SOURCE: Schibanoff, Susan. “Taking Jane's Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers.” PMLA 101, No. 5 (October 1986): 832-47.

In the following essay, Schibanoff claims that Phillip Sparrow is about readers and reading, and argues that the poem begins with a radical new reading in which the text “cues” readers to rewrite texts in their own images; goes on to deconstruct the text rewritten by the protagonist, Jane, and to show and how it was “cued” by her past reading; and finally disempowers Jane further by deconstructing her physical person and reconstituting her as a text.

In a recent essay on Skelton's Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe (c. 1502-07), F. W. Brownlow observes that the poem “tends to be read more by Renaissance scholars than by medievalists” (6). If by “reading” we understand Brownlow to mean the act of publishing literary criticism or interpretation, his statement is accurate, as a perusal...