2 - The Bowge of Courte and the birth of the paranoid subject

Summary

We have seen that André's Vita Henrici Septimi is a remarkably miscellaneous compilation. Biography, autobiography, chronicle, ode, elegy, panegyric, set speech based on classical precedent, are all narratively juxtaposed. In a comparable fashion, the early career of John Skelton – royal tutor to Prince Henry, as until 1500 was André to Arthur, Prince of Wales – also knots together various strands, which recent scholarship has done much to unpick. Skelton's position at this juncture is made up of several contradictory elements, which can only be sketched here, but which ask precisely the question of what a “court” poetry might be. His entry into royal service was marked by a highly personal system of chronology, connecting him to the ruler but also asserting an idiosyncratic difference. The attention given to his self-definition as “Skelton laureate” has proved laureation itself to be a remarkably fissile trope. As translator in 1488 of Diodorus Siculus's universal history, the Bibliotheca historica, from Poggio Bracciolini's fifteenth-century Latin version, he confirmed a Latinate auctoritas, already recognized by Oxford's laureation, which would be repeated at Louvain and Cambridge. He is also “Skelton laureatus” at the head of his first English poem, Upon the Dolorous Dethe of the Erle of Northumberlande.