Renaissance poetry and prose

During the Renaissance period the Christian faith and the Holy days that ensued were at the centre of the social calendar. All religious Holy days, such as Easter and Christmas, had a preparatory period of fasting with a concluding period of celebration. The celebrations consisted of a carnival, during which all rules that structured the way society were to behave, were broken. The socially accepted concepts of spatial boundaries; the body; the Sacred; and social hierarchies such as gender, sexual, marriage and linguistic hierarchies were turned on their heads. It was believed that by allowing the lower classes a brief period of power they would more likely to ‘behave’ for the rest of the year. By incorporating the same concepts of degradation in his poetry Skelton breaks down his subjects so as to make recognisable characters and situations simultaneously accessible and humorous to the reader.

However, the techniques used by Skelton are not unique to him. In the lecture we looked at the ways in which Skelton was influenced by his predecessors and how they can be seen throughout poetry. Although his earlier religious works were fairly conventional – elegies to the Trinity etc – he began to take the poetic conventions of earlier authors and combine them with those of his own creation in order to serve his own poetic purpose. Skelton was specifically influenced by the writing of Chaucer’s satirical take on society, and Rabelais, who subverted the conventional expectations of society into grotesque parodies. In The Tunning of Elinour Rumming Skelton utilises the grotesque carnivalesque techniques of Rabelais in order to create a humorous world in which to place the grotesque figure of Elinour:

Then Elinour taketh

The mash-bowl, and shaketh

The hens’ dung away,

And skommeth it in a tray

Whereas the yeast is,

With her mangy fistis

The images associated with the protagonist ale-wife in The Tunning of Elinour Rumming are humorous due to the disgusting animalistic images that distance her from a more conventional portrayal of a feminine image.

On the other hand, in The Book of Philip Sparrow the young girl Jane is depicted as a stereotypical beauty. However, the image of her youth, beauty and naivety is simultaneously mocked, due to the lamentations for a sparrow usually reserved for the death of a loved one, whilst being depicted as a figure of soft pornography.

Whan I was aslepe,

And his fethers shake,

Wherewith he wolde make

Me often for to wake,

And for to take him in

Upon my naked skyn,

God wot, we thought no syn.

What though he crept so lowe?

Although both women are being presented as figures of humour, both poems achieve their purpose through the use of very different images. Jane’s degradation is not, on the surface, unpleasant although is overtly sexual with images of the sparrow and her ‘naked skyn’.

Both poems would have appealed to the educated men of the court, who would have recognised the figures in both poems as people from their daily lives. By employing Rabelais’s techniques of the carnivalesque Skelton creates scenes that are simultaneously amusing and disturbing.