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 thesis considers a range of sixteenth-century literary texts in order to trace the evolution of the public image(s) of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c.1470-1530), Henry VIII’s chief minister from 1515 until 1529. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate and explore the genesis and subsequent evolution of literary characterizations of Wolsey. This process in turn reveals much about the individual authors, editors, and playwrights who generated these images; the readers and audiences who received them; and the social, political, and religious events to which they responded and with which they interacted. Moreover, this thesis argues that through analyzing case studies (like Wolsey’s), we can better understand how sixteenth-century authors conceptualized and represented history itself, as well as the uses to which these histories might be put. To explore this concept, this thesis creates a framework of ‘mimetic’, ‘poetic’, and ‘documentary’ representations of history to better distinguish how Tudor authors organized and created their respective histories. In order to identify common themes and highlight evolving textual features, this thesis moves chronologically through a diverse corpus, looking at early satires in doggerel poetry and drama; biography and de casibus verse; Elizabethan historiographies (both religious and secular); and Jacobean drama. This approach demonstrates how the public images of Tudor political figures were constructed in a web of interconnected texts, and how authors constructed and adapted representations of history over the course of the sixteenth century. In addition, this thesis considers how characterizations of Wolsey in particular demonstrate the means by which a particular image could be adapted to interact with a rapidly changing public sphere."

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.

Uniting literary analysis, theories of affect from the sciences and humanities, and an archival-based account of Tudor history, this project examines how literature reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance courtly sphere — arguing that emotionality, as a primary mode through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, should be adopted as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis. Spanning the 16th Century, chapters on John Skelton and Henrician satire, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and elegy, Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry, and the Earl of Essex and factional literature demonstrate how the dynamics of disgust, envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court. By aligning Renaissance discourses of emotion with current trends in empirical and theoretical research, the study provides a new methodology for an affective analysis of literature.