privileged as Scripture and as popular as outlaw legend;finally, and most
crucially, to the multiplying“properties”offiguration. Skelton’s career might
seem to locate him in some instances as the early Tudor Virgil, aspiring to the
status of laureate poet. He may also be seen, however, as his period’sOvid,
producer of texts and metaphors and unpredictable discourses of sexuality,
whose work defies ready ascription to a prior authority and what it represents,
and whose metamorphoses outrun their subjects.
romancing the laurelChaucer’sHous of Fameends enigmatically with the approach of a“man of
gret auctoritee”( 2158 ) whose identity remains undisclosed. Readers of the
Garlande of Laurell, however, know that the“man”is John Skelton. And
they know this on grounds that meet the only standard of proof admitted by
positivist scholarship–Skelton tells us so himself.The Garlande of Laurell,
long read as a response to Chaucer’s precursor text,^37 narrates Skelton’s
progress to thefinal honor of a laurel crown conferred before the Queen of
Fame and an assembly of great poets of the past. Yet its beginnings are
troubled enough: the melancholy poet drifts into a dream in“the frytthy
forest of Galtres”( 22 ) near Sheriff Hutton castle in Yorkshire, and hears his
right to a place in Fame’s court questioned in a long and heated debate
between Fame herself and Dame Pallas. His fortunes, however, then take a
turn for the better, as the wild press of poets struggling for Fame’s favor
clears to allow the arrival of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate–a Chaucer, we
might suppose, miraculously liberated from the House of Rumor in which
his own poem leaves him stranded, and in one of those giddying spatial
transformations it so often delivers, brought face to face with Skelton,
having picked up Gower and Lydgate somewhere along the intervening
years. The three are garbed as befits their status as the revered elders of an
English poetic heritage; indeed, says Skelton,“Thei wantid nothynge but
the laurell”( 397 )–which he, of course, covets.
If we leave aside the clichés about Skelton’s gigantic ego, there is much to
note about this encounter. Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, previously only
names in what is by Skelton’s day a topical roll call of the three major fathers
of English poetry, are here real men with real bodies who greet the newcomer
to Fame’s“collage”( 403 ) with their vernacular eloquence. They are there to
establish Skelton’s own name, his title to a signifier that will represent the
subject for other signifiers, be heard and read universally. Voice and body
guarantee–quite literally, substantiate–a transmission of poetic authority
both patrilineal and national.
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 159