question of medium: the Faques text is a rare instance of Skelton’s selective
resort to print, while the lyrics suggest private coterie circulation in manu-
script.^46 Kate Harris points out that in a patronage culture the book is“an
object to be created, to a degree now difficult to envisage, in the patron’s
image andThe Garland’s relation to both script and print complicates that
relation still further.”^47 Skelton’s is thus the pursuit of an ambivalent sign
indeed: the laurel crown that asserts the poetic and political authority once
assigned to Petrarch might also assert, at this historical conjuncture, the very
dissolution of that same authority into multiple readings and contexts, be a
laurel without an aura.
My concern here is not with the vexed question of Skelton’s relations to
Howard patronage, but rather with autobiography of a more deflected kind.
If we accept the dating just outlined, then we have a text which contains a
journey from origins in intimate manuscript circulation and a scene of
regional aristocratic patronage to the wider and more mixed reading public
of print, for whom the catalogue of Skelton’s works will be the sign that puts
the author-function“Skelton”in circulation. Yet in narrative terms, the text
seems to move in the direction of the lyrics that mark the earliest phase of its
composition, revisiting its beginnings in female patronage in a movement
defined by the trope ofhysteron proteron.^48 The Countess of Surrey episode
itself has undergone a bizarre structural translation; chronologically the
poem’s origin, it has now become an instance of the narrative dilation or
deferral described by Patricia Parker as a troping of the female body, a
digression on Skelton’s path to the phallus, full of lyric address and courtly
leisureliness. This quest, however, frames a rather more troubled relationship
to the signifier, and it is here that Skelton’s Ovidian allusions come into play.
Skelton’sGarlandeintroduces his self-projection as laureate through
citation of its hidden side–the dimension which, as Lynn Enterline has
forcefully reminded us, speaks to language as the scene of privation.^49 The
laurel crown’s Ovidian aetiology is recapitulated when the great company of
Skelton’s poets enters, led by Orpheus and Apollo. If Orpheus, the son,
exuberantly animates objects–the very stump against which Skelton is
leaning begins to dance–Apollo, his father, is trapped in lamentation for
Daphne (“I have lost now that I entended, / And may not atteyne it by no
medyacyon,” 318 – 19 ). Mediation, of course, is the purpose of the laurel
garland, signifier of loss:
in remembraunce of Daphnes transformacyon,
All famous poetis ensuynge after me
Shall were a garlande of the laurell tre. ( 320 – 22 )162 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland