John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (review)

John Skelton is a notoriously difficult author, whose poetry does not fit easily with medieval or Renaissance poetic theories and practices. In John Skelton and Poetic Authority, Jane Griffiths addresses this difficulty, exploring the poet's idiosyncratic corpus and placing it in the context of fifteenth- and later sixteenth-century literary traditions. The subtitle, "defining the liberty to speak," might lead some readers to expect a narrow study of Skelton's political satires and early Renaissance notions of freedom of expression. Griffiths, however, considers poetic authority in a broader way, examining how Skelton imagined the foundation of his right to speak as a poet. In the process, she discusses Skelton's multiple ideas: that such legitimacy comes from the king, a patron, God, the poet himself, and the active engagement of readers. Overall, she offers lucid, engaging, deft, and persuasive readings of much of Skelton's work, showing that for him such authority ultimately lies within the poet himself, but depends as well on active and imaginative readers.

Skelton wrote in a huge range of genres, from elegies and political satires to randy and humorous poems, such as The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng. Yet compared to later laureate poets with a similar range, such as Edmund Spenser or Ben Jonson, it is difficult to see how his poetry comprises a unified body of work. For this reason, Skelton tends to be remembered "piecemeal" (1). The major strength of the book is that Griffiths respects this breadth and diversity, and consequently finds a thesis and organization that allows her to explore the author's many kinds of writing, without imposing an artificial unity on them. Indeed, at first glance, one might expect a survey of how Skelton's poetic ideas altered or developed over his career, a chronological organizational scheme that would follow the lead of the major book on Renaissance poetic authority, Richard Helgerson's Self-Crowned Laureates (1983). Still, such an organization would likely have forced Griffiths to describe Skelton's career as a logical, orderly progression of attitudes, a view that she understands Skelton's poetry resists.

Instead, in each chapter, Griffiths discusses a number of Skelton's works in order to explore the notion of poetic authority each implies. For instance, in the first chapter, she examines Dolorus Dethe (1489), Agaynst the Scottes (1513), A Garleande of Laurell (1523), and A Replycacion (1528), arguing that the first two present the poet as a spokesperson for the king (a view that implies his dependence on external sources of authority), while the latter two imply that the poet is a laureate or even a prophet (a view that suggests the poet's authority is innate). In chapter 2, Griffiths discusses a translation of the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus (ca. 1487), showing that this work provides an even earlier expression of the view that the poet's authority lies in the poet himself. Later chapters develop this idea, showing how for Skelton such authority depended on the participation of readers as well. By organizing the book according to views of poetic authority (rather than chronologically), Griffiths argues for her thesis in a coherent and sound way, demonstrating the dominance of Skelton's complex notion that poetic authority is both innate and conferred by readers, while at the same time giving ample recognition to other ideas he expressed at points during his career.

This study will obviously appeal to anyone working on Skelton, early Tudor writing, or Renaissance concepts of poetic authority. If there is one weakness, it is that, for those who do not work directly in these areas, the connection of the argument to trends in medieval and Renaissance studies is not as explicit as it could be. Griffiths fully demonstrates that Skelton "manifests a fierce engagement with the question of the poet's identity" (185). Still, for those who are not well aware of developments in criticism on this topic...