Poetic Statesmanship and the Politics of Patronage in the Early Tudor Court: Material Concerns of John Skelton's Early Career As a Critical Context for the Interpretation of the Bowge of Courte‪.‬

1. Skelton's Bowge of Courte is a document that has met with some divergence in critical opinion, in large part because of its inherent ambiguity. Some believe, for example, Skelton's anti-court satire to be the textual representative of a now-lost early Tudor courtly entertainment; (2) others, a larger group, hold that the Bowge is a verse satire that draws on the medieval tradition of the dream-vision. The form of the Bowge and its use of conventions leads to such disparate opinions, but a degree of the confusion must also be attributed to the interpretation of its subject matter--an act urged by the poet himself who, in the final rhyme-royal stanza, suggests that his audience consider the meaning of the dream-vision by re-casting its fictional events in corresponding terms of the contemporary world: Given this, and given the nature of typical re-castings of the Bowge's fictional contents, one might convincingly argue that the author-focussed context in which much criticism urges us to "constrewe" the Bowge's "resydewe." perpetuates the greatest degree of critical uncertainty.