SOURCE: Kinsman, Robert S. “The Voice of Dissonance: Pattern in Skelton's Colyn Cloute.” Huntington Library Quarterly 26, No. 4 (August 1963): 291-313.

In the following essay, Kinsman contends that in Collyn Cloute Skelton achieves a structure and enlivens “the conventions of medieval satire by the deliberate and controlled use of ‘dissonant voices’,” which include that of the poet as “hero-prophet,” Collyn Cloute as a defender of the Church, and the tyrant Cardinal Wolsey.

I do not intend to revive the well-flogged issue of who, historically, 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 (1598) ever really accepted his proud assertions. As scholars of satire re-examine medieval and renaissance poems of purposive attack or “satire” in one sense, they find there...