interpret the Eleusinian mysteries is to divulge them. Since the verbvulgare(to
spread abroad, divulge) can also mean“to prostitute,”Numenius then has a
dream in which the Eleusinian goddesses appear to him standing before an
open brothel, dressed as courtesans.“When in his astonishment he asked the
reason for this shocking conduct,”reports Macrobius,“they replied that he had
driven them from their sanctuary of modesty and had prostituted them to
every passer-by.”^33 The goddesses have been undressed and expelled, their
mysteries revealed; in Macrobius’s anecdote, however, the unveiling gives place
to a reveiling, for the goddesses are not stripped naked, but“habitu meretri-
ciae.”The eroticized narrative suggests, in Hult’s words, that truth“isnever
perceived without itsfigurative covering”;^34 the“numina”have no bodies. As
R. Howard Bloch too has noted, Macrobius phrases“a potent paradigm of
representation,”which is“bodiless, empty, less capable of expressing a reality
exterior to it than of covering up an absence that is also,finally, scandalous.”^35
The same scandal arises in Skelton’s poem. Like Chartier’scourtiers,
Skelton’s eager merchants are readers enslaved to a sign, which here takes
the form of an image beyond description. Their onrush gives place to a
moment of unknowable commerce, as thedomina’s radiance defeats the
“connynge”of the poet who, pre-oneirically, was already overwhelmed by
past authorities. The moment is impenetrable to our reading. Does the
speaker see the lady butfind her beauty indescribable? Does he see her at
all through the concealing“traves”? Either way, she is no sooner mentioned
than she gives place to a series of signs. Once again recalling the lady of the
Roman de la Rose, Dame Sans-Pere, having eluded the narrator’s“connynge,”
is nowhere definitely present, but is rather incarnated in twofigures, one
daunting, the other more enticing. As the dreamer is left deciphering a
sinisterly ambiguous motto on the lady’s throne, he is accosted by
Daunger–not Guillaume de Lorris’s churl with a club, but a waiting-woman:
Than asked she me,“Syr, so God the spede,
What is thy name?”and I sayde it was Drede. ( 76 – 77 )The dreamer’s name is a startling revelation, not least because its content is a
prosopopeic identity by which he is already circumscribed. Having failed in
the prologue to enter an anterior order of poets, he is now exposed as afigure
in an order of personification, as Drede. Daunger’s fellow“gentylwoman,”
Desyre, offers new advice:
What though our chaffer be never so dere,
Yet I avyse you to speke, for ony drede:
Who spareth to speke, in fayth, he spareth to spede. ( 89 – 91 )50 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland