Of Manerly Margery Maystres Mylke and Ale;
To her he wrote many maters of myrthe;
Yet, thoughe I say it, therby lyith a tale,
For Margery wynshed, and breke her hinder girth;
Lorde, how she made moche of her gentyll birth!
With,“Gingirly, go gingerly!”Her tayle was made of hay;
Go she never so gingirly, her honesty is gone away.
Harde to make ought of that is nakid nought;
This fustiane maistres and this giggisse gase
Wonder is to wryte what wrenchis she wrowght,
To face out her foly with a midsomer mase;
With pitche she patchid her pitcher shuld not crase;
It may wele ryme, but shroudly it doth accorde,
To pyke out honesty of suche a potshorde. ( 1198 – 211 )A knowing classical allusion that exposes the woman is Dunbarically
replayed in the language of what Freud calls smut (“die Zote”). Amid
more exalted genres wefind“manerly Margery”whose unmannerly body,
textually dilated–she has a longer entry than previous, much more edifying
works–is bursting with the most profligate polysemy (her poorly patched
pitcher, her“tayle / tale”that“lyith”and is“made of hay,”Skelton’s usual
equine metaphors). At the same time, she is contained within the masculine
word of social satire, for her deferrals have no carnivalesque dynamism;
rather, her resistance is caricatured as the exaggerated delicacy of a girl with
ideas above her station (“go gingirly”). The text, having appropriated the
generative powers of the female body, can expose women’s genitals as
“nakid nought,”of which, even for Skelton, it is“harde”to make anything.
In Skelton’s poem, the woman’s body tropes several forms of material
contingency–the“occasionality”of the poem’s origin, its dependence on a
patron’s demand, the sliding signs of the mother tongue. There are, how-
ever, three reasons whyThe Garlandemay in the end be more than the sum
of such antifeminist discursive strategies. One is that recent historicizations
of Skelton’s antifeminism in other contexts have found in it an oppositional
and critical force: Elizabeth Fowler’s reading of the grotesque body of
Elynour Rummynge as parodic critique of a money economy,^64 Halpern’s
of the body of Jane Scrope inPhyllyp Sparoweas the site of a“regime of
pleasure”running counter to the bodily codings of emergent Tudor abso-
lutism.^65 A second is that if the song of the nightingale and the linguistic
grossnesses of Manerly Margery suggest a repudiation of the material body
of the English language, the Skeltonic by which the poet is remembered is
itself, as Roland Greene points out,“a poetry turned inside out, in which
166 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland