Born about 1460: died probably in 1529. An English scholar and poet. He was a protégé of Henry VII., a noted scholar, and the tutor of Henry VIII. He took holy orders in 1498, and for 25 years was rector of Diss in Norfolk: he was suspended from this office for marrying, but was not deprived. He wrote “The Bowge of Court,” “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparrow,” “Magnificence,” “The Tunning of Elinor Rummyng,” “The Garland of Laurel,” “Colin Clout,” a satire on the clergy, and “Why come ye not to Court?” a satire on Wolsey, etc. His rough wit and eccentric character made him the hero of a book of “merye” tales.

  I praye Mayster John Skelton, late created Poete laureate in the Unyversite of oxenforde, to oversee and correcte thys sayd booke. And taddresse and expowne where as shalle be founde faulte to theym that shall require it. For hym I knowe for suffycyent to expowne and englysshe every dyffyculte that is therein. For he hath late translated the epystles of Tullye and the book of dyodorus syculus, and diverse other workes out of latyn in englysshe, not in rude and olde langage, but in polysshed and ornate termes craftely, as he that hath redde vyrgyle, ouyde, tullye, and all the other noble poets and oratours, to me unknowen: And also he hath redde the ix muses and understande theyr musicalle scyences, and to whom of theym eche scyence is appropred. I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon’s well.

  Skelton satte in the corner of a piller, with a frostie bitten face, frowning, and is scante yet cleane cooled of the hotte burnyng cholour kindeled against the cankered Cardinall Wolsey, writing many a sharpe disticon with bloudie penne againste hym; and sente them by the infernall rivers Styx, Flegiton and Acheron, by the Feriman of helle, called Charon, to the said Cardinall.

  By what means could Skelton, that laureat poet, have uttered his mind so well at large, as thorowe his cloke of mery conceytes, as in his “Speake Parrot, Ware the Hawke, The Tunning of Elinor Rumming, Why come ye not to the Court, &c.” Yet what greater sense or better matter can be, than is in this ragged rhyme contayned? Or who would have hearde his fault so playnely told him, if not in such gibyng sorte?

  I wyth good ryght yeelde him the title of a Poet: hee was doubtles a pleasant conceyted fellowe, and of a very sharpe wytte, exceeding bolde, and would nyppe to the very quicke where he once sette holde.

  Being in deede but a rude rayling rimer and all his doings ridiculous: he vsed both short distaunces and short measures, pleasing onely the popular eare.

  Skelton, the Malancholy foole.

  Angry Skelton’s breathlesse rhymes.

  John Skelton, a jolly English rimer, and I warrant ye accounted a notable poet, as poetry went in those days, namely King Edward the fourth’s reign, when doubtless good poets were scarce, for however he had the good fortune to be chosen poet laureat, methinks he hath a miserable loose rambling style.

  Skelton’s poems are all low, and bad: there’s nothing in them that’s worth reading.

  It is in vain to apologise for the coarseness, obscenity, and scurrility of Skelton, by saying that his poetry is tinctured with the manners of his age. Skelton would have been a writer without decorum at any period…. Skelton’s characteristic vein of humour is capricious and grotesque. If his whimsical extravagancies ever move our laughter, at the same time they shock our sensibility. His festive levities are not only vulgar and indelicate, but frequently want truth and propriety. His subjects are often as ridiculous as his metre: but he sometimes debases his matter by his versification. On the whole, his genius seems better suited to low burlesque than to liberal and manly satire. It is supposed by Caxton, that he improved our language; but he sometimes affects obscurity, and sometimes adopts the most familiar phraseology of the common people.

  Jonson was evidently fond of Skelton, and frequently imitates his short titupping style, which is not his best. I know Skelton only by the modern edition of his works, dated 1736. But from this stupid publication I can easily discover that he was no ordinary man. Why Warton and the writers of his school rail at him so vehemently, I know not; he was perhaps the best scholar of his day, and displays, on many occasions, strong powers of description, and a vein of poetry that shines through all the rubbish which ignorance has spread over it. He flew at high game, and therefore occasionally called in the aid of vulgar ribaldry to mask the direct attack of his satire. This was seen centuries ago, and yet we are not instituting a process against him for rudeness and indelicacy!

  Erasmus must have been a bad judge of English poetry, or must have alluded only to the learning of Skelton, when in one of his letters he pronounces him “Britannicarum literarum lumen et decus.” There is certainly a vehemence and vivacity in Skelton, which was worthy of being guided by a better taste; and the objects of his satire bespeak some degree of public spirit. But his eccentricity in attempts at humour is at once vulgar and flippant; and his style is almost a texture of slang phrases, patched with shreds of French and Latin.

  Coarse and capricious as is Skelton, there is yet an abundance of genuine English humour in his metrical (rather than poetical) effusions. He is the “dear darling” of the thorough-bred black letter Collector; who never rests satisfied without the earlier impressions of his versification by Pynson, Faques, or Kele: but the sober reader and general collector will have reason to be contented with the correct and elegant impression of his works put forth (by an unknown editor) in 1736.

  The power, the strangeness, the volubility of his language, the audacity of his satire, and the perfect originality of his manner, render Skelton one of the most extraordinary writers of any age or country.

  Skelton is certainly not a poet, unless some degree of comic humor, and a torrent-like volubility of words in doggerel rhyme, can make one; but this uncommon fertility, in a language so little copious as ours was at that time, bespeaks a mind of some original vigor. Few English writers come nearer, in this respect, to Rabelais, whom Skelton preceded. His attempts in serious poetry are utterly contemptible; but the satirical lines on Cardinal Wolsey were probably not ineffective.

  At a period when satire had not yet assumed any legitimate form, a singular genius appeared in Skelton. His satire is peculiar; but it is stamped by vigorous originality. The fertility of his conceptions in his satirical or his humorous vein is thrown out in a style created by himself. The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six and even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes the playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually ludicrous, often expressive, and sometimes felicitous, there is a stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the ear, and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations. But the magic of the poet is confined to his spell: at his first step out of it, he falls to the earth, never to recover himself. Skelton is a great creator only when he writes what baffles imitation; for it is his fate, when touching more solemn strains, to betray no quality of a poet,—inert in imagination, and naked in diction. Whenever his Muse plunges into the long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream…. He is a poet who has left his name to his own verse,—a verse airy, but pungent; so admirably adapted for the popular ear, that it has been frequently copied, and has led some eminent critics into singular misconceptions. The minstrel tune of the Skeltonical rhyme is easily caught; but the invention of style and “the pith” mock these imitators.

  Skelton is to be regarded as one of the fathers of the English drama. His “Enterlude of Vertue” and his “Comedy callyd Achademios” have perished; so perhaps has his “Nigramansir;” but his “Magnyfycence” is still extant. To those who carry their acquaintance with our early play-wrights no farther back than the period of Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, this “goodly interlude” by Skelton will doubtless appear heavy and inartificial; its superiority, however, to the similar efforts of his contemporaries, is, I apprehend, unquestionable.

  There is much of the old jollity and rude humor of England about Skelton—of that mixture of strength and fun which made our ancestors relish strong ale, and bull-baiting, and cudgel-play, and horse-laughter. There is the crackle of northern pine-logs in the fire he roasts people at—a kind of humour more old Roman than Attic, as native English humour certainly is. He faithfully represents the national tendency to despise a novus homo which is to be traced right through our satires, and was particularly indignant at the nobility for courting a butcher’s son.

  How dark must have been the night in which such a Will-o’-wisp was mistaken for a star! He has wit, indeed, and satirical observation; but his wit is wilder than it is strong, and his satire is dashed with personality and obscenity.

  It is little to the credit of modern taste and refinement, that so gross and repulsive an author as Skelton should be better known to students of old English literature, than the graceful and elegant Surrey and Wyatt. Puttenham well characterizes Skelton as a “rude rayling rimer,” and it is not too much to say of him, that while he has all the coarseness of Swift, he does not atone for it by a spark of the genius of Chaucer…. It is more to his classical scholarship than to his poetical works that he owed his original literary reputation, and though his translations of some ancient authors, which are still preserved in manuscript, would be a valuable contribution to English philology, the loss of his rhymes would be but a trifling injury to English literature. His learning certainly did little for the improvement of his English style, and we may say of his diction in general, that all that is not vulgar is pedantic.

  The last eminent person who received the shelter of the Sanctuary fled thither from the violence, not of Princes, but of Ecclesiastics. Skelton, the earliest known Poet Laureate, from under the wing of Abbot Islip, poured forth against Cardinal Wolsey those furious invectives, which must have doomed him to destruction but for the Sanctuary, impregnable even by all the power of the Cardinal at the height of his grandeur. No stronger proof can be found of the sacredness of the spot, or of the independence of the institution. He remained here till his death, and, like Le Sueur in the Chartreuse at Paris, rewarded his protectors by writing the doggerel epitaphs which were hung over the royal tombs, and which are preserved in most of the older antiquarian works on the Abbey.

  A virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish.

  This is a fresh, audacious, boisterous, wayward pupil of Chaucer’s, very different from the tame decorous Lydgate. He plays wanton freaks with the time-honoured copy-books of the school: writes a few lines in sober imitation, and then dashes off into all sorts of madly capricious irregularities. He is, indeed, so independent of models that he should have a chapter to himself, were it not that this would exaggerate him out of all proportion to his poetic importance. It wants some leniency in the definition of poetry to allow him the title of poet at all; he was not much more of a poet than Swift.

  One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth century,—John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality. Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds. But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary winter follows.

  Skelton, especially in his gay and frolicsome mood, is, no doubt, occasionally indelicate, but with none of that deep-seated licentiousness which taints some periods of our literature; and the laureate of those days may fairly be allowed some indulgence for the manners of his time, when, to judge from the letters of Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, there was no very fine sense of propriety even amongst the highest of the land. And as to the gross epithet which Pope has associated with his name, he deserves it far less than Pope’s own bosom friend. There is more “beastliness” in a page of Swift than in these two volumes of Skelton.

  Skelton’s claims to notice lie not so much in the intrinsic excellence of his work as in the complete originality of his style, in the variety of his powers, in the peculiar character of his satire, and in the ductility of his expression when ductility of expression was unique…. In “The Tunnyng of Elinore Rummynge” his powers of pure description and his skill in the lower walks of comedy are seen in their highest perfection. In this sordid and disgusting delineation of humble life he may fairly challenge the supremacy of Swift and Hogarth. But Skelton is, with all his faults, one of the most versatile and one of the most essentially original of all our poets. He touches Swift on one side, and he touches Sackville on the other.

  Insufferably coarse, and deserving of more attention as a humorist than as a poet. Skelton’s position and acquirements made him well known in his lifetime. From him the future king, Henry VIII., received his education, and that he was deeply learned is proved by the high praise bestowed on him by Erasmus. How far Skelton’s buffoonery influenced the youthful prince can only be guessed at. His faults were common to the age, but the ability he possessed was as uncommon then as it is now, and it is impossible to believe it was wholly used for good. His writings, popular in his own day, are dead to the modern reader, and no republication can revive their fame.

  Whatever may be thought of the merits of his verse it cannot be denied that it has a vigour and plainness which is peculiarly Saxon.

  In Skelton there is a morning gale; we feel the breath of a new day. But Skelton was reckless, and asserted his individuality too extravagantly. He is a little Rabelais, full of verve, learned, free-spoken; capable at times of a certain frank and delicate charm. The palace of Art was not to be taken by violence, and the disorderly rabble of Skeltonical rhymes, laughing as they advance, presently fall back defeated from its outer wall.

  He is capricious, homely, never weak, often coarse, always quaint.

  Skelton was certainly not worse than most of his colleagues, and probably better than many of them. He had, however, peculiar ideas about many things, a peculiar temperament, which was but little fitted for the life of an ecclesiastic, and he was not the man to put any control upon himself, or to keep his views always under cover. Skelton was not without religious feelings, or without faith as a Christian; but his faith was mixed with a goodly amount of scepticism, his interests were mainly directed to secular concerns, and if he possessed reverence for the saints, it often took a peculiar form of expression. Above all, Skelton was one of the humanists, full of enthusiasm for classical culture, full of reverence for the sovereign importance of learning, and fully conscious of being a richly endowed and eminently learned son of the Muses. Self-denial, a secluded life, and asceticism, were foreign to his nature; he was fond of giving free play to his thoughts in poetry, and somewhat in his actions as well. The discordance between his inner nature and his position in life, between his Humanity and his Christianity, must often have forced itself upon him; his humour must have helped him over his difficulty, but his humour is often but little pleasant and much too negative in colouring. His conception of the world and of life seems, at times, pretty much that of the prelate, according to whom everything is a mere farce. Skelton was, at all events, inclined to play his part in the “farce” with all possible vivacity. His views of life are both those of a satirist and of a jester, and for both points of view, he had at his command a sprightly wit, a host of learned reminiscences, and a rich abundance of ideas and forms of expression which never failed him.

  Skelton’s verse is in general coarse and scurrilous, but vivacious and nimble.