medieval poets and romancers: an innovation infiltrated into the text and
even into the terms of a tradition.”The active readers envisaged by de
Certeau are able“to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant
text. In the Middle Ages, this text was framed by the four, or seven,
interpretations of which it was held to be susceptible. And it was a book.”^29
De Certeau’s medieval analogizing bears on Speke Parottin several
regards, not least suggestively at the points of difference. Parott is in a way
a dispossessed consumer, but is also the creation of an author working from
a complex intersection of privations, restraints and privileges. Evidently
excluded from court and at odds with the cardinal, who himself conjoins
church andpolisin unprecedented ways, he is still heir to the privileged
traditions of clerical hermeneutics. He is not so much de Certeau’srema-
nieuras the self-appointed terminus in an authorial chain; if Wolsey has
misread God’s book, apparently unaware that he is himself no more than a
figure in eschatological history, Skelton’s task is to correct such a blindly
self-enacted misreading. Yet Skelton, in terms that are not quite detachable
from Wolsey’s own–and do indeed sometimes mirror them–does counter
Wolsey’s encroachments on power by infiltrating himself into them and
recombining their elements.
As de Certeau’s“subject of will and power,”Wolsey’s consumption is
relentless.Speke Parottis an attack on Wolsey which in reading him as
Antichrist, manifested through history under multiple guises, prefigures
apocalypse as carnival. Wolsey, framed in the text of Skelton’s poem,
ensures theconvertibilityof registers into one another, in a poem that is, if
we are to follow Walker and consider that Skelton is here seeking patronage,
a speculative enterprise. There is a deep identity between Parott’s various
amorous and interpretive assays, as Skelton seeks readers, and thefigurative
Wolsey’s implacable advance across time and place. A privileged locus of
this conflict is the city. One of Parott’s transports of prophetic, avian and
erotic excitement (“Lyke a wanton, whan I wyll, I rele to and froo,” 109 )
gives place to a lament suffused with loss:
Ulula, Esebon, for Jeromy doth wepe!
Sion is in sadness, Rachell ruly doth loke;
Madionita Jetro, our Moyses kepyth his shepe;
Gedeon is gon, that Zalmane undertoke... ( 113 – 16 )The accents shift; from urban prophecy (Jeremiah) to the laments of Rachel,
to the disappearance of Gideon. Nelson offers the glosses that endowed the
biblical city of Heshbon with a double significance: the city under the rule
of the heathen“Seon”( 121 ), and the“new city rise[n] on the ashes of the
154 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland