chapter 2
The Bowge of Courteand the birth
of the paranoid subject
We have seen that André’sVita Henrici Septimiis a remarkably miscella-
neous compilation. Biography, autobiography, chronicle, ode, elegy, pan-
egyric, set speech based on classical precedent, are all narratively juxtaposed.
In a comparable fashion, the early career of John Skelton–royal tutor to
Prince Henry, as until 1500 was André to Arthur, Prince of Wales–also
knots together various strands, which recent scholarship has done much to
unpick. Skelton’s position at this juncture is made up of several contra-
dictory elements, which can only be sketched here, but which ask precisely
the question of what a“court”poetry might be. His entry into royal service
was marked by a highly personal system of chronology,^1 connecting him to
the ruler but also asserting an idiosyncratic difference. The attention given
to his self-definition as“Skelton laureate”has proved laureation itself to be a
remarkablyfissile trope. As translator in 1488 of Diodorus Siculus’s universal
history, theBibliotheca historica, from Poggio Bracciolini’sfifteenth-century
Latin version, he confirmed a Latinateauctoritas, already recognized by
Oxford’s laureation, which would be repeated at Louvain and Cambridge.
He is also“Skelton laureatus”at the head of hisfirst English poem,Upon
the Dolorous Dethe of the Erle of Northumberlande. Recent studies have
further shown laureate authority to be rooted in material and in immaterial
considerations–political sanction, court standing, the steady economic
support enjoyed by André, imagined roles, more noumenal forms of
“inspiration”–which rarely sit well together.^2
All these ambiguities cluster when William Caxton, prefacing his
Eneydosin 1490 , invites“Mayster John Skelton, late created poete laureate
in the Unyversite of Oxenforde, to oversee and correct this sayd booke.”^3
The gesture is clearly a complex one. For Daniel Wakelin, the mention of
Skelton actually goes with disenfranchisement from the“humanist inher-
itance”;^4 Caxton, desired by“som honest and grete clerkes...to wryte the
most curyous termes that I could fynde,”is rather interested in a wider
audience. William Kuskin argues compellingly for a multifaceted agenda on
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