Ryn God, ryn Devyll! Yet the date of Owur Lord
And the date of the Devyll dothe shurewlye accord. ( 439 – 45 )If Parrott is bringing God’s timelessness into juncture with Wolsey’s
diabolical time-serving,^25 then the poem hasfinally contracted into its
own historical moment.
Various motives have been ascribed to Skelton’s hostility to Wolsey:
revulsion at an accumulation of privilege and power, jealousy that the
King’s cardinal was usurping the true counsellor or poet’s place close to
the monarch, the misrecognition that could make Wolsey alone responsible
for absolutist arrogation of power and deflect attention from the king.
Along with this has gone a tendency to observe the various ways in which
Wolsey mirrors Parott, or his creator.^26 My narrower point here is that as
the poem’s initial pattern of paradisal loss and intermittent recuperation
supplies its energies to the more bounded circles of drive and desire that
associate Parott the courtly lover with Parott the allegorist, so Wolsey’s roles
become equally diverse. He is the matter to be glossed, and saturates the
poem’s symbolicfield, so that he is there at every turn. In this doubling,
Parott’s appetites are oral, while wolves (like Wolsey, the“wolf of the sea”or
“wolvys hede”[ 434 ]) love parrots with a special love.^27 Both antagonists
make allegorization an exercise in consumption, but if Parott nibbles in
return for producing the occasional scrap of meaning, Wolsey devours,
historically and allegorically.^28
Here, Skelton’s approach to constructing his poem brings us to the
duality of“strategy” and“tactic” outlined by Michel de Certeau. De
Certeau’s “strategy” comes into being when “a subject of will and
power...can be isolated from an‘environment.’”A strategy“assumes a
place that can be circumscribed asproper (propre)and thus serve as the basis
for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it.”A“tactic,”on the
other hand, cannot count on such a“proper,”or“a borderline distinguish-
ing the other as a visible totality”; it operates in time rather than space,
dependent on the opportune and the provisional. De Certeau’s main
analogy for this distinction isreading. In opposition to the relentless and
ruthless spectacularization of contemporary culture, reading is silent pro-
duction in which the reader“insinuates into another person’s text the ruses
of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it,
pluralizes himself in it...Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production
is also an‘invention’of the memory.”De Certeau offers what for our
purposes is a striking genealogy for this dimension of modernity’s spectacle.
Reading in his view resembles“that art whose theory was developed by
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 153