{"id":116816,"date":"2017-10-19T11:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116816"},"modified":"2017-10-20T17:24:54","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T21:24:54","slug":"renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

C. Hansen, La F\u00eate D’Aegir, <\/em> 1861<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat could be dafter \/ Than John Skelton\u2019s laughter?\u201d
\n\u2014Robert Graves<\/p>\n

Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially in trouble, and womanizing priest named John Skelton took to the lectern at his church. He faced his angry congregation and tried to explain the bastard child born to his mistress. Despite his Cambridge education, his humanist credentials, the fact that he\u2019d once been tutor to Prince Henry, and the immaculate poetry he\u2019d penned, the good Christians of Diss, Norfolk, had complained to their bishop about the priest\u2019s behavior. Skelton may have claimed that (when it came to poetry at least) he\u2019d imparted \u201cdrink of the sugared well \/ Of Helicon\u2019s waters crystalline,\u201d but his congregation was less than impressed. The priest penned inspired lyrics like \u201cSpeke, Parrot,\u201d \u201cPhillip Sparrow,\u201d and the immaculate doggerel \u201cThe Tunning of Elynour Rummyng,\u201d of which the five-hundredth\u00a0anniversary is this year. Across these works, he developed an innovative rhythm known appropriately enough as \u201cSkeltonics.\u201d But that sort of thing was of no sway with the bishop. Laity and clergy alike didn\u2019t care for the literary pretensions of this self-styled \u201cBritish Catullus.\u201d Perhaps it was clear that ordination was not Skelton\u2019s calling, for what could the parishioners expect from sacraments administered by a man who once wrote that \u201cTo live under law it is captivity: \/ Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride.\u201d<\/p>\n

A failure of imagination on the villager\u2019s part, for Skelton was no mere parish priest who scribbled \u201ctrifles of honest mirth.\u201d He was, in the words of the critic Michael Schmidt, a bard in Calliope green who \u201cstands like Janus at the threshold of the English Renaissance.\u201d A poet of a gloaming period gesturing back to the verse of Chaucer and forward to that of Shakespeare. Skelton, nostalgically pining for Merry Old England while anticipating a coming golden age. Skelton, singing in the bawdy prosody of the alehouse and the vulgar profanity of the bedchamber. Sublime Skelton, who has long troubled literary historians, even though Schmidt argues that he was \u201cthe first modern English\u201d poet who could be read \u201cwithout recourse to a glossary.\u201d A man included as poet laureate\u00a0alongside Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Hughes, but who was also a consummate master of \u201cflyting\u201d\u2014a type of improvised verse competition reminiscent of a rap battle\u2014can be difficult to categorize. The Scottish poet Alexander Barclay described Skelton as a \u201crascolde poet\u201d two centuries later and John Milton accused him of being \u201cone of the worst of men,\u201d while Alexander Pope simply called him \u201cbeastly Skelton.\u201d He was a satirist of anticlericalism at the verge of the Reformation, but he was also an embodiment of its abuses. Skelton reveled in the sublime poetry of hypocrisy, but whatever his moral lapses may have been, he was either the last medieval poet or the first poet of the Renaissance, whose bawdy, alliterative, hurdy-gurdy verse, in the words of the scholar Gerald Hammond, \u201crivals anything the Elizabethan lyricists\u201d achieved.<\/p>\n

As Skelton was now known to keep a \u201cfair wench in his house,\u201d the bishop informed him that the woman must be \u201cexpelled through the door.\u201d Interpreting the order with an opportunistic literalness, he did as instructed, only to let his mistress back in through the window. The bishop had long grown weary of these antics. He wrote that the priest was \u201cguilty of certain crimes <\/em>AS MOST POETS ARE.\u201d There are no contemporary depictions of Skelton, no accurate engravings or Holbein paintings. But I like to envision the canny old poet as tall and thin and just handsome enough, a consummate performer, so confident that his palms weren\u2019t even damp when he appeared before his flock with both mistress and bastard. Holding his illegitimate infant aloft, Skelton asked if he was not perfectly formed, perfect evidence of God\u2019s glory? Then who were these vipers, these clucking townspeople, chastising God<\/em>? The congregation was cowed. Skelton kept his job, until he got a better one: Prince Arthur died and Skelton\u2019s former charge, Prince Henry VIII, assured of his kingship, invited the priest to court.<\/p>\n

Skelton was conversant with both Erasmus (who wrote approvingly of him) and Luther. Skelton was less than impressed with the latter: he foamed, in denunciatory anaphora and hypnotic end rhyme, \u201cAgainst these frentics, \/ Against these lunatics, \/ Against these schismatics, \/ Against these heretics.\u201d But even if Skelton himself was not willing to go Lutheran, his anticlerical doggerel proved useful to English reformers a generation later. In his rough, alliterative, and very Anglo-Saxon Skeltonics, Protestant propagandists saw a vehicle for delivering invective against the church. After all, Skelton knew clerical abuse well, and pointed his barbs at appropriate targets: he had once been imprisoned for slandering Cardinal Wolsey.<\/p>\n

In 1517, the same year Luther affixed his own anticlerical \u201cpoem\u201d to a church door in Germany, Skelton penned his underrated masterpiece \u201cThe Tunning of Elynour Rummyng,\u201d written in profane imitation of the Catholic liturgy. It is anthologized alongside lyrics like \u201cPhilip Sparrow,\u201d with its erotic evocations of loss, or \u201cSpeke, Parrot,\u201d which charmingly begins with, \u201cMy name is Parrot, a bird of paradise.\u201d By contrast, Schmidt writes that \u201cElynour Rummyng \u2026 is certainly not charming.\u201d It is Skelton at his bawdy, wanton, disgusting, chauvinistic best. (Or is it worst?) The poem is an account of the titular bar wench, supposedly based on an actual tavern owner, who \u201cdwelt in Surrey, \/ In a certain stead \/ Beside Leatherhead.\u201d Elynour\u2019s surname is a pun on alcohol itself (notice the first syllable), and \u201ctunning\u201d is an archaism for bottling. She is described as \u201cDroopy and drowsy, \/ Scurvy and lousy; \/ Her face all boozy, \/ Comely crinkled, \/ Wondrously wrinkled, \/ Like a roast pig\u2019s ear.\u201d Skelton describes how the ale woman sometimes \u201cblends \/ The dung of her hens \/ And the ale together \u2026 The ale shall be thicker.\u201d Despite his misogynistic description of drunk housewives, who \u201ccome unbraced, \/ With their naked paps \/ That flips and flaps \u2026 Like tawny saffron bags \u2026 All scurvy with scabs,\u201d Elynour remains a character with admirable agency.<\/p>\n

It is also a striking poem about \u201cliquid oblivion,\u201d as Hammond describes it. While careful not to project modern concern onto the distant past, Skelton\u2019s poem conjures the desperation of the junky. Customers are willing to pawn their possessions for a dram of Elynour\u2019s swill. An egalitarian affliction, for it effects \u201ctravelers, to tinkers, \/ To sweaters, to sinkers, \/ And all good ale drinkers.\u201d Trained in scholastic philosophy, he was adept in allegorizing, but like Chaucer he was capable of endowing his creations with a rich interiority. \u201cElynour Rummyng,\u201d for all of its intentional ugliness, is a description of those who have lost everything. He simply writes: \u201cHer lips are so dry \/ Without drink she must die.\u201d It\u2019s vulgar verse of rough but exquisite beauty.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s his genius, taking the wool of common speech and spinning a resplendent banner of poetry from it. The poet Henry Wotton complained that Skelton deployed \u201cthe most familiar phraseology of the common people.\u201d On the verge of Renaissance, Skelton\u2019s idiom would have to wait for its appreciators. One of those more recent fans, W. H. Auden, explained that Skelton exhibits \u201cthe natural ease of speech rhythm.\u201d As the bard of the barroom and the poet of the pub, Skelton has more in common with de Quincey than Wordsworth, or Bukowski than Frost. The Elizabethan rhetorician George Puttenham, in imitation of his Anglo-Saxon alliteration, disparaged him as merely a \u201crude, railing, rhymer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet both Auden and Robert Graves drew inspiration from Skeltonics, the sing-song, alliterative trimeter\u00a0that thrums like an electric undercurrent beneath the staid Latinisms of canonical poetry. The scholar Ruth Kaplan explains that for Skelton, \u201crhyme, rather than meaning, seems to drive the poems forward,\u201d which he acknowledged himself: \u201cFor though my ryme be ragged, \/ Tattered and jagged, \/ Rudely rayne-beaten, \/ Rusty and mothe-eaten, \/ Yf ye take well therewith, \/ It hath in it some pyth.\u201d Kaplan explains that the logic of Skeltonics are such that the poem will continue \u201cas long as the resources of the language hold out,\u201d according to the indomitable wisdom of what rappers call \u201cflow.\u201d (Forgive my anachronism, it\u2019s a pose normally deployed to convince undergraduates to enjoy antique poetry (and it often fails). Yet there is a thread connecting Skelton to all who hear poetry in speech, overheard at the bar or on the subway or the street. His voice is all the more powerful for it; it\u2019s the artful artistry of appearing without art. Skelton awaits his audience\u2014yet his voice is all around us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ed Simon<\/a> is a senior editor at <\/em>The Marginalia Review of Books\u00a0and an expert on Renaissance literature. His first collection, <\/em>America and Other Fictions, will be released by Zero Books in 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cWhat could be dafter \/ Than John Skelton\u2019s laughter?\u201d \u2014Robert Graves Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially in trouble, and womanizing priest named John Skelton took to the lectern at his church. He faced his angry congregation and tried to explain the bastard child born to his mistress. Despite his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[4478,4962,31133,31136,31135,3261,31129,31132,31130,25988,12706,948,12941,31134,31131,2160,4248],"class_list":["post-116816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-alexander-pope","tag-chaucer","tag-dryden","tag-george-puttenham","tag-henry-wotton","tag-john-milton","tag-john-skelton","tag-michael-schmidt","tag-prince-henry","tag-renaissance","tag-robert-graves","tag-shakespeare","tag-tennyson","tag-the-reformation","tag-the-tunning-of-elynour-rummyng","tag-w-h-auden","tag-wordsworth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"John Skelton\u2019s rough and bawdy verse was far ahead of its time\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow by Ed Simon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 19, 2017 \u2013   \u201cWhat could be dafter \/ Than John Skelton\u2019s laughter?\u201d \u2014Robert Graves Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-10-19T15:00:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-10-20T21:24:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/loki-aegir-party.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"800\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"468\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ed Simon\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ed Simon\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Ed Simon\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/447d0af539e969e9cd40732e4329b81c\"},\"headline\":\"The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-10-19T15:00:58+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-10-20T21:24:54+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/\"},\"wordCount\":1489,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/loki-aegir-party.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Alexander Pope\",\"Chaucer\",\"Dryden\",\"George Puttenham\",\"Henry Wotton\",\"John Milton\",\"John Skelton\",\"Michael Schmidt\",\"Prince Henry\",\"Renaissance\",\"Robert Graves\",\"Shakespeare\",\"Tennyson\",\"the Reformation\",\"The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng\",\"W. 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