Stephen Hawes, when considered at all by literary critics, is generally studied as a foil to Skelton.1 Hawes's period of activity at the early Tudor court between around 1503 and 1511 coincides with Skelton's removal to Diss, and there are other ways too in which one poet can be seen almost as the inverted image of the other. Each draws upon the forms and idiom of Chaucer and his poetic successors, especially Lydgate; they differ, however, in their rehabilitation of tradition to the new technologies, learning, and shifting systems of patronage affecting theories and practices of textual production and literary authority in early Tudor England. Where Skelton has been seen as intelligently alive to the ‘conflicting energies embodied in his work’, even the most generous assessments of Hawes judge him rather as ‘a “potential poet”, one whose conceptions are not generally matched by his execution’, and who remained ‘resolutely parochial at a time when more astute and gifted writers were already sniffing the winds of change’.

Five of Hawes's poems survive: the short Conuercyon of Swerers (written before or in April 1509), comprising an attack on the blaspheming stereotypical of the court; A Ioyfull Medytacyon (c.June 1509), written in celebration of the coronation of King Henry VIII; two dream visions, The Example of Vertu (1503/04) and The Conforte of Louers (1510/11); and his longest work, The Pastime of Pleasure (1505/06), which also has affinities to the dream vision but combines a diversity of genres and themes.

Hawes cannot boast the poetic ingenuity of Skelton, the virtuosity of Dunbar, nor, as will be seen, the humanist ambitions of Douglas. Nevertheless, as a late example of the dream vision utilised for commentary on the poet's art, his poetry provides a valuable insight into ideas of authorship between the 1480s and 1530s. As in Skelton's Bowge of Courte, the veracity of poetic representation is perennially at issue in Hawes's allegories of the court. But unlike Skelton, Hawes insists that poetic fictions do convey pre-existing truths, even if his readers lack the understanding to appreciate them. This chapter investigates Hawes's utilisation of this kind of ‘obscure allegory’ – a circulus in probando whereby the significance of the poet's writings is evidenced by their impenetrability to all but the initiated.