Book Description

John Scattergood's 'The Complete English Poems of John Skelton', originally published in 1983 and long out of print, was the leading academic edition with comprehensive notes. Students are currently limited to searching for Skelton's poems in anthologies. This new edition contains the poems, accompanied by around 150 pages of revised notes. There is an entirely new introduction, covering all developments in Skelton scholarship since the early 1980's, and an updated reading list. Scattergood also reproduces much of the Latin paratexts, considered by readers to be so essential to Skelton - and therefore to scholars of his work. Reviews of previous edition: ''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; and the most important reason why Skelton's reputation [...] does not correspond to the reality of his work is that there has been no complete edition of the authentic text of his poems since that of Alexander Dyce in 1843. [...] Scattergood's is a splendid achievement: it must be the product of many years of learned and intelligent labour, and it is likely to be the standard edition of Skelton for many years to come.' The Cambridge Review '[Skelton] sits in an awkward historical corner beween the regular "middle ages" and the Shakespeare epoch; and is not nearly well-enough known today. Splendid then, to have [...] this new, complete edition of his works with both the original spellings and explanatory notes, indeed the only such edition since 1843.' The Morning Star