and a disordered, headless and split body politic. Out of all this there
somehow surfaces a temporarily triumphant culmination, in which
Parott’s identity as“green lover”can hardly be overlooked:
Collustrumnow for Parot, whyte bred and swete creme!
Our Thomasen she doth trip, our Jenet she doth shayle;
Parrot hath a blacke beard and a fayre grene tayle. ( 82 – 84 )As he reads Wolsey’s depredations in the frame of typology, Parott is clearly
in thrall to a hermeneutic power not which he possesses but by which he is
possessed, assembling references“Confuse distributyve”( 198 ). Parott’s“mar-
velous”being, in brief, invigorates, but is also not altogether identical with,
the more circumscribed patterns of erotic courtly exchange and the desire of
the exegete, three planes conjoined like the sides of a Möbius strip, in all of
which distinctions between subject and object seem to vanish.
Parott’s moments offigurative breakthrough are oral ones; once, it seems,
he was“Deyntely dyetyd with dyvers delycate spyce”( 3 ), and in the poem
this marks his relation to speech. A hungry Parott who“hathe not dyned of
all this long day”( 23 ) has all too clearly forsaken the paradisal“gyfte”
economy of his nest–dainty diet and language–for an exchange in
which he receives tidbits for thefrissoninduced by pointed comments
about cardinals (an“almon”[ 7 , 48 ],“nutmeg ...cum gariopholo”[ 183 ],
“synamum stickis andpleris cum musco”[ 185 ]). Even the levels of exegesis are
held together by small pieces of food: the“bit of bread”sought by Hob
Lobbin of Lothian catalyzes the shift to the southern tale of Jack o’Legs,
hanged by Baldock bakers. If as Marx claims a commodity’s value is only
recognized in its mirroring by another commodity, these items, like Parott
himself dear because far-fetched, are such mirrors,^23 though some are also
therapeutic,“For Parrot to pyke upon, his brayne for to stable”( 184 ).
Parott’s predicament cannot but recall Abraham and Torok’s depiction of
the“communion of empty mouths”in which speech is substituted for the
missing breast.^24 Parott’s speech must complete the desires of the ladies
(hence the poem’s title) while their continual solicitations also strive to draw
from him the historical signifiers that will tie him to the present. After this
movement of demand and desire, it is Parott’sfinal bid for a“date”that
brings the economy of John Colyns’s London down on him:
Now, Galathea, lett Parrot, I pray yow, have hys date–
Yett dates now are deynte, and wax very scante,
For grocers were grugyd at and groynyd at but late;
Grete reysons with resons be now reprobitante,
For reysons ar no resons but resons currant–152 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland