illumyne, she sayde, I was to dulle”( 20 ). Ignorance here targets the poetic
terminology of vernacular“heigh style,” with catastrophic effect. This
author would no doubt like to adopt Lydgate’s stylistic mantle–suggested
by a term which sparks a chain of associations back to Petrarch’s“enlumy-
nyng”labors in the prologue to theClerk’s Tale, and which we have seen in
Dunbar–but Lydgatean“dullness”stops short here of establishing rhetor-
ical and moral authority. On the contrary, it is all too authentic, leaving the
speaker genuinely grounded. Such an aspirant writer, stalled even before he
has begun, clearly could not stretch to the gargantuan outpourings of aTroy
Bookor aFall of Princes. The very invocation of“auctoryte”brings a clausal
ramification that carries enunciation out of reach; the“great auctoryte / Of
poetes olde”is no sooner mentioned than it leaves the narrator’s own to
vanish, dispersed into adiminutiopushed to its logical extreme. Far from
being magnificently assertive, this narrator struggles in the voluminous coils
of an invertebrate Lydgatean syntax.
This is not all, for the poet’s self-enunciation at this point is divided.
Between the lines of this hyperextendedfifteenth-century poetics, there is
much interest in what its language might cover. Poets are poets, it transpires,
because they can, under“coverte termes,”“touche a troughte and cloke it
subtylly.”Commonplace though these sentiments might be, we should
nevertheless pause. They suggest a clerical hermeneutics deriving from exe-
gesis, which is always a practice of reading before it is a practice of writing.
That hermeneutics is not entirely without precedent in Lydgate–who inThe
Fall of Princesasserts of poets that“Ther cheeff labour is vicis to repreve /
With a maner couert symylitude”(iii, 3830 – 31 )^28 – but it remains true that the
trope is rare in his work when compared to the lexis of illumination and
aureation. We have, then, a narrator split between different poetic models,
and a tantalizing suggestion that withinfifteenth-century public discourse
there may lie a privy kernel of secrecy, a poetics of obscuring hidden within
the language of“illumyning.”This division will be played and replayed
within the narrative of Skelton’s poem, to lethal effect. ForThe Bowge
discloses a violencewithinthefifteenth-century modestytopos, replaying its
thematics of authority as a scene of aggressive looking and ignominious
humiliation, in which mastery is inseparable from masochism.
That the ship which enters harbor is calledThe Bowge of Courtemight
surprise no one, given the poet-dreamer’s predicament. In Chartier’sCurial–
whose English version by Caxton was published in 1484 – the speaker notes
that“whan thou enforcest the to entre [the court] / thenne begynnest thou to
lese the seygnorye of thy self”( 13 ).^29 The court“maketh a man to leue hys
propre maners / And to applye hym self to the maners of other”( 7 ); eating,
48 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland