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In making a choral suite out of the poems for the Five Tudor Portraits of John Skelton, Ralph Vaughan Williams ventured to take some liberties with the text. Certain omissions have been made necessary, partly by the great length of the original, partly from the fact that certain passages did not lend themselves to musical treatment, and partly that certain lines that look well when read cannot conveniently be sung. Williams changed the order of the lines; this seems legitimate, as there does not appear to be an inevitable sequence in Skelton's original order. This fusion is, he hopes, justified by the fact that the character who sings the song in the play has immediately before quoted a line from “Jolly Rutterkin.” The setting is for baritone solo and chorus.

This chapter looks at the rhetorical culture of early Tudor England. It argues that educated English men (and to a lesser extent, women) were used to a degree of intellectual freedom in the 1510s and 1520s, allowing the kind of robust intellectual enquiry and argument that was taught in the grammar schools and universities, and which formed the bedrock of the training of the Inns of Court. It charts the decline in the reputation and governmental methods of Henry VIII from the time of his accession, when he was lauded as a liberal scholar’s champion, to the last years of his reign, when he was widely condemned as a tyrant. It shows how, as his reign progressed, his subjects had to learn new ways of thinking and speaking in the face of his government’s oppressive demands.

This chapter explores the poetic innovations introduced or imported into England by Wyatt and Surrey in their attempts to discover new ways of writing political verse under Henry VIII’s tyranny. It argues that royal oppression not only stifled the traditional forms of literary good counsel that had dominated literary culture for generations, but also prompted the development of newer forms of expression that would come to be seen as characteristic of the Renaissance spirit: individual subjectivity, interiority, a new secular Petrarchan lyric voice, and a variety of new stanzaic forms and metres.

Hermes Pan goes to Paramount to choreograph Let’s Dance for Fred Astaire and Betty Hutton before returning to M-G-M to choreograph Three Little Words with Astaire and Red Skelton. He remains at M-G-M to work with Sally Forest, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, Marge and Gower Champion, and Cyd Charisse in films such as Excuse My Dust, Texas Carnival, Lovely to Look At, and Sombrero. Pan also teaches Cary Grant to dance in Dream Wife and instructs Jean Simmons in period manners for The Actress.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the work of John Skelton. It then describes the primary aims of the book, which are to provide a new reading of Skelton's work, and question whether Skelton is as unassimilable to the English literary canon as has frequently been assumed. It is argued that Skelton's nonconformity has its roots in his confrontation of precisely those questions that exercised the later 16th century too: the purpose of poetry, the social position of the poet, and the relation between external guarantors of the poet's authority and the energy they seek to contain. The views of authority to which Skelton alludes explicitly are only the public face of a private obsession, and Skelton's most radical discussions of the poet's authority are to be found not in his adaptations of established views, but between the lines of his works themselves. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Skelton is strongly drawn to define his role in relation to the state. He is equally attracted by alternative formulations of poetic identity: those that locate the poet's authority in his learning, his place in a literary tradition, or his claim to divine inspiration. This chapter traces a number of these ideas through analysis of his poetic titles. It will thus identify the two contrasting views that recur throughout Skelton's writing. While the title orator regius locates the poet's authority in his position as the king's spokesman, the titles poet laureate and vates pave the way for viewing the poet's authority as innate.

Skelton's titles give some sense of the views of the poet available to him, and the way in which he redefines them depends not on theory but on his own practice as a writer. This chapter begins with a re-examination of its implications, focusing on his early translation of the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus (c.1487). Although the Bibliotheca has been neglected critically, it is none the less central to Skelton's understanding of the writer's authority. It provides him with a number of commonplaces on the subject of writing that recur again and again in his later works. More importantly, however, his practice as translator repeatedly demonstrates the extent of the writer's influence over his subject. Where his source-text presents the historian as one whose authority is derived from his material—that is, in the writings of previous historians—Skelton's translation proposes an altogether different relation between the writer and his subject-matter. His source consistently discusses the writer's res (or subject-matter) in classical terms, as independent from the verba (or the words in which it is clothed). Thus, the meaning of the original may be transferred intact, unaffected by its treatment by a new writer or translator.

The Bibliotheca represents an early recognition of the writer's freedom from the authority of the past; while such authority remains something that may be appealed to for rhetorical purposes, the practice of translation proves that such appeals themselves are a matter of form rather than substance. Skelton's awareness of his separation from literary auctores and auctoritates is not wholly liberating; this chapter demonstrates that it also entails a degree of anxiety about the sources and the guarantors of the writer's output. Works such as The Bowge of Court and Magnyfycence confront fears arising from the possibility that words shape matter and that the poet creates as much as he conveys. Yet they also show Skelton beginning to redefine the kind of ‘education’ that the poet is expected to provide in such a way as to take account of this possibility. For his predecessors, such as Lydgate and Hoccleve, advice consists of direct instruction: the skilful rehearsal of consensus and commonplace. But in The Bowge of Court, and still more in Magnyfycence, instruction is shown to rest in the challenge to the reader: to be wary, to read, to interpret, and to take nothing, least of all the commonplace, on trust.

This chapter focuses on Skelton's poem, Speke Parrot. The poem confronts Skelton's concern with the stability of poetic meaning, at a time when the question is given a new urgency by the linguistic issues raised by the ‘Grammarians' War’ (1519-21). In this conflict, concerned ostensibly with the question of whether Latin in schools was best taught by an emphasis on imitation of classical authors or by an emphasis on grammatical precept, Skelton's position is commonly held to have been a reactionary one. Yet, although he supported the traditional faction, a close examination of Speke Parrot indicates that his purposes in doing so were radical, rather than conservative. The chapter shows that the new method of language teaching championed by Skelton's opponents—with an emphasis on imitation rather than grammar—is treated as analogous to Wolsey's appropriation of royal authority: both are viewed as attacks on the poet's traditional freedoms or, in Parrot's words, on his ‘liberty to speak’. Conversely, to teach by grammatical precept becomes the path to the fluent and interpretive reading necessary for a full understanding of the poet's apocalyptic warnings, and thus for the possibility of political change.

Although Speke Parrot raises the possibility of the reader contributing to a work's meaning, it also anticipates the parody of this idea of collaboration in two further late works, A Garlande of Laurell and A Replycacion. These too combine an intensely serious political message with an element of playfulness in the telling. In all cases, the marginal glosses contribute significantly to the effect. Yet, although the glosses derive from the earliest witnesses to the poems, they have been omitted from the standard edition of Skelton's works, and have attracted little critical attention. This chapter attempts to redress the balance, demonstrating that far from being expendable, the glosses are a self-authorizing strategy central to Skelton's negotiation of a relationship with his readers.

This chapter focuses on the treatment of the poet's invention and inspiration in Magnyfycence and A Replycacion. A Replycacion has been claimed as the first English formulation of the Platonic theory of inspiration. Yet, whereas Plato treats inspiration as involuntary possession, for Skelton it is not passively received. Rather, it can be read as characterized by a ‘heat’ and ‘speed’ which strongly recall the terms used to describe the character Fansy in Magnyfycence. Fansy is not only a vice figure, but also a representation of the mental faculty of the fantasy. In the late 16th century this faculty was closely associated with poetic creation, and Skelton's Fansy too proves to be engaged in precisely the kind of improvisatory utterance which Skelton elsewhere treats as the province of the poet. This creates a resemblance between Fansy and the inspiration with far-reaching consequences, suggesting that inspiration is as much the result of, as a spur to, the act of writing. In consequence, A Replycacion moves decisively away from the idea that authority is necessarily derived from a source external to the poet. Instead, like a number of later 16th-century poetic treatises, it raises the possibility that inspiration is connected to the poet's innate powers of fantasy and invention.

This chapter focuses on Skelton's reception during the century after his death. Taking as its starting-point Skelton's divided reputation in the late 16th century, when he is referred to both as a proto-Protestant reformer and as an irreverent figure of a lost merry England, the chapter demonstrates that such apparently conflicting views in fact have more in common than might be expected. Skelton's influence is most immediately obvious in the writing of Protestant Reformers such as Luke Shepherd, Robert Crowley, and the anonymous authors of treatises such as The Ymage of Ypocresy (1534) and Vox Populi Vox Dei (1547). The Skeltonic form comes to be so closely associated with anti-Catholic abuse that Skelton himself is treated as part of the Reforming tradition. This occurs not only in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar but, more unexpectedly, in works such as Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon r (1599) and Ben Jonson's rFortunate Isles r (1624), which seem initially to present Skelton merely as a jester or entertainer.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that contrary to first impressions, Skelton may be viewed as ‘the thing of great constancy’ at the centre of his work. He is constant in his adoption of multiple personae, constant in his juxtaposition of different voices, constant too in his questioning of how words mean and what it means to write. His historical period gives these practices a local habitation and a name. Just as his own constant revision of his works reveals his interest in the process of writing rather than in any one final meaning, so he has been given many different identities.

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

The first chapter explores the development of the original collection of Mirror complaints in the voices of late medieval kings and rebels, sometimes known as ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’, from its suppression under Mary I, through its Elizabethan metamorphoses, to its final Jacobean iteration. The chapter aims to reframe discussion of the text together with its recensions, to effect a holistic analysis of the work’s reception and adaptation, instead of perpetuating the structural antagonism between phases in the corpus’s expansion. In particular, it addresses the editorial alterations made during the 1570s, the apex of the collection’s popularity, which shaped the direction in which later additions would develop, and the ways in which the complaints added in 1578, 1587, and 1610 build on Baldwin’s interrogation of historiographical transmission and unreliability.

This book investigates the intersection of English law and literature from John Skelton to John Webster. It takes as its subject the cultural meaning of “jurisdiction” during a transitional period when that technical category in law came under peak pressure, in immediate response to specific jurisdictional crises and as part of the long process of centralization and rationalization through which the common law achieved interpretive hegemony. Focusing on law's unstable practices rather than on the image of its stability, the book analyzes the production of English juridical norms in relation to jurisdiction as the administrative principle that orders power as authority by defining the scope of a particular power over a given matter or territory. It develops several theses about the practical life of the law and its relation to English literature such as prose, poetry, and drama, and describes a relatively recent moment in which law and humanistic culture were in a complex but non-oppositional relation to one another.