“For ony drede”: Drede is invited to differ from his own inscription in the
allegory through ambitious speech. If this is one of the lures that power
offers, Desyre follows it with another. Drede fears that he will fail in this
new world; he has no advocate who will be his“medyatoure and mene,”and
“but smale substaunce”( 93 – 94 ). In response, Desyre offers Drede some-
thing suspiciously resembling a fetish,^36 a“precyous jewell”calledBone
aventure( 98 ) that will assuage his anxieties. He must befriend the ship’s
highly capricious steerswoman, one Fortune. Drede is dismayed:
“Alas,”quod I,“how myghte I have her sure?”
“In fayth,”quod she,“byBone aventure.” ( 118 – 19 )The tautologous ironies unleashed by this unmasking of the fetish–Paul
D. Psilos aptly comments that the line denotes no more than“a good-luck
handshake”^37 – confirm all too clearly Drede’s subordination to the letter of
the allegorical signifier, to an order by which he is already spoken.
This entry into love-allegory has not gone entirely unprepared, since the
prologue has already set poetic aspiration againstdoubles entendresderived
from Skelton’s own work. Ignorance cuts short the poet’s syntactically
precarious strivings with blunt advice his“penne awaye to pulle / And not
to wrythe”( 21 – 22 ). This deflating imperative undercuts the endeavor to
imitate literary fathers, and the dreamer, denied access to authority through
an act of creationinterruptus,falls asleep. It is not surprising that this should
occur“In myne hostes house called Powers Keye”( 35 ), for here Skelton
writes over the slyly dialogic antifeminism of his earlier lyrics; in
“Womanhod, wanton, ye want!”(inAgaynst a Comely Coystrowne)“key”
punningly refers both to the name of a house and to the clitoris.^38 The
secrets offigural cloaking whispered in the prologue are, it seems, informed
by a carnality bound up with the vernacular polysemy of Skelton’s own low
style.
Now, as the beauty of the lady shades off into an indescribabilitytopos,
the limitations of the poet’s“connynge”are once again to the fore; the
earlier failure to measure up to poetic fathers is here refigured as the dazzled
lover’s inability to“reporte”his lady’s beauty. The relentless particularity of
the fantasy she represents–we hear of“one and other that wolde his lady
see”( 57 )–has already pointed to a world where isolation is the rule (“Than
there coude I none aquentaunce fynde,” 45 ), and where the lady of romance
is brusquely revealed as every solipsist’s personal vision, in a group offigures
struggling for gain.^39 Her presence, or absence, therefore, is intimately
bound up with this dreamer’s“connynge”to describe her; and since, as
we know from the prologue, he has no such“connynge,”she can onlyfigure
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 51