Conclusion

Summary

Throughout the complex weave of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scots court poetry, beneath its cloudy figures and sometimes dazzling aureate surfaces, are common questions about auctoritas – where it resides, or with whom, and whether it can be attached to new writing – differently conceived and often only obliquely answered, but which afford a focus for this difficult to conceptualise literary period. The careers of its foremost poets are, I think, better described in terms of their heterogeneity and individual temperament, rather than as the products of a ‘literary system’ premised on Chaucerian reception or the ‘institutional simplifications and centralisations’ of Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution (see Chapter 1). Skelton, Dunbar, Hawes, and Douglas evidence a spectrum of ideas of authorship – not stages in a transition from a ‘medieval’ to a ‘modern’ paradigm, but rather four distinct engagements with tradition and opportunity, united by their utilisation of a particular form. Their similarities and differences transcend national and period divisions. Dunbar and Hawes seem relatively cautious, or perhaps simply pragmatic, in their strategies for authorial self-promotion: Dunbar's poetry works to evoke a lively, literary court culture in which makaris can flourish and flyt; Hawes, meanwhile, assures the approbation of his writings by interweaving his poetic fictions with the texts and iconography of the image-conscious early Tudor court. That neither poet supplies biographical details beyond vague allusions to their royal service speaks of an imaginative and material dependence on the court and its systems of patronage; yet it is Dunbar and Hawes whose names appeared in print alongside Chaucer and Lydgate during the first decades of the sixteenth century (even if authorial self-promotion and commercial opportunism are difficult to disentangle in the early years of printing). Skelton and Douglas make more obviously author-centred claims for the authority of their writings: Skelton, by affiliating his poetic labours to those of the idealised Skelton Poeta; Douglas, by associating his name with the implied author for the Eneados. Both had the advantage of a clerical income and time to devote to the reading and emulation of classical and humanist poets – less evident in the poetry of Dunbar and Hawes.