Skelton, JOHN

Skelton, JOHN, an early satirical poet, is supposed to have been born about 1460, most probably in Norfolk, although generally said to have been sprung from a Cumberland family. He studied at Cambridge, perhaps also at Oxford, and received from each the academical honour of laureate. He was appointed tutor to the young prince Henry, and early acquired such reputation for learning that Erasmus styles him ‘the one light and ornament of British letters.’ He took holy orders in 1498, and became rector of Diss in Norfolk, but seems later to have been suspended for keeping a concubine; although Fuller tells us how, on his death-bed he protested ‘that in his conscience he kept her in the notion of a wife, though such his cowardliness that he would rather confess adultery (then accounted but a venial) than own marriage, esteemed a capital crime in that age.’ Wood tells us that he ‘was esteemed more fit for the stage than the pew or pulpit,’ and Churchyard says ‘his talke was as he wraet.’ Already he had produced some translations, and elegies upon Edward IV. and that Earl of Northumberland murdered by a Yorkshire mob in 1489; but now he struck into an original vein of satirical vernacular poetry, in rattling verses of six, five, and even four syllables, with quick-recurring rhymes, overflowing with grotesque words and images and unrestrained jocularity, and lightened up by bright gleams of fancy. His bent leaned strongly towards satire, and in this kind his chief productions were The Bowge of Courte, Colyn Cloute, and Why come ye nut to Courte. Of these the first is an allegorical poem showing striking power of characterisation; the second, a vigorous and unsparing attack on the corruptions of the church, of which he himself says, ‘though my ryme be ragged, tattered and jagged, rudely rain-beaten, rust and moth-eaten, if ye take well therewith, it hath in it some pyth;’ the last is a sustained invective against Cardinal Wolsey. He attacks with the most plain-spoken boldness his arrogance, avarice, and incontinence, and does not spare even his ‘gresy genealogy’ and the ‘bocher’s stall.’ Wolsey felt the sting, and tried to arrest his libeller, but Skelton fled to the sanctuary in Westminster, where Abbot Islip sheltered him till his death, June 21, 1529. Of his other poems the chief are Phyllipp Sparowe, a young girl’s lament for a pet bird killed in a convent of black nuns at Carowe near Norwich, an amusing but rather profane jeu d’esprit, which Coleridge called ‘an exquisite and original poem;’ The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, a vigorous burlesque picture of low life, its heroine an ale-wife at Leatherhead in Surrey; the Garlande of Laurell, a long but less successful poem; and Magnyfycence, the only one of his Interludes that has survived. Skelton’s reputation for wit, if not ribaldry, was so great that a wretched book of ‘merye tales’ was popularly linked with his name: as undeserved is Pope’s phrase—‘beastly Skelton’—written on occasion of a reprint in 1736 of the first collected edition (1568). The only good edition is that by the Rev. A. Dyce (2 vols. 1843).