rhetorical strategy, sixteenth century, Skelton, Alexander Barclay, Sebastian Brant, Narrenschiff, 1509, Phyllp Sparowe
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70
The rhetorical strategy of promising to amend or retract a contentious or controversial literary statement upon the receipt of a critical response appears to be a stock strategy for initiating literary discourse in the sixteenth century.
129
Skelton is being disingenuous however. Perhaps the only aspect of the poem open to serious moral criticism is its parody of the liturgy.
130
Since Jane’s lamentation over the death of her beloved pet sparrow at the hands of Gib the cat is the poem’s central theme, Skelton is offering his readership the opportunity to amend something that cannot really be “amendyd”. If his poem is attacked upon this front he will not be able to back down, and can only continue the discourse by way of a counter-offensive.
The poem attracted the attention of Skelton’s rival poet, Alexander Barclay, who did indeed construe it as irreverent. Barclay appended to his translation of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (1509) a sideswipe against Skelton in which he dissociates himself from the supposed impiousness of the laureate’s mock lamentation.
131
In his addition Barclay adds to Brant’s catalogue of folly that of heresy. His jibe at Skelton then, is more than mere ribaldry. He goes on to echo Skelton’s disclaimer in Phyllp Sparowe: “But if the reder wyse […] and discrete be/ He shall it mende laynge no faut to me”. Since Barclay’s theme is a moral one this serves to highlight the good intentions of his project when he turns to
129 See, for instance, Cat. Anon 52 and my discussion of John Donne’s ‘To Mr T. W.’ (“All haile sweet Poët, more full of more strong fire”), p.220.
130 In his examination of pre-Reformation mock epitaphs by John Skelton and Andrew Kennedy, Gregory Kratzmann concludes that, “In none of these poems which exploit the comic potential of a discrepancy between form and subject matter is there ever any attempt to question the authority of the devotional forms themselves”, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations: 1430-1550 (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), p.151. Similarly, in Rosemond Tuve’s examination of the relationship between secular and divine verse forms she describes “a long history of formal imitation and exchange, unselfconscious and ordinary, provocative neither of ambiguities nor ironies”, ‘Sacred “Parody” of Love Poetry, and Herbert’, in Essays by Rosemond Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970), pp.207-49 (p.230). While this may be the case, such parodies were nevertheless susceptible to accusations of irreverence, as this incident demonstrates.
131 Carlson (1995) first identified the relationship between these narrative poems and the reader is directed to his discussion of the rivalry between these two poets for further detail (see n.128).
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