Ambition and Anxiety in The House of Fame and the Garlande of Laurell

Chaucer’s The House of Fame and The Garlande of Laurell by John Skelton consider the ways in which people’s reputations are made¹. These works share an understanding of fame as a kind of worldly immortality, achieved when a person’s name becomes inseparable from the record of their notable deeds, and both feature a personification of Fame, who presides (with different degrees of constancy) over the reputation-making process.

Following the conventions of dream-vision poetry, The House of Fame and The Garlande of Laurell feature narrators who are to some extent representative of their poets, and the personal investment this implies seems to shape the poems’ approach to fame. Both poems have a particular interest in how poets might share in the fame of their subjects. They respond, in other words, to the Petrarchan assertion that a poem could bring “undying fame, a secular immortality, to [the poet] and to his subject matter”².

In Chaucer’s poem, the renowned poets stand in Fame’s house, bowed beneath the “hevy … fame” of the characters they have immortalised (III.ll.1451-1474)³. This image suggests that, when “Geoffrey” or “Mayster Skelton” encounter famous figures from the past, they do so through the work of the poets – Aeneas through Virgil, Phoebus through Ovid. This is complicated further in The Garlande of Laurell, because Skelton’s poem is in many ways an encounter with Chaucer’s, referring back to The House of Fame quite specifically. Skelton, like other poets of his day, identified Chaucer’s work as part of his own poetic inheritance; Dunbar’s apostrophe in ‘The Goldyn Targe’ of “Chaucere, … morall Gower and Ludgate laureate” (ll.253-62) is but one mirror of these three invoked “in armes, as brethren” by Skelton in The Garlande of Laurell (l.393)⁴. What all these encounters seem to demonstrate is that poets of the past can share in the fame of the people they have immortalised. To the writer in each case, they stand as examples of how poetic ambition might be realised.

Boitani contends that Chaucer approached literature as both the stimulus and the subject for dream poetry, consecrating the book as “the key and integrating element of the dream experience … and of the creative process itself”⁵. Certainly, Geoffrey in The House of Fame conceptualises everything he sees through his reading. The poem is distinguished by its wide range of literary reference (to Virgil and Ovid, to Boethius, to Dante) and the effect of this is to suggest that Geoffrey carries a substantial European tradition with him (indeed, the eagle remarks on his weight (II.ll.574)). Addressing this poetic tradition in English was itself an ambitious act; it made an argument for the dignity of the vernacular that Chaucer had encountered “for the first time in Dante”⁶. In The House of Fame, Chaucer seems to align himself with Dante’s vernacular project, not least by imitating Dante’s invocation of the muses with the first apostrophe in Middle English⁷.

As the poem progresses, however, Chaucer offers many sceptical observations on the fickleness of fame, and the notion that a poet’s work can bring him secular immortality is subjected to a certain amount of bathetic deflation. In what turns out to be a very Boethian poem, Chaucer’s invocation of the muses also calls to mind Boethius’ condemnation of them as “commune strompettis” (I.pr.1.l.49). Chaucer’s Fame certainly bears comparison with Boethius’s Fortune (we are told that Fame is Fortune’s “suster” (III.ll.1545-8)).

Fame satirises the idea that immortality can be a property of the world; she wields an almost divine power, yet she remains as mutable as the world that surrounds her. Fame grants fame to some of her petitioners, yet to others she grants “the contraire”, and Geoffrey can see no rationale behind her decisions: “What her cause was, y nyste” (III.ll.1538-43). Boitani locates the original force of “fame” in the capacity to communicate meaning and endure through time: “Fame is the inspired word, the voice of the Muses … with which … they sing the genesis of the gods … ‘from the beginning’”⁸. Chaucer subverts this idea; his Fame personifies communication breakdown, threatening the endurance of meaning as history and reputation. In Fame’s house, the immortal poets are surrounded by “mynstralles” and “gestiours that tellen tales” (III.ll.1197-1200), not to mention the “right gret companye” of the rest of the world, all of whom are appealing for “good renoun” themselves (III.ll.1528-58). Where Fame presides, distributing reputations at random rather than demonstrating good judgement, the position of the poets comes to seem insecure and compromised.

Like The House of Fame, The Garlande of Laurell describes a semi-fictional version of its author visiting Fame’s court. Where Chaucer had satirised the operations of Fame, however, Skelton appeals to her judgement as a source of legitimacy. Fame creates him ‘laureate’ in the Petrarchan sense and it seems, for all the comedy in The Garlande of Laurell, that Skelton employed the rhetorical force of this to advance real worldly ambition. The Garlande of Laurell appears to effect reconciliation with Wolsey, earlier the primary object of Skelton’s satire: Skelton’s laureation carries the force of official approval, and, through it, the former satirist aligns his voice with the voice of the court so that each endorses the other⁹. Skelton invested a summa of his career in this gesture: the version of The Garlande of Laurell that was printed in 1523 incorporated work from as early as 1485, representing a long process of accumulation and revision¹⁰. Also, within the drama of the poem, “Occupacyoun redith and expoundyth sum parte of Skeltons bokes and baladis”, articulating an extensive catalogue of Skelton’s poetry (l.1169a). Following the example of The House of Fame, however, Skelton could go further, endorsing the court with the authority of a poetic tradition that he carries with him; as Gillespie observes, “Skelton’s invocation of the Muses [brings about] a personification or incarnation of the traditions of classical literature”¹¹. The Garlande of Laurell claims direct inheritance from this literature, to “supplement … the tradition …, to work as an adjunct to it and to overgo it”¹². Skelton proposes to speak with the voice of the European tradition, and to do so in service of the court.

The precedent of The House of Fame presents problems for Skelton, however. Chaucer establishes the literary dream wherein Skelton enacts his laureate ambition, but he also infuses this form with scepticism about worldly fame, and Skelton’s practical, political investment in his poetic reputation means that Chaucer’s scepticism becomes a source of anxiety. Geoffrey himself protests indifference to fame in The House of Fame (his encounter with Fame leads him to prefer “That no wight have my name in hond” (III.l.1877)); similarly, the issue roles of the exchequer suggest that the real Chaucer had no investment in poetic fame for practical advantage, referring frequently to his “relations with the king” but giving no record of “reward to him as a poet”¹³. As we will see, however, Chaucer’s urbane, easy-going bathos in The House of Fame is a source of anxiety for the politically insecure Skelton, and Skelton’s claims to fame come to be shaped by the process of negotiating Chaucerian scepticism.

Chaucer conceived literary heritage as a thesaurus of stories that could be reimagined and retold as new work. When The House of Fame dramatises Geoffrey’s rereading of part of the Aeneid, Chaucer demonstrates his interpretative freedom by revising Virgil precociously, emphasising Dido’s pathos and diminishing Aeneas’ heroism: “he betrayed hir, allas, / And lefte hir ful unkyndely” (I.ll.294-5). Mann argues that such bold revisionism implies enduring faith in the historical substance behind the written record: in reshaping the narrative to “retrieve” an alternative historical point of view, Chaucer affirms “that such a retrieval is a permanent possibility … the writ of literary authority runs no further than the point at which it meets the reader’s own corrective or confirmatory experience”¹⁴. Cooper notes that this stance cuts both ways: “Chaucer’s own invention is just as likely, or unlikely, to be true as Virgil’s or Ovid’s”¹⁵. Separating the story from its famous teller, Chaucer demonstrates that the transmission of stories actually estranges poets from the famous people they commemorate; the means by which a poet might make his own reputation are placed in doubt.

Allegorising other narratives as part of its architecture, The House of Fame begins “Withyn a temple ymade of glas” where “ymages / Of golde” and stories on brass tables are set into the walls (I.ll.120-2). We find a comparable motif in The Book of the Duchess, where the dream begins in a room with “the Romaunce of the Rose” and the “story of Troye” painted on the walls and “in the glasynge ywroght” (ll.332-67). While both poems use these initial dreamed tableaux to acknowledge their literary debts, The House of Fame’s glass temple places particular emphasis on the narrator’s subjective position within his literary heritage, because the frame that surrounds him is translucent. When Geoffrey rereads Dido’s death, he looks through it to consider a range of betrayed literary lovers (I.ll.375-426); from his perspective, the stories overlay one another. The temple’s translucency suggests the affirming interrelatedness of stories as myths and history, but makes this contingent upon the narrator’s own acts of perception and retelling.

Encountering the canon in the process of adaptation and revision, the first empowerment a writer experiences is as interpretative reader. Whereas Dante encountered Virgil in person, Chaucer encounters the Aeneid as a reader. The reader too is involved in this subjective and contingent pattern; the architectural images that situate the poem within its tradition demand a “visual response”, making the reader particularly conscious that his own imagination is at work on Chaucer’s text¹⁶. This model of reading, then, has ramifications for how Chaucer thinks of his own poetic legacy; the way that he reads the poems of others creates a troubling model for the way that his own texts might be preserved and read.

When Chaucer recasts the reputations of Dido and Aeneas, he addresses himself to the European tradition by means of the story that, in turn, connects Europe to Troy. This stresses the destabilising potential of The House of Fame’s realignment of sympathy; if Aeneas had not rejected Dido, Europe would not have been founded. This instance of unregulated reinterpretation is the first suggestion of the chaos to follow in The House of Fame; the literary detachment of Virgil’s judgement from Aeneas’ actions prefigures the separation of deeds and renown that characterises Fame’s unreliability. Carrying him between books one and three, and naming him as “Geoffrey”, the eagle lectures the narrator on the science of non-literary reputation (II.l.729). Moving from glass, suggesting subjective reading, to sound ripples, suggesting the subjective judgments of fame, the subversive potential in retelling stories find its corollary in the real world. Chaucer is to visit Fame as reward for literary “labour and devocion” (II.ll.667), yet fame, the eagle tells him, is made from precisely the non-fictional rumours and stories that he never gets to hear because he is always working. Chaucer’s doubt that fame can link a poet and his work spreads into a discussion of whether any man’s deeds will necessarily match his reputation.

The Garlande of Laurell’s appeal to literary inheritance is enhanced rhetorically by its engagement with The House of Fame, the “most substantial earlier treatment of the subject”¹⁷. However, in order to appropriate successfully from Chaucer’s work, Skelton must reclaim the act of retelling narratives from its Chaucerian association with rumour and uncertainty. When The Garlande of Laurell reworks the primal story of laureation, with Phoebus lamenting Daphne, “Transformyd … into the laurel grene”, it engages in the kind of rereading that initiated Chaucer’s scepticism in The House of Fame (l.294). However, while Chaucer’s reinterpretation of Virgil threatens the very lineage by which he inherits from Europe, Skelton’s reworking of Ovid leads him to describe an almost providential genealogy of laureates, using a recurring celebratory apostrophe of “blessed Bacchus” to unite “poetis laureat of many diverse nacyons” and mitigate against the potential derailments of misinterpretation (ll.326-99). Patterns of recurrence like this one work against the Chaucerian sense that rereading can be destabilising. Fish has observed that, for Skelton, “the stability of the temporal reflects and guarantees the benignity of the eternal”¹⁸. The “remembraunce” promised to Daphne’s “transformacyon” (l.320) echoes in the addresses to the Countess’s ladies (ll.812, 845, 900). Furthermore, in Skelton’s list of poets, name and work are memorialised together in fixed order (“there names I thynke to specefye” (l.325)) as he re-enacts and regulates their laureation. When The Garlande of Laurell sets the names of the famous amidst patterns of repetition, Skelton insists that the process of their commemoration is stable and unchallengeable.

As we have seen, Chaucer considers the open-endedness of literary reinterpretation as a model for how his own work might be retold, generating anxiety about the future from his scepticism about the past. Skelton overcomes this by prioritising his capacity to reread over the potential for his being reread. He uses a rhetoric of inscription to forestall the uncertainties of future interpretation. Skelton’s laureation is everywhere endorsed by Occupacyoun, “Famys regestary”, who keeps written record of his accumulating work (l.522). All that Occupacyoun “hath compylyd”, even the apparently occasional lyrics addressed to the Countess of Surrey and her ladies, is inscribed, “garnysshyd and bounde” in the deluxe “boke” of Fame (ll.1156-70). Fame’s book reinforces The Garlande of Laurell’s “inscripted quality”, establishing the critical judgements it makes on itself and on Skelton’s back catalogue as impervious to future revision¹⁹. Assurances of written memorial entirely circumscribe the moments of drama and uncertainty that Skelton does permit in the poem, as when Pallas reminds Fame to “Beware” in judging Skelton, “for wrytyng remayneth of recorde” (l.89), or when Skelton recalls Pilate with his equivocal “Quod scripsi, scripsi” (l.1456). The anxieties dramatised here assume inscripted permanence, and the anxiety that follows from Chaucerian scepticism about rereading and rewriting is suppressed.

Skelton involves his own name with this rhetoric of inscription. The Garlande of Laurell repeats the rhyme of “name” and “fame” very insistently, investing it with a crucial thematic importance. The appearance of ‘Geffrey’ in The House of Fame extends the scope of the poem’s scepticism; as the second book of the poem moves to consider fame beyond the literary, it also casts doubt on the reliability of fame beyond its own fiction. By contrast, the presence of “Poeta Skelton” and “Mayster Skelton, Poet Laureat” throughout The Garlande of Laurell elides man and role within the poem to strengthen and endorse his status in the world.

The trees of The Garlande of Laurell’s dreaming and waking segments are pervasive symbols of organic genealogy, laurels and oaks reinforcing Skelton’s claim to unite his classical-European and English heritages. That Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate appear lacking “nothynge but the laurel” implies that they predate the convergence of traditions that Skelton finally embodies (l.397). Skelton argues for the pre-eminence of his own historical moment. In doing so, he reinforces his claim to be politically valuable; his reintegration into the court aligns his voice with that of king and people, his claim to inherit a literary tradition reinforces the Tudor claim to the crown. Skelton reclaims the power of Chaucer’s Fame from Chaucer’s scepticism, constructing a model of literary reputation that legitimates his own name and work and resists the retellings of the future.

As we have seen in the glass temple and the eagle’s sound waves, Chaucer presents the very frames of the dream-vision genre as shifting, permeable and requiring interpretation. The fragile walls of glass and sound suggest how the literary tradition is always dependent on, and possibly jeopardised by, the limited, individual perspective of each poet who engages with it. When Skelton negotiates with The House of Fame in The Garlande of Laurell, he must address the way that Chaucer associates frames and boundaries with scepticism about how reputations are made.

The House of Fame begins with a proem that compares different types of dreams in a pattern of bewildering antithesis. In this way, Chaucer’s narrator assumes a posture of confusion, placing the onus on the reader to interpret his dream. However, he also opens up a sense, between these oppositions, of what Kruger has called the exploratory “middleness of dreams”²⁰. This speculative “middleness” is allegorised as a physical space in the glass temple. Here, Geoffrey practices daring rereadings by interpreting the walls, the boundaries that frame the space. At first, this relationship between the boundary and the space it delimits might seem to provide a stable allegory for reading, reinterpretation and the transmission of reputation. However, when Geoffrey leaves the temple, he is repeatedly lifted from one space to another, and these spaces are delimited by increasingly unstable boundaries; through these images, The House of Fame draws attention to the limits of Geoffrey’s partial perspective.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy provides an important model for the transitions between frames in The House of Fame. When Chaucer describes his narrator being carried between different framed environments, he relates those frames to Boethius’ understanding of the boundaries between the spheres of knowledge that emanate from God.

Philosophy’s consolation is a process of reconciling the unhappy contingencies of the world with an understanding of the essential goodness of God’s universe. The Consolation of Philosophy begins after Boethius’ unjust imprisonment, awaiting execution for his defence of Albinus before the increasingly paranoid Theodoric, and, as such, it moves towards its affirmation of providence from a position that demonstrates the worst injustices of worldly reward²¹. Philosophy guides the narrator “Boethius” through arguments that relocate his understanding of justice away from his immediate context: Boethius had thought that his bad luck showed an unfairness in Fortune, but he is shown that Fortune is by nature changeable and so remains constant when she changes; Boethius’s experience seemed to demonstrate the wicked triumphing in their ambitions, but he is reminded that all men seek the good (indeed, this is the proof of its goodness) and so wicked men by definition cannot achieve the goal towards which their human nature impels them. A search for the broader pattern reveals an underpinning fairness; the changes and chances of human experience are in fact shot through with the justice of providence. Increasingly, this idea is figured in terms of realigning the spheres of that experience into a stable orbit around God: the relationship of “moevable destyne to the stable symplicite of purveaunce” is as that of “the cercle to the centre” (IV.pr.6.ll.143-5).

The orbital shape that expresses this stoic philosophy is knowingly parodied in the decentred reframings of The House of Fame. The eagle’s sound waves foreshadow a series of dislocations that becomes clear when The House of Fame is compared to its Boethean model. The eagle constructs a paradoxical model of the orbits of sound and Fame, where Fame is both at the centre (II.ll.782-6) and at “bothe brynkes” of the circular pattern (II.l.804); it is as though all speakers (and writers) must contest their centrality to what they say with Fame. When Fame finally appears, she is indeed the centre point of her house, surrounded by an equivocal “hevenyssh” melody (III.ll.1380-95). However, Fame’s centrality is intertwined with mutability; she is one moment “the lengthe of a cubit”, the next, “with her fet she erthe reighte / And with hir hed she touched hevene”, mirroring the unfairness of her judgements (III.ll.1370-5). Fame’s equivalence to Boethius’ God in the structure of the narrative is the measure by which we understand the ironic ramifications of this inconstancy.

Boethius was aware that subjective experience would be different in the different spheres; his difficulty in relating his experience to God’s justice is a product of the distance between the worldly sphere and God’s centrality. For Boethius, as for The House of Fame’s Geoffrey, the nature of what you can know is profoundly contingent upon the boundaries of your perspective. Boethius dramatises the problems of crossing these boundaries. Philosophy asserts her power to elevate Boethius by “fycchen fetheris in thi thought” (IV.pr.1.l.66), but acknowledges that “it nis nat leveful to man to comprehenden by wit, ne unfolden by word, alle the subtil ordenaunces and disposiciounis of the devyne entente” (IV.pr.6.ll.353-5). Philosophy shows Boethius that the universal gradation of perspective is justified because God has a greater capacity to know than man. This, in turn, informs The House of Fame’s awareness that seeing like God is not the same as knowing like God.

As Geoffrey’s journey begins, he ascends through the zodiacal signs to see the weather being made, as though going above time to its point of origin, gaining a clearer understanding of the process of causation (II.ll.964-7). The narrator references Boece directly as, looking down, his initial panic at his perilous altitude turns to praise for the way that God’s creation reflects his “might” and “noblesse” (II.ll.972-5). Chaucer employs anaphora in II.ll.896-904 to suggest that the narrator witnesses things simultaneously, having been elevated to a quasi-divine, atemporal perspective.

The last stage in Geoffrey’s travels, the move to the house of Daedalus, finally undermines Fame’s signposted structural claim to fixed centrality. Daedalus’ house of twigs is a labyrinth (III.1920-1) with no discernable centre, yet it rotates furiously, as if in a mockery of the Boethean vision of experiential spheres in stable orbit. Anaphora reappears in a huge accumulating deluge (III.ll.1916-76), but now acknowledges the narrator’s inability to comprehend an apparent chaos. The device that measured the confidence of a masterful perspective now displays the anxiety of a bewildered one.

Chaucer’s Boece glosses God’s centrality as “unmoevablete” (IV.pr.6.129), whereas The House of Fame moves from frame to frame, undermining a sense of where the centre is and stressing the changing states of the narrator. The House of Fame develops a wry awareness that no central authority validates worldly fame, and that the reshaping agency that measures poetic ambition participates in the arbitrary justice of Fortune’s world.

Skelton needs to reclaim from The House of Fame the certainty that Fame can grant the poet a privileged perspective within the world. As The Garlande of Laurell affirms Skelton’s laureation, the boundaries it employs are increasingly emphatic and repeatedly constructed to the disadvantage of other voices. The stability of The Garlande of Laurell’s frames consolidates its overbearing sense of its own telos. Where different traditions of national literature meet in a field “Enwallyd aboute with the stony flint”, Skelton contrasts his deserving position at this point of convergence with the excluded position of those who “presed to every gate” outside the wall (ll.569, 603). (These gates themselves participate in the rhetoric of inscription, bearing “wrytyng”, most notably the gate “Anglea” with its “capytall A” (ll.582-8).) Fame’s palace has “gatis” of “elephantis tethe” (l.468), and, again, is fortified against the excluded: “If xii were let in, xii hundreth stode without” (l.490).

On occasions, Skelton demonstrates the fortitude of the dream frame itself, defying generic tropes to wake him, as when the tree trunk on which he leans to sleep jumps backwards “an hundredthe fote” (l.282) or the “gunnies” cry “Bowns, bowns, bowns!” (ll.623-4). In the line “Then I me lent, and loked over the wall” (l.602), Skelton invokes the language of falling asleep to look outside the frame of the dream at those denied fame; dreamed authority usurps waking authority, the boundary’s solidity becomes the measure of Fame’s good judgement.

While The House of Fame develops anaphora bathetically, illustrating elevation then chaos, Skelton’s emphatic use of boundaries allows him to make anaphora affirming for those inside the walls and disabling for those without. Within the walls, each subsequent instance of anaphora gathers people and poems around an impetus towards Skelton’s laureation, uniting voices to marginalise misinterpretation. The “thronge” who arrive at Fame’s house openly recall The House of Fame’s petitioners who engulfed the memorialised poets in their noise (II.ll.1521-32). However, The Garlande of Laurell reverses this situation, having the poetic hopefuls drowned out by a “murmer of mynstrels” as the laureates arrive, “passynge sure” and “truely proporsionyd” in their endorsement of Skelton (ll.270-4). The final anaphoric sequence is equally confirmatory, as Occupacyoun itemises Skelton’s works in justification of his laureateship, synthesising his activity with his reward in a manner that forestalls a Chaucerian discussion of the value of poetic endeavour (ll.1170-90). Outside the walls, Fame’s house is besieged by petitioners, seeking to make their own reputation. When Fame petitions Pallas on Skelton’s behalf, the threat of pretenders is raised directly, and here Pallas’ anaphoric repetition of “some” suggests a crowd of undeserving supplicants, parodying a poetic genealogy (ll.182-91). Inevitably, Fame’s eventual judgements prove well founded, and the undeserving who “come crowding to get them a name” are sent “homwarde”, away from the walls (ll.602-22).

Skelton aligns his voice not only with that of the European tradition, but also with the vox populi. In the anti-Wolsey satire Collyn Cloute, Skelton’s Collyn proposes the “ragged” rhyme of his ‘skeltonics’ as an antidote to the language of the court, drawing on the commonsense of the people (“I here the people talke”) (ll.47-58, 288). As he returns to court for The Garlande of Laurell, this ability makes claims for his value as a current political ally as well as a timeless poet. Skelton’s use of anaphora and repetition argues for his ability to co-opt and speak with the voices of others. In making this argument, he enacts a forthright prolepsis, pre-empting and countering all possible criticism from his potential readers. The sound of Fame’s book closing is matched by an affirmation of unified voices, a shout that reaches back to Rome and up to the heavens, collapsing literary history and critical opinion into a single assenting interpretation (ll.1505-11).

The Garlande of Laurell does not ask to be read so much as endorsed: the envoy ending “or els” (ll.1594-1602) demands that Wolsey confirm Skelton’s laureateship – a political gesture, not an interpretative reading. The poem builds a final boundary against reinterpretation with its resistance to ending. Skelton imagines an audience who will “loke” and “rede”, but not edit, and Fox has identified the language of challenge in Skelton’s reflection on the “sad correction” his poem might receive²². The Garlande of Laurell presents years’ accumulated work as the culmination of traditions. It therefore has an impetus to continue that combines with its attempts to forestall commentary.

That Chaucer ultimately leaves The House of Fame incomplete while Skelton spends about 130 lines finishing The Garlande of Laurell bespeaks their different attitude to the boundaries of ambition. The Garlande of Laurell’s closing repetitions betray anxiety about The House of Fame’s sceptical open-endedness. Fame’s endorsement grants Skelton authority independent of his immediate access to patronage; this in turn gives value to his endorsement of the court. Recovering this from Chaucer in a dream-vision poem involves a forceful rhetorical countering of The House of Fame’s scepticism, emphatically silencing anxieties where Chaucer’s bathos insinuates a satire of ambition into the form and its conventions. The Garlande of Laurell attempts this in its approach to the retelling of stories, and in the way that frames and boundaries shape its narrative progress and buttress its poetic ambitions. Skelton’s memorial to the permanence of his name uses Chaucer’s forms and imagery to resist the very scepticism that they were originally designed to express.

Alastair Bennett (MPhil), U. of Cambridge

Contents

NOTES

1. This article is an expanded version of an essay submitted for MPhil coursework at the University of Cambridge. I am indebted to Professor Helen Cooper who supervised it.

2.A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.6.

3.References to Chaucer are from the Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, repr. 1988).

4.William Dunbar, ‘The Goldyn Targe’, in The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, ed. by J. A. Tasioulas, (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1999), pp.517-530. References to Skelton are from John Skelton, The Complete English Poems ed. by John Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).

5.Piero Boitani, ‘Old Books Brought to Life in Dreams: the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls’ in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.58-77 (p.60).

6.Spearing, p.25.

7.A. J. Minnis, with V. J. Scattergood & J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.174.

8.Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, Chaucer Studies, 10 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984), p.19.

9.Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp.191-2.

10.F. W. Brownlow, ‘Introduction 1’, in The Book of the Laurel by John Skelton, ed. by F. W. Brownlow (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp.17-45 (pp.30-36).

11.Vincent Gillespie, ‘Justification by Good Works: Skelton’s The Garland of Laurel’, Reading Medieval Studies, 7 (1981) 19-31 (p.28).

12.Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.29.

13.Nigel Saul, Richard II, Yale English Monarchs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp.361-2.

14.Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, Chaucer Studies, 30 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; repr. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), p.14.

15.Helen Cooper, ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999) 39-66 (p.55).

16.Minnis et al, p.191.

17.John Scattergood, ‘Skelton’s Garlande of Laurell and the Chaucerian Tradition’ in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 122-138 (p.123).

18.Stanley Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry (London: Yale University Press, 1965), p.3.

19.Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.198.

20.Steven F Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.17-34.

21.Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.46-68.

22.Fox, p.192.