Privy Chamber. Similarly, the strangely labilefigure of“bowge of courte”
disrupts personification allegory, mirroring the royal association of money
with the inner reaches of power and the disturbance of prior structures of
patronage. Such historical considerations, as we have seen, enter Skelton’s text
through rhetorical strategies that literalize–that execute, in other words, the
due processes of a punitive law. AndThe Bowge of Courtedoes indeed fulfill
the law, in no uncertain terms. At the end, Drede, panicked by the conspiracy
he imagines, prepares to leap overboard. This gesture has been interpreted as
one either of despair (the poet is forced out of his own poem by courtierly
evils)^74 or of a qualified creative optimism (the stalled poet of the prologue has
at least overcome writer’sblock).^75 However, I would submit that Drede, in
evoking these terrors, also coopts them in the interests of self-promotion, for
he is merely fulfilling the terms of a statute with which the poemfinally
reveals itself to be identical.“Me thoughte I see lewde felawes here and there /
Came for to slee me of mortall entente”: Drede has detected a homicidal
conspiracy, compassed and“ymagyned”in the absence of“actuell dedis.”
And with this initial work of“ymagyning”done,The Bowge of Courteis
finally sent forth to conduct its enigmatic work of surveillance among the
unsuspecting readers of the printed book, setting paranoid selfconscious-
ness in circulation as a condition of participation in that readership. The
paratext, indeed, underscores this: the 1499 edition is published anony-
mously, and thefigure of the author and the act of writing are both elided,
the last lines of the poem’sfirst-person narrative moving straight into an
explicit and colophon (“Enprynted at westmynster By me wynkyn the
worde”). The anxieties so subtly harnessed by Skelton inThe Bowgespeak
to a court increasingly structured around the monarchal seclusion of the
Privy Chamber, but also to a press whose instrumentality in imagining
national inclusivity and obedience has not by 1499 gone untested.^76 Drede
is a vanishing mediator, moving at once inward and outward into a printed
text that will conduct its own disembodied, reified scrutiny of political
subjects. The terrified Drede is invited to supply his own meanings to the
Vices’menacing indirection,filling in what their words leave out:
Iwys I coude tell–but humlery, home,
I dare not speke, we be so layde awayte ( 467 – 68 )But, of course, the terrifying dream supplies him with the“mater of to
wryte”he lacks at the outset, and he is left imitating the“poetes olde”whom
in the Prologue he felt unable to follow, writing“this litel boke.”^77 Yet the
rhythm of the lines that communicate this intent– glib, insinuating,
confiding, self-qualifying–by now sounds grimly familiar:
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 61