Originally published as An Incomplete Complete Skelton in ‘Adelphi’, III (1931–2), pp. 146–58. This article is a review of Philip Henderson's 1931 edition of Skelton.
Graves (1896– ) is zformer Oxford Professor of Poetry and a distinguished poet, scholar and critic.
Mr. Philip Henderson, in the introduction to his edition to ‘The Complete Poems of John Skelton,’ tells that it is only in the last ten years that Skelton has begun to be rediscovered popularly as a poet. The first and the most enthusiastic modern rediscoverer 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. So I have no hesitation in complaining on Skelton's behalf and on my own that Mr. Henderson has bungled his job. I only wish he had bungled it much worse: I have read several reviews of the book and none of the reviewers seem to have realised what is being put over on them. They are just blankly grateful that at last they have a Complete Skelton to fill that blank on their shelves. And so the book will sell and nobody will think of asking for a better one. Except myself.
But first about Skelton. He was born about 1460 and died in 1529. Henry VII made him tutor to Henry, Duke of York, afterwards Henry VIII, for whom he wrote a handbook of princely behaviour called ‘Speculum Principis,’ and who appears to have had great personal fondness for him, making him his Poet Laureate when he succeeded to the throne. Skelton was a famous scholar and a friend of Erasmus. But without pedantry. He was opposed to the Greek cult in the universities because it was too academic:
[Quotes ‘Speak Parrot’, lines 150-2.]
He was Laureate of Oxford, Cambridge and Louvain, an aggressive enemy of Church abuses, rector of Diss in Norfolk, and the only man in England who had the courage to stand up against Cardinal Wolsey when he was at the height of his power and tell him what he really thought of him. For instance, that he was a cur, a butcher's dog, that he hated religion, that he suffered from the pox, that the Pope had given him a special indulgence for lechery on account of his natural incontinence, that he knew no Latin, that his pride was immense and insane, that one day he would lose the King's favour and come to complete ruin, and that he was an obscene Polyphemus. Against Wolsey he wrote popular verse-satires which had a wide circulation among the common people. They were not intended as serious poetry but were put in easy rhyme for the convenience of ballad circulation. Though ‘Colin Clout’ and ‘Why Come Ye Not to Court?’ have a strong historical appeal which tempts professors of literature to misrepresent them as Skelton's most important work, and though Skelton took a lot of trouble with them —
To makë such trifles it asketh some cunning —
it is not on their account that Skelton has been rediscovered. They are still trifles. Wolsey was slow in taking action against Skelton, whose position at Court was extremely strong. He was the privileged buffoon, companion to Henry in his adventures among the common people and playfellow of the young Court ladies. His open jealousy of Wolsey's political influence with the King seems to have been regarded at Court as a standing joke. Wolsey would be thought a dull fellow if he did not laugh too, especially when the joker was so obviously at his mercy — a priest subject to his princely authority as Cardinal. Finally Wolsey seems to have entered into the spirit of the joke, which was not a joke really. No more of a joke than that other part of Skelton's buffoonery, his glorious self-admittance in ‘The Garland of Laurel’ to the House of Fame. For Skelton knew perfectly well how good a poet he was, and Wolsey knew perfectly well what real dislike Skelton had for him. Wolsey sent him to prison. Skelton refused to take this as a joke and complained loudly to his friends, who brought the news to Wolsey. The story is that Wolsey then sent for him and abused him at length. Skelton, kneeling with mock humility, asked for a boon. Wolsey refused it. Some court officials, aware of the joke that wasn't really, tried to ease things by persuading Wolsey to grant the boon. ‘It may be a merry conceit that he would show to your Grace.’ It was. ‘I pray Your Grace to let me lie down and wallow, for I can kneel no longer.’
Skelton had a ‘musket’ to whom he was devoted (secretly his wife) and by whom he had several children. He did not believe in the celibacy of the clergy and used his buffoon's reputation as a way of keeping her with him. He obeyed the Bishop's order to send her out of his door but took her back through the window. He brought his child into church and told the congregation that they had no good cause to complain about him, as they had done. It was a very nice-looking child, he said, not a monstrous birth, with a calf's or a pig's head, or with wings like a bird. They were unreasonable. ‘And if you cannot be contented that I have her (his wife) still, some of you shall wear horns.’
Skelton went too far with his satires, and his privileged position counted for nothing when the King was so dependent on Wolsey for raising money and arranging his divorce. He was finally compelled to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he lived six years until his death, being buried obscurely in a neighbouring church. Wolsey's fall came soon after.
Skelton's poems. About a third of his works survive. The titles of those that have been lost raise regrets. ‘The Ballad of the Mustard Tart.’ ‘A Devout Prayer to Moses’ Horns.’ ‘John Jew.’ ‘The Grunting of the Swine.’ ‘The Pageants of Joyous Garde.’ ‘Minerva and the Olive Tree.’ ‘Apollo Whirled Up His Chair.’ But there is still that surviving third, and the range of poetry in them is very wide. There is the ‘Tunning of Elinor Rumming,’ written at Henry's request about an ale-wife at an inn near Leatherhead. It is very pleasantly piggish and has given Skelton a bad name. The ale was so good — not only malt went into it but other accidental farmyard ingredients which gave it body — that all the women for miles around came to the Tunning (brewing) to get drunk on it. They paid Elinor in kind:
[Quotes ‘Elynor Rummin.’, lines 244–8, 303–8.]
and soon lost all modesty.
Then there is ‘Philip Sparrow,’ a long nonsense elegy for little Jane Scrope's bird which was killed by a cat in the Black Nuns’ convent at Carow where Jane was at school.
[In this fore-runner of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ occur, by the way, some seventy first-mentions in English of different bird-species.]
[Quotes lines 386–402.]
Then there are Skelton's popular songs. ‘Lullay, lullay, like a child,’ ‘Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale,’ and ‘Rutterkin, Hoyda.’ And his satire on the Scots. And ‘Magnificence,’ a lively play in the morality style but with no religious characters in it. Among Skelton's other distinctions is that he was the originator of the English secular drama. Then his ‘Prayer to the Father of Heave.’:
[Quotes lines 1–8.]
And his poem ‘Woefully Array'd’ about the Crucifixion, beginning:
[Quotes lines 1–6.]
And the early ‘Elegy for the Death of King Edward IV.’ And the macaronic ‘Trentale on the Death of Old John Clarke sometimes called The Holy Patriarch of Diss,’ which ends:
Sepultus est among the weeds,
God forgive him his misdeeds!
With hey, ho, rumbelbow,
Rumpopulorum
Per omnia saecula saeculorum.[‘A Devoute Trental.’,lines 18–19, 61–3]
And then ‘Speak Parrot’ in which, as if to resolve these apparent contradictions, the Philip Sparrow sentiment and the Father of Heaven sentiment and the Colin Clout sentiment and all the other sentiments fuse in a great parrot-confusion of serious gibberish. The joke once more that is not really a joke; and Skelton's most peculiar poem. 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 classes. 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.
In the late eighteenth century Chaucer was rediscovered in spite of his obsolete vocabulary; but then Chaucer wrote iambics. The early nineteenth century was so preoccupied with the Elizabethans that it could afford to go no further back than Wyatt and Surrey in the direct line of English Poetry, except to Chaucer as to an unaccountable Melchizedek. Skelton was over the boundary-line in the pre-sonnet, that is to say, in the pre-poetry epoch. From ‘Beowulf’ to Skelton was the province of the antiquary, not of the reader of poetry.
But the antiquarians had consciences, and the Reverend Alexander Dyce spent twenty years or so on an antiquarian edition of Skelton's complete works. That was in 1843, and and he did his job extraordinarily well. But there has not been a re-issue of the book. A Dyce's Skelton, if you are lucky enough to get one, will cost you at least five pounds. Since 1843 there has been a great extension of the boundaries of English poetry. Henrysoun and Gavin Douglas have been rediscovered and Child's ‘British Ballads’ and Chambers and Sidgwick's ‘Early English Lyrics’ have appeared. And even ‘Beowulf’ has been recognised as a real poem. And in the later traditional line, too, certain misfit poets who did not seem to belong because they wrote too personally have been given garlands of laurel and published popularly in decent collected editions. Blake and Donne, for example. Skelton was misfit as well as pre-sonnet, so his rediscovery has been the longest delayed.
Dyce was a very capable antiquarian. He routed out all the manuscripts and all the black-letter books he could hear about and reprinted the texts in their original spelling, letter by letter. And so anyone who has money and buys a Dyce and is prepared to recognise any poetry that there may be there waiting for him will find it very hard to keep the poetry sense of what he is reading when he has to deal with words like ‘puplysshyd’ (published), ‘ffylty’ (filthy), ‘preuye’ (privy), and ‘Diologgis of Ymagynacioun’ (Dialogues of Imagination). He will almost certainly give it up.
I read the Parrot's: ‘With my beke I kan pyke my lyttel praty to’ several times before I recognised that he meant that he could peck his little pretty toe.
In 1915 someone gave me a Skelton and I made the discovery and wrote about it. Ever since I have been asking for a Complete Skelton, an improvement on Dyce's book, with his notes re-edited in the light of recent antiquarian research, and newly discovered poems added, and the spelling modernised enough to make it at least as readable as the Globe edition of Chaucer. A publisher wanted me to do the job myself, but I refused because I had not the time or the research equipment to do it worthily. The only Skelton I have edited since is a sixpenny book of extracts for the ‘Augustan’ Series, and that was merely more ground-bait for an improved Dyce.
In 1924 Richard Hughes, to whom I had introduced Skelton when he was still a schoolboy, undertook, without mentioning his intention to me, to prepare an edition. He had never done the necessary research work, but he borrowed a copy of Dyce from an Oxford Library and sat down in a remote cottage in North Wales to do the sort of book that needed only an intelligent copyist. Among the curious omissions of Mr. Hughes's edition are ‘Lullay, lullay, like a child,’ and the ‘Addition to Philip Sparrow,’ which is almost the best part of the poem….
Mr. Philip Henderson is a young poet, as Mr. Richard Hughes was in 1923; but Mr. Hughes had at least the enthusiasm of a young poet. Mr. Henderson, without any of the equipment of a scholar, has made a tedious bluff of being one — writing as if with a scholar's moderation. He has put a little more work into the job than Mr. Hughes. He has visited the British Museum and consulted the recent authorities and put in two short new pieces which he found in Brie's ‘Skelton-Studien.’ But he has not apparently been to the trouble of studying the original manuscripts and printed texts, even in this country — taking Dyce's word for variant readings; still less has he found an American correspondent to help him with readings from the many important black-letter Skelton texts in the United States. Worse than not being a scholar, or getting the co-operation of scholars, he has not even shown a common-sense consistency in presenting his modernisations of Dyce. And he has proved himself to be without any true ear for Skelton's rhythms. He has had the effrontery to write of Skelton (who was, to say only that, one of the most skilful metrists in English) that ‘Skelton's line should not be read as iambics even when they approximate to such smoothness, which is not often, for by attempting to read them in that way we shall turn what, in its own time, was fairly regular and artistic verse into wretched halting stuff.’ He has been explaining about the final e which in Skelton's time was being less frequently sounded than in the time of Chaucer. He admits that he often cannot be sure in Skelton's lines whether the Elizabethan printers of Skelton (whose manuscripts have mostly been lost) have not omitted terminal e's from their editions which Skelton intended to be sounded. So he is content, he says, to mark only those which are necessary for scansion. Fairly artistic scansion only. The fact is, that scansion is not as easy with Skelton as with Chaucer, for readers without ears. Chaucer's syllable-counted iambics allow no mistake.
Whan that Aprillë with her shourës sootë can only be read one way. With Skelton, readers without ears can make mistakes. He wrote by stress.
Let me explain what I mean, by analogy. Nursery rhymes are written by stress. Take the rhyme:
Chilly was the weather:
There I saw an old man
Dressed all in leather …
Suppose that, being mediaeval in composition, this rhyme had survived only as an Elizabethan broadside, reading there:
Myste moiste was the morn,
Chylle was the weather …
It would then be possible to modernise it, disregarding the final e as:
Mist-moist was the morn,
Chill was the weather;
but obviously wrong to do so, because of the general needs of the rhythm. Or take the last line of ‘Humpty-Dumpty,’ to which common nursery usage rightly gives an extra bar (so as to mark the catastrophe with a long-drawn out sadness), by putting the stress on Couldn't instead of on put. If this were modernised into ‘Couldn't put Humpt-Dumpt together again’ that also would be obviously wrong. Mr. Philip Henderson has made far too many misty-moisties into mist-moists and Humpty-Dumpties into Humpt-Dumpts. To take the first four lines in his book, the opening stanza of the ‘Elegy on the Death of King Edward IV.’
He prints:
Miseremini me, ye that be my friends!
This world hath conforméd me down to fall.
How may I endure, when that everything ends?
What creature is born to be eternall?[lines 1–4]
There is a misprint in the first line, me for mei. ‘Down to fall’ is sheerest Humpt-dumpt. There must be a sounded e at the end of ‘down.’ Edward did not fall like a sack of coals; it is a tragic not a comic piece. The original reading of ‘friends’ is ‘frendis,’ and the word should be kept two-syllabled, and so should ‘endis.’ ‘Creature’ was in Skelton's time pronounced ‘Crëature’ and ‘eternall’ was pronounced ‘aeternall’ with an accent on all three syllables. Mr. Henderson elsewhere makes ‘creature’ three-syllabled by dotting the e, so that it is clear that he reads it here as only two. And he does not give ‘born’ a final e. What is the result? Humpt-dumpt-mist-moist, fairly artistic, wretched, halting stuff! About that Latin misprint. Mr. Henderson seems to have been dependent on an uncle for ‘worrying out’ the meaning of the Latin parts of Skelton's poems; and to have only a rudimentary knowledge of Latin himself. (Also of Greek and Spanish, which he mistranslates.) But he might have taken the trouble to copy the texts properly for the benefit of others who are better educated. For instance, Skelton's obscure Latin hexameter cypher in the satire ‘Ware the Hawk’ is made more obscure than ever by the omission of four separate letters (including lines over vowels which indicate terminal consonants) in the four lines.
Modernisation should be consistent. Mr. Henderson has no consistency. The word written ‘toote’ by Skelton, meaning to peer, is sometimes made ‘toot’ and sometimes ‘tote.’ He sometimes spells the three-syllabled ‘ladyes’ like that, and sometimes makes it two-syllabled, as ‘ladies.’ He modernises ‘denty’ as ‘dainty,’ except in ‘prickmedenty,; where he does not apparently recognise it. Prick-me-dainty is a word used to describe one of Elinor Rumming's customers who behaved coyly and affectedly, as if she were ashamed of finding herself in such low company. There are women like her in the private-bars of London public-houses every Saturday night. To turn the coarse ‘prick-me-dainty’ into a refined ‘pernicketty,’ as Mr. Henderson does in a foot-note, is doing the situation an injustice. In another footnote to ‘Elinor Rumming’ Mr. Henderson has invented a mediaeval verb, ‘I tun, thou tunnest, he tuns,’ meaning ‘I fall, thou fallest, he falls,’ by a misreading of a simple passage to which Dyce has, for once, given no note. About the hens contributing their share to the brew:
And dongë, when it comës,
Into the ale tunnës.[‘Elynor Rumming’, lines 193–4]
He has mistaken ‘dongë’ for a noun and ‘ale; for a noun on its own, and ‘tunnes’ for a verb. Whereas ‘dongë’ is the verb, and ‘ale-tunnës’ are the ale tuns in which Elinor was doing her tunning. Scholars are not supposed to guess at words like that. On another occasion we find him incorporating an explanatory note in the text:-
Also a Devout Prayer to Moses’ Hornës
Metrified merrily, meddeléd with scornës[‘Garland of Laurel’, lines 1381–2]
Mr. Henderson has explained ‘meddeléd’ to himself as ‘mingléd’ and then accidentally put ‘mingled’ up into the line. This is wrong from every point of view. It spoils the rhythm by removing a syllable, it spoils the succession of short me's, and Skelton did not write it. These instances could be multiplied. He has not, I think, left out any of Skelton's verses, except those which preface his ‘Book of Three Fools’— he should have put those in, of course. But he has left out Skelton's Latin marginal notes to ‘Speak Parrot,’ ‘A Replication’ and the ‘Garland of Laurel,’ and that is bad. To go on saying the same thing, I am afraid that these omissions and the many inaccuracies mentioned above and all the other faults will not be noticed, or considered important enough, if noticed, to justify the competitive publication of the really Complete Skelton that has been so long wanted. Mr. Henderson has probably delayed that for another ten years or more.
But that pretending mature sobriety, for which, on the jacket of this book Arnold Bennett praised his ‘First Poems,’ and which is really so disgraceful in a young poet! It even allows him to write here:
Although no one would pretend that Skelton was a great poet, one hesitates to apply to him the epithet ‘minor.’ One feels all the while that he worked at a disadvantage —
What is wrong with Mr. Henderson? What difficult emotion is he suppressing? One feels that one hesitates to guess, but that it is probably so. One suspects, in fact, that Mr. Henderson is a Proud Scot. Especially when he writes:
Skelton's savage exultance over the Scottish defeat at Flodden is sufficient to show that for all his culture, he still had a good deal of the unredeemed barbarian in him.
Skelton disliked the Proud Scots very heartily and pleasantly. He would have disliked Mr. Henderson particularly, as being also one of those:
Stoicall studiantes and friscaioly younkerkyns much better bayned than brained, surmised unsurely in their perihermenial principles to prate and preach proudly and lewdly and loudly to lie.
Yes, that is almost certainly right about the Scottishness. The unusual and nervous display of foot-notes to Skelton's ‘Against the Scots’ cannot be a coincidence.
Walk, Scot,
Walk, sot,
Rail not so far![‘…Dundas … Caudas contra Angligenas’, lines 61–3]
Not that Mr. Henderson rails. With a scholar's moderation he merely scoffs.