with his metrical techniques. He seizes on such features as the ‘tempo’ which is ‘consistently quicker than that of any other English poet’. Skeltonics are praised for their ‘natural ease of speech rhythm’. But Auden’s perceptions are not restricted to an appreciation of aspects of Skelton’s technique. He goes on to challenge received critical views on the nature of Skelton’s achievement: ‘Skelton’s work is abuse or flyting, not satire’, he argues, linked to a ‘capacity for caricature’. The effect of such factors is to enhance the ‘physical appeal’ of his poetry. Skelton becomes, in Auden’s terms, ‘an entertainer’ rather than a ‘visionary’. Auden is evidently concerned to balance sympathy and admiration for Skelton against a sense of the nature of great poetry. Such careful discriminations provide an invaluable corrective to contemporary excesses of enthusiasm as well as to earlier excesses of denigration. If by the highest standards of poetic excellence Skelton is found wanting, the nature of his achievement is none the less warmly acclaimed. Auden’s essay represents the most judicious and balanced assessment of Skelton’s poetic status so far.

His essay also marks the beginning of a movement towards a more qualified and discriminating evaluation of Skelton, a movement which was to continue into the 1950s. Thus, G. S. Fraser, writing in 1936 for ‘Adelphi’ (No. 53), develops the view that Skelton was a comic yet fundamentally serious artist:

But the scenes he chooses are often not intrinsically funny. It is rather that he deliberately makes them funny, that he sustains the reader’s amusement with his own energy of vision. On a much greater scale, of course Rabelais did the same sort of thing.

His final judgment, following on generally unfavourable comparisons with Rowlandson and Butler, is another carefully measured evaluation:

He created no tradition…. He is quite unique in his kind. The great stream of English literature would have taken much the same course if he had never written. But … Skelton will always remain an example for poets caught up in the coils of a tradition, a decent way of writing, which they feel to be constricting their lives. It is better, always, to be a buffoon than a bore.

In some respects the notion of Skelton as ‘buffoon poet’ is not a new one. It is foreshadowed in Warton’s criticism of Skelton over 150 years previously. And it can, of course, be found earlier than that, in the sixteenth-century biographies and pseudo-biographies of the poet.

But here it is erected into an aesthetic appreciation of the postures and qualities of Skelton’s verse, for which it is possible to have genuine, if circumscribed, admiration.

The same sympathetic, restrained admiration can be found in the last two articles in this collection, those by E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis. Forster’s essay (No. 54) was originally given as a lecture to the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk in 1950, and is particularly entertaining in its discussion of Skelton’s East Anglian poems, notably ‘Philip Sparrow’, ‘the pleasantest [poem] Skelton ever wrote’. Forster’s general thesis is that Skelton ‘belongs to an age of transition’ or ‘an age of break up’. This makes him, for Forster, ‘difficult’ or (as he characterizes Skelton at the outset) ‘extremely strange’. Such comments may suggest an unhelpful generality superficiality to Forster’s view of Skelton. But, in fact, writing as a non-specialist for a popular occasion he offers a deft account of Skelton’s oeuvre from the perspective of a discriminating, independent critical intelligence. Yet his ultimate conclusions accord with those of other mid-twentieth-century critics, such as Auden and Fraser: ‘On the whole he’s a comic — a proper comic, with a love for improper fun, and a talent for abuse.’ The judgment is perhaps distorting. The stress on the comic aspects of Skelton’s art fails to account satisfactorily for large portions of his poetic corpus. But Forster’s observations do help to provide a view of Skelton which reveals him as both accessible and alive to the intelligent general reader. As such, his lecture has a real, albeit restricted, value.

C. S. Lewis, writing in 1954 for the Oxford History of English Literature (No. 55), is more concerned to confront the larger critical problems of Skelton’s achievements. He examines first the question of the nature of the aesthetic success of the Skeltonic, particularly in relation to Skelton’s most praised poems, ‘Philip Sparrow’ and ‘Elynor Rumming’. Lewis’s conclusion here anticipates his more basic reservations about Skelton’s art. The Skeltonic, he argues, is validated aesthetically ‘because — and when — this helter-skelter artlessness symbolizes something in the theme. [E.g.] Childishness, dipsomania, and a bird…. When it attempts something fully human and adult … it fails.’ Indeed, for Lewis, Skelton’s poetic success is often a fortuitous affair:

Skelton does not know the peculiar powers and limitations of his own manner, and does not reserve it, as an artist would have done, for treating immature or disorganized states of consciousness. When he happens to apply it to such states, we may get delightful poetry: when to others, verbiage. There is no building in his work, no planning, no reason why any piece should stop just where it does … and no kind of assurance that any of his poems is exactly the poem he intended to write.

Such then it is urged, is the charm of Skelton — ‘he is always in undress … the gifted amateur’. The judgment is offered as an explicit disagreement with Graves’s earlier praise during his ‘rediscovery’ of Skelton. In fact, Lewis’s assessment marks the extreme point in the swing of the critical pendulum so far during the twentieth century. Skelton ceases to be even a comic or a clown, for Lewis; instead he becomes an unwitting versifier whose achievements are effected as much through inadvertence as through design.

Surprisingly, there have been no significant attempts to rebut the critical position assumed by Lewis. Rather, since 1954 such attention as Skelton has received has tended to be scholarly rather than critical. (76) Much significant work has been done to elucidate the many historical and textual problems which still surround Skelton’s poetry. In particular, Robert Kinsman, in a series of studies beginning in the early 1950s, has done much to sharpen our sense of the historical perspectives through which Skelton must be understood. (77) He has also compiled a fine selection of Skelton’s verse and a study of the canon. (78) There have been several book-length studies, including works by Italian, French and American scholars. (79) But it will probably not be until the appearance of the projected new editions of Skelton by the Penguin and Clarendon presses that there will be any fresh stimulus towards major new critical re-evaluation.

It would be fruitless to speculate on the form such a re-evaluation will take. But it if is at all influenced by the past it will doubtless be marked by either an emphatic affirmation or a rejection of the values identified in Skelton’s poetry. For Skelton has always been a controversial figure, capable of attracting vehement supporters and detractors in equal measure. Most often such vehemence has been aroused in literary figures of authority and distinction whose opinions cannot be lightly dismissed. The direction of Skelton criticism has been crucially affected by the views of such men as Puttenham, Pope, Southey and Graves. But even more poets and men of letters have felt inspired by Skelton to judgments of genuine independence. Caxton, Barclay, Drayton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth and W.H. Auden are only the most obvious examples. Not all such judgments are favourable; but they testify to a engagement and concern, which is, even at its most negative, an oblique tribute to Skelton’s verse.

Skelton has always been a difficult writer for critics to place. Few professionals from Warton to C. S. Lewis have felt altogether comfortable with him. He disconcerts by the nature of his innovative genius, particularly in his blending of new verse techniques with complex modes of satire, and by the remarkable forms these elements are given. Such a fusion is particularly challenging in the demands it places on the readers of Skelton’s poetry. All that can be said with any certainty is that Skelton will continue to challenge future generations as effectively as he has the past.

Notes

1 ‘Wyatt: The Critical Heritage’, ed. P. Thomson (London, (1974), p. 1.

2 This work has been edited for the Early English Text Society by F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards (London, 1956).

3 The best sources for Skelton’s biography are the studies by H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton’ (London, 1949) and M. Pollet, ‘John Skelton, Poet of Tudor England’ (London, 1971).

4 He produced at least one didactic prose treatise for the prince. This has been edited by F. M. Salter in ‘Speculum’, IX (1934), pp. 25–37.

5 For discussion of this allusion see R. S. Kinsman, A Skelton Reference, c. 1510, ‘Notes & Queries’, CCV (1960), pp. 210–11.

6 It is listed among Barclay’s works in Bale’s ‘Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanniae (Basle, 1557), p. 723.

7 ‘The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay’, ed. B. White (London, 1928), p. 165: 4th Eclogue, lines 679–86.

8 Ed. William Nelson (London, 1955), vv. 113–19.

9 Both the ‘Hundred Merry Tales’ and the ‘Merry Tales’ are reprinted in Dyce’s edition of ‘The Poetical Works of John Skelton’ (London, 1843), I, pp. lvii–lxxv.

10 The relevant extract from this work is conveniently printed in Dyce, I, pp. lxxv–vi.

11 ‘Short Title Catalogue’ (hereafter STC) 19299, p. 103.

12 STC 4941, pp. 99, 113.

13 The ‘Life’ is conveniently reprinted in C. C. Mish, ed., ‘Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century’ (New York, 1968), pp. 84–113.

14 See William Nelson, ‘John Skelton, Laureate’ (New York, 1939), p. 232.

15 Cf. J. W. McCain, Heywood’s ‘The Foure PP’: A Debt to Skelton, ‘Notes & Queries’, CLXXIV (1938), p. 205, and also the references to Heywood’s ‘Play of Love’ cited there.

16 The comment occurs among the latest ‘Additio’ (Sig. Sss iiv).

17 Bodleian Library MS Selden supra 64; this has been edited by R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (Oxford, 1902), pp. 253–5.

18 See Nelson, pp. 230–1, for details.

19 STC 13568, p. 1612.

20 See Harvey’s ‘Pierce’s Superogation’ (1593), p. 75 (STC 12903), for the reference to Skelton as a ‘Malancholy foole’. Concerning Skelton’s limited technical skills, Harvey records his father’s facility in imitating an ‘owld Ryme, of sum Skeltons, or Skoggins making as he pretended’ and offers a sample of the imitation; see ‘Gabriel Harvey’s Maginalia’, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913),p. 154.

21 See ‘The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall’, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 89, line 76.

22 Cf. Davenport, p. 252, n. 76, and the evidence of Skelton’s influence cited there.

23 Meres’s comments are conveniently reprinted in G. G. Smith, ed., ‘Elizabethan Critical Essays’ (Oxford, 1904), II, p. 314.

24 Cf. J. A. S. McPeek, ‘Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain’, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, XV (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), pp. 61–9, for fuller details of the influences discussed in this paragraph.

25 The ‘Revised Short Title Catalogue’ (London, 1976) lists seven separate editions between 1531 and 1558. There were six separate editions of ‘Philip Sparrow’ and six of ‘Why Come Ye Nat to Court’ during the sixteenth century.

26 Nelson, p. 233, draws attention to the earlier appearance of Colin Clout as a character in ‘The treatyse answerynge the boke of Berdes, Compyled by Collyn clowte’ (1543).

27 See A. D. Deyermond, Skelton and the Epilogue to Marlowe’s ‘Dr. Faustus’, ‘Notes & Queries’, CCVIII (1963), pp. 410–11, where the influence of ‘The Garland of Laurel’ is detected, and C. C. Seronsy, A Skeltonic Passage in Ben Jonson, ‘Notes & Queries’, CXCVIII (1953), p. 24, where the influence of ‘Elynor Rumming’ is suggested.

28 STC 18271, Sigs D 2–3 passim.

29 There are a number of allusions to a play entitled ‘Scoggin and Skelton’ (now apparently lost) during the period 1600–1601; see ‘Henslowe’s Diary’, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. J. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 138, 166, 167, 169.

30 See further on this point M. Pollet, ‘John Skelton, Poet of Tudor England’ (London, 1971), pp. 152–4, to which the rest of this paragraph is indebted.

31 ‘Summers Last Will and Testament’ in ‘The Works of Thomas Nashe’, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, reprinted 1958), III, p. 252. Nashe seems here to be echoing the Prologue to Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’ where the Parson talks disapprovingly of the ‘rum, ram, ruf’ of northern alliterative writing.

32 I have followed the text in C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, eds, ‘Ben Jonson’, VII (Oxford, 1941), pp. 707–29.

33 Cf., for example, lines 369–80, 404–6.

34 Jonson also speaks of the poem in ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (first published in 1640) (V, vii, 23–5):

The Worke-man Sir! the Artificer! I grant you. So Skelton-Lawreat; was of Elinour Rumming But she the subject of the Rout, and Tunning.

See ‘Ben Jonson’, III, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1927), p. 85.

35 STC 4579; see the reprint edited with an introduction by H. Neville Davies (Cambridge, 1976).

36 STC 4581; the work is reprinted in Mish, ‘Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century’, pp. 118–91 (the Skelton reference is on p. 120 of this edition).

37 Mention may also be made here of two works which appear to be imitations of ‘Elynour Rumming’: ‘Doctor Double Ale’ (n.d., STC 7071) and Richard West’s ‘News from Bartholomew Fair’ (1606), STC 25264).

38 Cf. ‘The Poems of Michael Drayton’, ed. J. W. Hebel (Oxford, 1932), II, 360–1, 370.

39 For an attempt (in my view very unconvincing) to see Skelton as a more serious influence in seventeenth-century poetry, see S. Kandaswami, Skelton and the Metaphysicals, in ‘Critical Essays on English Literature Presented to Professor M. S. Duraiswami…’ ed. V. S. Seturaman (Madras, 1965), pp. 157–69. One possible minor indication of Skeltonic influence (not noted by Kandaswami) is on Herrick; see, further, Robert Graves, English Epigrams, ‘Times Literary Supplement’, 19 July 1934, p. 511.

40 STC 22614; the picture and the verses are reproduced in Dyce’s edition, II, pp. 153–7.

41 The author was William Vaughan (1577–1641).

42 Page references in parentheses in the text are to the ‘Third Part of The Golden Fleece’ (1626), STC 24609.

43 These lines do not appear in the first edition (1630).

44 See ‘The Works of John Cleveland’ (1687), pp. 306–7.

45 This contains two attempts at Skeltonics: ‘The Awakened Child’s Lamentation’ (pp. 2–7) and ‘Of Non by Nature’ (p. 67).

46 …we may gather that the Old Testament, Christs Passion, and the Acts of the Apostles, were the ordinary entertainment on the Stage, all Europe over, for an hundred year or two, of our greatest ignorance and darkness. But that in England we had been used to another sort of Plays in the beginnings of H. VIII. Reign may be seen from that of the Laureat on Cardinal woolsey:

Like Mahound in a Play:
No man dare him with say

[‘Why Come Ye Nat to Court?’, lines 594–5]

(‘The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer’, ed. C. A. Zimansky (New Haven, 1956), pp. 129–30)

47 Before this, mention might be made of Swift’s Skeltonic imitation ‘Musa Clonsaghiana’ written in 1717; see ‘The Poems of Jonathan Swift’, ed, H. Williams, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1958), III, p. 966. Swift wrote another Skeltonic in 1721, ‘Copy of a Copy of Verses from Thomas Sheridan, Clerk, to George Nim-Dan-Dean’ (ibid., III, pp. 1019–20).

48 I. A. Gordon, ‘John Skelton, Poet Laureate’ (Melbourne, 1943), p. 200.

49 The work was, in fact, written largely by Robert Shiels; the account of Skelton occurs in I, pp. 27–30.

50 See further on this point R. M. Baine, Warton, Collins and Skelton’s ‘Necromancer’, ‘Philological Quarterly’, XLIX (1970), pp. 245–8.

51 ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, XLVIII (1778), p. 270.

52 See ‘The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth’, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1954), III, p. 18, sonnet xxii; this was first noted by Dyce in his edition of Skelton, II, pp. 105–6.

53 See, for example, his letters to Dyce of 23 July 1831, 21 July 1832, 4 December 1833 and his letter of thanks of 5 January 1844 to Dyce for a copy of his edition; ‘The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth’, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), pp. 554, 630, 678, 1196.

54 See the Preface to Dyce’s 1843 edition, I, pp. v–vi; Southey urges that ‘an editor … could not more worthily employ himself than by giving a good and complete edition of [Skelton’s] works’.

55 ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, n.s. XXII (1844), p. 227.

56 See R. A. Davison, Melville’s ‘Mardi’ and John Skelton, ‘Emerson Society Quarterly’, XLIII (1966), pp. 86–7.

57 This edition was published c. 1855 by Houghton Mifflin of Boston, together with an edition of Donne; for details of this edition and its attribution to Lowell see G. L. Keynes, ‘A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne’, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1973), p. 211.

58 ‘Essays About Men, Women and Books’ (1894), p. 158.

59 Skelton Laureate, ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, CCLXXXIII (1897), pp. 297–309.

60 Krumpholz’s study was entitled ‘Skelton und sein Morality play Magnyfycence’ (Prosnitz, 1881). This was followed by other scholarly studies including: G. Schonenburg, ‘Die Sprache Skeltons in seinem kleineren Werken’ (Marburg, 1888); J. Zupitza, Handschriftliche Bruchstucke von Skeltons ‘Why Come Ye Not to Courte?’, ‘Archiv’, LXXXV (1890), pp. 429–36; A. Rey, ‘Skelton’s satirical poems…’ (Stuttgart, 1899); A. Koelbing, ‘Zur Characteristik Skeltons’ (Berne, 1904); A. Thummel, ‘Studien uber Skelton’ (Leipzig, 1905); and F. Brie, Skelton Studien, ‘Englische Studien’, XXXVII (1907), pp. 1–86.

61 The Dating of Skelton’s Satires, ‘PMLA’, 29 (1914), pp. 499–516; The Poetry of Skelton, ‘Romanic Review’, 6 (1915), pp. 364–77; ‘Speke Parrot’: An Interpretation of Skelton’s Satire, ‘Modern Language Notes’, 30 (1915), pp. 140–4; ‘Early Tudor Poetry’ (New York, 1920), passim.

62 In the ‘Adelphi’ article included in this collection he states that he first read Skelton ‘in 1915’. But in ‘Oxford Addresses on Poetry’ (1962), p. 5, he claims to have discovered Skelton ‘by accident in 1916, while on short leave from the Somme trenches, and on long leave from St. John’s College’.

63 The poem occurs on pp. 6–8. Graves may have been affected earlier in his poem ‘Free Verse’ included in ‘Over the Brazier’ (1916), pp. 14–15, where Skeltonic influence has been detected by D. Day; see ‘Swifter than Reason’ (Chapel Hill, NC, 1963), p. 6.

64 For details see F. Higginson, ‘A Bibliography of Robert Graves’ (Hamden, Conn., 1966), nos A 6, 7, 12, 14, 16, 23, 24, 25, 31, 48.

65 Cf. Graves’s comments in the reprint of ‘The Marmosite’s Miscellany’ issued by the Pharos Press (Victoria, BC, 1975).

66 ‘Woman’s Leader’, 18 June 1920, pp. 462–3; this article is signed ‘FUZE’.

67 ‘Beastly’ Skelton, ‘Nation and Athenaeum’, XXXVI (1925), pp. 614–15.

68 ‘Fortnightly Review’, 125 (1926), p. 295. This comment was deleted when this essay was reprinted in ‘The Common Asphodel’ (1949); see p. 53.

69 ‘John Skelton Laureate’ (Augustan Books of English Poetry, 2nd series, no. 12).

70 I am only aware of two letters in the ‘Times Literary Supplement’: 19 July 1934, p. 511 (on Skelton and Herrick), and 28 May 1938, p. 368 (on the neglect of Skelton), between the early 1930s and late 1940s.

71 3rd ed. (1951), p. 451: ‘The only two English poets who had the necessary learning, poetic talent, humanity, dignity and independence of mind to be Chief Poets were John Skelton and Ben Jonson; both were worthy of the laurel that they wore.’

72 See his reply to Graves’s review in ‘Adelphi’, n.s. III (1933–4), pp. 239–41.

73 Merie Skelton, ‘Saturday Review’, 14 January 1922, pp. 30–1.

74 The various studies by these scholars are most conveniently collected in their subsequent books; see L. J. Lloyd, ‘John Skelton’ (Oxford, 1938); W. Nelson ‘John Skelton, Laureate’ (New York, 1939); I. A. Gordon, ‘John Skelton, Poet Laureate’ (Melbourne, 1943); and H. L. R. Edwards, ‘Skelton’ (London, 1949).

75 For example, he reviewed Henderson’s edition of Skelton in ‘Criterion’, XI (1932), pp. 316–19; and a number of his early poems in ‘Poems’ (1928) and ‘Poems’ (1930) seem to reflect Auden’s study of Skelton’s verse.

76 One possible exception is Stanley E. Fish’s book (see below, n. 79).

77 See, for example: ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’: Titulus, ‘Studies in Philology’, XLVII (1950), pp. 473–84; The ‘Buck’ and the ‘Fox’ in Skelton’s ‘Why Come Ye Nat to Court?’, ‘Philological Quarterly’, XXIX (1952), pp. 61–4; Skelton’s ‘Colin Cloute’: The Mask of ‘Vox Populi’, ‘University of California Publications, English Studies’, I (1950), pp. 17–26; Skelton’s Uppon a Deedmans Hed’: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic, ‘Studies in Philology’, L (1953), pp. 101–9; The Voices of Dissonance: Patterns in Skelton’s ‘Colyne Cloute’, ‘Huntington Library Quarterly’, XXVI (1963), pp. 291–313; and Skelton’s ‘Magnyfycence’: The Strategy of the ‘Olde Sayde Sawe’, ‘Studies in Philology’, LXIII (1966), pp. 99–125.

78 ‘John Skelton Poems’, ed. R. S. Kinsman (Oxford, 1969), and R. S. Kinsman and T. Yonge, ‘John Skelton: Canon and Census’ (New York, 1967).

79 See M. Pollet, ‘John Skelton’ (Paris, 1962); Edvige Schulte, ‘La Poesia di John Skelton’ (Naples, 1963); and Stanley E. Fish, ‘John Skelton’s Poetry’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).