“Come Who So Wyll”: Inclusive Poetics in Skelton’s Elynour Rummynge

Abstract

This essay argues that John Skelton’s Elynour Rummynge responds to the exclusionary Henrician court as well as the xenophobic Evil May Day riots of 1517. Skelton’s poem contrasts this multivalent cultural exclusivity with a laureate poetics that embraces juxtaposition, paradox, cataloguing, and antithesis to stage a vision of the English body politic that recognizes its foreign and despised elements as agents of cultural renewal. The resulting aesthetic grounds itself in an authorial exotopy that generates fresh axiological contexts and images a fecund new form of inclusive community. Skelton’s Bakhtinian hero, the tapster Elynour, embodies historical England’s sixteenth-century cross-cultural encounters, and in her alehouse collects or “tuns” a society of commoners, vagabonds, and oddities that speaks to the actual diversity of the English nation.