John Skelton's writing career took place roughly between 1488 and 1528, years that straddle two centuries and, most awkwardly, two epochs. Perhaps because of that awkwardness he has been a poet marginalized in our literary histories and critical discourse until quite recently. This overview essay suggests that to re-engage Skelton is to test alternative literary histories that think beyond the fifteenth century as a merely transitional moment and that put into play methodologies flexible enough to accommodate inter-related notions of aesthetics and context. This essay traces Skelton's critical tradition as a series of perspectives on the poet's own nimble engagements with form and history. The first section follows the story of formalist and historicist approaches to Skelton working in tension up until the last part of the twentieth century. The second section explores the interventions of the new Skelton scholars. The third and final sections speculate briefly about fresh directions in Skelton scholarship, noticing that many of the themes and questions raised around Skelton over the past century remain open for more extensive development.

This study examines how the images of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c.1471–1530) provided in the poetry of John Skelton (c.1460–1529) compare with those supplied by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in Henry VIII at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. These authors, separated by a full century and the bulk of the Tudor dynasty, created imagery of Wolsey for purposes dramatic, satirical, religious, and political. Despite ostensible differences in motivation, these poets used similar techniques to create powerful literary characterizations of this historical figure. By comparing the images of Wolsey found in Skelton’s poetry and in Henry VIII, this study will explore the nature and mechanisms of characterization through the use of imagistic rhetorical devices in these two literary bookends of the 16th century. Furthermore, this examination will seek more broadly to highlight the identifiable transmission and evolution of literary devices and practices across the gulf of the ‘Drab Age’. Through illustrating these elements, this consideration will attempt to help further dismantle the notion that the mid-Tudor period produced little of value to the Elizabethan and Stuart literary giants.

The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and early 1540s had significant effects on Tudor England, transforming traditional understandings of work and religious devotion. This article examines three elements of social life, associated with monasticism, that were drastically altered by the dissolution: prayer, otium, and withdrawal. As Tudor society sought to reshape or relocate these elements, writers including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare explored and appropriated them, crafting within their literary texts a place for the monastic impulse. Writers of the period transformed the inefficacy, idleness, and withdrawal that Reformers associated with Catholic religious life into the terms through which they defined their own relative autonomy. Concluding with an examination of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, the essay argues that in Renaissance England the ascetic contributes to the formation of the aesthetic.