self-discipline by exposing its continual struggle with its wayward body.”^56
In Skelton’s poem, this disciplinary dimension is explicitly evoked as the
Vices’rhetorical artifice shapes speech and is realized in both dress and
physical appearance. The Vices arefirst and foremost embodied tropes, and
through them rhetoric is imaged not merely as ethically deplorable, but as
manically out of control.
The dangers that supposedly lay in wait for the courtier on all sides,
including his fear of the watching eyes of others, had long been documented
by the 1490 s.^57 Chartier speaks of the court as“the nourysshe of peple /
whyche by fraude and franchyse / studye for to drawe from one and other
suche wordes / by whyche they may persecute them.”^58 Previous accounts of
the poem have emphasized the terror instilled in Drede by those who watch
him, but that terror cuts both ways; as the poem’s personified vices“studye
for to drawe ...wordes”from Drede, they expend a great many them-
selves. Suspycyon claims that“The soveraynst thynge that ony man maye
have / Is lytyll to saye, and moche to here and see”( 211 – 12 ). Yet the“Full
subtyll persones in nombre foure and thre”( 133 ) in fact talk a great deal,
testing both their adversary’s defences and their own. Fish, who speaks of
the Vices’“baseless sureness,”^59 misses the point of the psychomachia of the
dream, which turns on the double sense of the line“They sayde they hated
for to dele with Drede”( 146 ). Skelton’s Vices are conspicuously lacking in
“sureness,” and their attitude to a character who embodies a word as
multiple in meaning as“drede”is an index of their fears. In Skelton’s
moralityMagnyfycence, Crafty Conveyaunce says
many tymes moche kyndnesse is denyed
For drede, that we dare not ofte, lest we be spyed. ( 1338 – 39 )The poem here is well inside the genre of curial satire, and the arts of
courtiership that were to develop in the course of the sixteenth century. In
such a psychological context,“drede”is at once despised and desperately
seized when occasion demands. It indicates the furtive watchfulness, exem-
plified in Suspycyon’s lines, through which the courtier avoids exposure and
assesses the opposition. But as hesitation, it can also be lethal; any sugges-
tion of diffidence spells disaster in the competition suggested, at the begin-
ning of the dream, by the merchants’unthinking scramble to board the
ship.^60 When the courtier’s mentality is broken down into the Vices
composing a psychomachia–by dramatizing it, Skelton seems to analyze
it–theyflee Drede’s presence, and yet must speak to him. On one level,
they cannot bear even to acknowledge his presence; on another, they are
compelled to do so.
56 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland