A Perfect Feast of Fools and Plenty: Carnival in John Skelton’s Poem “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming”

Abstract

A PERFECT FEAST OF FOOLS AND PLENTY: CARNIVAL IN JOHN SKELTON’S POEM “THE TUNNING OF ELINOUR RUMMING” JOHN C. KELLY University of Western Ontario The grotesque body ... is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world. ... All [the] convexities and orifices [of the human body] have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. (Bakhtin 317) A t the close of “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming” John Skelton concludes that he has “written too much/ Of this mad mumming” (619-20) and calls an end to the “geste / Of [the] worthy feast” (622-23). Filled as the poem is with references to various stenches and disparate other images of decay, the “feast” appears to be anything but a “worthy” occasion. To Stanley Fish and others, the proceedings seem “designedly nothing more” (251) than a portrayal “in words [of] the chaos and confusion of a sixteenth-century still” (254). But what the “solemn drinking” (Skelton 548) represents is the madness of a feast celebrating the death of winter and the birth of summer. The arrival in the tavern of the character Drunken Alice, with the “tidings” of the “great war/ Between Temple Bar/ And the Cross in Cheap” (358-60), situates the “worthy feast” within the period of the Evil May Day of 1517, when violence erupted in London between native and foreign merchants (Kinsman 156). In this context, the “mad mumming” represents part of the festivities associated with the maypole and morris dances, and reflects the fundamental opposition between Lent and carnival: Lent as a time of abstinence from meat, eggs, sex, play-going, and other recreations, and carnival as a period of institutional disorder whose central theme was the world turned upside down (Burke 188). Not simply a description of everyday experience, Skelton’s poem reveals the chaotic and joyous activities of a May Day celebration. Interpreting the poem primarily as a realistic tableau of medieval or early modern life or as a condemnation of gluttony and drinking, current crit­ icism has not addressed itself to key questions concerning the anomalous E nglish Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , 22, 2, June 1996 gathering. In a culture where the tavern was primarily a masculine domain,1 Rumming’s usual patrons, the “travellers, ... tinkers, ... sweaters [and] swinkers” (104-05), have been displaced by an exclusively female clientele. This change and the women’s raucous activities demand attention. As Sheila Delany contends in her essay, “Women, nature and language: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” what becomes necessary is “to problématisé the obvious, which always seems less problematic than the obscure, but which ... constitutes the ideology-laden language of a culture” (151). In this man­ ner, the events and images in Skelton’s poem do not represent nature but possess symbolic and ritualistic meaning. Far from being a description of debauchery, “Elinour Rumming” presents a celebratory event of folk cul­ ture void of moralistic overtones. Recording the language and proceedings of carnival, it embodies the voice of women liberated from the strictures of quotidian reality. By focussing upon the voice of women, this paper reveals a world antithet­ ical to the one defined by the church and state in medieval and Renaissance England. Produced in or shortly after 1517, “Elinour Rumming” foregrounds some of the great changes that occurred within popular culture between the two periods. Placed within this context, Skelton’s poem sheds light upon the rich and vital folk traditions that had been effectively suppressed by the end of the seventeenth century. In addition, Bakhtin’s analysis of “carnival” in Rabelais and His World provides a theoretical model for excavating this silenced world. Bakhtin’s insistence that languages constitute concrete so­ cial philosophies “penetrated by a system of values inseparable from living practice and class struggle” (471) helps situate the poem at the nexus of the conflict between the dominant and the popular culture. Like...