With hindsight, even the poem’s opening, in which“hartis belluyng,
embosyd with distres”( 24 ) are pursued by foresters and hounds, evokes
an Ovidian prototype. Skelton is cast as Actaeon home on the English
range, about to slip into a dream where he will hear, rather than see, the
secrets of goddesses.
As it turns out, however, the castration and mutilation to which Skelton
may be exposed affects name rather than body. Fame complains that while
“auncient poetis”( 65 ) were industrious, and wear the laurel crown“In
figure”of their toil ( 68 ),“Skelton is wonder slake, / And, as we dare, we
fynde in hym grete lake”( 69 – 70 ).^50 Pallas justifies this distinctly emascu-
latedfigure on the grounds that the nature of writingper seputs any writer
in a no-win situation; it is constantly struggling to recover an impossible
relation. The outspoken panegyrist may be accused offlattery, while satire
and the riddling tropes of political prophecy may offend the powerful.
“Another manes mynde diffuse is to expounde,”she says,“Yet harde is to
make but sum fawt be founde”( 111 – 12 ). But the material sign, abstracted
from the body of its producer and subjected to multiple readings and
meanings, is also the source of literal thraldom.“Beware, for wrytyng
remayneth of recorde!”( 89 ) says Pallas proverbially, and the point recurs
throughout the poem; whether or not you stick to your word, your word
will surely stick to you.^51 And once again the bondage is erotic, for the whole
debate stems from Fame’s complaint that Skelton “wyll not endevour
hymselfe to purchase / The favour of ladys with wordis electe”( 75 – 76 ).
Here, the common opposition between poetry (the works of the classical
auctores) and making (writing as ephemeral courtly entertainment)^52 dis-
appears; poetry proves to be grounded in making, and at the heart of
Skelton’s attempt to enter the transcendent canon of what Chaucer called
“alle poesye”wefind a courtly scenario more appropriate toThe Legend of
Good Womenand its French predecessors. The poet bound to the uncertain
shifts of the signifier that are the inevitable concomitant of spreading one’s
name, the errancy of Fama underlying the renown of Fame, is simulta-
neously bound to the will and desire of female readers.
The drive to arrest this mobility isfigured in the topography of Skelton’s
poem, which is illuminated by Carolyn Dinshaw’s association of Chaucer’s
“queyntelych”-wrought house of Rumour with female sexuality and the
female body.^53 Atfirst the risks seem great. The three English poetic fathers
conduct Skelton to the palace of Fame through gates of“elephantis tethe”
( 468 ), portal of false dreams and uncanny prolepsis of thevagina dentata.
Once they have ceded their tutelage to Occupation, she leads Skelton up“a
windyng stayre”( 767 ) into the secret recesses of Sheriff Hutton and to“a
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 163