Skeltonics: Jonson, Shakespeare, the Literary Past and Imagined Futures

Abstract

ABSTRACTFocusing on King Lear, The Gypsies Metamorphosed and The Fortunate Isles and their Union, this essay explores the uses to which Jonson and Shakespeare put a shared stylistic resource: the archaic verse-form of the Skeltonic, named after and strongly associated with the Tudor poet John Skelton. It argues that the Skeltonic is a point at which questions relating to aesthetics, performance, identity and politics collide, and that Jonson and Shakespeare use it to complicate temporal schema, to establish fresh connections between past and present and to imagine alternative futures. Furthermore, it asserts that exploring the uses of the Skeltonic in the Jonsonian masque and Shakespearean tragedy points to potential ways of liberating current criticism, in which historicist and presentist approaches have often been unhelpfully opposed.