could be arbitrarily revoked. This renders it an appropriate center for the
symbolic economy of Skelton’s poem, where it takes on a bewildering
variety of forms.
Thefirst of the Vices, Favell or Flattery, sets the tone with Drede’s“Than
Favell gan wyth fayre speche me to fede”( 147 ). Words become food; in
effect,“Bowge of Courte.”Theflatterer’s language functions as a medium
of courtly exchange, becoming identical with court rations of a more
alimentary kind. The“banquet of rhetoric” is a familiar trope in the
twelfth-centuryartes poeticae.Geoffrey of Vinsauf exhorts the reader to
take delight in apostrophe,“[w]ithout which the food would be sufficiently
abundant, but whose presence swells dishes of an outstanding feast...this
food for the ear, when it arrives savory, fragrant and costly, lets us feast our
ears for a longer time on its greater riches and variety.”^47 Favell’s unseemly
behavior, however, transfigures such expansive diction into the grotesque
body of rhetorical carnival:“Me thoughte, of wordes that he had full a poke;
/ His stomak stuffed ofte tymes dyde reboke”( 179 – 80 ).^48 Dissimulation
approaches Drede wielding further culinary and iconographic stage
properties:
And in his other sleve, me thought I sawe
A spone of golde, full of hony swete,
To fede a fole, and for to preye a dawe. ( 435 – 37 )An associated play on words may even be implied in Dissimulation’s
weirdly recondite reference to his knife as the“stoppynge oyster”in his
“poke”( 477 ). Dissimulation’s“poke”points to a further semantic extension
of the title, for a“bowge”is also“a leather bag,”^49 pouch, purse or–another
usage wefind in the poem–the“male”^50 that Hervy Hafter is out to“picke”
( 138 ). Riot combines the characteristictopoiof petitionary poetry and
descriptions offictional gallants;^51 his purse, empty enough to imperil his
soul (“The devyll myght daunce therin for ony crowche,” 364 ), contains
nothing but a“buckell”( 397 ).
On one level, this extends a common topos of curial satire. The courtier’s
own commodification–his too is a value to be negotiated–is explicitly
stated in Skelton’s poem: Favell tells Drede that to the mysterious lady who
presides over the court he is“worth a thousande pounde”( 157 ). Chartier,
too, depicts the court as a marketplace in which the subject’s sole value
resides in the favor shown him by the sovereign.“For emonge vs of the
courte,”he writes,“we be meschant and newfangle / that we bye the other
peple / And sommtyme for theyr money we selle to them our humanyte
precyous / we bye other / And other bye vs”( 13 ).^52 More important,
54 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland