Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

Caxton’s part. Since Skelton translates“into Englysshe, not in rude and olde
langage but in polysshed and ornate termes craftely,”he is also a vernacular
auctor. This is of a piece with Caxton’s wider, layered project, which
gestures towards academic and aristocratic readers while fashioning a differ-
ent material product for a“broader audience”conceived as the community
of the state. Skelton’sUpon the Dolorous Dethe, on Kuskin’s showing,
locates itself similarly. Extant in one presentation manuscript, the poem
adheres to the authority of vernacular high style and aristocratic allegiance
in its modesty topos:

Mi wordis unpullysht be nakide and playne,

Of aureat poems they want ellumynynge;

Bot by them to knouledge ye may attayne

Of this lordis dethe and of his murdrynge. ( 127 – 30 )^5

Ultimately, however, it estranges both sources of authority, in the heavily
classicizing agenda presumably noted by Caxton and in the uneasy, fatalistic
suggestion of possible treachery in Northumberland’s death. The ground of
power it eventually outlines is an imagined community, tacitly centered on
the monarch. Thus Skelton’s identity, both poetic and political, is defined
less through feudal tradition than through“a juxtaposition of entrepreneu-
rial autonomy and allegiance to centralized power.”^6 InThe Bowge of Courte
Skelton, household servant and laureate, writes a poem for print dissem-
ination, at a point (c. 1499 ) when Wynkyn de Worde’s interest in promot-
ing contemporary English poetry is especially visible,^7 and addresses the
distinct, as yet partly symbolic, community that the medium endeavors to
define.
Writing on Skelton and laureation has largely been preoccupied with
Petrarch’s 1341 coronation by Robert of Sicily, and for the most part has
accordingly neglected the laurel crown’s Ovidian aetiology in erotic pursuit,
metamorphosis and loss.^8 Skelton himself is not unmindful of the scene, as
The Garlande of Laurellwill show. His poetry of the 1490 s, however, discloses
a more vernacular eroticism. The Lydgatean formality ofUpon the Dolorous
Dethehas a low-style double inManerly Margery Milk and Ale, and the shorter
poems later collected inAgaynst a Comely CoystrowneandDyvers Balettys and
Dyties Solacyous. Alongside aristocratic elegy and a vernacular laden with
classical reference there appears, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a very
different vernacular, one fascinated by“the female body asfigure of verbal
excess,”^9 the dominant role of what Roland Greene calls “the material
patterns of sound,”^10 and an abrasive, disjunctive relation between genres.
The construction of “the sexual Skelton”–to borrow A.W. Barnes’s

44 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland