The Voices of Dissonance: Pattern in Skelton's "Colyn Cloute"

Abstract

T DO NOT intend to revive the well-flogged issue of who, historically, I is the first English formal satirist. There are signs, nonetheless, that we no longer need to take seriously the boast of Joseph Hall: follow me who list, and be the second English satirist if indeed the readers of his Virgidemiae (I 598) ever really accepted his proud assertions. As scholars of re-examine medieval and renaissance poems of purposive attack or satire in one sense, they find there far greater rhetorical skill, more readily discernible structural patterns, more conscious fictiveness than has previously been acknowledged. As a result of the investigations of Peter, Kernan, and Heiserman, for example, we need no longer judge all English of the earlier times as rough, unlicked, brutish anticipations of the true and singular perfection of Augustan satire.' The medieval mode of satire, we are rediscovering, had its own conventions, its own personae, its own sense of structure-its own satiric art. To Peter we are indebted for the working distinction between complaint (marked by a lack of personal imprint, limited in rhetorical range, heavily schematic in content, excessively general in attack) and satire (marked by the sense of a personal imprint, wide in rhetorical range, incorporating a sense of the concrete par-

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