Satire

“Better a dumb mouth than a brainless skull,” said John Skelton 1 ( c . 1460-1529); but he heeded the adage very little, if a brainless skull is one which prompts its possessor to speak when silence would be more decorous or more prudent. It is doubtful whether many readers, except the special enemies of Cardinal Wolsey, have derived as much pleasure from Skelton’s verse as the poet’s manifold endowments and engaging personality qualified him to bestow. 2 He is one of the hardest authors to measure artistically, and it is not even easy to fix his historical position. Chronologically, he is one of the earliest of the Tudor writers, and the mechanism of his verse has more affinity with the fifteenth century than with Wyatt and Surrey; but his satiric spirit links him spiritually with Lindsay and the period of the Reformation, while the earliest literary notice of him, by Caxton in 1490, 3 presents him as a humanist scholar.