Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

fiction he himself inhabits. They repeatedly assimilate him to the stereotype
of the terrified cleric at court, while the poem that“authors”him, and for
which he stands, quietly exhibits the very“connynge”with which they
mock him,^64 weaving them into its text. There can be few dream allegories
in which the words“me thoughte”acquire quite the weight of meaning they
do here. As we have seen,The Bowge of Courteis a poem marked by
disclaimers and disavowals, which seem to be the only means by which
this subject can register his desire. Hefirst acknowledges his ambition with a
half-hearted“But than I thoughte I wolde not dwell behynde”; now, the
standard formula of dream vision functions as an alibi. Drede spies on
others, while denying that he does so. His unresisting eye is constantly
producing knowledge, in the shape offigurative Vices covered in legible
signs; but that knowledge itself, in Skelton’s poem, rests on an unstable,
mirroring ascription of attributes, in which author, narrator and characters
are all implicated. Meanwhile, the speeches of Drede’s adversaries, building
a menacing, deathly reality of which he evidently knows nothing, are
creating epistemological panic.

the uncanny rhetorician

The climax of the Vices’persecution also brings to a head Skelton’s linking
of literalization and paranoia. Having alluded casually to yet another con-
versation going on just out of earshot, Dissimulation suddenly points to a
new character:

Naye, see where yonder stondeth the teder man!

Aflaterynge knave and false he is, God wote.

The drevyll stondeth to herken, and he can.

It were more thryft he boughte him a newe cote;

It wyll not be, his purs is not on-flote.

All that he wereth, it is borowed ware;

His wytte is thynne, his hode is threde-bare. ( 484 – 90 )

As Anna Torti has pointed out, this mysterious and evidently disreputable
figure seems to sum up the Vices we have so far seen. The portrait’s specifics
recall Favell (“Aflaterynge knave and false”), the meager garments of Riot
(“his hode is threde-bare”), and the obsessional eavesdropping of everyone,
including Drede. The moment, however, has also a near Gothic quality, for
in Dissimulation’s speech there suddenly arises the uncanny double of the
aspiring rhetorician who narrated the prologue: deficient in“connynge”
(“his wytte is thynne”); in need of“a newe cote”as his original wished to
“cloke”truth like his poetic forebears; short of resources ( 488 ); laboring

58 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland