But the fathers, of course, are there not to beget, but to stand by and
applaud an act of self-creation, whose own gendering takes unpredictable
paths. Critics have drawn attention to the identity the poem asserts between
Skelton’s crown of laurel and the work that bears its name.^38 Appropriately,
the poem’s central emblem of poetic craft is a phoenix sitting in the heights
of a laurel^39 – determinedly a“She”( 669 ), as if in polemical reclamation
from the legend,figured in Claudian and Ovid, according to which this
immortal bird is its own son and its own father.^40 In a similar style,
Skelton’s self-authoring is witnessed and approved by the fathers, but goes
one step beyond biological reproduction, transfiguring and sublimating the
body of paternity in a spectacular gesture of imaginary self-enfolding,
gendered female, which becomes the poem’s own extraordinary reflexive-
ness. All is not so simple, however, for the legitimation the English poets
offer is evidently not theirs to give; having greeted him, they quickly ditch
him for reasons unexplained (“From you most we, but not long to tary,”
520 ) and hand him over to the care of Occupation, the Queen of Fame’s
“regestary”( 522 ), who leads him to the presence chamber of Elizabeth
Tylney Howard, countess of Surrey, and her attendant ladies. Here he
receives his crown of laurel, a very public emblem that is woven and
bestowed on him in a curiously private ceremony. Only after this can he
be honored by the court of Fame, where Occupation reads a long and
bizarre catalogue of his works. The labor so neatly summed up in the richly
allusivefigure of the phoenix, in other words, proves somewhat harder to
perform by narrative means, and to establish the supramaterial nature of
poetic inspiration Skelton’s poem has to map a course through, and past, a
scene of very material origins.^41 This scene centers on a female patron, and it
condenses a number of terms–matter, material labor, the maternal tongue–
which suggest that the endurance of Skelton’s name may be a more con-
tingent matter. I want to address here the multiple intertexts–for the most
part Ovidian and, as we have seen, Chaucerian–which both further and
complicate Skelton’s endeavor, and their connexion with the aesthetic and
economic institutions that shape the poem’s strange textual history.
That history is both revealed and concealed in the poem: revealed as a long
list of writings–an autobibliography; concealed in a scholarly problem of
dating. The only existing text of the poem that can be dated with assurance is
Richard Faques’s print of October 1523 , but since the 1960 sithasbeen
demonstrated that the poem probably originated much earlier, perhaps in a
celebration of Skelton’s academic laureation by the Countess of Surrey and
her ladies. Skelton was laureated by the universities of Oxford, Louvain and
Cambridge in 1488 , 1492 and 1493 respectively, while Melvin J. Tucker has
160 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland