Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

My general point is that there may be a more specific context for
Skelton’s poem than we often assume. A bifurcation is at work; while the
monarchfigures as spectacle and source of conspicuous consumption, he is
also associated with private spaces within the court, secrecy and surveillance,
and the money that usurped the pathways of grace and favor.^24 These
redistributions of authority overlap inThe Bowgewith print’s emergent
consolidation, in piecemeal and locally determined fashion, of English
vernacular poetic traditions, and the fact that various European works of
court satire–L’Abuzé en cour, Chartier’sCurial–had already circulated in
script and print for some time, providing templates to apply to the English
court.^25 Skelton’s printed poem shows an author for whom formal poetic
authority turns into erotic submission. It is, like the court it serves, at once
open and secret; it veils behind its moral pretensions its own complicity in a
world of paranoid pragmatism, to issuefinally in the narrator’s turning of a
chillingly interrogatory gaze on the reader into whose hands the printed
poem may happen to fall.

prologue

The louring opening chronographia is established with several brushstrokes:
autumn (the perfect time for the“wandering”dreams calledinsomnia),
fickle moon, baleful Mars, an uneasy balance of unstable opposites. The
narrator appears, only to disappear again:

I, callynge to mynde the great auctoryte

Of poetes olde, whyche, full craftely,

Under as coverte termes as coude be,

Can touche a troughte and cloke it subtylly

Wyth fresshe utteraunce full sentencyously;

Dyverse in style, some spared not vyce to wrythe,

Some of moralyte nobly dyde endyte;

Wherby I rede theyr renome and theyr fame

Maye never dye, bute evermore endure. ( 8 – 16 )

In Stephen Dickey’s claim that the“I”of the eighth line is left“naked, alone
and insubordinate”by the unfolding hypotaxis, a nice pun hides a slightly
inaccurate point.^26 The speaker is rather lifted into suspension on a surge of
present participles, clauses and parentheses that clearly evoke Lydgate’s
version of Chaucer’s high style, and its transformations of Chaucer’s com-
plex syntax into absolute constructions.^27 The poet’s aspirations, however,
are abruptly punctured as a dissuading female Ignorance cuts in:“For to

The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 47