chapter 6
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon,
Wheston next Barnet”
To move from a Hawes stranded by the accession of Henry VIII to the
Skelton of the early 1520 s is to cross a narrower gap than might be imagined.
Both poets engage with a similar crisis of symbolic investiture, revealed in
discursiveflights from erotic to apocalyptic and to metapoetic. My aim in
this chapter is to suggest that in Skelton’s case, this anxiety of location is
addressed through a poetics that seeks to multiply and disperse the grounds
of authority, whilefinding newfigures for the relations among them. In
contrast to André’s classically“foreign”England and Barclay’s Englishing of
the alien, Douglas’s thresholding of the epic, Dunbar’s performances of
disappearance and the retreats of Hawes and the earlier Skelton himself,
Skelton at this stage of his career embraces a poetics that deranges spheres of
authority altogether, providing intersections and divergences between them
with a bewildering rapidity.
While the known facts are few, readers of Skelton’s career at this period
have noted a certain insecurity. The royal tutor rusticated to Diss in 1503
looks to have returned to the center of royal power in the early 1510 s, but in
what capacity is not known. The title oforator regius, which he assumed in
or just after 1512 , reveals little. Works that cannot be securely dated oscillate
between laureate pretension (Calliope), royal counsel (the interlude
Magnyfycence) and theflytings and invectives of less exalted court enter-
tainment. Greg Walker, whose account I follow here, has suggested that the
multiple attacks on Wolsey were moved neither by personal grudge nor
noble support (the Howard sponsorship of earlier accounts), but rather by
political misreading;Speke Parottshows a Skelton operating on the assump-
tion that Wolsey is falling out of royal favor, only to discover belatedly that
he is not;Collyn ClouteandWhy Come Ye Nat to Courte?, also directed
against Wolsey, are accordingly a hunt for new patrons among urban
mercantile élites.^1 In fact Skelton, is, as Carlson notes,a’ˊsopo|–“unclassi-
fiable”or“unplaced,”^2 whether as client-poet or as conflicted cleric,fiercely
opposed to prelacy and eager to shame bishops back into the pulpit, yet
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