SOURCE: "The Twittering Machine: Skelton's Ornithology of the Early Tudor State," in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 103-35.

In the following excerpt, Halpern relates Skelton's poetry to political and cultural changes in Tudor England, particularly the transition from a feudal society to an absolute monarchy.

If he was nothing else, John Skelton was certainly one of the most obstreperous English poets; his literary gifts were inseparable from a bottomless and apparently free-floating aggression. Henry VIII employed him briefly as a writer of vituperative verses against the French and Scots and then to entertain the court in a display of "flytyng," a crude form of poetical name-calling. Yet the self-styled orator regius remained a marginal figure at court, and in his resentment he composed a series of vicious and ill-considered satires against the powerful Cardinal Wolsey, even...