John Skelton, Satirical, Idiom, saturnalian, license, orator regius, Horace, invective
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68
young authors at the Universities and Inns of Court indicate a personal voice”.
125
They are fledgling authors, cutting their teeth by turning skills of disputation learnt at the Inns and Universities to vituperative ends in order to make names for themselves, and their usurpation of rather menial official roles such as beadles, schoolmasters, surgeons, hangmen and so forth most probably registers in some form their reflection upon the struggle to find positions in the competitive climate of late-Elizabethan society.
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John Skelton’s Satirical Idiom
Skelton was subject to considerably different influences to the late-Elizabethan satirists which held saturnalian license in check, although its spirit strives regularly to push to the surface in his writing. In his role as orator regius he cannot present himself as being independent of temporal authority but, like Horace, he figures himself as an emphatically loyal servant of the crown.
126
By styling himself as Henry’s laureate or orator regius, however, Skelton does attempt to legitimise an independent satirical outlook and cultivates a literary space that enjoys some degree of independence from external authority. He seems to have a similar notion to that held by his late-Elizabethan counterparts of what it meant to be a saturnalian satirist and one outcome of this is what William Nelson terms “his inability to modulate his voice to the gentle tones required of a court poet”.
127
Like Horace, he exhibits the utmost confidence in his aptitude for retaliatory invective and his cultivation of an aggressive satirical persona in his work is generally sufficient to explain the hostile attention that he attracted. He is, as Carlson comments, “a man who
125 R. B. Gill, ‘A Purchase of Glory: The Persona of Late Elizabethan Satire’, SP, 72 (1975), 408-18 (p.409).
126 See Watson ed. (1968), pp.134-5.
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