shown that the only period during which the countess and other members of
the Howardfamiliawere in residence at Sheriff Hutton castle was 1489 – 99 ,
and that the women addressed in theGarland’slyrics“were to be identified
with a generation of Howard women and their compeers whoflourished in
the 1480 sand 1490 s.”^42 Overall, it would seem that the lyrics to the countess
and her ladies were written in the 1490 s, followed quite shortly by the Sheriff
Hutton narrative frame in which they are set; other parts of the poem came
later, and Skelton evidently added to and revised the poem throughout his
career, the bibliography appearing last.
In accordance with this palimpsestic temporal accretion, Skelton’s bid to
specify his relationship to the signifier is marked by afierce imaginary
rivalry. If half the poem tries to sustain a fantasy of its phoenix-like self-
sufficiency, the other half seeks as energetically to explode that fantasy. The
poem has been variously read as proud statement of the Renaissance poet’s
prophetic inspiration,^43 as a humanist orator’s self-promotion, and as an
attempt to construct an“implied reader”who“belongs to a conspicuously
national [i.e. English] community.”^44 All these views have a point, but are
not quite the poem we read. The Garlandproclaims the integrity of
Skelton’s name and corpus, and yet its very existence is rhetorically depend-
ent on other voices that crowd its pages, or, to judge by its sputtering
aggression, seem to threaten it from without. By the same token, talk of the
rhetorical construction of a unified audience sorts oddly with a poem whose
identifiable addressees include–on a conservative estimate–the Countess
of Surrey, assorted ladies, Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, the mysterious
Roger Statham who is so cryptically attacked at 742 – 51 , and–probably–
Alexander Barclay ( 1257 – 1375 ). Nor is it quite clear how the profile of“the
oratorical performing self”^45 is enhanced by a catalogue that includes such
gems as“The Balade ...of the Mustarde Tarte”( 1245 ),“The Gruntyng
and the Groynninge of the Gronnyng Swyne”( 1376 ) and“the Murnyng of
the Mapely Rote”( 1377 ). The poem unpredictably mixes genres (dream
vision, debate, lyric, catalogue, invective), rhetorical identities (Juvenalian
satirist, courtly maker in the mode of Machaut and Chaucer), meters, stanza
forms and indeed languages. The laurel, with its post-Petrarchan academic
and political sanctions, thus becomes the paradoxical sign of an extremely
heterogeneous text, a strange litter of cultural grammars in which several
different literary and historical models are overlaid.
These models return us to an early sixteenth-century patronage market in
which multiple economies, both real and symbolic, and multiple models for
identification circulate and compete. The difficulties of Skelton’s vocational
place at this point have already been noted. Also relevant here is the
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 161