SOURCE: Halpern, Richard. “John Skelton and the Poetics of Primitive Accumulation.” In Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint, pp. 225-256. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Halpern explains that Skelton lived in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism—which Karl Marx described as a process of “primitive accumulation”—and says that Skelton's works, particularly Phillip Sparrow, displays a utopian response and a counter-movement to that cultural movement and ideology of the newly powerful state.

I

Defying the best efforts of critics, John Skelton has valiantly resisted all attempts to provide him a secure place within the English literary canon. Even among minor Renaissance poets he remains quirky and marginalized, partly because of the conjunction of attributes that led Alexander Pope to dub him “beastly.” The satires display a brutish energy for obscure vituperation while The Tunning of...