Author: SKELTON (John):
Title: Pithy Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. To King Henry the VIIIth.
Description: London: Printed for C. Davis..., 1736. 12mo, 168 x 94 mms., pp. xiv, 294 [295 - 296 adverts], title leaf a cancel with visible stub, with ms. note in 18th century hand on recto of second front end-paper (leaf very soiled but readable), "Lionelle Campbelle - 1756" inscribed on title-page and another 18th century name below, and "John Orville Bayley" and purchase information on verso of last leaf, with other 18th century inscriptions, contemporary calf (worn), rebacked, gilt spine, black leather label. A modest copy. Lionelle Campbell of Campbeltown, Scotland was an early Scottish surgeon and physician. He was also a correspondent of the much more famous Scottish physician Dr William Cullen. See http://cullenproject.ac.uk/docs/181 for a later example of his signature. One of the inscriptions is a contemporary endorsement of the quality of Skelton's verse: "This book written upwards/ of 260 years back may/ Serve as a scale to compare/ the advance or … in/ the English language during/ that period./ As this is the production/ of the Laureate of the then/ Reigning Monarch we may Conclude the Language/ The most beautiful of its Day." The collection was first published in 1568 and edited by John Stow. Skelton (ca. 1460 - 1529) is one of English literature's more obscure figures. In his masterly Critical History of English Literature (1960), David Daiches said of him that he "is the most interesting and original of all the transitional poets who, while considering themselves in the tradition of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, are in fact Janus-faced, looking both toward the medieval past and to the Renaissance future. As a satirist, Skelton attack the abuses of courtly life, new fashions in thought, religion, and behavior, personal enemies, Scots, and aspects of the contemporary scene which he found annoying." John Scattergood in his excellent recent edition (1983) says of the poems "Skelton's greatest poems are learned, difficult, allusive, multilingual, intensely self-conscious and self-reflexive. With their verbal play and many-layered meaning they demand careful and repeated reading...."

Keywords: poetry satire literature


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