Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

edition of Barclay. They bring together several sources: Eneo Silvio
Piccolomini’sDe miseriis curialium epistola; two of the increasingly popular
Eclogues of Baptista Spagnuoli, or Mantuan; and, at one point, more
remotely, Jean Lemaire de Belges’sLe Temple de Vertu et d’Honneur.^14
Almost from the outset, Barclay ringfences his monastic identity with a series
of defensive repudiations. He begins with an assertion that he does not seek
the name of“Poete laureate”( 104 ) and the fourthEclogue,onthemiseriesof
poets faced with grudging patrons, returns to this particular combat with
singular violence. At the end ofThe Ship of Fools, the moralist-monk has
already inveighed against Skelton’s“wantones”:“It longeth nat to my scyence
nor cunnynge / For Phylyp the Sparowe the (Dirige) to synge”( 841 ,lines
19 – 21 ). Less prominent is a possible thrust atThe Bowge of Courte’s Skelton’s
and Hawes’s reworking of exegetical terms in the secondEclogue,oncourtly
flatterers who“cloke the truth their princes to content”( 295 ).^15 In the fourth
Eclogue, however, Barclay embroiders on his original in Mantuan to launch an
assault on“rascolde poetes”( 680 ), one of whom is“decked as Poete laureate, /
When stinking Thais made him her graduate”( 685 – 86 ). Skelton’s academic
laureation, conferred in Barclay’s formula by the Muse-as-courtesan, leaves
the poet-laureate abjectly bound to a vilified female body.
Clerical misogyny, however, is not contained, but linked to a series of
connectedfigures that extend a more general heterogeneity, though still one
hostile to monastic maleness. This is already apparent inThe Ship of Fools,
where Barclay pictures the London printing of his text as a lively encounter
between its encyclopedic categories and an urban promiscuity that risks
breaking bounds:

From London Rockes almyghty god vs saue

For if we there anker, outher bote or barge

There be so many that they vs wyll ouercharge. ( 151 , 12 – 14 )^16

ThefifthEcloguetakes up this vision:“Baudes be suffered so where them
lust to bide, / That the strete fadeth vpon the water side”( 797 – 98 ). Here the
courtly courtesan reemerges triumphant:

Uile Thais was wont in angles for to be,

Nowe hath she power in all the whole citie. ( 801 – 02 )

A sexuality both unbridled and commodified blurs jurisdictional bounds.
Faustus, the city-loathing shepherd of this eclogue, implodes with inevitable
allusions to the paradigmatic city of Sodom ( 1005 ), and the work ends as his
interlocutor Amintas attempts to mollify him. The pacification of comic
excess issues in a promise to take up the subject again the next day.

Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 91