I.

The first record we have that mentions Skelton tells us that he was "late created poete laureate in the vnyuersite of oxenforde," a degree he would also be awarded from Cambridge and the University of Louvain on the Continent.1 Sometime around 1497, he was brought into the Tudor household as the royal tutor to young Prince Henry, Duke of York. A year after his appointment, Skelton took Holy Orders. While employed at court as a Catholic priest, Skelton wrote his first major work, The Bowge of Coort, which employs conceits typical of the late Medieval period (allegorical figures and dream images) but which also voices a typical Renaissance contempt for courtiers. Three years after this poem Henry VII's eldest son, Prince Arthur, died, and the young Prince Henry ascended to the position of heir apparent. Perhaps because of his contempt for the court as articulated in his poetry, perhaps because he was angry for being dismissed as the Prince's tutor, or perhaps only as a consequence of realignments that occurred with Henry's elevation, in 1504 Skelton moved out of London and took up the rectorship of Diss, a bustling town northeast of London.2 From Diss, Skelton produced his first major poem, Phyllyp Sparrow, which was written in the style that would define him in literary history: Skeltonics.
For reasons that historians do not agree on, in 1512 Skelton took up residence at Westminster, which had the unusual ability of offering perpetual sanctuary for those seeking refuge.3 While safe in the sanctuary of Westminster, Skelton's unusual poetic style was employed to attack the Catholic Church-in particular, England's most powerful prelate, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

Cardinal Wolsey had risen quickly through the hierarchy of the Church and in the political milieu of Henry VIII's England. At a young age Wolsey was given the extremely rare title of legate a latere (as if "from the Pope's side"), which gave him unprecedented power to decide on a range of ecclesiastical matters without needing to consult either the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope.4 In the same year that he was given this power, Wolsey invaded Westminster under the guise of investigating the scandalous behavior of the monks. Wolsey was seeking to revoke Westminster's ability to give perpetual sanctuary and reduce its length to the forty days that every other church was allowed to give. As powerful as Wolsey was, however, he did not succeed in his quest and, perhaps luckily for Skelton, those residing behind the walls of Westminster were safe from the vengeance of the Church and State.5

By 1521 not only had Wolsey become the most powerful Catholic prelate in England but his power rivaled that of the young king.6 Perhaps because Skelton saw Wolsey's rise to power as a threat to the nation or perhaps because he lamented the extravagant trappings with which Wolsey surrounded himself, in the years 1521 and 1522 Skelton aligned himself with the old peerage (especially the Howard family) that saw Wolsey as a threat to its influence. As Wolsey committed England to war in France and sought to finance his war by raiding the coffers of London and demanding a war tithe from its citizens, Skelton began attacking the Church hierarchy.

His first attack came in Speke Parott, in which he chided the other English Catholic prelates for not standing up to Wolsey. "O causeles cowardes," he writes,

                         O hartles hardynes,
O manles manhod, enfayntyd al with fere,
O connyng elergye, where ys your redynes
To practise or postyll thys prosses here and there?
For drede ye darre not medyll with such gere,
Or elles ye pynche curtesy, trulye as I trowe,
Whyche of yow fyrste dare boldlye plucke the crowe.⁷

Though his attacks in Speke Parott are thinly veiled, it takes no stretch of the imagination to know that the "crowe" that Skelton called on those "causeles cowardes" to "boldlye plucke" is Wolsey. Skelton's cry for a clerical uprising against the corrupt Wolsey fell on deaf ears. In "Collyn Clout" Skelton continues to rail against the corruptions of the Church and decries the conspicuous display of the Church's wealth as being "Rychly bewrapped" ("C," 312), while "Theyre neyghbours dye for meate" ("C," 320). It is not, however, until "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" that Skelton takes the gloves off and openly attacks Wolsey as "the kynges deriving / And his swete hart rote" ("W," 666-67), and equates him with the "Sodomites" who had "lost theyr inward syghtes" ("W," 470-71).

However, two years after he launched these attacks Skelton did an about-face and dedicated "The Garland of the Laurel" to his nemesis. Historians are not in complete agreement as to why this occurred (whether some sort of truce was brokered or whether Skelton joined the ranks of other conservative Catholics fighting against the "increasing menace of Lutheran ideas"), but Skelton continued to live at Westminster until his death on 21 June 1529, five months before the first Reformation parliament was seated.8

This is the official biography of Skelton, as painstakingly researched by the handful of prominent historians that I have footnoted. This is not, however, the only biography of Skelton, for there is another one that is told that does not fit so neatly into this perfectly normal narrative: a second tale that is written after Skeltons death and during the height of the English Reformation.

The first biography of Skelton was written by John Bale in 1557. In the last year of the Catholic Queen Marys reign, Bale published a kind of encyclopedia of English writers titled Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytanniae. The section on Skelton was supposedly taken from the writing of one of Skelton's contemporaries, Edward Braynewode, who, like Bale, was an ardent reformer. Braynewode's biography, however, is lost, and we come to Braynewode only through Bale, who copied Braynewode's words down in his own notebook. Nevertheless, from both of these Protestant apologists, we learn that

John Skelton, poet laureate and professor of theology, was priest of Diss in the county of Norfolk and skilled in both kinds of writing, verse and prose. He was much given to the daily invention of satires. Nevertheless, under the mask of laughter, he did not omit to utter the truth . . . [b]ut he was not in full accord with Holy Scripture, although he concealed the fact deftly. He saw many great evil deeds being carried out among the clergy, which he sometimes attacked with lively rhetoric and judicious sneers. He continuously waged war on certain babbling friars, especially the Dominicans. Under the false bishop of Norwich, Richard Nix, he kept that woman (whom he had secretly married for fear of [the] Antichrist) under the title of concubine. When, as he was dying, he was asked about her, he replied that he had nothing on his conscience before God concerning her, since she had been kept as a true wife.9

Besides confirming the historical facts that Skelton was a "poet laureate and professor of theology" and priest at the church in Diss, Bale's biographical sketch is significant because it is the first historical record we have that tells us of Skelton s concubine, whom supposedly on his deathbed Skelton confessed to have married. Bale's pronouncement of Skelton's sexual activities is important not only because it follows Skelton's biography throughout history but also because the way it was attached to the subject of Skelton bears witness to both a kind of early modern construction of identity that is the product of the Reformation as well as a mark of modern sexuality when the subject of Skelton is resurrected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Perhaps Bale constructed Skelton's biography based upon his own history. Bale had been raised from the age of twelve in a Carmelite monastery. He was sent to Cambridge by the order to be educated, and took his degree in theology. Afterward, he was made prior of several Carmelite monasteries, but during the tumultuous years of the 1530s and after the Carmelite order had been dissolved, he left the Catholic Church, married, and became a fervent Protestant reformer. As part of a propaganda campaign begun by Henry VIII's close advisor, Thomas Cromwell, Bale was employed to write dramas that castigated the Catholic Church and, in particular, its lascivious priests. As part of this attempt to influence public opinion, Bale and other reformers also used the poetry Skelton had written against Wolsey and the Catholic hierarchy-those "connyng clergye" who were "Rychly bewrapped" while "Theyre neyghbours dye for meate." Skelton is important in this campaign because as a priest he had firsthand knowledge of the abuses of the Church ("He saw many great evil deeds being carried out among the clergy"). But why did Bale feel it necessary to invent for Skelton a wife who appears in no other document before his 1557 biography? The answer lies in a fundamental conflict that Bale must have encountered when appropriating Skelton for the Protestant cause. Unlike Bale, who renounced the Church after being heavily involved with those "babbling friars" whom he applauds Skelton for warring against, Skelton never renounced his priesthood. Rather, when faced with the reformers' demands, Skelton turned back to defend the church and condemned those heretics who do "laboure to confounde / And brynge the churche to the grounde" ("C," 493-94). Bale, however, ignores these invectives and instead creates a pro-Protestant poet who was "skilled in both kinds of writing, verse and prose" and a Catholic priest who proved the bishop of Norwich, as the arbiter of Catholic doctrine, "false" by keeping "that woman . . . under the title of concubine." But why did Bale have Skelton break his vows of celibacy and not some weightier theological tenet like transubstantiation or hagiolatry? Perhaps the reason lies with Bales near obsession with the perverse sexual activity of priests, monks, and friars, which he used as his weapon of choice in Cromwell's campaign against Rome.

In one of Bales most notorious Protestant propaganda plays, A Comedy Concerning Three Laws, of Nature, Moses, and Christ, he gives us an explicit performance of what he understands to be the grave sins of Catholic clerics.10 Three Laws is an allegorical play that speaks of man's corruption of natural law and his redemption through Christian faith. A majority of the play gives us long stretches of dialogue between the vices, in which they explain their corruptive natures. In the dramatis personae, Bale instructs the performers on the correct apparel for each vice: "Let Idolatry be decked like an old witch, Sodomy like a monk of all sects, Ambition like a bishop, Coveteousness like a pharisee or spiritual lawyer, False Doctrine like a Popish doctor, and Hypocrisy like a grey friar" (TL, 2). It is the appearance of Sodomy as "a monk of all sects" in this play that Alan Stewart cites in proclaiming that "[s]ometime in the late 1530s, Sodomy first walked the English stage." Stewart believes, along with other scholars, that Bale was obsessed with writing about sodomy in the priesthood. Stewart writes suggestively that "Bale s prolix prose-most of it unpublished since the mid-sixteenth century-is saturated with references to sodomy and other alleged unspeakable practices of the Roman Church which Bale himself had deserted only a few years earlier, as he converted to the Reformed Church, and to marriage (to the faithful Dorothy), after being brought up from the age of twelve in the Carmelite order." Perhaps, Stewart's essay invites us to ask, it was not Skelton who "saw many great evil deeds being carried out among the clergy" but Bale, and seeing those deeds forced Bale to quickly leave the Church and marry his "faithful Dorothy." Such speculations may be fruitless but not altogether frivolous."

In the second act of Three Laws, Sodomy saunters onstage to explain himself. In almost Skeltonic fashion, he provocatively tells his companions Infidelity and Idolatry:

In the flesh I am a Ore,

And such a vile desire,

As bring men to the mire

Of foul concupiscence.

(TL, 21)

He goes on to explain, however, that it is not just any man that he brings to "foul concupiscence" but, as his apparel is meant to show, those "monk[s] of all sects." Indeed, when God first sends The Law of Nature to teach man the correct way to behave, Sodomy laughs at such a suggestion since

In the first age I began,

And so preserved with man,

And still will, if I can,

So long as he endure.

If monkish sects renew,

And popish priests continue,

Which are of my retinue,

To live I shall be sure.

(TL, 23)

Not only will The Law of Nature be unable to conquer Sodomy because Sodomy has been with man from the beginning of time and thus will live "So long as he endure," but Sodomy finds a safe harbor, a kind of perpetual sanctuary, within the Church with those "monkish sects" and "popish priests." Sodomy explains that this is so because "Clean marriage they forbid" (TL, 23) and since man cannot escape sexual desire, it necessarily follows that

In Rome to me they fall,

Both bishop and cardinal,

Monk, friar, priest, and all:

More rank they are than ants.

(TL, 23)

Bales equating "Monk, friar, priest, and all" with sodomy stems from a long history of popular belief that stretches back into the Middle Ages. But Bale's equation is ridiculously reductive: because Catholic clerics eschew "Clean marriage," they necessarily must fall into the "mire" of sodomy.13 This understanding of the relationship among marriage, priests, and sodomites gets in the way, then, when Bale constructs the biography of Skelton. If he wants to rescue Skelton from his role as priest in order to privilege his poetry as Protestant propaganda, then Bale must outfit Skelton with a wife in order to save him from the figure of Sodomy, by which unmarried priests cannot help but be seduced. For Bale, the historical fact of Skelton's secret marriage rescues him for the Protestant cause, even if the historical Skelton as unrepentant priest resists that appropriation. Bale's efforts to take Skelton out from under the unnatural tenets of the Catholic Church cannot, however, completely save Skelton. As the history of Skelton s biography shows, after Bale constructs a wife for him others add to the image of the married priest, until the figure of Skelton is neatly woven back into an early modem tapestry of perverse clerical sexuality via the ever popular jestbook.

Bale's biography of Skelton is the obvious source for the jestbooks that present Skelton as a lecherous buffoon. The first jestbook that mentions Skelton was published in 1526, three years before Skelton s death. On 22 November of that year, John Rastell, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, distributed a jestbook titled A C. Mery Talys. Of the hundred tales compiled there only number forty-one is about Skelton: "Of Master Skelton that brought the Bishop of Norwich two pheasants."13 Despite the innocuous sounding title, the jest tells of how Skelton insulted the bishop, who had forbidden Skelton from visiting him because it "fortuned [that] there was a great variance between the Bishop of Norwich and one Master Skelton a poet laureat" (H, 102). The jest is concerned not with the cause of this "great variance" between the two but only with the fact that there was one. After a long period of time, Skelton decides to try to mend the rift and so travels to the Bishop's residence with an offering of two pheasants. He is, however, turned away but, after falling into a moat, sneaks into the residence and presents his gift. The bishop scolds him and Skelton wittily replies:

"I wis, my lord," quod Skelton, "tills pheasant is called 'alpha' (viz. primus, the first), and this is called Omega' (viz. novissimus, that last). And (or the more plain understanding of my mind: If it please your lordship to take them I promise you this 'alpha' is the first that ever I gave you, and this 'omega' is the last that ever I will give you while I live." (H, 103)

Those in attendance laugh at Skeltons witty joke, and the Bishop himself cannot help but forgive Skelton his early transgression, whatever that may have been, and willingly takes him back into his good graces. The moral of the story, as the last line tells us, is that "ye may see that merry conceits doth a man more good than to fret himself with anger and melancholy" (H, 103).

In 1567, nearly four decades after Skeltons death and a decade after Bale s biography, Thomas Colwell published a jestbook that he attributed to Skelton: Merie Tales Newly Imprinted and Made by Master Skelton Poet Laureat. This short book contains only fifteen tales, but all of them have Skelton as their central figure. The Merie Tales is an odd mixture of stories that present Skelton as a practical and often violent man, who is also a buffoon. One of the jests that Colwell weaves into his book is Rastell's forty-first tale with, however, some very telling additions.

Colwell's sixth tale, "How Skelton was Complained on to the Bishop of Norwich," uses the alpha and omega joke of the original, but in the end there is neither a reconciliation between the bishop and Skelton, nor a moral to instruct us how to resolve disputes with honey rather than vinegar (H, 331). On the contrary, Skelton tells the joke and then simply exits. As opposed to the earlier tale, Colwell s is meant not to impart a moral but to give a biographical sketch of poet laureate Skelton. Because of this change of focus, rather than begin the tale with the vague explanation that there was a "great variance" between the two men, Colwell's tale tells us that "Skelton did keep a musket [mistress] at Dis, upon the which he was complained on to the Bishop of Norwich" (H, 331). For this violation of his vow of celibacy, the bishop summons Skelton to him; Skelton is not the agent of reconciliation, as in the Rastell version. After the bishop calls him a "whore head" and orders Skelton to "amend, and hereafter live honestly," Skelton delivers his alpha-omega line and briskly leaves (H, 332). The difference between the Rastell tale and the Colwell retelling is clearly influenced by Bales biography; however, whereas Bale uses Skelton s wife to try to rescue Skelton from the figure of Sodomy, thus rendering him valuable to the Protestant cause, this rescue is of no concern for the later tales. On the contrary, the Skelton who emerges in the Merie Tales does not seem to have any importance to the Protestant cause, which arguably was on surer footing under Elizabeth, when Colwell published his book, than under Mary, when Bale wrote his. The Merie Tales is interested only in presenting the subject of Skelton in the most ridiculous and stereotypical light by using the available biographical information on Skelton, via Bale, and supplementing that with folklore and gossip.

Around the same time that Colwell published the Merie Tales he bought the license to publish another jestbook on the mythical figure of John Scoggin, who became the epitome of the clown figure in the late sixteenth century. As Maurice Pollet points out, the alpha-omega story in the Skelton jestbook tales can also be found in Scoggin's story, where, Pollet believes, it is much more appropriate for "the mischievous and sycophantic character of Scoggin" than for the historical figure of Skelton.14 Nevertheless, with Colwell's publication of both jestbooks, the clownish figure of Scoggin is overlaid with the historical subject of Skelton until the two figures become indistinguishable. As opposed to Bales attempt to reconcile the skilled writer and the errant priest, the figure of Skelton that survives from the late sixteenth century forward is one that is ridiculed for being a bad poet because he was a buffoon, and for being a buffoon because he was a bad poet.

In Rastell's 1526 edition of the tales, there is another jest that speaks of a friar who sought shelter with a poor man and his wife: "Of the husbandman that lodged the friar in his own bed." The jest tells of a friar who comes to a poor man s house in the country late one evening. The poor man was "glad to harbor the friar" and "lodged him in his own bed." After he had fallen asleep, the poor man and his wife retired to the same bed and likewise fell asleep. In the morning, the poor man got up and "went to the market, leaving the friar in the bed with his wife." As he was walking along, he began laughing to himself, thinking of how funny it would be when the friar woke up to find himself alone in bed with his wife, as if the mere fact would impinge on his vow of chastity. However, when he began laughing to himself, his neighbors grew curious and "demanded of him why he so smiled." The poor man replied, "I laugh to think how shamefast the friar shall be when he waketh, whom I left in bed with my wife" (H, 128). In the moral of the tale, the poor man was characterized as a fool, because he obviously didn't realize what a grave mistake he had made: obviously the friar would take advantage of his wife, as clergy were understood to do. Indeed, in "Collyn Clout," Skelton had written that

Of parsons and vycaryes

They [lay persons] make many outcryes:

"They can nat kepe theyr wyves

From them for theyr lyves!"

(C, 570-73)

Obviously Rastell's poor man never learned the lesson of parsons, vicars, and wayward wives. As with the forty-first tale, when this tale is printed in Colwell's 1567 version, significant changes are made that give us not only Skelton the married priest but also Skelton the scurrilous and lascivious pervert.

In the Merie Tales the friar story is renamed "How Skelton Handled the Friar that Would Needs Lie with Him in his Inn," and tells the story of a friar who was riding one night through the country and came to an alehouse where Skelton had likewise stopped. There was, however, no room in the inn: Skelton had already booked the only bed available for travelers. The friar turned to Skelton and asked, "I pray you that I may lie with you," for he had "lain with as good men as you." For two men to sleep in the same bed, of course, was not unusual in this time period. But Skelton refused the friar, telling him: "I do use to have no man to lie with me." The friar was persistent and finally Skelton relented, telling the friar to "get you to bed and I will come to bed within a while." The friar went to Skelton's bed, lay down, and fell asleep. Soon Skelton, too, retired to the bedchamber, where he noted that the friar "did lie upright and snorted like a sow" (H, 335). The tale continues:

Skelton went to the chamber, and did see that the friar did lie so, said to the wife [of the alehouse]: "Give me a washing hetle [stick]." Skelton then cast down the clothes and the friar did lie stark naked. Then Skelton did shite upon the friar's navel and belly, and then he did take the washing betle and did strike an hard stroke upon the navel and belly of the friar, and did put out the candle and went out of the chamber.

The friar felt his belly and smelt a foul savor had thought he had been gored, and cried out and said: "Help! help! help! I am killedl . . . The friar said: "I am killed. One hath thrust me in the belly." (H, 335)

Having reentered the bedchamber, Skelton so shamed the friar by insisting that he had "beshitten [him]self" that the friar willingly quit Skelton's bed and settled in the barn (H, 336).

What is suspicious about the beginning of this tale is Skelton's anxious response to the friar s request to "lie" with him when the friar seemed to indicate that such a practice was common-he had, after all, "lain with as good men as you." Either Skelton misinterprets the friar's proposition, which is made in front of the innkeeper and his wife with no hint of embarrassment nor any attempt at secrecy, or he is all too familiar with the proclivities of friars who "lie" down together (after all, Bale tells us that he had seen "many great evil deeds being carried out among the clergy"). Skeltons defensive response to the friar that he was "use to have no man to lie with me" seems an attempt to distance himself from the "evil deeds" that clergy had a reputation for performing, but he cannot completely cleanse himself of that taint. What happens after he relents, of course, is extremely interesting-if not a bit disturbing.

Unlike the forty-first tale, which outrightly proclaims that "Skelton did keep a musket," the tale explaining "How Skelton Handled the Friar that would Needs lie with Him in his Inn" does not say explicitly that he was a sodomite (nor is it the intention of this essay to prove that he was or was not), but the performance that Skelton is made to act out in this jest plays upon the image of sodomy that was so prevalent in sixteenth-century England and that Bale stages in Three Lotus. Indeed, in Bale, once the character of Sodomy gives an explanation of himself, he sets out to successfully seduce The Law of Nature. Having been ravaged by Sodomy, The Law of Nature stumbles onto the stage to the astonishment of the audience: "I think ye marvel to see such alteration," he explains, "At this time, in me whom God left here so pure!" (TL, 26). He apparently is covered in filth from Sodomy's ravishment, for "By him have I got this foul disease of body; / And, as ye see here, am now thrown in a lepry" (TL, 26-27). The Law of Nature goes on to try to explain what happened to him:

And so hath Sodomy, through his abuses carnal;

That he is now lost, offending without measure,

And I corrupted, to my most high displeasure.

I abhor to tell the abusions bestial

That they daily use which boast their chastity;

Some at the altar to incontinency fall;

In confession some full beastly occupied be.

(TL, 27)

While the sodomitic act cannot be named since he "abhor[s] to tell the abusions bestial," the description that the besmeared figure of The Law of Nature gives of those friars and monks who "boast [of] their chasity," while "In confession some full beastly occupied be," is clearly sodomitic. Existing outside the regulated confines of marriage, these unholy monks have no control of their bodies' desires as they "at the altar to incontinency fall." While this incontinency is meant to describe their lack of sexual control, it easily overlaps with a general inability to control the functions of one s body that echoes in the incontinency Skelton performs atop the naked body of the friar. Both Bales incontinency and Skelton's, in other words, befoul their companions with the stink of their "abuses carnal."

The term "sodomy" was often used in the Renaissance as a weapon against heretics, traitors, and a variety of other social transgressors, including Catholic priests.15 When Skelton labels Wolsey a sodomite in "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" he is not necessarily accusing Wolsey of a sexual crime; on the other hand, his use of the term does not, at the same time, deny the sexual connotation that has come to signify the act of sodomy (Wolsey was, after all, accused of being the "kynges derlying / And his swete hart rote").

In his very important work, Mark D. Jordan clearly documents the historical and etymological history of sodomy in Christian theology and the way in which the term was invented by church fathers in order to name, without actually specifying, the perverse sexual acts that they witnessed behind monastery walls. Tracing the term back to the eleventh-century Catholic theologian Peter Damian, Jordan notes that

[s]odomy is as much a theological category as trinity, incarnation, sacrament, or papal infallibility. As a category, it is richly invested with specific notions of sin and retribution, responsibility and guilt. The category was never meant to be neutrally descriptive, and it is doubtful whether any operation can purify it of its theological origins. There is no way to make "Sodomy" objective.'"

While contemporary scholars tell us that in the sixteenth century "sodomy is not the name of a sexual activity, nor even an illicit desire," Jordan teaches us that its invention was necessitated by very specific sexual acts at locatable historical moments.17 The unspecific nature of the term in Renaissance ideology stems from the paradox that the Church Fathers encountered: to name the sexual acts witnessed in the monasteries might also incite the monks to increase their sodomitic activity. The term "sodomy," therefore, was constructed through a process of "thinning and condensing" that fit it "into a category that looks concrete but that has in fact nothing more concrete about it than the grammatical form of a general noun."18

Jordan, like his predecessors, first demythologizes the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah to show that Gods fiery retribution on the sinful cities had nothing to do with same-sex copulation but everything to do with being proud, arrogant, and inhospitable: "[T]here is no text of the Christian Bible that determines the reading of Sodom as a story about same-sex copulation. On the contrary, there is explicit scriptural evidence that the sin of the Sodomites was some combination of arrogance and ingratitude." When Church Fathers produced an explication of the Sodom passage, the nonsexual sin of the Sodomites was coupled with the general sin of luxury that included "mental blindness, inconsiderateness, inconstancy, haste, self-love, hatred of God, passionate attachment to the present, and horror or despair over the future," as well as an array of "fleshly sins" that was equated with "staining, polluting, [and] stinking" of the body.19 It is within the scope of this definition that Skelton calls Wolsey a sodomite because of his "mental blindness," that is, because he had lost his "inward syghte[s]." It is also this history of sodomy that inextricably links priests and monks to this "luxurious" sin that Bale draws upon, as he dresses the figure of sodomy "like a monk of all sects" who proceeds to stain and pollute the pure Law of Nature. Likewise, it is this construction of the term "sodomy" that is equated with a moral and physical "inconstancy" that must influence our reading of Skelton as he is pictured in the jestbooks. That figure, squatting atop the friar, is sodomitical not only because it so seductively performs the sexual act of penetration that stains, pollutes, and certainly stinks up the body of the friar ("The friar felt his belly and smelt a foul savor"), but because it taps into that locatable history within Christian theology that first codified the tenu, and into its subsequent deployment as a political weapon against Catholic priests during the English Reformation.20 In the same way that Skelton was believed to have kept a mistress because priests were widely known to seduce their parishioners' wives ("They can nat kepe theyr wyves / From them for theyr lyves"), so too must we place Skelton within the sodomitic tropes that were almost universally deployed to ensnare banished Catholic priests. Thus inevitably, the subject of Skelton is tainted by an overdetermined sexuality that slowly develops throughout the history of English literature.

II.

George Puttenham is in large part responsible for solidifying the view that Skelton was a bad poet and a lecherous historical figure. In his ever important and extremely influential treatise, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he set out to record the history and the practice oi writing poetry in the English vernacular. Futtenham uses Skelton as an example in the ninth chapter oi the second book, "Of Proportion Poetical." In this chapter, "Of Concorde in Long and Short Measures, and by Neare or Farre Distaunces, and Which of Them is Most Commendable," he advocates a kind of golden mean for verse length and meter. he explains that "bycause your concordes [rhymes] centaine the chief part of Musicke in your meetre, their distaunces may not be too wide or farre a sunder, lest th'eare should loose the tune, and be defrauded of his delight." On the other hand, he continues, poetic rhyme must also not be crammed too close together: "[R]ime or concorde is not commendably used both in the end and middle of a verse, unlesse it be in toyes and trifling Poesies, for it sheweth a certaine lightnesse either of the matter or of the makers head." The type of short, staccato rhyme pattern that bears witness to the "lightnesse" of poetry and poet is obviously definitive of Skeltonics, because Puttenham uses Skelton as an example of this poetic defect. he writes derisively that "[s]uch were the rimes of Skelton (usurping the name of a Poet Laureat) being in deede but a rude rayling rimer and all his doings ridiculous, he used both short distaunces and short measures pleasing onely the popular eare: in our courtly maker we banish them utterly." Puttenham, however, banishes Skelton not only for being a "rayling rimer" (that is, for using a short measure in his poetry), but for being "rude" in the act of rhyming and "ridiculous" in "his doings." While the rudeness that Puttenham notes in Skelton might be in response to the uncomfortable avian flirtations in "Phyllp Sparrow" or the base and bawdy behavior of the heroine in "The Tunnying of Eleanor Humming," Puttenham founds his criticism not only on Skelton's poetry but also on the jestbooks that were so popular in the late sixteenth century. We see this when Puttenham criticizes verse that is fit only to be sung in "tauemes and alehouses and such other places of base resort." As an example oi these types of verse, Puttenham lists "the tale of Sir Topas, the reportes of Bevis of Southhampton, Guy of Warwicke, Adam Bell, and Clymne of the Clough and such other old Romances or historicall rimes." Most of these works were popular jestbooks similar to the Merie Tales and it is with their portraits of Skelton that Skelton himself is compared. Puttenham combines, it seems, the "rayling rimer" of Skeltonics with the "rude" and "ridiculous" figure of the lecherous priest that we see in the jestbooks.21 From Puttenham through the seventeenth century, Skelton becomes a perverse joke, and his poetry is constantly derided.22

When the subject of Skelton arrives in the eighteenth century, Thomas Warton admits that it is "in vain to apologise for the coarseness, obscenity and scurrility of Skelton . . . [who] would have been a writer without decorum at any period." Wartons immense History of English Poetry (1778) spans "from the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century," and in the thirty-third section, Warton takes up the subject of Skelton. His history of Skelton is obviously a compilation of the biographical sketches found in Bale and the invectives of Puttenham. As with Bale, Warton tells us that Skelton was a poet laureate under Henry VIII, took Holy Orders, assumed the rectorship of Diss, and eventually sought refuge at Westminster, where he died and was buried. In his criticism of Skelton, Warton uses Puttenham's "rude rayling rimer" quote but goes further than Puttenham and condemns "Skelton s characteristic vein of humour [as] capricious and grotesque" and his "manner [as] gross and illiberal." While a majority of the section on Skelton consists of an analysis of his "vulgar" poetry, the biographical information offers a very telling, if not completely unexpected, alteration. Noting that Skelton took Holy Orders in 1498, Warton writes that

[b]ut for his buffooneries in the pulpit, and his satirical ballads against the Mendicants, he was severly censured, and perhaps suspended by Nykke his diocesan, a rigid bishop of Norwich, from exercising the duties of the sacerdotal function. Wood says, he was also punished by the bishop for "having been guilty of certain crimes, AS MOST POETS are."23

Nowhere in Wartons biography is it mentioned that Skelton had a mistress/wife (or, for that matter, that his "coarseness" and "obscenity" were related to any scatological games played with fellow clerics); rather, quoting the seventeenth-century antiquarian Anthony Wood, Skelton was only guilty "of certain crimes," of which "MOST POETS" are guilty. With a kind of eighteenth-century sensibility, Warton (via Wood) blurs the specific sexual crime of which Skelton may or may not of been guilty, leaving the reader with a tantalizing, if also cryptic, notion of exactly what crimes most poets engage in and for what specific scurrility Skelton was "severely censured." If Bale gives us Skelton the married priest, the jestbooks give us Skelton the sodomite, and Puttenham collapses the two to arrive at Skelton the perverted priest, then Warton eviscerates Skelton's reputation completely until he becomes a great amalgam of poetic vice that should be spurned "at any period." From Bale to Warton, the biography of Skelton evokes a history of sexuality that begins with a single declarative statement ("he kept that woman . . . under the title of concubine") to a long, evocative, and abstracted discourse that one "cannot quit" even though "too much has been already said."24 This history, then, when it surfaces in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, produces a subject that is comfortably assimilated into that easily digestible biography of Skelton that those estimable historians have written for us.25

III.

Anthony S. G. Edwards credits the Reverend Alexander Dyce with producing "authoritative surveys of Skelton's life, reputation and early influence" and applauds his research, which "is a tour de force of nineteenth-century scholarship, the foundation upon which all modern study of Skelton rests."26 Dyce's two-volume anthology of Skelton includes not only his poems but also a complete reproduction of the 1567 Merie Tales of Skelton, including the sixth tale, which gives us Skelton's wife, and the ninth of Skelton and the friar. He also extracts the forty-first tale of the 1526 A C. Mery Talys without, however, noting the textual variance between the two versions of the story. In addition, in a section that gives us "Notices of Skelton from various sources," Dyce pieces together a handful of historical documents in an effort to produce the subject of these long-neglected poems. As a matter of editorial choice, the historical documents that Dyce reproduces appear to substantiate the figure of Skelton that was first constructed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: that is, of Skelton the married priest, of Skelton the buffoon, and of Skelton as the inseparable companion of the quintessential Renaissance fool, Scoggin. From these highly selective source materials, Dyce then gives us "Some Account of Skelton and His Writings" that becomes, in "all modern study of Skelton," the "foundation" of Skelton's current biography.27 Dyce writes:

We are told that for keeping, under the title of a concubine, a woman whom he secretly married, Skelton was called to account, and suspended from his ministerial functions by his diocesan, the bloody-minded and impure Richard Nykke (or Nix), at the instigation of the friars, chiefly the Dominicans, whom the poet had severely handled in his writings. It is said, too, that by this woman he had several children, and that on his death-bed he declared that he conscientiously regarded her as his wife, but that such had been his cowardliness, that he chose rather to confess adultery (concubinage) than what was then reckoned more criminal in an ecclesiastic,-marriage.28

This account of Skelton, as the married priest who kept "under the title of a concubine, a woman," obviously comes from Bale. Indeed, Dyce footnotes the source of those from whom "[w]e are told" these accounts and cites not only Bale but also the 1567 Merie Tales of Skelton as his source material.29 While Dyce prefaces these facts with the disclaimers "[w]e are told" and "[i]t is said," there is little doubt that Dyce takes them to be historical facts. Shortly after this entry, Dyce admits that "[i]t is at least certain that the anecdotes of the irregularity of his life, of his buffoonery as a preacher, &c. &c. were current long after his decease, and gave rise to that tissue of extravagant figments which was put together for the amusement of the vulgar, and entitled the Merie Tales of Skelton."30 For Dyce, the "irregularity of [Skeltons] life" produced "that tissue of extravagant figments" found in the jestbooks, rather than the "figments" constructing the biographical life of Skelton. Because Dyce can read this historical causality in only one predetermined direction, he concludes that, although perhaps suspect, the "anecdotes" of Skeltons life nonetheless contain within them historical facts that allow Dyce to reproduce Skelton as a sexual subject with a wife and "several children." If, however, Dyce reads the jestbooks as historical artifacts that contain discernible traces of Skeltons sexuality, then he must also take into consideration that sodomitic ninth tale, which surely problematizes Skelton as the married priest. Needless to say, Dyce's biography never mentions Skelton s escapades with the friar. On the contrary, it pulls together enough self-selected source material about Skelton's mistress that any other reading seems impossible. From this first fully modem biography that Dyce constructs out of privileged early modem source documents, then, Skelton emerges in contemporary English literary history as Henry VIII's poet laureate and as a radical Catholic priest who not only kept a mistress but also sired a brood of children.

When William Nelson takes up the subject of Skelton nearly a century later, he uses the source material that Dyce footnotes to conclude that "Mistress Skelton seems substantial." Nelson does recognize, though, the problem with this information, but believes that "[d]espite the late date of publication and the apparently popular character of the pamphlet, however, it is not altogether worthless as a source of biographical information." He further contends that "the Merry Tales, though published almost forty years after Skelton s death, is part of a tradition which had grown up either during the poet s lifetime or within a few years after he died."31 For Nelson, the late postmortem publishing date of the jestbook is mitigated by his belief that the tales represent a "tradition" that began "during the poet's lifetime." This tradition, however, includes Bale's role in the Protestant propaganda campaign that sought to capitalize on the figure of a married priest and relied upon the term "sodomy" as a fully loaded political weapon. Given the move in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to privilege sexuality as a distinct marker of subjectivity, it should not surprise us that Dyce and Nelson construct Skelton as a married priest while covering over the possibility of Skelton as a sodomite. Indeed, this very modern move to construct Skelton's subjectivity via his sexuality becomes absolutely clear when H. L. R. Edwards writes his 1949 biography and unveils Skelton as a hyperheterosexual literary playboy of the Renaissance.

In keeping with his predecessors, H. L. R. Edwards also concludes that "[t]here is no reason to doubt that Skelton kept a woman at Diss, when so many of his colleagues did the same." As evidence, Edwards reminds us that "[p]riestly celibacy had never been a great success in England" and, citing some undocumented authority, that "many of the clergy were married." Perhaps because he lacked any stronger evidence of Skelton's marriage, Edwards even quotes from the jestbooks to show that it was necessary for priests to keep women in the rectory in order that someone might "perform all the endless daily duties of a busy rectory," and thus likely that Skelton, too, kept a woman as a maid-if not a mistress. Edwards does, however, note that the first time we hear about Skelton's "musket" is in Braynewode's biography, and that from Braynewode's biography the story of Skelton's mistress was "developed in the Merry Tales." While he faults Braynewode for thinking that Skelton was a "literary John the Baptist of the new faith," Edwards nevertheless proclaims that "[o]ne need not question the facts." As a Skelton apologist, intent on resurrecting "an unduly neglected figure to the general reader as well as to the scholar," Edwards repeatedly proclaims Skelton to have kept a mistress since, "like a great many clergymen in his day from Cardinal Wolsey down," the circumstantial evidence demands such a conclusion. He is so determined to establish this point of Skeltons biography that Edwards finally concludes that "Skelton unquestionably had a way with women. Perhaps it was his cloth that gave them confidence; perhaps it was what they spied, or thought they spied, beneath it." In constructing his well-endowed subject, Edwards cannot help but create a kind of modem sexual subject who is "unquestionably" heterosexual, but in constructing him this way, Edwards must also make some very telling choices and avoid some very problematic possibilities.32

When H. L. R. Edwards offers as circumstantial evidence that priests had a reputation for having wives or keeping mistresses, he does not note that they also had the reputation for being sodomites-as Church history, popular early modem beliefs, and Bales play, as Protestant propaganda, overwhelmingly document. When Edwards tells us that Skelton fits within a long line of priests who kept mistresses, "from Cardinal Wolsey down," he so clearly shows his hand by completely ignoring the Wolsey as sodomite and "the kynges derlying" that Skelton himself gives us. Likewise, it is telling that when Edwards cites Braynewode he fails to tell us that we come to Braynewode only through the sodomy obsessed Bale, whom Edwards dismisses as "bilious." Over and over again, H. L. R. Edwards reassures us that Skelton did have a mistress and, perhaps fantastically, imagines "a brood of young Skeltons" that populated the early sixteenth-century landscape, while he covers over the possibility that the ninth tale presents in the Merie Tales. In constructing Skelton as the hypersexual priest who "unquestionably had a way with women," and thus filling in the picture left vague by those earlier documents, Edwards must steer clear of any of those markers which might problematize this view. Thus the source documents he privileges must necessarily lead us to that historical subject who was, after all, "[b]eing human, and very much of his age" when he secretly married that woman whom he kept as a concubine.33

H. L. R. Edwards's biography is a hysterical culmination of a sexual discourse founded in Skelton s elusive biography that bears the marks of a history, not of Skelton as a historical subject but of a privileged sexual discourse that, over the centuries, constructed what we have come to know as "John Skelton." The construction of Skeltons biography, therefore, tells us much more about the developing ideology of sexuality from the Reformation to modern historical and biographical study than it does about an early sixteenth-century poetic subject. Skelton is perhaps unique in this regard because of his death on the eve of the English Reformation, which allows the construction of his biography to be so clearly attributed to early modern religious and political shifts. Whether he kept a concubine or not, or whether he played that crude joke atop the friar as a performance of sodomitic practices, the process by which Skelton's sexuality was written must give us pause when reading that easily digestible biography that has so carefully been constructed for us, and that has so rarely been questioned.

William Paterson University