Introduction

Summary

The woodcut on the cover of this book stands as frontispiece to the earliest surviving print of John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte (c. 1499). This may not be its first association with courtly duplicity, since it was likely attached around 1495 to a Wynkyn de Worde edition of Caxton's Historye of Reynart the Foxe. Bruyn the bear is delivering to the elusive Reynart a summons to the court of Noble the lion. The bear's jaws are clenched in a grin that we are not quite sure how to read. Slavering sycophancy? The Schadenfreude of the messenger bearing bad news, or his repressed anger at a thankless and doomed task? Predatory instinct, servile resentment or sadistic enjoyment? Meanwhile, Reynart sits above and aloof, amid the “hooles” and “secrete chaumbres” of his lair of Maleperduys. Perhaps he is relishing his iconographic resemblance to the monarch in a scene of poet-to-patron dedication, but his closed bodily surface (no bared teeth) still harbors a certain inscrutability. At the center is the sealed royal summons tendered by Bruyn, an executive document whose effects are deflected, not least across the textual tradition itself. Renart pleads delay with the fiction that he hungers for (in the original) or has surfeited on (Caxton and his Dutch source) honey. Bruyn, of course, cannot resist the bait, with disastrous consequences.