‘An Ende of an Olde Song’: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic*

摘要

Although John Skelton has recently been the subject of renewed critical interest, this attention has not extended to the verse form to which he gave his name: the Skeltonic. This article revisits the vexed question of its origins, arguing that there are strong (and previously unremarked) resemblances between the Skeltonic and the Middle English lyric, specifically that form of the lyric which deploys long rhyme leashes within a containing stanza form. The article compares Skelton's own lyrics with his Skeltonics, and both with the lyrics of BL MS Additional 5465, a manuscript with which Skelton is closely associated. Having demonstrated that all three share a number of formal features, it then traces a persistent lyric influence in a number of Skelton's later works, focusing in particular on what is apparently one of his most unruly poems, Why Come Ye Nat to Court? Finally, it argues that the form of a number of poems of the later sixteenth century (notably William Barnes’ ‘Treatyse answerynge the boke of Berdes’ and the anonymous The Passyon of the Fantasy of the Foxe) reveals that Skelton's immediate successors viewed lyric and Skeltonic as closely related. Thus, although the Skeltonic remains a highly idiosyncratic verse form, the article demonstrates that it is more closely linked to the development of mainstream English poetry than has generally been suggested.