The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland 9781442666245

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One. High Courtly Narrative: The Tale of Love
1. The Kingis Quair
2. Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid
3. Gavin Douglas, The Palice of Honour
4. William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois
5. John Rolland, The Court of Venus
Part Two. The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric: A Mode of Clerical Provenance
6. Robert Henryson, Morall Fabillis
7. William Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and Public Court Didactic Verse
8. David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, The Testament of the Papyngo, and Squyer Meldrum
9. The Freiris of Berwik
10. King Hart
Part Three. Romance
11. Fergus
12. Lancelot of the Laik
13. Golagros and Gawane
14. The Taill of Rauf Coilyear
15. Eger and Grime
Part Four. Scots Renaissance: Soundings
16. Mary Queen of Scots
17. King James VI
18. William Alexander, The Monarchicke Tragedies
19. William Drummond of Hawthornden
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE LILY AND THE THISTLE: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland – Essays in Criticism

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WILLIAM CALIN

The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland – Essays in Criticism

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4665-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Calin, William, author The lily and the thistle : the French tradition and the older literature of Scotland : essays in criticism / William Calin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4665-0 (bound) 1. Scottish literature – To 1700 – History and criticism.  2. Scottish literature – To 1700 – French influences.  I. Title. PR8538.C34 2014  820.9'94110902  C2013-907202-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

To Ron Schoeffel In Memoriam

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 Part One  High Courtly Narrative: The Tale of Love  13 1 The Kingis Quair 15 2 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid 28 3 Gavin Douglas, The Palice of Honour 38 4 William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois 53 5 John Rolland, The Court of Venus 66 Part Two  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric: A Mode of Clerical Provenance  83 6 Robert Henryson, Morall Fabillis 85 7 William Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and Public Court Didactic Verse  103 8 David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, The Testament of the Papyngo, and Squyer Meldrum 126

viii Contents

 9 The Freiris of Berwik 157 10 King Hart 167 Part Three  Romance  175 11 Fergus 179 12 Lancelot of the Laik 189 13 Golagros and Gawane 

197

14 The Taill of Rauf Coilyear 205 15 Eger and Grime 212 Part Four  Scots Renaissance: Soundings  221 16 Mary Queen of Scots  225 17 King James VI  236 18 William Alexander, The Monarchicke Tragedies 252 19 William Drummond of Hawthornden  265 Conclusion 295 Notes 303 Bibliography 355 Index 401

Acknowledgments

Some pages in this book are taken from material which appeared originally in Florilegium 24 (2007); Florilegium 25 (2008); Chartier in Europe, ed. Emma Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008); Le Souffle épique, ed. Sylvie Bazin-Tacchella et al. (Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2011); “Moult a sans et vallour,” ed. Monica L. Wright et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012); and “Fresche Fontanis,” ed. Janet Hadley Williams and J. Derrick McClure (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013). These items are not included in the Bibliography. I wish to thank colleagues in Scottish Studies who have graciously offered me encouragement, support, and counsel for this project: Priscilla Bawcutt, Christa Canitz, Sarah Carpenter, Sarah Dunnigan, James Goldstein, Janet Hadley Williams, Ronnie Jack, Rod Lyall, Alasdair MacDonald, Sally Mapstone, Derrick McClure, David Parkinson, Alessandra Petrina, Rhiannon Purdie, and Jamie Reid Baxter. As always, I am grateful to friends in Medieval French and in Studies in Medievalism (plus one Dantista) for their unstinting good wishes and camaraderie: Ron Akehurst, Barbara Altmann, Mary-Jo Arn, Pierre Bec, Philip Bennett, Michelle Bolduc, Gerry Brault, Gene Clasby, George Diller, Elizabeth Emery, Thelma Fenster, Karl Fugelso, Bernard Guidot, Caroline Jewers, Catherine Jones, Sarah Kay, Bill Kibler, Bonnie Krueger, Laurence de Looze, Philippe Ménard, Brian Merrilees, Gwen Morgan, Peter Noble, Bill Paden, Bart Palmer, Wendy Pfeffer, Rupert Pickens, Beth Poe, Vincent Pollina, Gina Psaki, Roy Rosenstein, Mary Jane Schenck, Ian Short, Claire Simmons, Susan Small, Jane Taylor, Robert Taylor, Steven Taylor, Jane Toswell, Richard Utz, Kathleen Verduin, Timmie Vitz, Lori Walters, and Mary Watt.

I am beholden to the anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press; to my senior editor, Suzanne Rancourt; to my copy editor who also made the index, Ruth Pincoe; and to Breanne MacDonald, who read proof. And supreme thanks to my graduate research assistants, Kate Fredericks, who loves Voltaire even more than I do, and Kelly Wiechman, with her radiant humanity.

THE LILY AND THE THISTLE

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Introduction

In 1927 Hugh MacDiarmid, the father of the modern Scots Renaissance, proclaimed: “Not Burns – Dunbar!”1 By this he meant that the most authentic model for a modern resurgence ought not to be associated with Robert Burns – according to general belief, the quintessentially Scottish poet – and his epigones, but instead with the Makars of the later Middle Ages. In 1954 C.S. Lewis opined that the best literature in Great Britain, after Chaucer and prior to Spenser, comes from Scotland. Today the literature of the Makars enjoys something like classical status in Scottish academic circles, and it stands out as a major element in Scottish studies. The quality of scholarship and criticism devoted to the Makars is rivaled only by the work on Chaucer. From 1560 to 1630 occurs a resurgence of writing, centring mostly on the Stewart court, first in Edinburgh and later in London. These are works by authors who cultivate themes and adhere to conventions of the Renaissance much as their predecessors did with the medieval. For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, French was the language of the upper classes in England, the language of the court, international commerce, the law, and, along with Latin, of belles-lettres. Although less pervasive in Scotland, and with Scottish writers coming under a strong English influence, French remained a powerful focus for all literature in the vernacular. Nevertheless, the situation in Scotland needs to be differentiated from the one in England, given that the use of French was less extensive in the North and that the impact on literature came primarily from the Continent and not from Anglo-Norman. This state of affairs continued through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as the Renaissance arrived in Scotland by way of France, Italy, and England, and the Reformation by way of England, France, and

4 Introduction

Switzerland. James VI / I himself was an active writer who translated and adapted from the French. Specialists in Scottish literature were always aware of the French connection. In 1934 Janet M. Smith published a meticulous analysis of the French sources for the medieval period.2 More recently Helena Mennie Shire gave us a sensitive, well-informed study on poetry and music, especially French or from French sources, at the Stewart court.3 In general, however, apart from some illuminating articles,4 scholars have moved in  other directions. John MacQueen oriented the profession towards the  Latin, arguing for the presence of humanism in late medieval and early modern Scotland, and offering powerful Christian readings of ­ texts.5 R.D.S. Jack published two very important books on the contribution of Italian.6 In my opinion, it is now time to reconsider the French. Since Smith’s day a spate of hitherto relatively unknown French texts have received scholarly editions or are now granted an importance denied to them by earlier generations. Since the 1960s the later Middle Ages in French literature has been rediscovered and rehabilitated much as the rediscovery and rehabilitation in Scots. In addition, since the 1930s we have seen new ways of looking at literature, including but not limited to the approaches of the various schools of modern and postmodern criticism. We can now understand and appreciate the highly conventional, mannered, ludic verse of the later Middle Ages, in contrast to earlier generations of scholars who valued only the literature they thought was “sincere” and “original.” This study is meant to be, in some sense of the term, a sequel to The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England.7 It can also be considered an outgrowth from Minority Literatures and Modernism,8 for one preparation for work in Middle Scots by a French scholar is a grounding in twentieth-century Scots, its literature, and the problems it poses. This book can also be thought of as a parallel to, and inspired by, Jack’s synthesis on Italian. This is the case even though my approach is different and the result is significantly less comprehensive than The Italian Influence. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 concerns medieval narrative texts in the high courtly mode, which are often called Chaucerian but which I prefer to designate as tales of love, the equivalent of the French dits amoureux, one of the major genres, perhaps the major genre, in late medieval France. Individual chapters are devoted to The Kingis Quair, The Testament of Cresseid by Robert Henryson, The Palice of Honour by Gavin Douglas, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois by William Dunbar, and The Court of Venus by John Rolland.

Introduction 5

Part 2 treats a series of comic, didactic, and satirical texts which are also works of the court or can appeal to a courtly audience, yet which do not partake of the courtly ethos. They are, instead, ultimately of clerical provenance or, perhaps more accurately, of clerical intent, of a higher intellectual order, sometimes specifically addressing ecclesiastical matters and ­always with a didactic component. Chapters are devoted to Morall Fabillis by Henryson, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and some didactic lyrics by Dunbar, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis plus two verse narratives by David Lyndsay, the fabliau The Freiris of Berwik, and the moral allegory King Hart. The barriers between these two “modes” are porous and by no means mutually exclusive. Dunbar and Douglas, the one in priest’s orders and the other ultimately a bishop, wrote as clerks and also wrote high courtly allegories. They appear in Part 1, and Dunbar, of course, in Part 2. The very secular Lyndsay authored almost exclusively works of a didactic and satirical thrust, so often reformist in intent. Consequently, I include him in Part 2. Part 3 is devoted to Scots romance. The medieval romances composed in Scotland are far less numerous than those in England. As a representative sample, I discuss Lancelot of the Laik, Golagros and Gawane, The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, and Eger and Grime. Here the presence of French romance is important, and also that of the Old French epic. These chapters are preceded by one on Fergus, a romance written in French for a Scottish patron by a certain Guillaume who, it can be posited from internal evidence, had spent time in Scotland and knew the local geography and customs. This would be a Scots equivalent to the texts in Anglo-Norman. Part 4, entitled “Scots Renaissance: Soundings,” contains chapters on Mary Queen of Scots, James VI / I, William Alexander, and William Drummond of Hawthornden. Mary’s poetry is an important corpus composed in French which, because it is in French, until the last ten years or so was neglected by Scottish literary scholars. James was powerfully influenced by French texts and French literary practice, as were Alexander and Drummond. As is obvious from a perusal of the table of contents or of the preceding paragraphs, this study is not meant to be exhaustive. Works left out ­include (with the exception of King James) direct translations, texts by the Makars which have little or no French connections, history whether in verse or in prose, which also has little French connection, chivalric conduct books, and those works where the “Frenchness” has already been thoroughly documented by others. These later texts include The Complaynt of Scotland,

6 Introduction

John Ireland’s Meroure of Wysdome, and Thomas Urquhart’s version of Rabelais. This said, I believe I have “covered” the most important works from the medieval period and can offer an accurate portrayal of the French tradition in Scottish literature. The Renaissance in Scotland, on the other hand, is so rich a topic, with such a vast store of texts, that I could not have explored this domain without years of additional labour: Ars longa, vita brevis. Hence, only the four soundings. I regret having omitted a number of important figures, especially Alexander Montgomerie, who, of all the Renaissance vernacular ­poets, was best known and most appreciated in later centuries. However, his work and the French presence in it have been explored by a number of scholars, most recently, in depth by Roderick J. Lyall.9 It would have been a dereliction of duty not to discuss Mary Stuart’s opus, which is, along with Fergus, the most important material actually written in French in Scotland and, in her case, by “a native Scot.” James, an important author in his own right, introduced the French Renaissance to the North. And Alexander and Drummond each develop French themes, motifs, and forms in very exciting, very “Renaissance” ways. The English connection has been worked on avidly by scholars; their scholarship is exemplary. For this reason, I will, for the most part, not ­refer to the English presence in Scots texts; it is known and fully documented.10 This is but one example of the richness and depth of the work devoted to the older literature of Scotland, scholarship and literary criticism from which I have benefited throughout. On occasion, however, there will be questions where the French critical tradition differs from the Scots, and where the French approach can offer new perspectives on the old books. Although I argue for a number of direct influences and direct textual borrowings that earlier scholars may have missed, rather than the microanalysis of Scottish texts and their French sources, I am concerned primarily with broader issues of genre, mode, structure, and style in the hope of situating the Scottish books in an enlarged intertextual frame of reference. Like my other works, this one combines the reading of texts (practical criticism) with theoretical and cultural considerations that I hope will enrich the contents of a scholarly monograph. The reader will notice pieces of Freudian criticism and also other approaches, for example Jungian, gender-related, reader-response, aesthetics of reception, and intertextuality; I try to have the text choose the approach, and not the other way around. I seek to rehabilitate authors and books that have been relatively neglected, whether in the French domain (Eustache Deschamps, the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, Pierre Gringore) or in the Scottish domain (John

Introduction 7

Rolland’s The Court of Venus, William Alexander’s Monarchicke Tragedies). The entire early modern period in Scotland is not as well known in English departments as it deserves to be. The same is true for much of late-­ medieval French in Romance departments. There are also wider implications. In accord with the current trend in Scottish studies towards the international – Scotland in its international contextualization – I propose that so much of traditional, medieval and early modern Scottish culture, which a number of previous scholars thought was native to Scotland or came primarily from England, is strikingly international and European, and that the international, European-oriented Scotland of Adam Smith and David Hume, and for that matter of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, was preceded brilliantly in the earlier times. Comparative studies can still make contributions to our overall comprehension of a national tradition and of the historical functioning of literature in that tradition. They can also help enrich our knowledge of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and guide us to what they can mean for our culture today. A Note on Language Scots Scots is the vernacular tongue of the Scottish Lowlands. Functioning today, it has been described as “a language continuum ranging from Broad Scots to Scottish Standard English.”11 For many scholars, Scots is an independent Anglic or Anglo-Saxon language, distinct from, though related to, English. Other scholars deny this formulation outright, pointing to Scots as a sliding linguistic scale by no means divorced from standard English, which is itself far from being a fixed universal entity – today and also, mutatis mutandi, in the Middle Ages when they were two sliding scales. Six centuries ago the king’s Scots in Edinburgh was the equivalent of the king’s English in London. Justification for considering Scots to be an independent language is supported by a number of arguments: Scots has a distinctive phonology, morphology, grammar, and lexicon; it enjoys an unbroken tradition of literature from the Middle Ages to the present; in the distant past and in our present it comprises dialects of its own; it is codified more than would be the case for a dialect; and it is officially recognized as a language – under the category of languages of lesser currency or lesser used languages (“langues moins répandues”), that is, minority languages – by the European Union.12 Since the 1970s a rich fund of

8 Introduction

scholarship has been devoted to the history of Scots and to the language today. This follows upon the twentieth-century Scottish Renaissance, the literary movement launched by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s, which gave rise to a copious production in Scots and in English which persists into the twenty-first century. Scots evolved from the Northumbrian variety of Anglo-Saxon – Northumbrian English. After the Norman Conquest, and especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, David I and his successors attracted a French-speaking baronry and clergy, largely from northern England, with their retainers and associates. The newcomers also spoke English. Thus, French and “Inglis” spread into Scotland, and the Gaidhealtachd shrank. In time, Northumbrian “Inglis” became the lingua franca of society as a whole. Towards the end of the fourteenth century began the flowering of literature in Scots, which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries functioned as a high court language, used for all purposes and by all social classes, and with an extraordinary range of expression: nine modes or registers, according to the now classic study by A.J. Aitken.13 Nor was the cultivation of the vernacular limited to “literature”: written Scots prose served as the vehicle for the records of state and of the church, for account books, private correspondence, and also for serious moral didactic treatises and the writing of history. In 1498 the diplomat Pedro de Ayala wrote that the differences between English and Scots are comparable to those between Castilian and Aragonese, the languages that today we call Spanish and Catalan. At the same time (1494) Adam Loutfut became the first to distinguish Scottis from Inglis in writing. Gavin Douglas makes the distinction in 1513, and James VI does the same in 1584. Note, however, that Dunbar calls his language Inglis, and that the distinction between Scots and English is valid for the speech and writing of the courts in Edinburgh and London; elsewhere we find wide varieties of English and Scots, and, in Scotland, the continued presence of Gaelic. It is ironic that, well before the Scots apogée as a recognized language of high culture to be distinguished from English, the process of Anglicization begins, at first only in writing. Scholars have identified the historical phenomena that contributed to Anglicization: the Protestant Reformation, which, because there was no translation of the Bible into Scots, used the English “Geneva Bible” of 1561; English printers in Edinburgh or in London who, for publication, Anglicized texts originally in Scots, either of their own volition or in conformity to the wishes of writers who sought a wider readership, the literate public of the entire British Isles; regular cultural interchange between England and Scotland, with Scottish books

Introduction 9

sometimes published first in London; and, finally, the Union of the Crowns in 1603, which meant that the court and all that it represented as a centre of culture was now to be in London, and its language would be English. As a result there are a number of texts written first in Scots, which are then Anglicized for publication, and, finally, writers such as William Drummond who, dwelling in Scotland, composed their entire corpus in the tongue of England. The similarities between the historical evolution of Scots in its connection to English and the evolution of Occitan (Provençal) in its connection to French are striking. In both cases what was to become a minority / ­regional language enjoyed a splendour of literary accomplishment in the Middle Ages, to be followed by periods of decline with, however, bursts of renewal including a twentieth-century renascence centred on reviving and revitalizing the language and its literature in the present, for the sake of the future, and always grounded in a usable past. French Much is known, and much scholarship has been devoted to, AngloNorman, also called Anglo-French and, most recently, the French of England. One relatively recent breakthrough states that French never became a lingua franca in medieval England and that the English masses remained largely monolingual. According to this thesis, the nobles and the high clergy, originally French-speaking, soon became bilingual, and, by the thirteenth century or perhaps as early as the end of the twelfth, French became, even for the nobility, an acquired language not used in everyday life. This said, French remained, like Latin, a high-prestige language, existing in a diglossic relationship to English, dominant in literature, the schools, the court, the law, administration, commerce, and the cloister, whereas English prevailed in the home, in the tavern, on the road, and on the farm – that is, everywhere outside the towns. And French remained, until ca. 1350, the principal medium for a rich vernacular literature, both sacred and secular, even making generic inventions or discoveries before the Continent did.14 Much less work has been done on French in Scotland largely because there is so much less evidence of its presence. French and “Inglis” spread into Scotland with the nobles who were given grants of land from David I and his successors, and with the clergy attracted to newly founded abbeys and monasteries. French would have functioned in a way similar to AngloNorman in the South – spoken in the public sphere by magnates and the

10 Introduction

clergy and recognized as the language of war, chivalry, and high culture. However, French did not give rise to a vital, productive literature. There is  very little in “Scotto-Norman” comparable to the riches of AngloNorman. When, in 1424, Scots became the language of record for Acts of Parliament, it replaced Latin, not French. French did not function as the ordinary language of the courts or of estate management. G.W.S. Barrow notes: “it is significant that the text of the treaty of Bingham (1290) sealed by the Scots guardians and intended to be kept by Edward I of England was in French, while the copy sealed by King Edward to be kept by the Scots was in Latin.”15 When Froissart praises King David II for his fluency in French, he states that it is because he spent his youth in France. French does appear occasionally in formal documents from the late thirteenth century onwards and, more so, in private correspondence. Whatever the comparisons with the situation in England, in Scotland French maintained its status as a language of culture well beyond 1350, and a command of it was especially important for those who travelled abroad. Examples come from David Lyndsay’s letter to Thomas Erskine from Brussels in 1531, where, as Janet Hadley Williams comments, Lyndsay would normally use French, orally and in writing, at the Hapsburgh court;16 and from Thomas Ker of Redden’s memorandum of his travels in the Low Countries in 1620, written in French. John J. McGavin comments that Ker would have been heavily schooled in French, the common language of exchange in Northern Europe, probably spoken by Ker in most of his encounters.17 We know that David Lyndsay, along with James Foulis and Adam Otterburn, composed a French oration, delivered by Henry Lauder, for the entry into Edinburgh of Marie de Lorraine, James V’s queen. Helena Shire has explored how song and dance, in the French style, had a social function at the Stewart courts. Most books, in Latin and other languages, were imported from the Continent – that is, largely from France. Scots connected with the law and government service often studied in France – in Paris, Orleans, and Bourges. And, because of the Auld Alliance, young men served in the Scots Guards; some made illustrious careers in France and in Scotland. What was written originally in French? The Roman de Fergus and Mary Queen of Scots’ poetry are the two most important works of literature which can be included in a Scottish corpus. I do so while recognizing that the author of the Fergus, a certain Guillaume, may well be an AngloNorman (a Scotto-Norman?) or even a Continental French-speaker, and that Mary Stuart spent her most important years in France and was more fluent in French than in her native Scots. The action of Froissart’s

Introduction 11

Meliador, sometimes called the last French verse romance, is situated largely in Scotland – in a mythical Scotland with few ties to reality, and Froissart had only the most perfunctory acquaintance with the kingdom. Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica, a chronicle of the history of Britain, including Scotland, was begun (ca. 1360) while the author was a prisoner in ­Edinburgh; however, he is an Anglo-Norman from the north of England. Mark Alexander Boyd composed Discours civiles sur le Royaume d’Écosse, and Alexander Scott translated into French the Oraisons de Cicéron in two volumes. A Vraie Cronicque d’Escoce was written for diplomatic negotiations; Kathleen Daly attributes it to John Ireland. It is, nevertheless, ­significant that Scotland’s literary reputation abroad, in both the Middle Ages and the early modern period, was for writing in Latin, for which Scots were famous and justifiably so. From a linguistic perspective, French had an enormous impact on the Scots language, comparable to its impact on English. In English are to be found the loss of inflections and of grammatical gender, compensated by a relatively fixed word order, and also idioms and syntactical innovations that are the result of contact with French; and the auxiliaries, pronouns, conjugations, and prepositions of Germanic origin now function in the English sentence in a French manner. John Orr lists the areas he ascribes to French influence: formal and semantic fusion, homonymic and paronymic perturbations, affinities and innovations of structure, syntactical affinities and / or innovations, parallels in phraseology and semantics, and proverbs and proverbial sayings.18 These would be caused by, or be the effect of, accelerated drift due to linguistic (French) interference, the acceleration of “natural” evolution in the language caused by the presence of French and the absence, for three centuries, of a central or aristocratic class that could have slowed the evolution. The same would be roughly the case for Scots, originally a variety of Northumbrian English, with, directly or indirectly, the same causes. As was the case with English, the Scots lexicon was enriched by loan words from other languages. The Scandinavian and the Dutch lexicons helped shape the Lowlands vernacular. As with English, however, the greatest quantity of foreign terminology, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, came from French. C.I. Macafee states that the percentage of words of French origin – of French loan words – is significantly greater in Scots than in English.19 A certain number of terms to be found both in Middle Scots and Middle English disappeared from English while remaining in the Scots lexicon to the present day. Examples are ashet, aumrie, causey, cowp, cummer, douce, gean, groset, houlet, jigot, leal, mavis, stunk,

12 Introduction

and tass(ie). Others came into Scots while there is no trace of them in English at all or the English was borrowed from the Scots. Examples ­include affeir, aippleringie, bajan, Bon Accord, bonallie, caddie, dams, ­disjune, dote, fash, fiar, gardyloo, hogmanay, howtowdie, jalouse, purpie, rew, spairge, sussy, sybie, vaig, vennel, vivers, and, as coins, hardhead and turner. Writers used the foreign lexicon in a number of ingenious ways in order to create special literary effects. Jeremy J. Smith notes the presence of some nineteen words derived from French in the first two stanzas of Henryson’s fable The Preaching of the Swallow.20 The Gallicisms signal a philosophical discourse and high-status expression, much as they would today. The audience would be aware of Henryson’s procedure – that he was partaking of a particular register for a particular purpose. The same is true for aureate discourse in the highest register. Here there is a problem whether the aureate terminology is borrowed from Latin or French. The standard view is stated cogently by Bengt Ellenberger in his study on the Latin element in Henryson and Dunbar: “a latinism is a lexical item of Latin origin that – whether borrowed directly or through French – betrays no sign of Gallo-Roman or Old French sound changes in its base, and so can be immediately related to its Latin counterpart.”21 This approach, eminently valid on its own terms, risks distorting the French ­impact. Words such as preclair, matutine, celicall, palestrall, celsitude, pul­ chritude, supern, and lucern, whether or not the base has evolved in terms of phonology, are to be found in Burgundian and Central French one or two centuries before their first appearance in Scots. Learned borrowings from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance do not evolve as in the earlier lexicon – because they are learned and derived from Latin. Given the prestige of the Burgundian “rhetorical” style, not only may the borrowing have come through French; it was probably recognized to be high French as well as high Latin.

PART ONE High Courtly Narrative: The Tale of Love

Although less pervasive in Scotland than in England, with major Scottish writing coming under a strong English influence, French maintained its presence and its seminal impact on literature in the Scots vernacular through both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.1 This is especially true for what is, arguably, the most important single genre in late-medieval Scotland, high courtly narrative, what C.S. Lewis called the allegory of love.2 Late-medieval Scottish poetry can benefit from renewed scrutiny in the light of the analogous French tradition of the dit amoureux (tale of love). Because Lewis limited his perusal of French books to Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot and the Roman de la Rose, and because late-medieval literature was neglected, even downgraded, in French studies, it is only over the last forty years or so that the French contemporaries of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate have received the attention they deserve. We are now aware of a line of narrative which extends from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century and which includes, among the major figures, Guillaume de Lorris, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, the authors of the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, René d’Anjou, several of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, and Jean Lemaire de Belges. The dit amoureux can be defined roughly as a courtly narrative treating of love and the psychology of lovers, most often containing allegorical personifications as characters in the plot and most often narrated in the first person by a speaker who acts as either the amorous protagonist or as a witness to the doings of the amorous protagonist. It is significant that the dit amoureux, which had so strong an impact on Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, proved to be one of the genres most congenial to the Scots Makars and their public. The Makars, like their counterparts in England, were aware of and totally up to date concerning

14  High Courtly Narrative

the dominant literary modes and production in the French-speaking lands. In this section I hope to go beyond the Chaucerian legacy, important as it is, in order to situate Scottish books in the larger intertextual context, which is international and European. The major tales of love in the grand manner in Scots are The Kingis Quair, attributed to James Stewart (King James I), The Testament of Cresseid by Robert Henryson, The Palice of Honour by Gavin Douglas, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois by William Dunbar, and, I wish to add, The Court of Venus by John Rolland. These tales are admirable test cases demonstrating how greater attention to the French can help situate these great Scottish texts in their cultural milieus, and also help account for their extraordinary complexity and maturity as works of art.

1 The Kingis Quair

The Kingis Quair, attributed to King James I, was written relatively early in the fifteenth century, either in late 1423–4 or, according to Matthew P. McDiarmid, between 1428 and 1437, more likely in 1435.1 It is the first of a number of Scottish texts that partake of that medieval mode of high courtly narrative, Lewis’s allegory of love, what, in French studies, we now call the dit amoureux or tale of love. A number of scholars have explored James’s debt to Chaucer, Lydgate, and to a lesser extent Gower and Hoccleve; their studies are so meticulous and so exhaustive that the uninformed reader could arrive at the conclusion that the English books plus Boethius are, for all intents and purposes, the sources of The Kingis Quair.2 I wish to cast a wider net and look at the French analogues, which James would have known and which will enrich our understanding of his poem. The Quair narrator recounts a night of insomnia during which he reads Boethius and decides to write his own life experience. He tells of a sea voyage and of being taken prisoner when he was only a youth. While in prison, he delivers a Boethian complaint and then looks out the window and beholds a lovely garden with bird song, especially the song of a nightingale. Then enters a lady of quasi-divine beauty. The narrator prays to Venus and addresses the lady’s little dog and the birds. After the lady departs, the narrator delivers a second complaint. He then experiences a dream vision and is wafted up to Venus. Venus delivers wise counsel and provides the narrator with Gude Hope, who conducts him to Minerva, who delivers more wise counsel. Gude Hope then takes the narrator to Dame Fortune, who, after having lodged him on her wheel, yanks him by the ear, upon which he awakens. As a sign that the dream is authentic, a turtle dove brings him a red flower on a green stalk with a message written

16  High Courtly Narrative

in gold: Wake up, sing, and laugh! The narrator proclaims that Fortune gave him freedom and the lady. The themes, motifs, and doctrine in the Quair follow closely upon those found in the French love allegories of the time. Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart are the leading French poets of the dit amoureux in the fourteenth century; their impact on Chaucer is enormous.3 Three of Machaut’s narrative texts – Remede de Fortune, La Fonteinne amoureuse, and Le Confort d’Ami – are pertinent here.4 In Remede de Fortune the unhappy amorous narrator flees to a beautiful garden where, after a long Boethian complaint against Fortune, he is comforted by a female authority figure, Esperence, also called Bon Espoir. She offers him counsel on love. He returns to the court and to the lady. Machaut’s Bon Espoir and James’s Venus and Minerva, seconded by Gude Hope, preach the same doctrine: a good lover must be patient and must moderate his desires with regard to the lady. Machaut’s souffissance is echoed by James’s sufficiance: Dont cils qui vit de si douce pasture Vie d’onneur puet bien et doit mener, Car de tous biens a a comble mesure, Plus qu’autres cuers ne saroit desirer, Ne d’autre merci rouver N’a desir, cuer, ne bëance, Pour ce qu’il a souffissance; Et je ne say nommer ci Nulle autre merci. Garde que Raisons te maistrie Et qu’aies en toy pacience Et la vertu de souffissance. Eke quho may in this lyfe haue more plesance Than cum to largesse from thraldom and peyne, And by the mene of luffis ordinance, That has so mony in his goldin cheyne Quhich thinkis to wyn his hertis souereyne? Quho suld me wite to write thar-of, lat se? Now sufficiance is my felicitee.

(Remede 2003–11)

(Remede 2486–8; also 2773–8)

(Quair st. 183)

Esperence informs the Machaut narrator that Souffissance (plus Pacience) lead to Bonneürté:

The Kingis Quair 17 Les deus precieuses vertus Que je t’ay nommé ci dessus: L’une est Souffissance la belle, L’autre est Pacience, s’encelle. … Eins mettent l’omme a seürté En chemin de Bonneürté.

(Remede 2775–8, 2785–6)

Earlier she tells him of the closeness of bonneürté and felicité, and that, as gifts, so to speak, of Nature and Reason, they are not subject to Fortune: La bonneürté souvereinne Et la felicité certeinne Sont souverein bien de Nature Qui use de Raison la pure; Et tels biens, on ne les puet perdre … Si que je te moustre en appert Que Fortune n’a riens seür, Felicité ne boneür.

(Remede 2467–71, 2476–8)

Machaut’s bonneürté and felicité are the precise equivalent of James’s fe­ licitee and plesance, just as his joie (2806) corresponds to the Scots blisse (st. 181) and joy (st. 182, 188). This happiness means that the lover will joy in his lady’s love even if sexual possession is forever denied him. Both Machaut and James denounce false, deceitful lovers who expect too much: Et qui vorroit plus souhaidier, Je n’os cuidier Si fol cuidier Que cils aimme de cuer entier Qui de tels biens n’a souffisance; Car qui plus quiert, il vuet trichier, S’Amours tant chier L’a que fichier Deingne par l’ueil de son archier En son cuer d’eaus la congnoissance. Bot there be mony of so brukill sort, That feynis treuth in lufe bot for a quhile, And setten all thaire wittis and disport The sely innocent woman to begyle, And so to wynne thaire lustis with a wile.

(Remede 459–68)

18  High Courtly Narrative Suich feynit treuth is all bot trechorye, Vnder the vmbre of ypocrisye.

(Quair st. 134)

All this is an extension of the Boethian response to earthly vicissitude, applied uniquely to the erotic domain. James follows Machaut closely, agreeing that sufficiance brings happiness; however, he takes the doctrine one step further by implying that, because he loves wisely, he wins the lady in the end: And schortly, so wele Fortune has his bore To quikin treuly day by day my lore, To my larges that I am cumin agayn, To blisse with hir that is my souirane. … And eke the goddis mercifull virking, For my long pane and trewe seruice in lufe, That has me gevin halë myn asking, Quhich has my hert for-euir sett abufe In perfyte joy, that neuir may remufe Bot onely deth.

(Quair st. 181, 188)

Whereas Esperence offers the Machaut narrator a remedy against Fortune, the James narrator proclaims that Fortune helped him attain his ends. His blisse and joy appear to be more solid and more lasting than the Machaut narrator’s. This said, Machaut’s and James’s narrators both overcome a problem of communication with their respective beloveds, they are educated by female authority figures, they grow in the course of the experience, they deliver long plaintes against Fortune, and they are comforted by or through the assistance of Esperence / Bon Espoir and Gude Hope. At the centre of their love experience is a beautiful garden, a locus amoenus and image of the feminine. In Machaut the narrator composes a number of lyrics; he is a poet as well as a lover, and one theme of the Remede is the writing of poetry. Similarly, the Quair narrator provides a lyric text to the songs of the nightingale: “And to the notis of the philomene / Quhilkis sche sang, the ditee there I maid” (st. 62); one theme of the book is how it came into being. Finally, the Machaut dream is authenticated by Esperence placing a  ring on the narrator’s finger, just as the dove brings authentication in James’s text. Since one may nowadays think of the Machaldian first-­person narrative as poetic pseudo-autobiography, The Kingis Quair adheres to the same subgenre.

The Kingis Quair 19

In La Fonteinne amoureuse the narrator functions as observer and witness to the love experience of another, one whom we can designate as the prince. The prince, who is to be separated from his lady, delivers a long complaint at night in his chamber. The next day the prince and the nar­ rator have a dream vision in which Venus and the lady bring comfort and consolation. The prince can be identified as Jean duc de Berry, who, upon the liberation of his father, King Jean le Bon, who was taken prisoner at the battle of Poitiers, crossed the Channel to pledge himself in Jean’s stead. His situation, crossing the sea to become a prisoner of the English, corresponds closely to that of James Stewart in The Kingis Quair. Like the Quair narrator, the prince is in love and in despair over his separation from the lady and his inability to communicate with her. At the beginning the prince delivers his complaint isolated in a room, alluding to a prison and stating that he is already in confinement, and specifically, that his heart is held in his lady’s prison: C’est ma dame qui tient en sa prison Mon loial cuer; a trop bonne occoison Y devint siens maugré li; c’est raison Qu’il oubeïsse Et qu’il y soit en tele entencion Que mis jamais n’i soit a raënçon Et qu’il y muire ou qu’il ait guerredon Qui le garisse.

(Fonteinne 827–34)

Although in the end he will go into prison, in the meantime he is comforted in a lovely garden by two anima-figures who teach him and give him counsel. Venus’s advice is once again to love deeply and purely, to remain chaste, and to endure what Fortune does to him. The dream vision brings comfort and learning; also, as an authenticating device, the prince and the lady exchange rings. In this circular structure – the circularity underscored by the imagery of the fountain – the prince goes from prison to freedom to prison, much like the Quair narrator. In addition, both the Quair and the Fonteinne narrators are lyric poets, and, as in the Remede, the narrative relates how their poetry came into being. No less significant is the fact that, whereas in Remede de Fortune the lovelorn suitor is a textual self, a poet-lover and clerkly narrator to be partially identified with the historical figure Guillaume de Machaut, in La Fonteinne amoureuse the two entities are separated. The clerkly narrator,

20  High Courtly Narrative

famous for his poetry, is obviously a displacement of Machaut, the implied author. He is the narrator as observer or witness, not the protagonist of his story. The protagonist, the lover-figure, is now a prince. The Machaldian prince, to be identified as Jean, duc de Berry, resembles the Scottish prince, to be identified as James Stewart, soon to be crowned King of Scots. Both are sons of kings. One was crowned, the other could have been. Both poets generate sympathy and empathy for that most tragic of figures, the prince in love, forced into exile and imprisoned, his love and his freedom thwarted by fate and Fortune. Thus, James conflates, as it were, the princely protagonist and the faithful friend and adviser, returning to the original structure of the dit amoureux in Guillaume de Lorris: the lover-narrator who tells his own story. And because he is a prince, James deletes or ­ignores the comic elements in the narrator when he is only a clerkly author-figure. Finally, Le Confort d’Ami is a largely didactic work: the addressee is Jean le Mauvais, King of Navarre, who was held prisoner by King Jean le Bon of France from 1354 to 1356. In other words, Machaut is advising and comforting a royal prisoner. It is presumed that Friend is in love, and his amatory situation is alluded to from time to time. Although Friend is separated from his lady, he should think of her fondly with Douce Pensee born from Souvenir: Je t’ai dit que Douce Pensee Est de Souvenir engendree, Dont toutes les fois qu’il avient Que de ta dame te souvient.

(Confort 2153–6)

The locus amoenus imagery of the garden is evoked by the stories of Susanna and the Elders and of Proserpine and Pluto. In what is primarily a moral, didactic poem, the speaker discourses at length on Fortune and on the necessity for Friend to remain loyal to Esperence. He also explores how a prince can practice the virtues – can be virtuous – and can also regain happiness and good fortune in the world. This Boethian thematic, in its political dimension and its relation to statecraft, is thought by recent scholars to be a central element in The Kingis Quair.5 Several of Froissart’s narrative poems relate in similar ways to the Scottish books.6 In Le Paradis d’Amour, Froissart’s first love allegory, while in a lovely garden embellished with singing nightingales, the narrator complains, dreams, and is wafted to the seat of Amour. Plaisance and Esperance offer comfort: the narrator will win his lady’s love but must,

The Kingis Quair 21

under no circumstances, manifest haste or presumption and must never expect sexual favours – Machaut’s Boethian doctrine in Remede de Fortune. The doctrine of souffissance and the goal of consolation and comfort carry over to Froissart’s other tales of love, including Le Bleu Chevalier. Le Dit dou Bleu Chevalier is based on Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse. Like Machaut’s prince, Froissart’s protagonist, perhaps to be identified as Louis, duc d’Anjou, is a French hostage held prisoner in England. The narrator ministers to the Blue Knight in a garden with nightingales. The knight suffers from claustration and from separation from his lady; held in a tower, he can neither see nor converse with her. The knight is urged to love and be loyal to his lady. That is all, and that should suffice. In the extended narrative of L’Espinette amoureuse, the narrator is comforted by Venus, who takes him to be her vassal. Alone, enclosed in his room, he delivers a long complaint. In a dream the lady’s voice gives comfort. He travels over the sea to England. Love and the lady have taught him much, beginning when he was very young. More interesting, no doubt, is La Prison amoureuse, which tells the story of two lovers who are also poets: Rose and Flos, that is, the prisoner and the narrator. The narrator offers his homage and fealty to Love, just as James’s narrator does: Et pour ce que tant vault services, Que tenus je ne soie a nices, Je voel servir de franc voloir Celi qui tant me poet valoir, A cui j’ai fait de liet corage Seüreté, foi et hommage: Amours, mon signeur et mon mestre.

(Prison 21–7)

Than wold I pray his blisfull grace benigne To hable me vnto his service digne, And euermore for to be one of tho Him trewly for to serue in wele and wo.

(Quair st. 39)

Rose is to be identified as Duke Wenceslas of Brabant, who was taken prisoner at the battle of Baesweiter in 1371. The imprisoned Rose is in love, and his lady is unaware of his predicament. Rose sends her a complaint. Flos reassures his friend that he will be helped by personages that include Esperance. Flos offers an allegorical interpretation of Rose’s captivity, the prison being the situation of the lover suffering from jealousy or

22  High Courtly Narrative

his beloved’s refusal. Rose’s cell is called the “cambre … amoureuse li bien celee” (Prison 3289–90): di ensi que vous sejournés et demorés en prison, car coers jolis et amoureus, qui aimme en le fourme et maniere comme vous fetes, ne poet vivre ne resgner sans estre emprisonnés … de quoi tel vie doit estre appellee amoureuse et prisons ossi. (Prison Letter 12, p. 171)

Finally, La Prison amoureuse recounts how, as a book, it came into being: the lady was so pleased with the embedded lyrics and correspondence that she urged them to be put together. This text recounts the interactions between Flos and Rose, that is, between the clerkly poet of love and the imprisoned prince, who becomes a poet of love. Both are enamored of their respective ladies. Froissart, like Machaut, develops the theme of Horatian friendship between noble ­patron and clerkly poet. The very title – La Prison amoureuse – could have given James the idea for his poem of amorous incarceration, especially since Froissart spells out the symbolism latent in the Scottish text. For, beyond the four walls of a jail cell, the true devotee of fin’ amor lives a life of imprisonment to love, his lady, and the gods and goddesses of love, yet, and most importantly, his is a good captivity, a captivity that the true lover must embrace with steadfastness and joy. Finally, Le Joli Buisson de Jonece tells how an older narrator remembers his earlier life and tells of it and the circumstances surrounding his re­ membrance. Nature and Philozophie come to him and urge him to write. During a long winter night he dreams of an encounter with Venus, who urges the narrator to leave his room and to listen to the song of the nightingale. In the end, after a complex and convoluted story, on the road to Amour, he is pushed, and he awakes. Although Froissart constructs a rich, complex, and indeed convoluted narrative structure, so different from James’s relatively stark pattern, he and James tell a similar tale: a narrator reflects on what happened to him in the past; he learns of true love from Nature and Venus; he communes with a nightingale; and he becomes (James), or becomes again (Froissart), a writer. Very little in The Kingis Quair can be traced to the works of Christine de Pizan.7 James’s near contemporary, she took the dit amoureux in a different direction, and it is possible that James was unacquainted with her texts. However, in Le Livre du Debat de deux amans one speaker points out that good love should always remain happy even when the lover is (physically or allegorically) imprisoned; he should always seek comfort in

The Kingis Quair 23

Bonne Esperance and Doux Penser. And in Le Livre du Dit de Poissy one of the unhappy ladies is separated from her lover, who was taken prisoner after the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. Finally, the lady’s little dog, praised and spoken to by the Quair narrator, recalls the lady’s chien­ net in Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, who brings about communication between the witness narrator and the debating lover and lady. Thus, almost all the motifs to be found in The Kingis Quair appeared earlier in the French dit amoureux. These motifs – insomnia, reading a book, a sea voyage, being taken prisoner, a Boethian complaint, the locus amoenus, singing birds and the nightingale, the lovely lady, the lapdog, the prayer to Venus, ancient myth, the dream vision, being wafted on high, female authority-figures, vassaldom to one of them, Venus, Fortune and her wheel, advice and comfort, the Boethian lesson of sufficiance, being suddenly awakened, the authenticating device, writing the book, and a circular structure – permeate the works of Machaut and Froissart, and some of them can also be traced to Guillaume de Lorris, whose Roman de la Rose is the first major allegory of love, and to Christine de Pizan. Above all, the French books offer what Chaucer does not – tales of love narrated in the first person, in which the I-narrator is the protagonist and the lover, and the diegesis concerns his fortunes and misfortunes in love – the same as in The Kingis Quair. Which French poems would have influenced James Stewart? Perhaps Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, with the Boethian nexus, comfort from Esperence, and the doctrine of souffissance; perhaps also La Fonteinne amoureuse, with the prince to be imprisoned and yet comforted by Venus, and Froissart’s Prison amoureuse, which tells of a noble duke in love and his real and metaphorical prison of love. James could also have been acquainted with some of the other tales of love. During his stay in England, and to a lesser extent in Edinburgh, he would have had the same access to contemporary French books that Chaucer and Gower had. James also spent time in France, twice crossing the Channel at the behest of King Henry V. In addition, in 1416 James and Charles d’Orléans were prisoners in the Tower of London; they perhaps met and talked, and in the course of their conversations, Charles could have spoken of the French allegories. We know the extent to which The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women are permeated with French themes and motifs, and that the three Chaucerian works bear witness to the overriding presence of Machaut, Froissart, and Le Roman de la Rose.8 The same is true for The Kingis Quair. Many of the themes and motifs could have come to James filtered through Chaucer. No doubt

24  High Courtly Narrative

many did, but far from all of them. Especially not the overall structure: the I-narrative where the narrator recounts his own story as a lover, including the adoration of the unreachable lady, the experience in a garden or a prison, the dream vision, the message (fin’ amor) from supreme ­donors of the wisdom which he acquires and which makes him a better man. Thus, the first book of high courtliness in Scottish literature, like Chaucer’s texts, comes at the beginning of a national, insular tradition, but well along in the international Continental context. Part of its success can be attributed to the belatedness, to the intertextual richness and ripeness of a work so totally grounded in the conventions, themes, and motifs of Continental provenance. Can the French books help to interpret James Stewart’s book? First of all, there is no inherent conflict between reading the Quair as “reality” (that is, as James’s personal story) and seeing the Quair as a more general, “universal” allegory of love. La Fonteinne amoureuse, Le Confort d’Ami, La Prison amoureuse, and perhaps Le Bleu Chevalier, all universal tales of love, are directed to and speak of a single, specific prisoner in his concrete historical existence, a duke or prince held captive. It is probable that the medieval public would have identified the Quair narrator as the man who became King James I of Scotland. Again, although the text contains no direct allusion to marriage, and although the pure, good, and faithful love in Machaut and Froissart is in no way directed towards or expected to end in marriage, the medieval audience, having recognized the protagonist to be James, could then presume the lady to be the Joan Beaufort whom James indeed wed and who became his queen. To the extent that The Kingis Quair treats the question of kingship and the attainment of political wisdom as well as wisdom in matters of the heart, it can also be read as James’s personal claim to having mastered the prudence, steadfastness, and self-reliance necessary to being a successful monarch. The medievals were as eager to find “reality” in their texts as are their twentieth- and twentyfirst-century descendants. This said, the conventionality and the styl­ ization of the Quair are such that the narrator’s story can be designated pseudo-autobiography, just like the works of Machaut and Froissart in which the I-narrator is also the protagonist. Therefore, one need have no hesitation at reading James’s prison as the sign and symbol of his captivity at the English court but also as an allegory for the prison of love, for the sudden absence of freedom and loss of self felt by a courtly lover when he falls in love. That is how scholars read Froissart’s Prison amoureuse; the same is true for The Kingis Quair.

The Kingis Quair 25

Do I have the right to designate as a “courtly lover” the protagonist of a story who weds his beloved, whom he had presumably loved chastely prior to the happy ending? A few scholars insist that, because courtly love is grounded in adultery, it is either condemned or surpassed or simply not manifest in The Kingis Quair.9 Lewis even states that because of the marriage James’s Quair is the first modern book of love. In my opinion, these critics are in error. The error can be traced to Lewis’s own The Allegory of Love, which lists the four constituant traits of courtly love, one of which is adultery.10 Some of the more recent Quair scholars base their knowledge of the convention on Lewis. The Allegory of Love is one of the great books on the Middle Ages; it also dates from 1936. At a time when Robertsonian exegesis declared that there is no such thing as courtly love or that sexual desire unredeemed by caritas is always condemned in medieval books, apologists for Lewis conceded that they would have to disavow much of The Allegory of Love. Today, it is the extreme Robertsonian formulations that have been rejected, whereas Lewis’s book remains. Today, most French medievalists would say that fin’ amor existed then and was as important as Lewis says it was – hence the resounding success, over the decades, of the scholarly group named The International Courtly Literature Society. It is also true, however, that scholars in medieval French studies have for the most part substituted “obstacle” for adultery in the erotic literary convention called fin’ amor. Obstacle would be perhaps the necessary element in fin’ amor. In addition, long before 1432 French books, including the Erec and the Yvain by Chrétien de Troyes, were exploring the problematic relations between fin’ amor and marriage. And so many romances of fin’ amor end in marriage and have a happy ending. Therefore, I can posit deep, pure love, obstacle, and a happy ending in The Kingis Quair – in other words, that James wrote a dit amoureux of fin’ amor that the audience may have assumed to end in marriage. The denouement is one of a happy ending; the marriage is a trifle more problematic. What really occurs is that James adopts the Boethian practice previously adopted by Guillaume de Machaut in Remede de Fortune. A man can attain happiness in the sphere of Eros by controlling what lies in his power to control – his way of loving. If he loves deeply and purely, if he is a fin’ aman, then love is its own reward. Such love is grounded in joy, the joy of the troubadours. Fin’ amor bestows its own joy on all who love well. What constitutes the joy? In The Kingis Quair does the narrator’s love end in physical possession? In marriage? Or in a chaste love which is its

26  High Courtly Narrative

own reward? The denouement is hinted at yet not spelled out. Similar ambiguities are common in the French books. In Remede de Fortune the narrator seemingly attains a successful outcome with his lady – they love each other. Yet the poem does not end there. The ambiguity comes from an added section in which the lady flirts with other men and the narrator falls into jealousy.11 Froissart’s texts also have ambiguous endings. The ambiguity in James’s book, his ending, may well be conscious and intentional; such an element forms part of the tradition. Fin’ amor in the French poems is an admirable positive state. Love is good or, rather, good love is very good. It is not, however, particularly or necessarily Christian. It forms part of a refined, elegant, and highly aristocratic culture that, in most of the romances and allegories of love, is secular – not anti-Christian in any reasonable sense of the term, yet not preaching Christian doctrine either. A number of Quair scholars, on the contrary, state that James does proclaim Christian doctrine (whether in accordance with the fin’ amor or against it), that the poem teaches Christian cosmic harmony and peace, and that the story itself reflects God’s plan.12 A Christian reading of the Quair is eminently legitimate, and a number of medievalists, still under the influence of D.W. Robertson and the Robertsonian school of Christian exegesis, will normally adopt a Christian stance in ­interpreting literary works composed during the Christian Middle Ages. The French evidence, however, dating back to the songs of the troubadours and the trouvères, and to the earliest courtly romances, not to speak of the allegories of love, testifies to two cultures – an ecclesiastical culture and an aristocratic culture – that flourished in the Middle Ages and up to and beyond 1776 and 1789. Reading The Kingis Quair in line with the French leads me to posit a secular aristocratic poem by James. The structure of the Quair corresponds to that in Machaut and Froissart. A young man falls in love or is already in love; he is usually the narrator of his own story. He progresses from the court to a locus amoenus (garden, grove, or park) and then returns to the court. A variation on this structure has the lover progress from a real or metaphoric prison to the garden and then back to his prison, or from the court to a prison and back to the court. These are versions of the archetypal withdrawal and return of the epic hero and of the structuralist presence-absence-presence and possession-lack-possession. In the course of the narrative the protagonist learns the secrets of life and love; in some sense he grows from a boy into a man or from a princely boy into a man worthy of exercising sovereignty. The transformation is brought about through a dream vision in which the lover-narrator receives instruction and comfort from divine

The Kingis Quair 27

or semi-divine and usually female authority-figures including Reason, Good Hope, Happiness, Venus, and Nature, as well as the God of Love. Venus is perhaps the most common. Adhering to a complex configuration of the dream experience, the dream is shown to be an extension of the dreamer’s previous waking concerns (Freud’s day residue) and a positive response to his sexual anxiety (Freud’s wish-fulfillment). The dream is also shown to be a genuine somnium and oraculum by means of authenticating devices: in the French texts, usually the giving or exchange of a ring; in The Kingis Quair, the arrival of the turtle dove, Venus’s dove, with a flower and a message. Last of all, in Machaut and Froissart the art of poetry – the theme of art and the artist – is a major component of the book: the narrator-lover or the narrator-observer or the noble lover all compose poems. The poems contribute to the narrative and authenticate its and the lover(s)’ sincerity and are there for their own sake, as art. In Machaut’s Voir Dit and in Froissart’s Prison amoureuse the narrative recounts how it (the book) comes into ­being, how the lady requests that the lyrics and the prose letters be gathered to tell her (and their) story. Even when the noble lover and the clerkly narrator are separated into two distinct characters, both grow in the course of the narrative, and both are or become poets. They share dreaming and the act of writing. However, as noted above, whereas Machaut and Froissart include, embedded in their narratives, lyric poetry ascribed to their noble patrons (Jean de Berry in La Fonteinne amoureuse, and Wenceslas de Brabant in La Prison amoureuse and Meliador), James Stewart writes his own book, which cites his own textual offering to the music of the birds as well as his own love-complaints. This is one of his most significant departures from the tradition. Quair scholars emphasize, and with good reason, James’s artistic self-consciousness and the extent to which his narrator tells how he learned to write and how his book comes into being.13 This is Chaucerian, of course, and is also the central convention in the French ­allegories of love.

2 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid

Although a very different text in so many ways, The Testament of Cresseid by Robert Henryson partakes of courtly traditions just as The Kingis Quair does. This magnificent poem is one of the masterworks of medieval literature.1 Bound intertextually to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the Testament has been portrayed as offering commentary on the Troilus or  presenting a sequel or alternative ending.2 Some scholars insist upon Henryson’s critiquing or destabilizing Chaucer and undermining his authority.3 For the most part they agree on Henryson’s powerful, dark, tragic vision in contrast to the Chaucerian: tragedy in response to Chaucer’s broad ironic comedy or to Chaucer’s more humane tragedy.4 Henryson tells his story through a narrator, old and suffering from the cold weather, a devotee of Venus obliged to sit before the fire and read books, one of which is Troilus and Criseyde. Allegedly based on his reading of the other book, he tells how Cresseid, abandoned by Diomedes, falls socially and morally. Returning home to her father, she berates Cupid and Venus for having betrayed her. Cresseid falls into a trance and dreams that she is indicted before the seven planets, who are also seven gods. Cupid demands punishment for Cresseid’s blasphemy, apostasy, and libel – she blamed others for her own sins, and she accused Venus of being blind. Found guilty, she awakes to discover that she is now a leper, and she repairs to a leper house to beg by the roadside. Troilus passes by. Neither he nor Cresseid recognizes the other. Informed of Troilus’s identity, Cresseid repents, delivers a moving testament, and dies. Informed of Cresseid’s identity, Troilus erects her tomb. A number of elements in Henryson’s text correspond to and reflect elements in the French dits amoureux. In Machaut’s Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre an old narrator remains indoors in winter because of the plague.5

Robert Henryson  29

He leaves in spring to go hunting but is summoned by Lady Bonneürté (Happiness, Good Fortune) to be tried before the King of Navarre. He is accused of having given a false judgment in the earlier Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, in essence of having defamed ladies and the God of Love. Machaut brings together the themes of winter, the cold, old age, and the plague. Henryson does the same, foregrounding leprosy, and not the plague. This said, the medievals associated the two; John B. Friedman proposes that Henryson was influenced by a treatise in Latin on the plague as divine punishment.6 Machaut’s and Henryson’s respective depictions of the malady are similar in some of the details: Et … leur couleur en perdoient. Car tuit estoient mal traitié, Descoulouré et deshaitié: Boces avoient et grans clos Dont on moroit. Thy lustie lyre ouirspred with spottis blak, And lumpis haw appeirand in thy face … Of hir becaus scho was sa deformait, With bylis blak ouirspred in her visage, And hir fair colour faidit and alterait.

(Navarre 320–4)

(Cresseid 339–40, 394–6)

In some of the details Machaut’s November corresponds to Henryson’s April: M’en aloie par mi ma chambre … Pour ce me tenoie a couvert; Car ce qu’estre soloit tout vert Estoit mué en autre teint, Car bise l’avoit tout desteint Qui mainte fleur a decopée Par la froidure de s’espée. Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend, That scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend. Ȝit neuertheles within myne oratur I stude … The northin wind had purifyit the air And sched the mistie cloudis fra the sky;

(Navarre 26, 31–6)

30  High Courtly Narrative The froist freisit, the blastis bitterly Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill, And causit me remufe aganis my will.

(Cresseid 6–9, 17–21)

It is a time of storms, wind, contagion, melancholy, madness, and death. The death is unleashed by God. This is a mundus senescens in which the narrator is forced into solitude and portrayed as a writer of love deprived of love. The would-be writer of love deprived of love is thwarted by winter; with the change in the season his situation improves in one respect yet not in the other. In springtime joy triumphs over melancholy, health over corruption, and life over death. The Machaldian narrator would like to participate. He cannot, for a number of reasons, some relating to his age and others to his social class. An inept lover and unreliable narrator, he defends himself badly at court. Among other things, he mocks the female allegorical figures who plead against him. On the other hand, it can be argued that the trial machinery is biased − the King of Navarre’s councillors include ladies from Bonneürté’s camp, and the accusation itself shifts in the course of the proceedings. In a comic, good-natured ending the clerkly narrator cannot function in the courtly aristocratic world as a lover but can always do so as a writer. Machaut’s narrator is condemned to compose a ballade, a virelay, and a rondeau. In his last great tale of love Machaut casts himself as an aged writer of love and an aged lover: senex amans. Le Livre du Voir Dit, which many consider to be Guillaume de Machaut’s masterpiece, tells of an old narrator, famous for his poetry and music − a figure for Machaut the implied author − and of his amorous relations with the young Toute-Belle.7 TouteBelle pays him court because of his authorial celebrity. Old, ill, metaphorically impotent, and a coward, he avoids visiting her in winter, because of bandits and bad weather, and in spring as well. On the one occasion when they are together, the narrator prays to Venus and enjoys some form of consolatio. The text can be read as an anti-romance in which the clerkly narrator cuts a sorry figure both as a lover and also as a teller of his own story because, although he appears to be accurate enough concerning the facts, we see him to be utterly unreliable in terms of judgment, unable to interpret the facts that he himself reveals. Finally, the intertextuality of Le Voir Dit is enormous, because it parodies a number of the author’s previous love allegories and because the story could not come into being without the narrator’s reputation due to his previous work. In other words, the French poem is autotextual whereas Henryson’s poem, following after

Robert Henryson  31

Chaucer, is heterotextual. Thus, just as the Cresseid narrator is concerned with finding the “true” version of his story – “Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?” (64) – so also Toute-Belle and her narrator are committed to the authenticity of their True Story: Le Voir Dit veuil je qu’on appelle Ce traitié que je fais pour elle, Pour ce que ja n’i mentirai.

(Voir Dit 518–20)

Yet, just as the Cresseid narrator leaves open the question as to which quair offers the true story, so the Voir Dit narrator is torn throughout his livre as to what is true and what is not. Irony is a powerful element in both works. Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece, an intertextual reworking of Le Voir Dit, develops roughly the same thematic. The old narrator, known as a writer, bewails the world’s mistreatment of him. In the cold of winter, in a dream vision, he complains to Venus that his youth is gone and that his lady threw him over for another. Venus serves as a guide, leading him to Jonece. In time the narrator is taught the wisdom of the Bush / Grove of Youth, knowledge which includes the seven planets and planetary gods and the seven ages of man. Important for our reading of Henryson are the motifs of winter and old age, and also knowledge of the planets and gods, in a poem intertextually grounded in a famous preceding poem. No less important in the French tradition is a series of texts from the fifteenth century, La Belle Dame sans Mercy by Alain Chartier and the sequence of poems which make up the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, the second major literary controversy in the French vernacular (the first being the debate over Le Roman de la Rose).8 In Chartier’s original Belle Dame, the narrator, wretched because of his lady’s death, overhears a dialogue between a lover and a lovely lady. The lover uses every argument in the books to convince the lady to have pity on him and, therefore, to accept his love service. She refuses on all counts. The narrator has heard since then that the lover died of chagrin. The Belle Dame Cycle is comprised of a series of narratives in verse which recount a trial scene: the lovely lady accused before the God of Love’s judgment seat. Three of these narratives are of interest for the Testament of Cresseid. In Baudet Herenc’s Le Parlement d’Amour the narrator witnesses a trial held by Amours before his parliament, where Desir and Espoir accuse the lovely lady of cruelty, pride, and disdain, and of having insulted Amours. Due to the absence of defence counsel, the case is

32  High Courtly Narrative

adjourned. In Achille Caulier’s La Cruelle Femme en Amour the wretched narrator has a vision whereby he is conveyed to Amours’s judgment seat, where the previous case, which had led to acquittal, is reopened. Here, because the lady was loyal to no one and wished to be altogether free from love, she is found guilty of lèse-majesté vis-à-vis Amours and is condemned to be executed. In the anonymous Les Erreurs du Jugement de la Belle Dame sans Merci the lovely lady’s heirs appeal the previous judgment and, for the sake of her honour and the family’s good name, petition that verdict be overturned. The new verdict states that there were no ­errors in procedure and that the lady is indeed guilty. In all these texts the narrator is an unhappy lover who recounts the story as an observer or witness. The story line is roughly the same throughout: the lovely lady of Chartier’s poem is accused of lèse-majesté, of having betrayed Amours (Henryson’s Cupid) by her discourse in Chartier’s text, especially the phrase “Amours est crüel losengier, / Aspre en fait et doulx a mentir” (313–14), which corresponds to Cresseid’s reproach: “O fals Cupide, is nane to wyte bot thow / And thy mother, of lufe the blind goddes!” (134–5). By that phrase and elsewhere she accuses the God of Love of cruelty, duplicity, and lying. The majority of the texts, though not all, take the lover’s side against the lovely lady, manifesting what appears to be the reaction on the part of male writers and courtiers against a woman. Just as a number of feminist articles treat the gender question in Henryson,9 so also a gender-oriented approach to the French would argue that in the sequels the lovely lady is condemned repeatedly in a court of justice, a quintessentially masculine institution presided over by a male divinity: her penalty is to be drowned in a well of tears. The mode of execution can be termed, from a Freudian perspective, vaginal, as the appropriate sentence for a woman who has renounced her femininity and the traits, including pity, which purportedly give meaning to a woman’s existence. Felicity Riddy argues convincingly that Cresseid is treated as someone abject and that her abjection is misogynistic punishment for being a woman in a woman’s body; the same is true for the lady through much of the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle.10 The trial machinery allows for, when it does not require, sequels. In Baudet Herenc judgment is postponed to allow the lovely lady to find an advocate; other poems relaunch the action by having one side or the other claim a mistrial and file an appeal. In addition, the ludic exploitation of the judicial increases with time. Les Erreurs du Jugement argues, for and against, the twelve errors alleged to have taken place during the trial recounted by Achille Caulier.

Robert Henryson  33

As part of the judicial machinery, each poem examines the text of Chartier’s Belle Dame and, occasionally, the text of the previous poem(s), just as they would in a “real” trial, especially a deliberation in which a person’s statements are being scrutinized for heresy or for lèse-majesté. In addition, the poets do not hesitate to invent new material within the textual narratives; that is, they not only reinterpret but also recreate their predecessors’ work, and thus criticize or refute it. Such a tendency is most flagrant in La Dame loyale en Amour, where the defence of the lovely lady is based on the claim that she does not deny love or blaspheme the God of Love: she loves and is loved by someone else and is faithful to him. Achille Caulier will then deny the validity of the new evidence; and, now on the offensive, the lover’s advocates, in Les Erreurs du Jugement, submit that the lady spurned the advances of more than ten suitors only to sell herself to the highest bidder. Other poets will take the same route and introduce new material − the lady ogled at the lover during the dance, or they exchanged a kiss, or he is not in fact deceased − which can then be interpreted and / or refuted. Therefore, these poems are inherently and essentially intertextual: they come into being as interpretations and critiques of the preceding texts and unite with them to form a narrative cycle, similar to the earlier French chanson de geste, Arthurian, and Reynardian cycles yet strikingly more self-conscious. Last of all, such texts, which offer as their central thematic the interpretation of texts, call out, as it were, to be interpreted in turn by the implied reader / audience. Indeed, modern scholars differ with regard to how the Cycle should be read as much as they differ over Henryson’s Cresseid. Like the scholars in Middle Scots, French medievalists offer divergent readings of fifteenth-century mental structures on the nature of love and of nobility and what it means to be a lady.11 Outside the tradition of the dit amoureux, the most important elements of a possible French influence in the Testament of Cresseid would be the leprosy motif and the testament. In Beroul’s Roman de Tristan King Marc is convinced to punish Iseut, caught (almost) in flagrante delicto, by handing her over to a herd of one hundred male lepers to be their sex slave. Tristan rescues her in time. In the chanson de geste Ami et Amile Ami is punished by God with leprosy for having taken Amile’s place in judicial combat, having lied to do so, and having wed Charlemagne’s daughter (as if he were Amile) when he was already married to another. Amile sacrifices his two infant sons so that their blood can be used to cure his friend’s malady. Similarly, in La Queste del Saint Graal Perceval’s sister sacrifices herself so that her blood can restore a leper to health. And in the Occitan

34  High Courtly Narrative

romance Jaufre the protagonist rescues a maiden, a baby, and several children from the machinations of two wicked lepers, one of them a monster intent on rape and blood sacrifice.12 These analogues develop a thematic of leprosy. Leprosy is connected to sexual promiscuity and deviance: lepers are presumed to be especially lecherous, and their illness caused by or the punishment for that lust. They are presumed to be evil, their wickedness made manifest in acts of illicit sex or violence or perjury. God punishes lepers for their sins. However, the leper can also be one of God’s chosen, chastised by God out of love and as a test of faith and virtue. Finally, since leprosy can be cured by the shedding of innocent virginal blood, the leper becomes a figure for sinful humanity redeemed by the blood of the Lamb on the Cross. With regard to Henryson’s thematic of leprosy, community of lepers, last testament, and death, note also that early in the thirteenth century Jean Bodel and Baude Fastoul wrote Congés.13 These farewell poems are also last testaments, for the two poets have developed leprosy and are leaving Arras to go to a leper house where they will be dead to life. A cold, dark, windy April in Scotland − the equivalent of winter elsewhere − sets the tone for the Testament of Cresseid. This weather, plus the god Saturn, plus the old, cold, and dry narrator, whose condition relates to old age in the year, dominate Henryson’s cold tragic narrative which begins at sunset and in which, as Larry M. Sklute observes, the sun sets twice but doesn’t rise.14 This imagery is also found in Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre, Le Voir Dit, and Le Joli Buisson de Jonece. In the French texts, which exploit the vein of comedy, winter, old age, melancholy, decay, and death are contrasted with and succeeded by spring, youth, the sanguine, growth, and life. Henryson concentrates on the tragic, eliminating the ­jovial and sanguine except by implication. One reason for the disparity is that, in the dits amoureux by Machaut and Froissart, the old, cold, and dry narrators are also the protagonists, and their follies in the domain of love are balanced against their success as clerks in the domain of art. Henryson’s narrator – the narrator as implied author – purportedly relates what he has read in a book. Since he is not personally involved in the diegesis, he has greater liberty in breaking with the tradition and setting his own ambience for the story. One model for the new ambience of the failure of love due to the treachery of women, the ambience of tragedy, comes from Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy and the Cycle which it inspired, with their portrayal of the coldness and the fickleness of women. The plague in Machaut is transformed or, rather, concretized as leprosy in Henryson. Cresseid’s leprosy is perceived, as in the French tradition, as

Robert Henryson  35

venereal disease, as the corruption and decay associated with promiscuous sex, a manifestation, symbolic and concrete, of sexual corruption and decay.15 The woman is punished as a woman, in her sexuality, by a panel of largely male divinities in a masculine institution: a trial before the law. Cresseid recalls Alain Chartier’s lovely lady and the judicial proceedings that condemned her. Significantly, to be subject to leprosy or to drown in a well are both manifestations of the cold and moist, the tempers associated with the feminine. Cresseid and the Belle Dame are adjudged guilty of roughly the same offence: breaking a sexual taboo − promiscuity and lechery in the one, the absolute refusal of love in the other − accompanied by blasphemy and heresy: Si l’aproche en deux faiz permis De crisme tout manifesté. Premier, je diz qu’elle a conmis Crisme de leze magesté.

(Caulier, La Cruelle Femme 745–8)

“Lo,” quod Cupide, “quha will blaspheme the name Of his awin god, outher in word or deid … With sclander and defame iniurious.”

(Cresseid 274–5, 284)

The blasphemy and heresy, and the sexual transgression, are directed against the same deity, named Amour or Cupid. The doctrine of Eros is the same − medieval fin’ amor, a love grounded in high ideals: loyalty, service, and the gift of self inherent in joven, the spirit of youthful ardor and joy. These are lacking in the Belle Dame (too calculating, too selfcentred) and in Cresseid (too promiscuous, too self-centred). Both ladies are spiritually old, close to death; therefore the one is executed and the other endures living death administered by the god of senectus, Saturn. And then she dies also. In Machaut, Froissart, and Henryson (as well as in Gower) the stories are told by old men seeking to be devotees of Venus but lacking the virility inherent in joven and joy, and subject instead to melancholia, as writers and as greybeards under the sign of Saturn. This masculine melancholia and acedia contribute to and justify, in psychological terms, an atmosphere of misogyny in which men and male deities punish the women who defy their law. As with Chaucer, the French tales of love are situated in a conventional, self-contained, fictional, and high courtly world of ladies, noblemen, and male and female allegories. Henryson adapts this machinery to his own

36  High Courtly Narrative

closed, self-contained, fictional neopagan world of mythological characters and classical gods who exercise their influence as astrological planets. In both worlds Eros rules. The fact that Christianity is absent from the French books helps explain why Henryson’s poem can be and has been read also as non-Christian.16 I say “can be read” because a number of studies argue cogently for a Christian reading of The Testament of Cresseid.17 In other words, the doctrinal ambiguity and the interpretative indeterminacy which characterize Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre and Le Voir Dit and which are the raison d’être of the Belle Dame Cycle apply also to The Testament of Cresseid. Scholars are free to debate for what sin Cresseid is  punished: whoredom, promiscuity, sexual betrayal, lechery, apostasy, blasphemy, slander, the abdication of responsibility, or the denial of life. Scholars are also free to debate Cresseid’s trial, to what extent the proceedings are fair and just, and, therefore, how seriously we should respond to that increment in the narrative. One can argue that the trial machinery in Henryson is as warped, as consciously defective, as that in Machaut and the Belle Dame Cycle: Cresseid is not allowed to defend herself, the two justiciars (Saturn and Cynthia) are hostile to her, and her punishment far exceeds the purported crime.18 Complexity and ambiguity are further augmented by the conditions of narratology, the fact that the Machaut, Froissart, and Henryson narrators are inherently unreliable, not for the facts per se but for how they are presented and how the implied reader’s or audience’s response is moulded. The Cresseid narrator can be read as sympathetic or antipathetic, as a learned ironic author-figure who leads us by the hand or as a cold impotent lecher who plays the fool. How we interpret the narrator will help shape the interpretation of the poem as a whole. As a final example can be cited Cresseid’s dream vision which, like more than one comparable oneiric experience in the French books, can be deemed either an authentic, objective somnium or visio or the more subjective insomnium or visum caused by the medieval equivalent of Freud’s day residue. What is the truth? How can we know it? These are fundamental questions to which the implied reader or audience has to provide the answers. Last but not least, the French dits amoureux and the poems of the Belle Dame Cycle contain a meditation on the functioning of language and ­reveal the conscious practice of intertextuality. So for The Kingis Quair, so also for The Testament of Cresseid. As in the French poems, language is the action, what Cresseid says rather than what she does, what and how the narrator says it; and the story turns around the distinction between good and bad speech, how the one is to be rewarded and the other

Robert Henryson  37

punished. Just as The Testament of Cresseid replies to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, so also Machaut’s Roy de Navarre replies to his own Roy de Behaingne, Froissart’s Buisson de Jonece replies to Machaut’s Voir Dit, and each poem in the Cycle replies to the preceding poems and to Chartier’s original Belle Dame sans Mercy. The Continental tradition, so “bookish” as C.S. Lewis would say, so profoundly intertextual in its essence, helps explain Robert Henryson’s own intertextuality vis-à-vis Chaucer and also vis-à-vis the French love poems. Bookishness, complexity, and ambiguity are the hallmarks of these texts, so rich in their representation of the problematic of court culture and in their very literariness.

3 Gavin Douglas, The Palice of Honour

Gavin Douglas, recognized as one of the greatest Scots Makars, is best known for his Eneados (1513), a translation of the Aeneid.1 Many a scholar, and a number of poets including Ezra Pound, consider Douglas’s version to be the best that we have “in English.” In addition to the thirteen books (Virgil’s twelve plus Maffeo Vegio’s Supplementum of 1427–8), Douglas authored superb prologues for each book, original verse of high caliber. The three nature prologues – winter in Prol. 7, a day in May in Prol. 12, and a June evening in Prol. 13 – have been especially prized. Some critics emphasize the extent to which all thirteen prologues comment on the books of the Aeneid and on how each book should be read, and thus function as an Ars poetica which explores the creative process and the relationship between the poet and his life-experience. Overall, they illustrate Douglas’s program as a writer and the evolution of his poetics and his art.2 Janet M. Smith accepts the argument from a 1910 dissertation by Aloys Schumacher that, although Douglas praises Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s version of the Georgics and probably was acquainted with Saint-Gelais’s recent Les Eneydes de Virgille translatez of 1509, he was not influenced by the French Aeneid.3 It is true that Douglas and Saint-Gelais choose to amplify different passages, and that Douglas’s superb high Scots is by no means a Gallicized idiom. Nevertheless, having compared the first hundred lines or so of Book 6 of Virgil with the equivalent passages in the Eneydes and Eneados, I have noticed a number of cases where the French and Scots lexemes correspond.4 Although all of Douglas’s terms are to be found in the dost, instead of coincidence it would appear more likely that the Scottish text follows the French one. Perhaps Douglas used SaintGelais as a “trot” or as a dictionary / thesaurus. It is perhaps significant that although Douglas attacked Caxton’s English version of a French

Gavin Douglas  39

Livre des Eneydes, he avoids any mention of Saint-Gelais’s Aeneid. Would then the absence of trace be in fact a trace of conscious willed absence? And a trace of the anxiety of influence? Of lesser scope than the Eneados yet also a work of high quality is The Palice of Honour, completed in 1501 or perhaps earlier.5 This text reflects any number of French themes and motifs common in the late Middle Ages, and it adheres to structures and expectations of genre on the Continent, from a Continental perspective. Scholars agree that Douglas may have studied in France. Priscilla Bawcutt argues persuasively for the period between 1505 and 1509; the 1490s are also possible as the dates for a French sojourn. Therefore, I shall expand the usual parameters (The House of Fame, the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, and Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes) to include French texts in the scrutiny of Douglas’s sources and analogues, the textual world in which he flourished.6 The Palice of Honour is a fascinating work in that it takes the structure, themes, motifs, and comic tone – the literary essence of the dit amoureux – and shapes them in the manner of other genres: the late medieval honour poem and the pilgrimage of life poem. In other words, he incorporates or fuses the allegory of love and the allegory of life in a synthesis that is both consummately mature and aesthetically exciting. The narrative frame comes entirely from the tradition: Douglas’s narrator wends his way to a lovely garden. It is the month of May. A profusion of verbal imagery portrays, or even embellishes, the visual: flowers, birds, and sunlight, the radiance and splendour of burgeoning new life. In due course he has a vision in which he finds himself by a river flowing blood, a locus of horror with screeching fish, bare rocks, wind, and rotten trees. In the course of the vision he arrives at the garden and palace of honour and, while attempting to cross the moat on an improvised bridge – the trunk of a tree – falls off and wakes up. The young narrator placed in a beautiful garden, a locus amoenus with flowers, birds, trees, and sweet dew on the grass, is the standard décor in love allegories going back to Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. Sometimes the garden occurs within the dream, as in Guillaume de Lorris and in Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece; sometimes the dream occurs within the garden, as in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and Fonteinne amou­ reuse, Froissart’s Paradis d’Amour and Espinette amoureuse, and several poems in the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle. Sometimes there is no dream at all, as will generally be the case with Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier. Douglas plays with the motif by having his protagonist wander into the garden and question if he is experiencing a dream or vision.

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Dazzled by the light, he then experiences a dream vision. The horrific desert in the vision, a locus horribilis, is less common. However, it does correspond to the winter-old age-death décors in Machaut (Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre and Le Voir Dit) and Froissart (Le Joli Buisson de Jonece), and to the pathetic fallacy décor proper to unhappy lovers, as in two works of the Belle Dame Cycle: La Dame loyale en amour and La Cruelle Femme en Amour. Finally, the humorous awakening due to a fortuitous circumstance in the dream, such as a lover touched by Plaisance in Le Paradis d’Amour or pushed or shoved by Venus in Le Joli Buisson de Jonece, is typical of the love allegory mode. We have seen the extent to which the French allegories of love contain comic elements or, even more, are comedies of love from beginning to end. In Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Behaingne the fumbling, eavesdropping narrator / observer hides in the foliage while his betters – a knight and a lady – discourse on love.7 In Remede de Fortune the narrator loves and is the protagonist of his own tale. This said, the narrator’s desire is equaled only by his fear: he runs away from his lady when queried about the lai he wrote to her; he is afraid of Lady Esperence; he is afraid to return to his lady; he is afraid that she loves someone else. In Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre we find an older coward and misogynist who remains indoors during the winter and sets forth in spring only to hunt rabbits; and the mighty hunter of rabbits proves to be fumbling and inept before Bonneürté and at court. The senex amans in Le Voir Dit dreads highwaymen and the plague, dreads travelling in winter and in summer, and dreads meeting Toute-Belle, especially if they are to be close: Car honte, amour, biauté, paour … Me tollirent si le memoire Et les cinq sens … Tant estoit en estroit loien Mes cuers qui de paour trambloit. … je say vraiement Qu’eüsse esté mors en la place Pour paour de perdre sa grace … Car li cuers en corps me trambloit … Si n’en savoie conseil prendre, Car j’estoie tous estahis … Car se je n’ay milleur conduit Que de Päour qui me conduit, Je ne voy pas comment j’y aille.

Gavin Douglas  41 … Mais je n’os corps, ne cuer, ne jame, Ne sanc, qui ne fremist en mi, Quant je la vi; car si fremi, Que, se Dieus de li me doint joie, Grant päour de chëoir avoie. (Remede 708, 711–12, 716–17, 728–30, 3057, 3060–1, 3083–5, 3382–6) Si Dieus me doint beneÿsson, Je n’os onques si grant frisson, Si grant paour ne si grant doubte, Car la char me fremissoit toute … Quar j’estoie si esbahis Et plus c’une beste estahis; Et si sentoie une froidure Entremellee d’une ardure Qui faisoit fremir et suer Mon corps et ma couleur muer.

(Voir Dit 1794–7, 1930–5)

The mode continues with Froissart. The same clumsiness and the same cowardice emanate from Le Paradis d’Amour, L’Espinette amoureuse, and Le Joli Buisson de Jonece. In Paradis and Buisson the narrator hides in the shrubbery; in Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy the narrator hides behind a leafy trellis. This is the standard clerkly narrator-figure, a lover and a clerk, a success as a clerk and a failure as a lover, who would like to partake of courtly doings in elegant high society. However, he cannot ape the upper classes, he is inept and obtuse, bold in speech and timorous in action, sometimes too old to please the ladies, good only to observe love from a distance and to write about it at second-hand. Gavin Douglas places his narrator in the tradition and exploits it with brio.8 The Palice of Honour narrator is afraid before his vision begins. He dreads a voice in the garden, prays to be comforted from fear, and, struck by a bright light, falls down like a woman. Transported to the visionary desert, he is afraid again. He complains to Fortune: Why has spring become winter? Must I die here? And with that word I raisit my visage, Soir affrayit, half in ane frenesie. “… Comfort ȝour man that in this fanton steruis, With spreit arraisit and euery wit away, Quaiking for feir, baith pulsis, vane and neruis.”

42  High Courtly Narrative … Amyd the virgultis all in till a fary As feminine so feblit fell I doun. … The dreidfull terrour swa did me assaill. … Bot than God wait how affrayit was I … All in ane Feuir out of my muskane bowre On kneis I crap and law for feir did lowre. … The fewerous hew intill my face did myith All my male eis, for swa the horribill dreid Haill me ouirset; I micht not say my creid. For feir and wo within my skin I wryith. I micht not pray, forsuith, thocht I had neid. (Palice 89–90, 97–9, 107–8, 117, 197, 646–7, 731–5)

Like his French forebears, he hides – in the hollow stump of a tree – when important beings pass by: Lors me boutay par dedens la fueillie Si embrunchiez qu’il ne me virent mie. Et me mis en .I. buissoncel Qui seoit dalés un moncel. … J’estoie laiens tous couvers De foellettes a toutes pars.

(Behaingne 54–5)

(Buisson 2959–60, 2964–5)

Si m’assis derriere une treille Drue de fueilles a merveille, Entrelacee de saulx vers, Si que nul, pour l’espesse fueille, Ne me peüst veoir au travers.

(Belle Dame 156–60)

Bot than God wait how affrayit was I … Amid a stock richt priuelie I stall, Quhair luikand out anone I did espy Ane lustie rout.

(Palice 197, 199–201)

Like the good clerk and reader of Ovid that he is, when assaulted verbally by Venus, he dreads being metamorphosed: Ȝit of my deith I set not half ane fle. For greit effeir me thocht na pane to die.

Gavin Douglas  43 Bot sair I dred me for sum vther Iaip, That Venus suld throw hir subtillitie In till sum bysning beist transfigurat me As in a Beir, a Bair, ane Oule, ane Aip.

(Palice 736–41)

Later, we find him terrified at climbing the mountain on which Honour’s palace is constructed; his guide the nymph has to pull him up the rock and pull him by his hair over a gulf. Don’t gawk! she orders him at one point, and Don’t dawdle! at another. Needless to say, this most unheroic Scots hero faints at the sight of Honour, he and the nymph quarrel, and she accuses him – once again – of acting like a mere woman. Humour is generated by the fact that the nymph – a female being – mocks the narrator for being like a woman, an inevitable situation given that the clerkly writer will inevitably be less heroic and, therefore, less manly than a miles dominans. Most significantly, the Douglas narrator delivers as a ballade a plaint against love in which he curses Cupid and Venus. With customary social ease he does so in the presence of Venus and her retinue, who overhear him. He is spied and dragged out from his tree stump, in a mocking summons that (but for “thow”) could be French – “Auant, veillane, thow reclus Imperfite!” (Palice 645) – before reverting to sermo humilis Scots (but for “deplome”) – “Pluk at the Craw … deplome the Ruik!” (Palice 651). He is then given a modest thrashing and put on trial before Venus, where his defence is to claim that, as a man, he ought not to be judged by a woman, and that, as a cleric, he ought not to be subject to non-ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This scene recalls the comic jugements d’amour in the French love poems. The narrator in Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre is tried for a poem he wrote previously. The narrator in Le Paradis d’Amour delivers a love plaint attacking the God of Love and Plaisance, upon which two ladies – Plaisance herself and Esperance – reproach him for it. The Joli Buisson de Jonece ­protagonist complains to Venus. And not only is Chartier’s lovely lady tried before the God of Love for evil speech in the original Belle Dame sans Mercy. In L’Excusacion aux Dames the implied author, Alain Chartier in his own voice, is accused by the God of Love of having insulted and demeaned both ladies and the god. The accused also dreads Cupid’s drawn bow and arrow just as Douglas’s narrator dreads Venus’s wand or baton: Quant j’euz ces parolles ouÿ Et je vi la fleche en la corde,

44  High Courtly Narrative Tout le sanc au cuer me fouÿ. Qncq n’eu tel paeur dont me recorde.

(L’Excusacion 113–16)

The general situation in all of these scenes is the same. The Machaut narrator, the Froissart narrators, and the Chartier narrator are all indicted in their clerkly function as writers: for what they have written or, more precisely, for verse that they composed, whether it be Le Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, La Belle Dame sans Mercy, or their sundry complaints against Cupid and / or Venus – the precise offence committed by the protagonist of The Palice of Honour. Adhering to the mode of comedy, whatever the threat, the trials end with the misogynistic clerkly poet condemned to write more poetry, to do penance by praising Venus, Cupid, ladies, and love – in poetry. The Machaut narrator does his penance in the form of a ballade. So does the Palice of Honour narrator. Consequently, one central theme in these texts is demonstrating that the various clerkly narrators – who are, after all, figures for the implied authors Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Gavin Douglas – are accomplished poets in the lyric genres as well as accomplished tellers of tales of love. Hence the inserted or embedded lyrics in these dits. In Remede de Fortune Machaut offers one model of each of the most important lyric types: a lay, complainte, chanson roial, baladelle, balade, chanson baladée or virelay, and rondelet. In Remede de Fortune, La Fon­ teinne amoureuse, Le Voir Dit, Le Paradis d’Amour, L’Espinette amou­ reuse, and Le Joli Buisson de Jonece – to take just these examples – the embedded lyrics are ascribed to the author-figure (Guillaume, Jean), to the princely patron and friend (Jean duc de Berry, Wenceslas duc de Brabant), to the lady, and to helpful allegories such as Esperance. The courtly audience is fully aware that, in almost all cases, the implied author, Machaut or Froissart, stands behind the personae to whom he attributes the composition of these pieces. They know that the creator is Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart. Rather more modest then his French forebears, Gavin Douglas nevertheless inserts into the Palice three lyrics, all ballades, two of which have an important function in the narrative: the first brings about the narrator’s arrest and accusation before Venus; the second serves as his sentence and penance and leads to his liberation. The emphasis on writing differs from the French in interesting ways, for Douglas portrays his protagonist not only as a poet and child of the muses but also as the (potential) creator of a special, weighty, and unique kind of poetry. The narrator observes four processions heading towards the Palace of Honour. The first three are the procession of Minerva accompanied by philosophers, sages,

Gavin Douglas  45

and sybils, plus great figures from Antiquity and the Bible; the procession of Diana accompanied by famous chaste women; and the procession of Venus, copious in its variety of clothes, musical instruments, the gold and gem-incrusted chariot and accoutrements, and in its muster of great lovers. Although, as Smith observes, Venus and her attendants parade in front of the protagonist in some of the French love allegories, R.D.S. Jack rightly underscores that the principal source here is Petrarch’s Trionfi, especially Trionfo d’Amore, Trionfo della Pudicizia, and Trionfo della Fama.9 In the midst of the trial, a fourth procession comes into sight, a procession of the Nine Muses with their attendants devoted to poetry, music, rhetoric, and history. Here we find the great poets of old. And here the narrator shows no fear; on the contrary, his timorous pallor gives way immediately to health and joy. Calliope, the muse of epic, speaks on the narrator’s behalf, appeals to Venus for mercy, and wins his release. Later, the nymph who guides him to the Palace of Honour, has him stop briefly at the Hippocrene Well, where the narrator and his “governour” listen as Ovid tells of great heroes.10 Finally, in the Palace garden, where Venus holds court, the goddess hands to the narrator a book for him to retell in rhyme: Than suddanelie in hand ane buik scho hint, The quhilk to me betaucht scho or I went, Commandand me to be obedient And put in Ryme that proces than quite tint. I promisit hir, forsuith, or scho wald stint, The buik ressauand, thairon my cure to preif.

(Palice 1749–54)

We can assume that this is the Aeneid that Gavin Douglas did in fact translate and publish as the Eneados some twelve years later. A pattern of epic is thus established: the epic muse Calliope befriends the narrator, taking him under her wing. And the goddess of love, protector of Troy and of the founders of the New Troy, herself serves as the narrator’s patron. Whereas in the French books the personae of Machaut, Froissart, and Chartier are recognized authors, and the intertextual reference is often to their own earlier works, with Gavin Douglas the intertextual reference will be to other books, not to his own, for he has as of yet not written any. (Note that, at the Hippocrene Well, the narrator cannot drink.) However, whereas the French poets allude to their own writings in the past, Douglas makes a place for his Eneados to be written in the future. Whereas the other writers, including Chaucer, so often begin with a book, their own or someone

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else’s, Douglas begins with nothing but ends with his own (future) masterpiece, the Scots Aeneid. The trial scene over and Venus’s procession on its way, the nymph leads the narrator away from concerns with Eros, just as Gavin Douglas fashions his poem away from the love allegories. On the quest for the Palace of Honour, the nymph takes Calliope’s new devotee to the Hippocrene Well and then to the mountain on which the palace was built. They go up the mountain, towards the castle, into the garden, to the castle gate, into the castle, and into the presence of Honour. Douglas illustrates the copia of the décor and of his own poetic style by amplifying descriptions of the sheer glass-like marble rock of the mountain, the gold, crystal, and beryl of the palace, Venus’s magical mirror, the ekphrastic gate, the baroque splendour of the interior, the feast held therein, and, of course, the lists and lists of heroes who dwell or have dwelt with Honour. He does this with rich and copious embellishment. Here Douglas cultivates a subgenre or submode of late medieval literature that can be called the honour poem.11 Froissart’s Le Temple d’Honneur (shortly after 1363) is a sort of epithalamium. It tells of a narrator lost in the woods who is then guided by a cavalier to festivities at the Temple of Honour, shimmering with light, depicted with rich and copious embellishment. Honour, on his throne, delivers a sermon to Desir and Plaisance, about to wed, explaining how they can climb up the seven steps to him. The seven steps for the young men – Avis, Hardement, Emprise, Atemprance, Justice, Loyautés, and Largeche – constitute the ideals of the secular prince. Twelve steps lead up to Venus’s throne in The Palice of Honour. In Le Songe de la Toison d’Or by Michault Taillevent (1431) the narrator, sad on a lonely spring day in a locus amoenus, dreams of a palace all in gold, silver, amber, and precious stones, depicted with rich and copious embellishment: Mais je ne sçay de quel machon Fait estoit ne de quel metal, Fors de bericle et de cristal Dont il estoit tout machonnés. … Car les marbres et les degrés Laiens de mainte riche chambre N’estoient de bois ne de gres Mais tout d’ivoire et de riche ambre. En aprés, de fin or d’Arabe Ce beau palais couvert estoit …

Gavin Douglas  47 Car [the pavement] pavé estoit d’argent fin Sur lequel on estoit marchans … Et puis de riches dïamans Estoit l’entree et le parvis Du bel palais … Je deïsse que le chiment Estoit de pierres precieuses … De clareté au soleil pareille Estoit ce beau palais listé Quant au mïeulx se apareille Au doulx printemps ou a l’esté. (Taillevent, Songe 107–10, 117–22, 129–30, 133–5, 137–8, 145–8)

Douglas’s Palace of Honour is depicted in much the same manner: Vesyand I stude the principall place but peir, That heuinlie Palice all of Cristall cleir, Wrocht as me thocht of poleist beriall stone. … For like Phebus with fyrie bemis bricht The wallis schane, castand sa greit ane licht It semit like the heuin Imperiall. … Swa the reflex of Christall stanis schone, For brichtnes scarslie blenk thairon I mocht. The purifyit siluer surelie, as me thocht, In steid of Symont was ouir all that wone, Ȝit round about full mony ane Beriall stone, And thame coniunctlie Ionit fast and quemit. The Clois was pachit with siluer as it semit. (Palice 1450–2, 1876–8, 1884–90)

In Le Songe de la Toison d’Or, after a feast with music, and with ekphrastic tapestries on the chairs, Bonne Renommee, the queen of the assembly, arrives with her retinue. Heroes of old rise from the dead, and modern heroes found the Order of the Golden Fleece. Then comes more feasting and more music. Robert Deschaux comments: “Honneur: le songe et l’ensemble du poème sont placés sous son inspiration.”12 Honneur is mentioned throughout, and the palace could likely be his home. Le Trosne d’Honneur by Jean Molinet (after 1467) is a funeral deploration. The narrator, finding himself in a garden in summer, dreams of the death of a fleur-de-lis in the garden of Noblesse. Noblesse and Nature,

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plus the great mourners of Antiquity, mourn. Vertu descends from heaven and bears the wilted flower to the throne of Honour. In Molinet’s Le Chappellet des Dames (mid-1478 or later), the narrator, in a lovely garden to begin with, follows a flying bird to the Vergier de Bonnes Moeurs, which contains the Temple of Honour and the Throne of Virtue. The way to Honour is always through Virtue. Honour poems were especially in vogue on the Continent during Gavin Douglas’s lifetime and testify to how informed and up-to-date he was in literary matters. His immediate contemporary, Jean Lemaire de Belges, wrote two such works, Le Temple d’Honneur et de Vertus (1503) and La Concorde des deux Langages (wr. 1510–11, pub. 1513). In the first text a mourning duchess is transported high on a mountain where she beholds an ancient temple all in gold, alabaster, and precious stones, with ekphrastic statues, accompanied by explanations from Entendement. The second text tells of a long sojourn in the Temple of Venus. High on a mountain are the Palace of Honour and its Temple of Minerva, to which the narrator hopes one day to aspire by working with Labeur historien. These were written after Douglas’s Palice of Honour; the second one, especially, cultivates the same thematic that he does. The Palice of Honour partakes also of the pilgrimage of life thematic. A few motifs in Douglas’s text recall similar ones in Le Pèlerinage de la Vie humaine and Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme by Guillaume de Digulleville. These include the sight of a hell pit and of the earth on fire and ships broken on the sea, a magic mirror, and people trying to climb castle walls and falling off. However, these motifs can also be found in a pilgrimage narrative which, in addition, highlights a palace of honour – Octovien de SaintGelais’s Séjour d’Honneur. Le Séjour d’Honneur, written from 1489 to 1494, can be deemed the last great allegory of the Middle Ages. It was written by the same man whose translations of Virgil Douglas knew and, in the case of the Eneydes de Virgille, I have argued, used for his own Eneados, a man considered the leading poet of his age. This was a major contemporary work, one that could not have escaped Gavin Douglas’s notice when he studied in France. The narrator’s guide in Saint-Gelais is Lady Sensualité. She cor­ responds to the nymph in The Palice of Honour. Like the nymph she quarrels with the Séjour d’Honneur narrator, especially when he fears to press on or when he manifests scruples. They cross the sea, called Mer Mondaine or Mondaine Plaisance, where the narrator beholds ships broken and sinking and people drowning or heaps of corpses of the already

Gavin Douglas  49

drowned. On the island of Vaine Esperance the narrator dances with a lady whom he loves and from whom he has had no joy; his amorous experience is identical to that of Douglas’s protagonist. Later he passes through the Forest des Advantures (and still later the desert of Aspre Melencolye), dreadful décors, where he falls into fear and trembling and is as timorous as the seeker of the Scottish palace of honour at the beginning of his quest. In the Forest des Advantures Saint-Gelais’s narrator comes across great warriors and a locus of the arts and sciences where are to be seen any number of thinkers and writers, ancient and modern, many of whom dwell also in Douglas’s Palace of Honour. Meanwhile, again like Douglas’s narrator, he is tired, he cannot go on, and he needs to be berated and insulted by his female guide, who orders him to stop his whining and be a man: “Mais se tu veulx a bon port parvenir, De telz larmes te convient abstenir. Larmes et pleur appartiennent a femme. Plourer n’engendre a tout homme que blasme.” “Ores n’as les jours de loisir pour les ymaiges regarder. C’est a jeunes enfans et aux cornars de s’amuser a choses painctes … Laisse doncques le muser et plus ne tarde.” (Séjour II. x. 9–12; IV. I, p. 348) “Thus in a stair quhy standis thow stupifak, Gouand all day, and nathing hes vesite. Thow art prolix, in haist returne thy bak. Ga efter me and gude attendance tak.” … “Be merie, man,” quod scho, “the worst is past. Get vp,” scho said, “for schame be na Cowart. My heid in wed, thow hes ane wyifes hart, That for a plesand sicht was sa mismaid.”

(Palice 1460–3, 1935–8)

Finally, Saint-Gelais’s people arrive at the Séjour d’Honneur, their palace of honour, like Douglas’s a supremely beautiful, perfect structure built on the highest of mountains. All value, knowledge, and virtue are there. It contains a magnificent portal of entry, with twin towers and allegorical statues. Honneur is seated on a throne like Douglas’s Honour, and their respective narrators undergo the same feeling of awe. Finally, analogous to the tourney witnessed by Douglas’s narrator, Saint-Gelais’s narrator participates in a tourney in which he is beaten.

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Long before these respective jousts, however, becomes evident the extent to which Saint-Gelais’s and Douglas’s conceptions of honour diverge, and the extent to which the divergences are important. Octovien de SaintGelais critiques the unproblematic exaltation of honour typical of the ­poetic texts of his age. For him, La Court is the gatekeeper, and his narrator enters through the door of Faveur. For all his praise of the castle (the entire French royal line dwells there), honour here is depicted as fame, power, and wealth, as the outward manifestation of success in a shame culture as opposed to a guilt culture. In this pseudo-autobiography the narrator is urged by Ambition to seek Richesse (and a bishopric) in the tourney. He fails, and, having failed, learns instead to leave the palace on the mountain and, now counseled by Raison, to proceed on the path of Vraye Penitence to the hermitage of Entendement where he awaits a good Christian death. In other words, despite the title, Saint-Gelais follows Guillaume de Digulleville in constructing a Christian allegory of the pilgrimage of the life of man. Gavin Douglas, on the contrary, reinstates the now traditional praise of honour. For him, it is the acme of life, in a culture of guilt, not one of shame. In his text the sentinel is Loyalty and the gatekeeper is Patience. As in the French honour poems, great men are admitted into the castle not on account of blood or earthly estate but for their virtue. The way to honour lies through virtue: Honneur aussy point ne les attendoit. Nul ne pooit en son quartier venir, Se de Vertu le chemin ne prendoit; Mais se du tout a elle se rendoit, Jamés n’avoit malleureux advenir. Celui qui voeult au clos d’Honneur venir Par le sentier ou Vertu l’a cité, Se purement il se voeult maintenir, Il poeult enfin dedens sa main tenir Le grand salut de sa felicité. “Ay vertew ringis in lestand Honour cleir. Remember than that vertew hes na peir. … It is the way to hie Honour, I-wis. It dantis deith and euerie vice throw micht. Without vertew, fy on all erdlie wicht. Vertew is eik the perfite sicker way, And nocht ellis, till lestand honour ay.”

(Molinet, Chappellet 1: 131–40)

(Palice 1997–8, 2005–9)

Gavin Douglas  51

Although the virtue can entail triumph in war or the arts (as with SaintGelais), it means most of all inner virtue – strength, goodness, magnanimity – the inner traits that give meaning to the life of the upper classes, who constitute a Christian aristocracy. And it alone adheres after death: Et pourtant tiengz a bien heureux Cellui qui sur Vertu se fonde, Cellui qui est chevaleureux Et en qui haulte honneur habonde, Cellui qui se tient net et monde Et qui a bien faire s’amort Car des loenges de ce monde Une vault deux aprés sa mort. “Vertew is eik the perfite sicker way, And nocht ellis, till lestand honour ay. For mony hes sene vitious pepill vphieit, And efter sone thair glore vanische away, Quhairof exampillis we se this euery day. His eirdlie pompe is gone quhen that he deit. Than is he with na eirdlie freind suppleit Saifand vertew; weill is him hes sic a feir.”

(Taillevent, Songe 409–16)

(Palice 2008–15)

The majority of scholars who have written on The Palice of Honour stand in rough agreement over the nature of honour in this text and over the narrator’s growth in the course of the poem as he discovers what it is. Bawcutt observes convincingly that honour is grounded in virtue not worldly fame or glory. Honour is related to and attained by love, ascetic commitment, wisdom, and poetry. Included in honour, nevertheless, are the heroic deeds of both men and women. A.C. Spearing and Lois Ebin argue in favour of the narrator’s growth made manifest in a metaphorical journey.13 Thus, in the course of his narrative, he undergoes a spatial journey that brings him to distinguish between good and bad mentors, and consequently between the inconstant and the permanent, and thus between the worldly and the celestial. From conflict, despair, and sterility he evolves towards harmony, hope, and poetic power. He is able to turn from his mediocre surroundings and from sight of the evil and the ugly to the dazzling palace which may even be also the house of God. The evolution, education, and inner journey occur through thought and the imagination. The acquisition of virtue and, eventually, honour occurs in a garden of rhetoric, and is depicted in a poetic pseudo-autobiography

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in the French tradition with its inserted lyrics and intertextual references. In other words, the narrator undertakes a voyage to becoming a writer. For, while respecting and remaining devoted to Venus, he transfers his loyalty to Calliope. Venus graciously gives him not a woman but a book – Virgil’s Aeneid. The narrator is restored and renewed by poetry. As in the Prologues to the Eneados – what he did with Venus’s book – The Palice of Honour presents a self-conscious author concerned with authorship and the creative imagination. Or, more accurately, a would-be author. From a narratological perspective, the narrator as implied author knows more than his protagonist the dreamer. In time the dreamer will come to be the narrator; he will come to be a poet capable of telling his own story. Therefore, The Palice of Honour is, in part, a poem about the coming into being of its author and of itself. The narrator has been privileged; he underwent something like a mystical revelation during his education in poetry. As a result, he becomes worthy to compose The Palice of Honour and, hopefully, will be worthy to compose the Eneados. Or, was he and is he? Denton Fox and David Parkinson argue convincingly for a more problematic, more ambiguous reading.14 As they see it, the rich humour throughout the poem, a form of self-deprecation which functions to undermine the narrator, also undermines his moral and aesthetic authority. Has he in fact been educated? Has he in fact grown in the course of the narrative? This bumbler, this fumbling fool, has he not been admitted only to gaze upon Honour but not entry into the palace? Is he not a trespasser, on probation, as Parkinson phrases it? I grant more than a little credence to the nay-sayers because I believe that their reading captures perhaps better the richness and complexity of Douglas’s poem, in all its problematic ambiguity. If this be so, then an ambiguous ending would bring this text closer to its no less ambiguous forebears in the tradition of the French dit amoureux. Contributing to the ambiguity would be the last words after the awakening: the narrator’s praise of Honour and his prayer to be aided in writing, when he has already written, and the self-deprecating affected modesty topos according to which he denounces the book he has just written. Such ambiguity, in my opinion, only adds to the aesthetic value of this work. Gavin Douglas combines the allegory of love and the allegory of the pilgrimage of life, the striving for honour and clerkly self-deprecation, courtly verse in the grand manner, copious and highly wrought, with the undermining of the grand manner, and a hero and a narrator in part reliable and in part unreliable. This first masterpiece can well serve as the equivalent of Virgil’s Eclogues and / or Georgics, a magnificent first step that will lead to the Scots Aeneid.

4 William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois

When Hugh MacDiarmid launched the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the twentieth century, he urged writers and readers to go beyond the ­cliché-ridden icons of a false, primitive, backward, and limited cultural identity: Robert Burns and his epigones. MacDiarmid proclaimed instead a turn to the more vital, living culture of the Middle Ages and, more specifically, to William Dunbar: “Not Burns – Dunbar!”1 Dunbar is indeed considered by many as the greatest of the Scots Makars, and beyond any doubt the richest, most varied, most dynamic poet writing in Middle Scots or, for that matter, the richest, most varied, and most dynamic poet in the history of Scottish literature. Although he is best known for cultivating other genres in other modes, Dunbar did compose two brief high courtly verse narratives which adhere to the tradition of the allegory of love or dit amoureux. These are The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois.2 A first cluster of scholars condemned these texts and the aureate style in which they were written. According to these critics, the court allegories are sullied by foreign in­ fluence, by dead, artificial, imposed, regressive modes from France and Burgundy, far from the vitality of living Scots speech.3 A second current, heralded by C.S. Lewis, defends the aureate style, proclaiming that this register is every bit as valid as the common, plain register à la Wordsworth.4 Lewis himself, however, limits the virtues of the style and the poems to an external, highly wrought play of light and colour on surfaces, stating that the texts themselves exist primarily as a medium for the artistic play on the surfaces. A third cluster of studies take both poems seriously, The Goldyn Targe as a Christian moral allegory in defence of reason and against the passions, and The Thrissill and the Rois as an epithalamium and a medi­ tation on kingship and the qualities requisite for governance.5 Last of all

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there is to be found a current emphasizing what we can call the metapoetic reading of Dunbar, poetic language exploring the creation of poetic language, poetry about the writing of poetry and the elaboration of a poetic voice, poetry revealing how one becomes a poet.6 The Goldyn Targe The Goldyn Targe contains any number of motifs from the French tradition. Here I wish to argue that Dunbar’s text is derived from, and influenced the most by, Le Roman de la Rose, and that the intertext is the entire Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meun as well as by Guillaume de Lorris, an intertext of the greatest importance for late medieval literature in Great Britain.7 In The Goldyn Targe the narrator, on a morning in May, in an incredibly beautiful garden, has a dream. He dreams that a ship lands near him, and one hundred lovely ladies disembark, including Venus, other goddesses of Antiquity, the muses, mythological characters, Nature, and the month of May. Descends also a male contingent including Cupid, Mars, other classical gods, Aeolus, and Priapus. Venus, on perceiving the narrator, sends her ladies to capture him. In several assaults an army of female allegories shoot arrows at the narrator, who is defended by Reson holding a golden shield. Eventually, however, Presence blinds Reson, and the narrator, now wounded and all but helpless, is taken prisoner and presented to Beautee. Although welcomed at first, he remains with Hevynesse because of Dangere and Departing. Aeolus blows his horn, the assembly boards the ship and departs, and, upon a canon shot from the vessel, the narrator wakes up, back in the beautiful garden. In French courtly literature, as in the Targe, a standard motif is the physiological representation of a young man falling in love. Cupid / Amors or the lady herself either shoots an arrow or tosses a burning torch from the lady’s heart to her eyes and across space into the lover’s eyes and down to his heart. His heart then is either destroyed or taken prisoner by the lady and kept in her heart. Guillaume de Lorris amplifies the motif by having Amors shoot his narrator in the eye with five golden arrows: Biautez, Simpleice, Cortoisie, Compaignie, and Bel Samblant (1653–878). We are told later how, in a variation on the Ovidian motif, Douz Regart holds the five positive arrows in gold, but with Franchise not Cortoisie, and the five negative ones in iron: La meillor et la plus isnele de ces floiches, et la plus bele,

William Dunbar  55 et cele ou li melor penon furent anté, Biautez ot non. Une de celes qui plus bleice ot non, ce m’est avis, Simpleice. Une autre en i ot, apelee Franchise: cele iert empanee de valor et de cortoisie. La quarte avoit non Compaignie: en cele ot mout pesant saiete, el n’iere pas d’aler loig preste; mes qui de pres en vosist traire, il em peüst assez mal feire. La cinquieme ot non Bel Samblant: ce fu toute la mains grevant.

(Rose 935–50)

Now, four of the five Rose arrows correspond to four of the five ladies in  the first assault who shoot at the Targe narrator: Biautez to Beautee, Simpleice and Franchise-Cortoisie to Fair Having and Lusty Chere (and Simpleice to Grene Innocence in the second group of five), and Bel Samblant to Fyne Portrature: And first of all with bow in hand ybent Come dame Beautee, rycht as scho wald me schent. Syne folowit all hir dameselis yfere, With mony diuerse aufull instrument. Wnto the pres Fair Having wyth hir went, Fyne Portrature, Plesance and Lusty Chere.

(Targe 145–50)

Cortoisie corresponds also to Considerance, Mylde Cher, and Benigne Luke who come in a bit later. Dunbar’s equivalent of Compaignie will appear at the end of the battle as Presence, the conqueror of Reson. Among the dancers in Guillaume’s Garden of Delight are a number of allegories whom Dunbar marshalls in Venus’s “chivalry”: Joinece / Youth; Deduiz / Plesance; Leesce / Wantonnes; again Franchise / Honour, Fredom, Nobilitee; and Richece (and Largesce) as the French equivalents to the Scots Richesse and perhaps also to Hie Degree, Estate, and Noble Array. A number of scholars deny to The Goldyn Targe any concern with human psychology and, for that matter, any genuine interest in the anatomy of love.8 It is true that Dunbar’s brief, powerfully condensed text does not  allow for major evolution on the part of the lover, for the learning

56  High Courtly Narrative

experience and growth, and for the complexity of social interaction that figure so prominently in Guillaume’s Rose. On the other hand, it can be maintained that Dunbar’s brief, condensed text ends at the same point in the narrative as does Guillaume’s finely elaborated one. In both the Rose and the Targe a first-person narrator, after having fallen in love, finds himself in deep melancholy when his wooing falls short and he is left alone, reduced to solitude, due to separation from the lady: in the Rose Bel Acueil is locked in a tower; in the Targe Beautee and the others board their ship and sail away. Although, according to the tenets of fin’ amor, one can fall in love from afar (amor de lonh) with a lady whom one has never met, separation is more often considered to be an obstacle, perhaps the greatest obstacle to fulfillment, given that not only are the lover and lady denied physical contact; they cannot communicate, and, consequently, the lover cannot pursue his amorous quest. As to the experience of falling in love, Dunbar probes more deeply than his French predecessor. Numerous favourable traits, physical and moral, make the lady desirable to the narrator, any one of which appeals to him and could cause him to fall in love. His resistance is embodied in the personification of reason. Reson stands for man’s rational nature, reason and also the will to freedom and mastery, all of man’s resistance to the emotions, to enslavement by passion, to losing self-control. Here the war of the sexes is grounded in the traditional Western dichotomy: man versus woman, reason versus passion, spirit versus the body, the sun versus the moon. Reson defends the narrator against the idea of love, love in the abstract, and against the positive traits of a woman beheld from a distance. However, reason is helpless against the concrete physical attractions of the lady when perceived close up. Here reason, self-control, and common sense cannot resist Beautee allied with Presence. The narrator’s desire is unleashed, and although loving satisfies him for a while, time passes, and it is this now thwarted desire which, after the initial exaltation, brings him down, for he is confronted by Dangere (the lady’s resistance) and, separated from her by Departing, is then reduced to his own Hevynesse: Dissymulance was besy me to sile, And Fair Calling did oft apon me smyle, And Cherising me fed wyth wordis fair. New Acquyntance enbracit me a quhile And fauouryt me, quhill men mycht go a myle, Syne tuke hir leve. I saw hir nevir mare. Than saw I Dangere toward me repair.

William Dunbar  57 I coud eschew hir presence be no wyle, On syde scho lukit wyth ane fremyt fare. And at the last Departing coud hir dresse, And me delyuerit vnto Hevynesse For to remayne, and scho in cure me tuke.

(Targe 217–28)

For a war of allegories, for an assault in which female allegorical figures participate actively and on the offensive, we must turn to Jean de Meun’s section of the Rose and Amors’s siege of the tower built by Jalousie to ­imprison Bel Acueil. Prior to Amors’s first assault on the tower, more than twenty attacking allegories are cited. This is a mustering of the troops not to be found in the Middle English translations. Almost all of them correspond to Venus’s archers in the Targe. In addition to those also to be found in Guillaume de Lorris and discussed above, these are: Noblece de Queur / Dignitee, Nobilitee; Hardement / Will, Stedfastnes; Honor / Honour; Seürté / Discrecion; Jolivetez / Fair Having, Fyne Portrature, Plesance, Lusty Chere; Humilitez / Abaising, Obedience, Lawlynes; Pacience / Pacience; and Bien Celer / Discrecion: Dame Oiseuse, la jardiniere, i vint o la plus grant baniere; Noblece de Queur et Richece, Franchise, Pitiez et Largece, Hardement, Honor, Cortoisie, Deliz, Simplece et Compaignie, Seürté, Deduiz et Leesce, Jolivetez, Biauté, Jennece, Humilitez et Pacience, Bien Celer, Contreinte Atenence qui Fausemblant o lui ameine, san lui i venist el a pein e.

(Rose10419–30)

Most important of all is Faus Samblant: the imago of dissimulation and hypocrisy who plays a central role in Le Roman de la Rose. His speech – confessing, revealing, and upholding what he is – is located at the midpoint of the narrative. Unsavory as he is, Amors admits him into the army and thus accepts the indispensable function of deceit in a love affair; it is he, along with Contrainte Atenence [Abstinance], who slays Male Bouche, mollifies La Vielle, and reaches Bel Acueil. He succeeds where the rest of Amors’s army fails. Significantly, the precise Scots equivalent – Dissymilance – leads

58  High Courtly Narrative

the final charge to defeat Reson and seize the narrator. Just as Faus Samblant reaches Bel Acueil, so Dissymilance reaches the Targe narrator. She is joined by three allegories, all three the rough equivalent of Bel Acueil – Fair Calling, Cherising, and Hamelynes – in addition to Beautee and Presence. Finally, Dissymilance contributes to granting the narrator the brief moment of happiness which turns to melancholy when Beautee departs. It is near the end of Jean de Meun’s Rose that Venus, having been summoned by Amors, leads the assault, shoots her arrow – a burning torch – and sets the place on fire, ensuring the victory of Eros: Venus n’i va plus atardant. Le brandon plein de feu ardant tout anpané lesse voler por ceus du chastel affoler. … Quant li brandons s’an fu volez, ez vos ceus dedanz affolez. Li feus porprant tout le porpris, bien se durent tenir por pris.

(Rose 21221–4, 21229–32)

Only from Jean de Meun could Dunbar have gotten Venus and Cupid together in a situation allied to and supported by Nature, an army of fighting allegories, and the victory achieved by an archer who is Venus or a Venus-surrogate. Given the seeming importance of the French intertext, I wish to offer a reading of the Rose, especially Jean de Meun’s section, which will serve to refute the Robertsonian interpretation of The Targe. The Christian interpretation is largely grounded in the notion that, because Reson defends the narrator with his golden shield and because the narrator is handed over to Hevynesse by Dangere and Departing just before he wakes up, his dream ought to be considered a nightmare, Reson the guardian of moral virtue, and romantic love a lure and a vice that conquer a man by fraud and bring him only misery. I beg to differ. As I see it, the French dits amoureux tell a different story and lead us in a different direction. First of all, the Scots hevynesse is another word for melancholia, the universal state of lovers who have yet to win their wary beloveds (Dangere) and who are separated from them in space (Departing). All the courtly narrators / lovers in Guillaume de Lorris, Machaut, Froissart, and Chartier go through their period of hevy­ nesse. Melancholia, which gives rise to or which is the outward manifestation of love sickness, is often deemed to be a blessing, painful and blessed,

William Dunbar  59

because it is endured in the cause of fin’ amor. It is also closely associated with those born under the sign of Saturn, lovers and, above all, poets. Second, in so many of the French books the protagonist awakes sometimes before, sometimes long before, a happy ending; in a number of the texts, including Guillaume’s Rose, the work ends on a note of ambiguity, with doubts as to whether the protagonist will ever pluck his rose. There are a number of reasons – doctrinal, psychological, political, and aesthetic – why the French poets and consequently Chaucer avoid closure. So also, perhaps, does William Dunbar.9 Most importantly, the French Reson plays a major role in Jean de Meun’s section of the Rose, where she speaks for some 3000 lines and discourses on love in its many aspects including love of reason. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Reson speaks for Jean de Meun the author and that she is to be considered any more authoritative than the other allegorical discoursers. Jean de Meun’s Rose can be considered an outstanding early example of polymodality and of multifocalization: it is a story told by an I-narrator who is at various times hero, witness, or quasi-omniscient outsider (mock-author, scriptor); at the same time it is a story delegated to a series of secondary I-narrators and focalized through their consciousnesses. The problem is that each of the great delegated narrators – Reson, Amis, Faus Samblant, la Vielle, Nature, and even Genius – speaks in his own voice, with equal vehemence and authority. We cannot assume that Jean de Meun necessarily agrees with any one over the others. Indeed, lest we yield to the rhetoric, he creates distance and undermines his own delegated voices. It is up to the reader / audience to analyse fact and motivation, cause and effect, and mind and rhetoric. The result, determined by Jean’s narrative technique, is a state of doctrinal indeterminacy in which the lover as narratee intradiagetically and we the implied audience extradiagetically are offered a sequence of philosophies, doctrines, and worldviews. The indeterminacy remains to the end part and parcel of Jean’s text and of a late medieval mentality of which Jean de Meun is the first outstanding master. In addition, as a figure of allegory in a work of comic fiction, Jean’s Reson is presented to us as a woman who seeks to turn the narrator away from the Rose to herself, allegorically from fin’ amor to reason; however, on the literal level she wants to seduce a young boy. And she fails in her endeavour. She is a loser. The boy will remain Amors’s vassal and be faithful to the Rose. In addition, Reson proves to be a failed rhetorician and an inept teacher, for she employs and re-employs in a clinical situation certain terms in genus humile – coilles and viz – that disturb the idealistic youth and cause him to distance himself from the teacher.10

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Reson, like most other abstract nouns in French and in Latin, is ascribed grammatically to the female gender and, when personified, becomes a woman. Since such gender distinctions do not exist in Middle Scots, Dunbar switches genders and personifies his Reson as a man. The change would be recognized as a bright, witty touch by the educated among his audience. In addition, he corrects any hint of sexual impropriety and, by so doing, turns Venus’s assault on the narrator into a war of the sexes – women against men – always a subject of comedy, especially when the women are doing the attacking, and all that the men can hope for is to stand fast – not to run away – and not to be wounded in the process. As it turns out, the Scots Reson is as inept a warrior as the French Reson proves to be as a teacher and seducer. He is a loser. Presence tosses some powder in his eye, and he ceases to exist in the battle and in the poem. Omnia vin­ cit amor, say Virgil, Jean de Meun, and William Dunbar, for the triumph of love, due to Douz Regart and Presence, the arrows from the lady’s eyes, cannot be resisted, and those who seek to resist are fools. Such is the reality of love, life, and the life of love at the courts. The Thrissill and the Rois For all its wrought artistry, condemned by the earlier scholars and praised by the more recent ones, and for all its narrative line praised or critiqued as convention and artifice, The Thrissill and the Rois is simpler and less controversial than The Goldyn Targe. In the Thrissill the narrator dreams that May comes to him and orders him to write. Off he goes to a lovely garden, a locus amoenus, its attributes praised by birds: Hail to May, Flora, Aurora, Nature, and Venus! Nature summons to her court all the animals, flying creatures, and flowers. She crowns the lion king of the beasts, the eagle king of the birds, and the thistle king of the flowers. In addition, Nature crowns the rose as queen of the flowers, choosing her over the lily. The birds sing in praise of the rose. The narrator then wakes up. Scholars have identified this text as an epithalamium, an encomium, and a public poem to celebrate the wedding of Margaret Tudor to King James IV in 1503.11 Dunbar innovates in an important manner by valourizing the thistle as, figuratively, not only the Stewart royal badge / devise but also the symbol or icon of the nation. Priscilla Bawcutt demonstrates that it is during these years that the thistle became, for Scotland, the equivalent of the English rose and the French fleur-de-lis.12 Nature’s court and the election of the three kings elaborate a structure of hierarchy and harmony in

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the natural world, ruled by love. A dynastic marriage is celebrated with its sundry political alliances and its reflection of natural and supernatural order. Nature is personified as a creator and voice of authority presiding over the symbolic order and a harmonious community exemplified by the multiple coronations and the garden itself, the décor in which the coronations take place. From a somewhat less regal perspective, French texts are often adorned by or built around a rich floral imagery. In two early romances flowers symbolize the girl’s innocence and also her hidden sexuality. These are Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole by Jean Renart and Le Roman de la Violette by Gerbert de Montreuil.13 The later Roman de la Rose is the most famous of these texts; in Guillaume de Lorris’s section the rose stands allegorically for the girl or, more accurately, her love; in Jean de Meun’s section the rose signifies the girl or, more accurately, her sexual anatomy. Guillaume develops the traditional, archetypal equivalence of girl and rose, assigning to the rose those qualities – beauty, purity, freshness, fragility, evanescence, and difficulty of access (nulla rosa sine spina) – that men like to ascribe to their women. The tradition in Western literature extends from the Greeks and Romans (Sappho, the Greek Anthology, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, Ausonius) to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and on to modern times (Apollinaire, Jouve, Éluard, and Aragon). It flourishes also in the Far East (witness the Chinese Chin P’ing Mei, among other examples). Jean de Meun differs from Guillaume de Lorris in bringing to the surface the specifically sexual aspects of the metaphor, the fact that the flower, and especially the rose, is a concrete vaginal image. Hence in so many of our languages taking a virgin is depicted as the act of de­ flowering or of plucking a flower. The ending of Jean’s Roman de la Rose ­recounts the lover’s joyful, triumphant conquest of the Rose. Here the young lover and the older narrator conceive of the Rose as a sex object. When recounting the story of her defloration, the narrator discourses in prollepsis on his other, postoneiric conquests, contrasting the relative merits of young and older roses. The process of reification and of antifeminism is crowned by Jean’s transformation of the woman-rose into a piece of lifeless architecture (the sanctuary), which the Lover pries open with his pilgrim’s staff, while alluding to his conquests in gastronomic terms as the courses of a meal or as the wide and narrow roads that constitute female topography: Quant suis en aucun leu requoi et je chemine, je le [mon bourdon] boute

62  High Courtly Narrative es fosses ou je ne voi goute ausinc con por les guez tanter, si que je me puis bien vanter que n’i ai garde de naier, tant sai bien les guez essaier, et fier par rives et par fonz. … Mes or lessons ces voies lees a ceus qui les vont volantiers; et nous les deduisanz santiers, non pas les chemins aus charretes, mes les jolives santeletes, jolif et ranvoisié tenons, qui les jolivetez menons.

(Rose, 21370–7, 21398–404)

Dunbar’s Thrissill and the Rois respects decorum much as Guillaume did in his Rose. Nevertheless, the phallic regal thistle joining with the vaginal rose is (symbolically) essential to the Scots royal epithalamium and to its message of harmony, order, fertility, and peace:14 Than callit scho all flouris that grew on feild, Discirnyng all thair fassionis and effeiris. Vpone the awfull Thrissill scho beheld, And saw him kepit with a busche of speiris. Concedring him so able for the weiris, A radius croun of rubeis scho him gaif And said, “In feild go furth and fend the laif. … Nor hald non vdir flour in sic denty As the fresche Ros of cullour reid and quhyt … Conciddering that no flour is so perfyt, So full of vertew, plesans and delyt, So full of blisfull angeilik bewty, Imperiall birth, honour and dignite. … O lusty dochtir most benyng … Fro the stok ryell rysing fresche and ȝing, But ony spot or macull doing spring, Cum, blowme of ioy, with iemis to be cround, For our the laif thy bewty is renownd.” … “Haill, blosome breking out of the blud royall Quhois pretius vertew is imperiall.” (Thrissill 127–33, 141–2, 144–7, 149, 151–4, 167–8)

William Dunbar  63

Closer to Dunbar’s Thrissill are a number of briefer poems in praise of flowers or containing a debate or comparison between two flowers. Guillaume de Machaut wrote Le Dit de la Rose, Le Dit de la Marguerite, and Le Dit de la Fleur de lis et de la Marguerite. Jean Froissart wrote Le  Dit de la Margheritte and La Plaidoirie de la Rose et de la Violette. Christine de Pizan wrote Le Dit de la Rose.15 As in Dunbar’s text the various French roses can be assimilated to the lady or ladies, to the pain of love (the thorns), and to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the French, however, the rose’s competitor turns out to be the marguerite or daisy. The daisy is assimilated to Saint Margaret and to the pearl. The daisy turns with the sun in the day and closes at night; like the rose it is both red and white, and also green and yellow; and more than the rose, it can heal illness, and indeed can resuscitate the dead. It is likely that Machaut wrote the first of his marguerite poems for Peter de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, famous for storming Alexandria in  1365. Written in Peter’s voice, it may have been a court encomium for  Margaret of Flanders. The second marguerite poem may have celebrated Margaret’s wedding in 1369 to Philip of Burgundy. Machaut even provides an allegorical interpretation of the daisy’s stalk, petals, corona, pollen, roots, and stamen. Froissart follows Machaut in his Dit de la Margheritte, adding, however, his own pseudo-Ovidian invented myth of the daisy’s origin. As Froissart tells it, Hero wept so bitterly over the death of Cepheus that Jupiter transformed her tears into the daisy, which was then plucked by Mercury, who sent the flower to his beloved. Note that Mercury, god of artifice and eloquence, signifies the creative process and Froissart himself, the poet who creates the myth. In Le Paradis d’Amour the Froissardian narrator sings a ballade to his lady in praise of the daisy; the daisy is the best of all flowers. The narrator may be telling us that his lady is named Margaret. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, in La Plaidoirie de la Rose et de la Violette Froissart follows Machaut’s Dit de la Fleur de lis et de la Marguerite. In Machaut’s text the speaker prefers the daisy to the lily just as Dunbar’s speaker prefers the rose to the lily. However, in Froissart advocates for the rose and the violet plead before Ymagination, who dwells at the court of the lily, that is, the fleur-de-lis. We are told that the lily is sovereign over all flowers, including the rose, just as the eagle reigns over the birds and the lion over the beasts. A political allegory shapes Froissart’s poem, with the French crown standing ahead of the various dukes and counts, just as Dunbar’s text places the English rose over the French lily, to be united with the Scottish thistle, the king of plants:

64  High Courtly Narrative “La noble et haute fleur de lis Qu’on doit bien tenir en chierté N’a elle souverainneté Sus la rose et sur toutes flours ? Si a, et a eü tous jours Et avera, et c’est bien drois, Car sicom li lions est rois Des bestes, et li aigle aussi Rois des oisiaus, est, je vous di, La flour de lis la souverainne Sus toutes flours et plus hautainne.”

(Plaidoirie 284–94)

And first the Lyone, gretast of degre, Was callit thair … “The King of beistis mak I the …” Syne crownit scho the Egle King of fowlis … “O lusty dochtir most benyng, Aboif the lilly illustare of lynnage …” “Haill be thow richest Ros, Haill, hairbis empryce, haill, freschest quene of flouris!” … “Haill, of all flouris quene and souerane!” (Thrissill 87–8, 103, 120, 149–50, 159–60, 170)

Proceeding forward in time, the Burgundian school preferred a more elaborate mode of allegorical encomium. In Jean Molinet’s Le Chappellet des Dames (after July 1478) Vertu makes a garland of five flowers. Experience explains to the narrator the five letters, flowers, virtues, and colours. These include the marguerite, pure and white, and the rose, joyful and red. The five first letters spell Marie, the name of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God. Molinet continues with L’Alliance matrimoniale des Enfans d’Austrice et d’Espaigne (October 1496), with flower imagery, and Pour une margueritte (after April 1497?), which states that the rose is nice and the daisy nicer.16 Finally, Jean Lemaire de Belges, in La Couronne margaritique (part 1, 1505; written after Dunbar’s Thrissill), has Mérite make a crown for Margaret of Burgundy, recently widowed, with the ten letters of her name assimilated to nymphs, jewels, and virtues.17 From the French, Dunbar could have taken the competition of flowers, the notion of one flower reigning over the others, and the flower motif as the structuring device in an epithalamium. And he turned the tables on the French by preferring the rose to the lily (or the daisy) and by introducing

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the Scots thistle as the best of all. With The Goldyn Targe he could have found, in the French, the psychomachia of warring allegories, the psychology of falling in love, and the ambiguous ending. Both the Thrissill and the Targe are superb reworkings of their sundry preceding intertexts. Dunbar imparts to these high courtly allegories of love his own rich, complex ­vision, a vision embodied in his own, unique style – abbreviatio in place of the French and Burgundian amplificatio yet expressed in magnificent high aureation. In this, as in other ways to be discussed in Part 2, Dunbar is unique.

5 John Rolland, The Court of Venus

The Court of Venus by John Rolland is a text all but totally neglected in  Scottish studies.1 C.S. Lewis, in his pioneering rehabilitation of the sixteenth-century in Middle Scots, cites the book, describing it as “an erotic allegory strangely encumbered by the author’s legal interests, and almost (but not quite) without merit.”2 Maurice Lindsay, in his History of Scottish Literature, represents the poem as old-fashioned and not “in itself of much importance or interest.”3 Gregory Kratzmann also employs the term “old-fashioned” in the four-volume History of Scottish Literature to designate Rolland’s poetry.4 And Janet Smith observes that the poem appeared “long after the old fashion was out of date” and that “Rolland’s mock trial fitly concludes the tradition” of the law court form, which “was an arid, unpoetic style.”5 It may well be that the belatedness of The Court of Venus – published in 1575, written before 1560 – explains the absence of scholarly commentary and critical recognition.6 In contrast to these judgments, in my opinion The Court of Venus is a  major work, a masterpiece if you will, in the style of the French dits  amoureux and closer to the French tales of love than any other Scottish text, including The Kingis Quair and Gavin Douglas’s The Palice of Honour. Given the importance of the trial scene at Venus’s court, it should surprise no one that the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle offers an especially rich fund of themes and motifs to, and occupies a central position in, the tradition behind John Rolland, a tradition that he cultivated so well. The seeming “foreignness” of The Court may also explain why the book has yet to find a place in the canon. The foreignness here refers in part to Rolland’s closeness to French poets who themselves were excluded from the canon until quite recently, but also to the phenomenon of belatedness, exemplified in a very medieval work dating

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from the mid-1500s, which cannot be ­accounted for within our standard Renaissance horizon of expectations.7 In a 338–line Prologue the narrator, who is also the implied author, discourses on the four tempers in the body, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the four elements, and the four animals to which they correspond. The worst of these beasts is the pig, associated with the element earth and the temper melancholia. After a disquisition on man’s free will as opposed to astral determinism, the narrator decides to write in order to avoid idleness and the commerce of bad people who commit vice. He writes for gentlemen and not rural folk, he is willing to be corrected, he states that Venus made him do it, and he sends his book on its way. First of all, the narrator is making his claim to be an author, that is, a figure of authority. In the medieval and Renaissance tradition, he cultivates conventioned rhetorical topoi: captatio benevolentiae, affected modesty, and “Go Little Book” among others. He makes a claim to knowledge and to wisdom which he can then disseminate to his readers. And he places himself in the category of intellectuals born under the sign of Saturn and, therefore, in contact with Venus yet also subject to melancholia and its ­attendant vice: acedia. Second, the narrator states twice that he is writing a “Comedie” (266, 336). Comedy can already be detected in the Prologue. It takes the form of self-deprecation, for this learned and rhetorically proficient auctor admits, even volunteers, that melancholia – inevitably his melancholia – is the worst of the tempers and that it is associated with the worst of animals, the pig. He himself, as a lover, poet, and sage, a man subject to idleness, is implicitly, metaphorically a pig, and the act of writing that will free him from idleness requires a disposition that will bring him ever back to the earth, to Saturn, to melancholy, and to their iconic image. The Prologue over, “The First Buik” begins with a traditional extradiegetic frame narrative: The weather is dreadful, typical of the season in Pisces. It is wet and windy, yet it is also the time for choosing a mate. Alone, miserable, lying in bed, the narrator nevertheless gets up, bundles himself in warm clothes including mittens, and goes out to a garden where he cowers under a bush to escape the rain. There he perceives two fine youths and takes care to overhear them, lying low in order not to be noticed: I Jowkit than but dout quhen I thame saw, Behind the Bus (Lord) bot I liggit law. Buir me richt coy, and this my caus, and quhy, To se gif thay wald ony nar me draw,

68  High Courtly Narrative Or gif they had sum secreitis I micht knaw. … That I was thair forsuith thay did misknaw Howbeit I was to thame ane secreit spy.

(Venus 1:55–9, 62–3)

This passage contains the reworking in Scots of a number of motifs from the French love poems. Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Behaingne is probably the first text in which a narrator hides in the grass and eavesdrops on a debate concerning love. He is then followed by Alain Chartier where the narrator in La Belle Dame sans Mercy hides behind a leafy trellis and overhears a similar love debate: Si m’assis derriere une treille Drue de fueilles a merveille, Entrelacee de saulx vers, Si que nul, pour l’espesse fueille, Ne me peüst veoir au travers. … Et n’y avoit autre destour Fors la treille entre moy et eulx.

(Chartier, Belle Dame 156–60, 167–8)

With La Belle Dame the debate – is love good or bad? is one subject to love or not? – is presented in the guise of a lover wooing the lovely lady, who rejects his suit. The author-figure as observer and, ultimately, as perhaps the arbiter of a love debate is a common motif in the dits amoureux. Examples where the narrator does not hide but participates in the conversation include Christine de Pizan, Le Livre du Debat de deux amans, Le Livre des Trois jugemens, and Le Livre du Dit de Poissy, and Alain Chartier, Le Livre des Quatre Dames.8 That the narrator in these poems is unhappy, and particularly unhappy in matters of the heart, is standard in the later texts, specifically in Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy – itself a variation on the love debate – and in most poems of the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle: in Baudet Herenc, Le Parlement d’Amour; La Dame loyale en Amour; and Achille Caulier, La Cruelle Femme en Amour:9 Nagaires, chevauchant, pensoye Com home triste et doloreux, Au dueil ou il fault que je soye Le plus dolent des amoureux. Quant ainsy je me vy contraint D’Amours a la ballade faire,

(Chartier, Belle Dame 1–4)

John Rolland  69 De soucy me trouvay astraint, Pour ce que doubtoye forfaire Les biens d’Amours dont j’ay affaire … Pour quoy il me couvint gesir Par desconfort sus une couche.

(Herenc 9–13, 37–8)

Ce fu ens eu moys de septembre Que tresdollent me complenoye; … A poy soubstenir me pouoye, Car en ce point esté avoye Troys jours sans boyre et sans mangier, Que nulle chose ne faysoye Fors le Dieu d’Amours invoquier.

(Dame loyale 25–6, 28–32)

De Crainte et de Desir contrains, Chevauchoye apart moy seullet, Ainsy mené, ne plus ne mains, Comme ungs homs qui ne sceit qu’il fait. … Que seul estoye en tel esmay, Main levé et fort courouchié. … En grant habondance de plours M’eust on trouvé, baignant en lermes.

(Caulier 13–16, 27–8, 61–2)

In Chartier’s Livre des Quatre Dames the narrator, also quite like John Rolland’s author-figure, miserable and melancholic, suffering from lovesickness, sets out on the first day of spring to a garden where the four ­ladies will speak. All of these texts build on the theme of the fumbling, lovelorn, bookish, old author-figure, most competent as a writer and most incompetent as a potential or actual lover. Machaut and Froissart launched this ­thematic in Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre, Le Voir Dit, and Le Joli Buisson de Jonece. Finally, in Charles d’Orléans’s rondeaux we find the speaker in bed on Valentine’s Day, unwilling or unable to rise and choose his mate:10 A ce jour de Saint Valentin Que chascun doit choisir son per … A mon resveillier, au matin, Je n’ay cessé de penser … Mais Nonchaloir, mon medicin, … m’a conseillié reposer Et rendormir son mon coussin.

(Rondeau 3)

70  High Courtly Narrative Quant j’ay ouy le tabourin Sonner pour s’en aler au may, En mon lit fait n’en ay effray Ne levé mon chef du coissin, En disant: il est trop matin, Ung peu je me rendormiray.

(Rondeau 38)

To be compared to Rolland: This samin day (gif I remember richt) Is consuetude to all kin Foule of flicht, Quha is vakand to cheis thame than ane maik. … To pas the time, and ather solace mak. Bot I alone of sic curage did laik. Pansing far mair how sone wald cum the nicht Me to repois, in my couche rest to tak.

(Venus 1: 28–30, 33–6)

All this to observe how well and with what thoroughness Rolland assimilated the French tradition and also the extent to which he relates his frame narrative to the Prologue. His narrator, alone, miserable, and in bed, and later alone, miserable, and hiding from the rain under a bush, makes him, on the one hand, a lover wallowing in melancholia and sloth, and, at the same time, an author-figure subject to melancholia and sloth. He is committing the very sins that he warns against in the Prologue. His situation is comic because of his inability to adapt to the social world of lovers and participants in the Valentine festivities and because he remains obliv­ ious to the meaning of his situation and how it relates to the confident didacticism of the Prologue. Thus, we can measure a certain distance between the narrator as storyteller and the narrator as observer or witness in the story he is telling. The observer is a comic figure, a bit of a fool. The storyteller is, on the contrary, a serious moralist yet not consciously aware of the disparity. He is reliable with regard to the (wildly fictional) events that take place but seemingly not at all with regard to how they are to be interpreted. The narrator overhears two fine young men, superlatively dressed – we are given a long description of their clothes and jewellery – one of whom loves whereas the other wishes to love no longer, the one blissful in his love life and the other wretched. Among the many French debate poems, a few develop the same thematic. Christine’s Le Livre du Debat de deux amans recounts the dispute between an older knight and a young squire over whether love brings more joy or more pain. The knight insists that

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love causes us to lose our minds and our sense of honour; we are knocked about by Fortune with tragic results; love destroys. The squire responds that love remains ever good and that lovers should accept with joy whatever occurs, keeping with them Esperance and Doux Penser; separation and death are externals that ought never to be blamed on love itself. Chartier’s Le Debat des Deux Fortunés d’Amours follows in the wake of Christine’s poem. Here a healthy, happy knight argues that love is always good, and it brings joy (with allusion to Esperance), while a sad, sickly (thin) knight responds that love is always bad, and it brings misery. A variation on this thematic occurs in Les Cent Ballades with the equivalent of a debate between an old knight who counsels love as fidelity and loyalty while La Guignarde upholds love as inconstancy.11 A similar debate, ­entirely between women, is presented in Le Débat des deux soeurs by the fifteenth-century Burgundian, Vaillant.12 They recall the ideological divide in Le Roman de la Rose between Guillaume de Lorris and fin’ amor versus Jean de Meun and amour libre. A second variation is represented by Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy: the lover praises love as the embodiment of all virtues whereas the lady lists the reasons why she should not love, including the argument that love is bad and it hurts people. Chartier’s thematic is again anticipated in Christine’s Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame.13 John Rolland adapts the French pre-texts to his own uses with wit and brio. The two youths have been transformed from knights and squires into allegories, and they are given French allegorical names: Esperance, borrowed directly from Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier; and its antithesis, Desperance, a Scots version of the French Désesperance. These female abstract nouns, in French always given a female gender, are here applied to the two youths. Such play with gender, grammatical and sexual, is scarcely unique. The norm is for a female allegory to instruct and to o ­ ffer consolation and comfort to a male erotic, desiring subject. Breaking the norm, in Le Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun ascribes long speeches to male figures – Ami, the Jalous, and Genius – who offer the lover copious lessons in misogyny. Furthermore, both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun ascribe the Rose’s impulse to welcome the lover’s advances by the term Bel Acueil. The masculine noun is personified as a young boy, which allows some deliciously ambiguous situations of an erotic nature. Those in the Scottish public aware of the medieval allegorical tradition would have enjoyed Rolland’s contributions to ­ the game. The debate as a game takes place in a series of succeeding and alternating huitains, with one stanza each for each of the debaters. This is the precise

72  High Courtly Narrative

same formula as the one in La Belle Dame sans Mercy. Esperance and Desperance go on and on, mechanically repeating the same arguments, each deaf to the reasoning of the other. Rather like the characters in Christine and Chartier, rather specifically like Chartier’s lovely lady – “Amours est crüel losengier, / Aspre en fait et doulx a mentir” (313–14) – Desperance attacks love and its source – the goddess Venus – but he does so in more virulent terms. According to Desperance, Venus’s works are false, faithless, and odious; love is a poison, it gives rise to slander and shame, it slays the soul; Venus herself is without faith and truth. Actually, “lufe” is allegorized as a woman; love and Venus are the same: That lufe thow speikis hes na continuance. Bot slydis away as dois the snaw or slime … … lufe is full of dissait, And be na way thow sall not find it stabill. … Hir warkis ar sa odious and Prophane, Into na sort thay ar not for to vse. … I the assure, scho is fals and faithles. … lufe is sa perrellous, To all gude deid it is ane strenthie bar. Of all poisoun it is maist venemous. Sclander and schame euer to it drawis nar. … God is forȝet, lufe hes the cheualrie: First slais the saull, and puttis the bodie down. … Luf is truthles: and lufe is tressonable: Nocht lauchfull, but scho is lamentable. Vod, wantoun, vane, and void of veritie. … Lufe is richt mad: and lufe is malicious, Presumptuous, odious, and suspicious, Sclanderous, and cled all with scurrilitie. … Angrie, Irefull, birnand as baitit bair. … Crabit, Cankerit, fenȝeit, baith feirce and fell. … Bitter as Gall, and speciall net of hell. (Venus 1: 323–4, 353–4, 387–8, 407, 513–16, 534–5, 580–2, 596–8, 611, 613, 615)

Compare with Christine and with Chartier: C’est seraine qui endort a sa voix Pour homme occire; C’est un venim enveloppé de mirre

John Rolland  73 Et une paix qui en tous temps s’aÿre, Un dur lïen ou desplaisir në yre N’a nulle force Du deslïer … Ainsi amours fait devenir avugle Le fol amant, qui se cueuvre d’un cruble Et bien cuide veoir en temps de nuble Le cler souleil. (Christine, Debat de deux amans 459–65, 881–4) C’est la chace dont le veneur est pris; C’est le beau los qui retourne en mespris; C’est le mestier dont le maistre est repris. C’est ly esbas Dont sourt discors, rïotes et debas, Dechié de corps et de chatel rabas, Et qui a mis mainte cité au bas Sans retourner. … C’est bien grevable … Crainte hastive, Seure päour, hardïesce craintive, Desir forcé et force volentive, Advis musart, muserie soubtive … Temps sans exploit et paine a l’aventure. (Chartier, Deux Fortunés 1060–7, 1079, 1099–1102, 1106)

Finally, whereas in the French tales of love the debaters habitually agree to have their “case” adjudicated by an authority-figure, often one proposed by the narrator, in John Rolland Esperance, overwhelmed by Desperance’s verbal assault against Venus, is so sensitive to the assaults that he falls into a swoon, and on the point of dying, in his last breath calls upon Venus and Cupid to defend him. Venus then arrives and, as did the lady with Venus in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse, she ministers to him, taking him in her arms and kissing him: Adonq la dame s’abaissa … Et plus de cent fois le baisa En son dormant; Et puis elle le resgarda Et de son droit braz l’embrassa Et li dist: “Amis, trai te sa!”

(Fonteinne 2495, 2497–501)

74  High Courtly Narrative Anone Venus that Ladye fair and bricht, In armes swith scho claucht hir awin trew knicht Confortit him with kiss ane thousand syis With voce cryand, with all her mane & micht. Awalk, awalk, awalk, thow wofull wicht.

(Venus 1: 668–72)

Humour radiates from Esperance’s near-death or real-death experience. The tradition of chivalry is still alive, at least in books. All the knightly lovers in the French dits amoureux are presumed to be brave and valorous in war. In Christine’s Le Livre du Dit de Poissy one of the ladies suffers from the imprisonment of her beloved, a brave knight captured at the battle of Nicopolis. Similarly, in Chartier’s Le Livre des Quatre Dames three of the ladies suffer from the misfortune of their brave beloveds, killed, captured, or missing at the battle of Poitiers. The fourth is perhaps the most wretched; her boyfriend escaped from the battle alive and is, therefore, a coward. It is also true that the wretched lovers in Machaut, Froissart, Christine, and Chartier all speak of dying from love. Yet very few of them do. In La Belle Dame sans Mercy the narrator states that he has heard that the spurned lover later died of chagrin. In Baudet Herenc and in Achille Caulier the lovely lady is accused of being directly responsible for the lover’s death, in other words, of murder. Desir makes the accusation in Le Parlement d’Amour, and the lover’s friend, Verité, and Loyaulté make the accusation in La Cruelle Femme en Amour: Et ceste dame a le deffaire S’est efforcee tellement Que la mort par son dur affaire L’a desconfit mortellement. La quelle luy ait reffusé Mercy, par son fellon courage, Et par son regart abusé Dont il soit mort. … Le dur coup de la mort obscure, Que celle luy voult procurer Avant son temps, mal gré Nature.

(Herenc 157–60)

(Caulier 273–6, 622–4)

Being found guilty of murder is second only to being found guilty of blasphemy and lèse-majesté. The very same accusation is made against Rolland’s Desperance:

John Rolland  75 Desperance Knicht thow art Indytit heir For slauchter of ane knicht hecht Esperance.

(Venus3: 299–300)

Furthermore, as is the case with Desperance, in the Cycle the facts of the case (the assumption of death) are questioned. In La Dame loyale en Amour, after Desir makes the usual accusation, Verité wonders whether the lover is really deceased. We aren’t sure, she affirms. And in Les Erreurs du Jugement de la Belle Dame sans Mercy Verité pleads that one of the twelve errors in procedure concerns the lover’s purported death. One month after the fatal verbal encounter he was still alive, she declares. And in The Court of Venus the wretched debater and upholder of great love dies (more or less), simply from hearing the notion of love and Venus verbally denigrated by his debating partner. In a rage, then, over the near death of her knight, Venus demands that Desperance be tried for blasphemy, misogyny, and attempted murder. Thus, instead of a judge deciding which of the two positions (for or against love) is the more truthful or the morally superior, the judge becomes the accuser in a trial which recalls Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Navarre and, above all, the La Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle. In Baudet Herenc’s Le Parlement d’Amour, since no advocate at Amours’s court is willing to stand in the lovely lady’s defence, she requests an adjournment in order to seek counsel: Et celle conseil demanda, Pour respondre a ce que on disoit. … Quant la dame ouÿ l’apparanse Que conseil n’auroit, clerc ne lay, Estat demanda, pour absense De conseil, pour avoir delay.

(Herenc 577–8, 585–8)

Similarly, when Desperance’s trial is scheduled for three days after the bill of indictment is executed, the accused observes how little time he has to prepare his defence (“Sen this sa schort the mater cummis on case,” 1: 881) and will use the three days to find counsel: To Desperance not vnknawin in ane part How that Venus wes set to eik his smart: He him bethocht for to fang sum defence, And for to get sum Aduocat expert: Wald Venus court retreit, cast or conuert, Or in sum part thairin mak resistence.

(Venus 2: 1–6)

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“The Secund Buik” is devoted to Desperance’s quest. And quest it is indeed, a mock-heroic quest, as he wends his way through forests, climbs mountains, and fords rivers, in the most inclement weather – wind, rain, and snow – in his all but fruitless search. Henri Bergson explains how the comic is generated by “du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant,”14 the juxtaposition of the artificial or the mechanical, and the vibrantly, dynamic, living human, and by the artificial, mechanical repetition of this juxtaposition. Bergson’s comic can help us understand the sequence of events in Book 2: Desperance seeks help in turn from the Seven Sages of Antiquity, the Nine Muses, the Nine Worthies, the Ten Sybils, the Three Fates, and the Three Graces. From each group he receives roughly the same answer: Venus is very powerful, we cannot help you, but we can send you to someone who can. And thus is played out a delicious comic routine in which the great figures of classical myth prove to be cowards and, consequently, utterly useless vis-à-vis the desperate protagonist, while the desperate protagonist dashes about the countryside tossed back and forth from one to another. Among other comic motifs can be cited Desperance’s own cowardice: he is afraid to enter the domains of the Muses and Worthies, and he faints away in the presence of the latter, the only masculine authority-figures in his quest. He receives an encouraging prophetic dream from Spes but doesn’t know how to interpret it; the Fates predict Desperance’s future but he isn’t listening: This thay conclude all thre with ane consent: Bot he thairof had na experiment. For throw the fall he was in Frenesie.

(Venus 2: 661–3)

Other comic moments relate to the narrator, who is not sure that he remembers the names of the Nine Worthies (the one list of names that everyone would know); and when Desperance has to be ferried across a river, the narrator doesn’t know whether or not he paid toll: Bot I knew not gif he payit fraucht or fie. Bot as I ges, superexspendit was he.

(Venus 2: 684–5)

Finally, Hoip takes Desperance to Vesta’s palace. Chastity, the porter, won’t let him in. Once inside, he discovers that Vesta is surrounded by far fewer ladies than was the case with Venus. Happily for the young man, Vesta is Venus’s sworn foe, and she agrees to be his advocate in the upcoming trial.15

John Rolland  77

The entire “Thrid Buik” is devoted to recounting that trial. John Rolland plays with the trial machinery in much the same way that Machaut, Froissart, and the French followers of Alain Chartier play with theirs. For example, in Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny Pitié, defending the accused lover, denounces Amours’s officers, Dangier and Mallebouche, for their responsibility in the affair and states, therefore, that they cannot be allowed as judges; in The Court of Venus, Vesta contests several of the assessors – Venus’s own mother plus, among others, Phyllis, Medea, Delilah, Jocasta, Deianira, and Thisbe – for having lived always for Venus and against chastity. Venus denies Vesta’s appeal. When Vesta then protests against Venus serving simultaneously as both judge and advocate, Venus denies all Vesta’s motions in a fit of anger. What can be called arbitrary justice is more flagrant and more comic in The Court of Venus than in the Cycle poems. However, the situations are identical. Accused before and judged by Amours and Venus, the Belle Dame and Desperance are doomed from the start. In theory, their best defence would be to deny Amours’s and Venus’s jurisdiction, to declare that they have nothing to do with love and, consequently, are in no way subject to love’s law. But, of course, they don’t. Finally, whereas the allegorical plaintiffs in Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre culled examples from Antiquity – from history and myth – to attack the narrator, John Rolland, in a delightful comic sequence, has his mythical Venus and Vesta cite precedents from the Old Testament. Vesta is more of a scholar than Venus, who makes a fool of herself by arguing that Vesta’s “storyis” don’t prove a thing and that perhaps some of them are made up: How beit ȝe haif schawin furth ane small legent. I do not knaw gif it be euident For sic storyis I cuir thame not ane prene. And I deny that euer sic hes bene. Bot quhen ȝe pleis sic castis ȝe can Inuent, Me to defraude with gyle, and circumuene. … Quhair that ȝe say, seir storyis ȝe haif sene, In the Testamentis baith ald and new surelie: I gif credence, I traist it may weill be Ȝit sum thair is that ȝe haif forȝet clene, Or ellis I traist ȝe neuer thame saw with ene.

(Venus 3: 544–9, 642–6)

Venus questions the reliability of Vesta’s testimony in much the same way that poems in the Cycle question the reliability of Alain Chartier’s narratorwitness in the original Belle Dame sans Mercy.

78  High Courtly Narrative

Following these trial proceedings, in the Belle Dame Cycle and in The Court of Venus defendants face the death penalty for a relatively insignificant misdemeanor: having affirmed that sexual love is a bad thing. In  Achille Caulier’s La Cruelle Femme en Amour the lovely lady is ­accused of irresponsible speech, of being guilty of tyranny, blasphemy, and lèse-majesté: Et puis que le tirant ressemble Puis je bien “tirande” appeller … Pour quoy la puis, sans sournonmer, Appeller la Faulse Tirande. … Premier, je diz qu’elle a conmis Crisme de leze magesté, Quant de sa bouche a arresté Que pour pluseurs cas [vous, Amours] estes vice. (Caulier 665–6, 671–2, 747–50)

She is then condemned to be executed by drowning in a well of tears. So too, in the early letters and in L’Excusacion, the implied author Alain Chartier is threatened with death both by the courtiers and by the god Amours. He also would be a “mauvaise langue,” a busybody and eavesdropper who commits heresy out of spite, that is, his personal failure with the ladies. In the later poems of the Cycle narratological play gives rise to the various advocates taking as reality the fiction of the Belle Dame narrator, equated with Alain Chartier, as an observer and witness. Hence, in the poems which defend the lovely lady Chartier is said to have gotten it all wrong and to have exaggerated what he overheard: in La Dame loyale en Amour he is assimilated to “jengleurs” (587) and “mesdisans” (584) guilty of “parler villain” (597). The texts which attack the lovely lady, on the other hand, praise the supposed witness for being, as Caulier puts it, “ung tresnotable escripvain” (466) and not at all a “faulx informeur” (476). In Rolland’s text, Venus charges Desperance with having slain Esperance and having slandered her, Venus. Vesta observes that Esperance is still alive and that the alleged slander is the truth. In the French books the verdict scenes are relatively straightforward. Such is the case in the Belle Dame Cycle. In Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Navarre and Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women humour is generated by the fact that the author allows his persona – the narrator – to be adjudged guilty but then to be sentenced only to write more poetry, the one domain in which he stands unrivaled. John Rolland, on the contrary,

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devotes “The Fourt Buik” to developing, amplifying, and expanding on the humorous elements in the previous tradition. Thisbe, chosen to be the chancellor of the assisers because she was devoted to love yet died a virgin, delivers the bill of judgment. According to this bill, Vesta stands higher and better than Venus; therefore, presumably, spiritual love is superior to the carnal variety. Nevertheless, because Desperance is Venus’s vassal (a facet of the case revealed to us now for the first time), he is guilty of feudal treachery. He shall be condemned to death. However, Thisbe pleads that Venus show mercy, because women – the category includes Venus – ought to avoid harshness and to manifest womanly pity. This is the very same argument used to condemn Chartier’s Belle Dame.16 In addition, in L’Excusacion Amours castigates the implied author Alain Chartier for having, through the Belle Dame, encouraged ladies to show no pity to their suitors: Es tu foul, hors du scens ou yvre, Ou veulx contre moy guerre prendre Qui as fait le maleureux livre, Dont chascun te devroit reprendre, Pour enseigner et pour aprendre Les dames a geter au loing Pitié la debonnaire et tendre, De qui tout le monde a besoing?

(Chartier, L’Excusacion 25–32)

In Rolland Venus agrees with Thisbe, and Desperance repents. All goes well. But then, because Vesta boasts of her triumph and says that she will never again be subject to the likes of Venus, the supposedly defeated and humiliated goddess, in a rage, re-condemns Desperance to death and sends him off to a dungeon to await his doom. It is only upon Esperance’s plea for mercy towards Desperance that Venus once again changes her mind and relents. Significantly, Esperance argues that it is wrong for such grave punishments to be allotted for what, between Desperance and himself, was only play, a point that Desperance himself made when first accused by Venus. Here we see that Venus’s bobbing back and forth as a judge, and her personal, strictly emotional response to the events around her, characterize her in gendered terms. She is a woman, The Woman, as society envisaged women – emotional, irrational, physical, subject to passion, subject to fickleness and change, a creature of the night with particular ties to the moon and Dame Fortune. Hence the delicious irony that, in the Prologue, it was the goddess herself who purportedly urged the narrator to tell the story, one in which she plays a sorry role.

80  High Courtly Narrative

After Desperance repents again and is taken back into Venus’s service, and after a banquet and an erotic tournament – blows are delivered but no blood spilled – the narrator reappears in the story. In a delightful spoof of the tradition Rolland has his narrator tell us that he remained lurking beneath the bush for all this time, that is, for the three days that Desperance took in his quest for an advocate, plus the day of the trial, verdict, sentence, feast, and tourney. We are not told, of course, how this first-person narrator with his limited point of view became omniscient or otherwise found out about Desperance’s quest. We are told, however, that the narrator’s name is Eild and that, like the old narrator in Machaut, Froissart, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, it is as a senex amans that he prays to Venus for alms and for permission to join the festivities. Despite the fact that he used to be a member of her court, Venus and her retinue mock him. As Venus observes, he may have the will but cannot perform the deed, and she cares only for the deed: Ga way said scho, ane fell freik thow hes bene That weill I knaw be thy beld heid and ene: With thi gude wil thow hes done that thow may Bot thy gude will without gude deid betwene Is not comptit in my Court worth a prene. Trowis thow gude will be payment? … Preif it than in deid with corage fra the splene.

(Venus 4: 707–12, 714)

Ejected from the garden, the narrator, this clerkly author-figure, indulges in a comic version of the affected modesty topos, more or less confessing that behind the bush he was cold and remembered badly what took place. He then ends by stating that he writes for lovers, ladies, Venus, Cupid, and Christ. Putting Christ at the end places the entire work in a Christian frame of reference, one which recalls Vesta and Venus citing biblical precedents for their pleas, with Vesta arguing that the virgin martyrs manifest the highest, best love of all. The invocation also provides a last bit of humour, reminding the implied reader / audience of the extent to which The Court of Venus is a totally secular aristocratic book emanating from a long tradition of secular aristocratic books, the extent to which it takes Christian and secular motifs – worshipping God, paying feudal homage, etc. – and builds with and upon them a magnificent, mature, urbane, witty dit amoureux, one of the last and one of the best.

John Rolland  81

Given the quantity and quality of analogous themes, motifs, images, passages, and forms, I think it a reasonable deduction that John Rolland was acquainted with the dit amoureux and, more particularly, with the La Belle Dame sans Mercy and the Cycle. In that case, given the ludic qualities of the Cycle, he would have added, developed, and amplified comedy from the material in the Cycle, would have drawn out and actualized the Cycle’s comic potential. Even more, whatever his acquaintance with the French texts, can we not envisage The Court of Venus as a late contribution to the Cycle, rather like Le Dialogue d’un amoureux et de sa dame or Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny, that is, a work with different characters and with no overt reference to the Chartrian pre-texts yet employing the same apparatus and exploring the same questions of doctrine and techniques of narration? The Court of Venus testifies to a rich, manifold tradition, especially French, in the dit amoureux, and also to a similar tradition in the debate or judgment poem. The “law court form” fascinated poets and their public in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, from Machaut to Rolland. In this subgenre Alain Chartier and the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle occupy a place of honour, at the centre. Far from being arid and unpoetic or without merit, these texts are fascinating cultural artefacts and, at their best, first-class works in the comic vein, first-class comic poetry. Ostentatious bookishness and conscious, willful intertextuality, with an author’s revelling in the pre-texts he appropriates, devours, and recreates; and artistic self-consciousness with the notion that a novel’s major thematic will be concerned with the writing of novels and, more specifically, with how the novel itself came into being – these are givens in our time, recognized and attended to by creator and critic alike. Inevitably, they have also been displaced onto the Middle Ages, not always with success. It ought to be obvious that fabliaux were not written to problematize the writing of fabliaux. However, in the later Middle Ages, and in the dit amoureux especially, narrative does become metanarrative, and the metanarrative is intertextual. The intertextual metanarrative is also social, given that one of the standard themes – one that can be envisaged as a “problematic” – concerns the position of the poet vis-à-vis his patron, depicted as the Horatian friendship between the older poet as failed lover or the poet as witness and the younger, more dashing, more successful high aristocratic or even royal lover. Consequently, late-medieval texts manifest some of the features we find in their twentieth- / twenty-first-century coun­ terparts. They are perhaps indicative of mannerism, a state of mind or a

82  High Courtly Narrative

pattern of mental structures that unites our respective ages. They certainly enable today’s scholars to envisage the later Middle Ages with greater sympathy and insight than was the case for preceding generations and thus enrich the national heritage, both French and Scots. One feature of the later Middle Ages in France, England, and Scotland is the elaboration of a high court culture. Its most important literary manifestation is to be found in the allegory of love. Thus the dit amoureux in the Scottish literary culture proves to be a central element in a world of letters that was so aristocratic, transnational, and European.

PART TWO The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric: A Mode of Clerical Provenance

Literary typology – the construction of a pattern or structure of genres, modes, types, and forms to account for a corpus of literature – is a fascinating and perhaps also a futile persuit. In French studies, for a long time, the typology was grounded in part in genre and in part in chronology but more so in the presumed literary public or the presumed cultural background of the modes. Hence, from the time of the creator of modern literary history in France, Gustave Lanson, for up to three generations, French medieval literature was compartmentalized as a heroic and chivalric lit­ erature written for the nobility, followed by or contemporary with it a bourgeois literature composed for the middle classes; later came the “decomposition” of the Middle Ages, with the French people and Monsieur Lanson waiting impatiently for the Renaissance.1 Now, the so-called bourgeois literature included the fabliau, the Roman de Renart, and Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la Rose. What this meant, as I have argued elsewhere, is that early writers who appeared to resemble genuine bourgeois Parisian authors in more recent times – say, Voltaire and Anatole France, and those who embodied a Voltairian or Francian spirit – were assimilated to them and called “bourgeois.”2 The writers were Jean de Meun, Rabelais, and Molière; the spirit was comedy, satire, rebellion against established norms, a strongly secular ideology, and the didactic. One of the first to rebel against the bourgeois formulation was Per Nykrog, who, in a path-breaking study of the fabliaux, observed that fabliaux are contained in the same manuscripts as courtly lyrics and romances and that their public is the same public of the courts.3 He argued that there was no independent bourgeois audience or independent bourgeois patronage for literature. The urban craftsmen and merchants, to the extent that they had literary preferences, adopted those of their superiors. I have

84  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

suggested that this state of affairs existed up to the eighteenth century, at least, and perhaps until the 1850s.4 Coming after Nykrog, Jean-Charles Payen, one of the leading medievalists of his generation, in a superb book on Le Roman de la Rose, posited that Jean de Meun wrote in a clerical spirit and that the traits that characterize his portion of the Rose – learning, a rich intertextuality invoking the Ancients, anticourtly satire, misogyny, a serious preoccupation with ideas, and the desire to teach others – can be considered not at all bourgeois but, rather, clerical or of clerical origin.5 Being of clerical descent, however, in no way presumes a Christian message. Voltaire himself was a prize pupil of the Jesuits. It may, therefore, be possible to propose a clerical mode of comedy, satire, and the didactic as a continuous strand in Old and Middle French. This mode can perhaps also be proposed for much of the literature in Middle Scots, including works by Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay, The Freiris of Berwik, and King Hart. Can the comic and the satirical, on the one hand, and the didactic and the allegorical, on the other hand, be separated for the purposes of generic typology? Not at all for Le Roman de la Rose. And not at all for the Morall Fabillis and for Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Do I run the risk of conjuring an omnium gatherum of disparate texts, whatever is not high Chaucerian? I am afraid so. Yet I hope that this sort of typology is valid, at least for the purposes of this book, and as the impulse for further discussion.

6 Robert Henryson, Morall Fabillis

Robert Henryson’s Morall Fabillis place us in a seemingly different world from his Testament of Cresseid and from the high courtly dit amoureux tradition in which the Cresseid holds an honoured place. The Morall Fabillis are generally considered to be Henryson’s masterpiece, one of the first and one of the greatest achievements in Scottish literature.1 If the scholars are unanimous in their high valuation of Henryson’s work, they diverge on about everything else relating to it. Douglas Gray, who wrote one of the best full-length studies on Henryson, observes that we cannot be certain of either the text itself or of the ordering or the sources of the fables.2 Much disagreement exists also with regard to how the fables are to be read and to the precise relationship, in each fable, between the narrative proper and the moral of the fable (the moralitas) which, in most cases, immediately follows it. To give some examples, early scholars emphasized what they thought to be the popular spirit and peasant humour emanating from the fables, derived in part from folkloric sources such as the “popular Reynardian cycle” and “Aesop and other animal tales from popular tradition.”3 Richard Bauman went so far as to ascribe to the oral folk tradition Henryson’s amplification of literary sources and to posit a central role for Flemish animal folklore, transmitted in part by merchants who traded with Flanders.4 Today, the romantic exaltation of the Volk tempts scholars rather less than it did in the past. Almost all agree that medieval fable collections, including the Morall Fabillis, form part of a clerkly, learned tradition.5 Nevertheless, whereas John MacQueen and A.C. Spearing see Renaissance traits in Henryson and ascribe them to his contact with Italian humanism, Gray and Denton Fox argue that we have no certainty that Henryson was a humanist and / or was familiar with the new writers in Latin.6 Whereas

86  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

David K. Crowe, MacQueen, and Robert L. Kindrick sought to establish a chronology for the fables relying partially on the assumption that Henryson took much of his material from William Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox (1481) and his Fables of Aesop (1484), Fox insists that there is no convincing evidence that Henryson read Caxton.7 Marianne Powell observes that Henryson is closer in tone to the animal literature in Old French than he is to Caxton.8 Concerning the French presence, however, opinions range from Fox’s skepticism whether Henryson could even read French to Matthew P. McDiarmid’s belief that the dependence on French sources is such that Henryson could have spent a considerable time in France and received his degrees there.9 While not going quite so far as McDiarmid, I do follow him and Powell in their reliance on the French materials. These are the Old French fable collections called Isopets plus the Fables by Marie de France,10 and also the various branches of the beast epic Le Roman de Renart. Henryson’s first fable, The Cock and the Jasp, tells how a rooster, while scraping for food, comes across a precious stone that the servant maids swept out by mistake. The rooster observes that the jasper has great value for others but not for himself; he wants food, and he leaves the jewel as is. Henryson took the fable from his standard Latin source, the Romulus by Gualterus Anglicus – whom Julia Bastin calls Walter l’Anglais – a text known also as the Anonymus Neveleti, and from the Isopet de Lyon. Henryson amplifies the rooster’s love of food in the Isopet: “En toi ne truis point de pasture. Muez ainz grains de fromant ou d’orge, Quar miez me font ovrir la gorge.” “I lufe fer better thing of les auaill, As draf or corne to fill my tume intraill. I had leuer go skraip heir with my naillis Amangis this mow, and luke my lifys fude, As draf or corne, small wormis, or snaillis, Or ony meit wald do my stomok gude.”

(Lyon 1: 20–2)

(Fables 90–5)

He also expands on some French scriptural elements in the moralitas: in the Isopet the folly of the rooster’s worldliness and his ignorance, his failure to recognize that the jewel signifies learning and wisdom, and that Savoir (25) and Sapience (29) are for him also, therefore that he is a fool in his essence, as Foul and Poul (28) (Fool and Fowl). Note thirty-four lines

Robert Henryson  87

of direct speech in Henryson, sixteen lines in the Isopet, and none in the Latin. Note also a borrowing of rhyme by Henryson: Une Jaspe, per aventure, Ai trovee, don n’avoit cure.

(Lyon 1: 3–4)

To get his dennar set was al his cure. Scraipand amang the as be auenture …

(Fables 67–8)

The Two Mice tells the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse, and how the country mouse learns to appreciate her meager yet unthreatened life far from luxury, butlers, and housecats. Here Powell argues that Henryson is closer to the Isopet de Lyon and to Isopet I than to Walter.11 In the Isopets the mice – la rate and la souris – are female. In both collections they call each other “suer.” Henryson picks up that point and makes his mice genuine sisters. Isopet I draws social distinctions – the condescending city mouse is a dame (12: 27, 41) and bourgeoise (12: 12, 24) compared to her rural friend – that Henryson amplifies beautifully. In addition, both French fables insert a preliminary moralitas into the narrative, urging people, whether rich or poor, to offer hospitality with generosity and a good heart; their hospitality will then be appreciated, whether it be lavish or frugal. Henryson incorporates the gist of this moralizing into the response of the country mouse to her sister’s finnickyness. Dare I suggest a witty adaptation of the French rhyme “Amie chiere … faites bonne chiere” (Isopet I, 12: 51–2) into the Scots “my sister deir … with a heuie cheir” (Fables 316, 318)? Last of all, the story of the two mice is also told in the late medieval didactic and satiric Renart le Contrefait.12 In this version the country mouse takes fright at the apparition of a creature called Freres Thiebers: Lors ont vehu frere Thiebert, Qui fu grant et fort, et apert. … l’autre l’a apelée Qui sot bien de Thiebert l’alée … “Freres Thiebers s’en est alez.”

(Contrefait, vol. 2, pp. 240–1)

He is the custodian and warden of the larder whose unique task is to pursue mice to the death. According to the city mouse: “C’est,” dist celle, “noz gardians Qui est custodes de ceans;

88  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric Tost nous feroit noz fins venir, Sans pates nous pouoit tenir; C’est cil qui jusque a mort (nous) fiert, Nulle autre rien fors nous ne quiert.”

(Contrefait, vol. 2, p. 240)

Tibert is the iconic name for the cat in Le Roman de Renart. In Renart le Contrefait Brother Thiebert the cat has replaced the anonymous butler or steward of the Isopets. Henryson may have taken the idea for his cat, named Gilbert / Gib Hunter, from Renart de Contrefait: Quhen in come Gib Hunter, our iolie cat, And bad God speid. … Syne vp in haist behind the parraling So hie scho clam that Gilbert micht not get hir.

(Fables 326–7, 337–8)

He then amplifies the source material by having his country mouse terrified first by the butler and then by the cat. In Henryson’s The Sheep and the Dog the dog takes the sheep to court alleging that the sheep owes him a loaf of bread. The sheep denies the charge. However, the poor defendant stands alone against the judge, the clerk, the summoner, the arbiters, and the dog’s advocates, all of whom are his natural enemies. He is found guilty and forced to sell his fleece in order to reimburse the dog, and he will spend a cold, miserable winter naked to the elements. In Walter’s Romulus and in most of the French collections the judge is a neutral entity; a bad judgment is granted because of false witness committed by the dog’s cohorts. In Isopet de Lyon, however, the wolf, formerly an advocate, has become the judge, and the dog is counseled by the kite and the vulture. Thus, the system itself is called into question. Henryson develops this concept brilliantly in his fable where the entire personnel of legal officers are shown to be rapacious beasts prejudiced against the sheep, and where, in the text and in the moralitas, the suffering of the poor and weak at the hands of the rich and powerful replaces the Latin and French moralitates’ concentration on “falsidicus testis,” “faus tesmongnaige,” “fausetey,” and “mavaistié.” Even here, Isopet de Lyon spells out the material advantages which bring bad people to perjure themselves, another point that Henryson will ­expand upon. The Lion and the Mouse recounts the tale of a lion who shows mercy to a mouse caught when a group of mice were playing on his body while he was asleep, and of the mice who later reward the lion’s clemency by biting through the man-made netting that held the lion entrapped. The argument in favour of showing mercy to the mouse is, in Walter l’Anglais, Marie de

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France, Isopet I, and Isopet de Lyon, the lion’s own idea. In Isopet II de Paris the mouse speaks up for herself and urges the lion to spare her because one day she may be able to help him: La Soris li requist Que pas ne l’occeïst Ainsi n’en si poi d’eure, Et qu’elle li fera, En un temps qui vendra, Et servisce et bonté.

(Paris II, 38: 10–15)

The lion laughs at the idea but does release her: “Vas la ou tu vorras, Plus mal par moi n’aras,” Ce respont le Lyon; “Ja ne me greveras Ne bonté ne feras: Ne te pris un bouton!”

(Paris II, 38: 19–24)

This delightful interplay between the two beasts plus the mouse’s self-­ defence could have influenced Henryson, who placed the entire, extended argument for mercy in the mouth of the mouse, punctuated by the lion’s demands for punishment. In Henryson alone we find genuine dialogue. In addition, in Walter and the three Isopets the “maister mous” (1418), as Henryson calls her, delivers the lion by herself. In Marie de France she announces that she will seek help from the other mice: “E jeo ferai od mei venir Autres suriz pur mei aider As cordes, que ci sunt, (de)trencher, E as resels, ki sunt tenduz.”

(Marie 16: 36–9)

Henryson has his mouse do the same: … and on with that scho gais To hir fellowis, and on thame fast can cry, “Cum help, cum help!” and thay come all in hy.

(Fables 1549–51)

In The Preaching of the Swallow Henryson tells of the swallow who warns the larks and other little birds three times against the farmer who

90  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

plants linseed which will grow into flax which he will use to make nets to capture them. The larks do not listen nor do they make the effort to devour the seeds or to uproot the sprouts. They are caught and killed. In the Romulus and in the French collections the swallow eventually makes his peace with the farmer and goes to dwell with him. For the purposes of his moralitas – the farmer represents Satan and the swallow represents the Good Preacher – Henryson suppresses the link between the two. However, whereas Walter, Marie, Isopet I and Isopet de Lyon have the swallow warn the larks, and the larks disregard the warning once, in Isopet II de Paris the confrontation occurs twice – once when the linseed is planted and once again when the sprouts appear – just as in Henryson. In addition, whereas in the Romulus the swallow utters two lines of warning and in Marie we find no direct speech at all, Isopet II de Paris contains three passages in direct discourse: nine lines from the swallow, three more from the swallow, and six lines of dismissal from the birds; and Isopet I contains a delightful give-and-take with eight lines from the swallow, ten lines from the lark, and six more from the swallow. The lark’s response is worthy of inclusion in the Scots fable; she says that the swallow ought not to slander the farmer concerning acts for which he might need absolution in Rome, for the good farmer seeks only to make cloth for his clothes: – “Dame Arondelle, dit l’Aloe, Il n’est pas mout saiges qui loe A faire dommaige au predomme; Aler en couvendroit a Romme S’il en vouloit estrë absouls. Le villain, pour draps en son dos Faire, a semee la semance, Non pas pour nous fere grevance. Alés vous en en vo maison, Car vous vous doubtés sans raison.”

(Isopet I, 25: 19–28)

Additional irony resides in the fact that the swallow does go home, to her new home with the farmer. It would appear that Henryson took from the Isopets the notion of continuous direct speech in dialogue between the preacher and the heedless listeners, some witty speech at that, and also the idea of spacing out the discussion over the seasons with the swallow urging the little birds to destroy the menace in the egg, so to speak, before it has time to hatch and grow. The Wolf and the Lamb recounts the well-known fable of the wolf and the lamb drinking from a stream. The wolf makes various accusations

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against the lamb, which the lamb refutes by an appeal to logic and to the law. So, the wolf kills and eats him anyway. All the French versions expand on Walter’s original Latin, adhering, however, to his story line. The only significant divergences occur in the moralitates. Isopet I and Isopet de Lyon follow the Romulus: Thus act evil people towards good people, and the strong towards the weak. Isopet II de Paris says, of all things, if you come across bad people, don’t stop to converse but go your way. Only in Marie de France do we find the moral fleshed out in contemporary social and political terms with the evildoers moved by greed: Issi funt li riche seignur, Li vescunte e li jugeür, De ceus qu’il unt en lur justise: Faus acheisuns par coveitise Treovent asez pur eus confundre; Suvent les funt a pleit somundre.

(Marie 2: 31–6)

This is the strand chosen by Henryson – with the same three categories of evildoers – developed with power, eloquence, and compassion: Thre kynd of wolfis in this warld now rings: The first ar fals peruerteris of the lawis … Ane vther kind of wolfis rauenous Ar mychtie men, haifand aneuch plentie, Quhilkis ar sa gredie and sa couetous Thay will not thoill in pece ane pureman be … The thrid wolf ar men of heritage, As lordis that hes land be Goddis lane … O thow grit lord, that riches hes and rent, Be nocht ane wolf, thus to deuoir the pure! Think that na thing cruell nor violent May in this warld perpetuallie indure. … God keip the lamb, quhilk is the innocent, From wolfis byit and men extortioneris; God grant that wrangous men of fals intent Be manifest, and punischit as effeiris. (Fables 2714–15, 2728–31, 2742–3, 2763–6, 2770–3)

Five texts in the Henryson corpus can be designated as Reynardian f­ ables. In all five the fox plays a central role; all five relate, in one way or another, to the French beast-epic cycle, Le Roman de Renart.13 The Cock

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and the Fox tells the well-known tale of how the fox seizes the rooster by convincing him to strut about, wink, and sing, but then the rooster regains his liberty by convincing the fox to open his maw to call out to the pursuing villagers. Although the story goes back to the Renart cycle, more than forty years ago Donald MacDonald demonstrated convincingly that The Cock and the Fox is in a number of significant respects closer to Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale and, therefore, that Henryson took his material directly from Chaucer.14 For this reason The Cock and the Fox will be discussed only in relation to the other fables. In The Fox and the Wolf, Lowrence, the fox, sensing that he is a sinner, confesses to Freir Volff Waitskaith. The wolf offers him remission of his sins, dependent, however, on doing penance – the penance of not eating flesh until Easter. The fox is hungry and sees no way to go fishing. So, when he espies a young goat, he seizes the animal, dunks him in the river, saying: “Ga doun, schir Kid, cum vp, schir Salmond, agane” (751), and devours the newly baptized and drowned salmon. He is then slain by the herdsman who had been guarding the flock. “Renard’s Confession” is a standard motif in the beast-epic cycle. The best-known confession occurs in Le Jugement de Renart (FHS 10, M 1, R 1) where Renard confesses his sins to his cousin Grimbert the Badger. He does so under the threat of a probable death sentence at court. R ­ enard recounts his ill deeds, is absolved, yet, once again on the road, tries to  lead Grimbert towards a convent garden teeming with chickens. Grimbert is outraged at his cousin’s cavalier treatment of the sacrament of confession and his eagerness to sin again, while Renard regrets not being able to sin again: Dist Renart: “Car nos adreçons Par encoste de ces epines, Vers cele voie a tiex gelines: La est la voie que lessons.” – “Renart, Renart,” dist li tessons, “Diex set bien por quoi vos le dites. Filz au putain, puanz herites, Mauvés lechierres et engrés N’estïez vos a moi confés Et avïez merci crïé?” – “Sire, je l’avoie oublïé. Alon nos ent; vez moi tot prest.” … N’en ose fere autre semblant

Robert Henryson  93 Por son cousin qui le chastie, Et nequedent sovent colie Vers les gelines cele part. (FHS 6816–27, 6840–3; M 1: 1158–69, 1182–5; R 1176–87, 1202–5)

One feature of the comedy lies in the fact that Grimbert, who is not ­really a priest, loses his temper and curses the fox in speech that is neither courtly nor ecclesiastic (son of a whore, stinking heretic, and wicked, evil lecher). In La Confession de Renart (FHS 24, M 7, R 14) the fox is trapped on a little hill by rising waters. Renard confesses to Brother Hubert the Kite and, with the kiss of peace, seizes the confessor and eats him. Just as Lowrence refuses to be contrite for having slain and eaten hens and lambs, so Renard refuses to be contrite for his sexual exploits, including commerce with Hersent, Isengrin the wolf’s wife: “Et qui consieurrer ne me puis De Hersent ne de son pertuis? Pertuis? Je ment, ainz est grant chose; C’est merveille que nomer l’ose, Et por ce seul que il m’en membre, M’en fremissent trestuit li membre Et herice toute la char. … Je ne voudroie mie estre abes, Si Hersent n’estoit abeesse O ceneliere ou prioresse, Ou el ne fust en tel leu mise Ou ele fust fors de justice; Q’eüsse de lui toz mes bons Et ele de moi toz les sons; Qar mout est l’ordre bone et bele Qui est de male et de femele.” (FHS 12989–95, 13022–30; M 7: 429–35, 458–66; R 14559–65, 14588–96) “Art thow contrite and sorie in thy spreit For thy trespas?” “Na, schir, I can not duid. Me think that hennis ar sa honie sweit, And lambes flesche that new ar lettin bluid, For to repent my mynd can not concluid, Bot off this thing, that I haif slane sa few.”

(Fables 698–703)

94  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

A third case would be Le Pèlerinage de Renart (FHS 25, M 8, R 9), in which the old and repentant fox – he has eaten too many chickens – goes to confession before a holy priest in his hermitage. The priest, however, says that the fox’s sins are so great that he has to seek absolution in Rome. This episode launches the action of Renard’s pilgrimage. These are the three most important examples; there are others. The narrative increment of Renard’s confession allows the poet, in Renard’s voice, to recount his past exploits and thus inform the audience of his place in the cycle. Given the fable genre with its dearth of narrative construct, Henryson deletes this part. However, he follows the central Renart structure by having Lowrence relapse immediately into shedding blood and devouring the victim, and by having Lowrence offer cynically the least possible contrition and negotiate the least possible penance. Indeed, whereas Grimbert and Hubert were all too sincere and took their clerkly duties seriously, Brother Volff is as cynical and irresponsible as Lowrence himself. Renard does not baptize animals as fish. However, in the French fable collections we find the wolf deciding that he will eat the sheep as if it were a salmon (Marie 50) and the wolf saying to the sheep: “Tu es saulmon et come saulmon je te mengeray, car je ne mengüe point de chair” (Isopet III de Paris 41). The Roman de Renart, on the other hand, indulges in quite a bit of play with the notion of Renard manifesting clerical attributes (such as baptizing) and of this nouveau clerk eating fish. In Les Vêpres de Tibert (M 12, R 11), the fox and the cat ring the bells and sing vespers at Blagny. Tibert dons clerkly vestments, replacing the priest; he and Renard discuss learning and other aspects of “clergie.” Renart et les poissons (FHS 2–3, M 3, R 12) relates to another of Henryson’s fables, The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger. After Renard seizes some eels, in the manner recounted by Henryson, Isengrin the wolf arrives at Renard’s lair and smells them cooking. Wait! says Renard, the monks are dining; I have joined their Order. We can eat only fish. Isengrin agrees to become a monk also, Renard tonsures him with boiling water, and the action continues. The difficulty for a wolf to catch fish is a crucial motif in this tale, where Isengrin places his tail in the freezing water as line and bait and loses his tail and tale. In another text which also relates to The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger, Renart et le loup Primaut, frère d’Isengrin (FHS 7–8, M 14), Renard and Primaut enter a monastery at night, they eat and drink, and Primaut becomes inebriated, thus allowing Renard to tonsure him, so that he can sing the offices. Primaut howls, the monks beat him, and the action continues.

Robert Henryson  95

In The Trial of the Fox Lowrence’s son, also named Lowrence or Lowrie, after insulting his father’s corpse, appears at the court of Lyoun the king. The fox and the wolf are sent to summon a mare, who was contumax. Lowrie convinces the wolf, supposedly an educated clerk, to read the mare’s document of extension she claims to be located beneath her hoof. She gives the wolf a formidable blow. On the return trip, Lowrie slays and eats a lamb. Back at the court Lowrie and the others mock the wolf. However, when the ewe arrives to denounce the fox for having slain her son, he is judged guilty, given confession by the wolf, and hanged. In Le Roman de Renart (FHS 20, M 19, R 16) Isengrin the wolf seeks aid from Rainsant the mare. Rainsant agrees to go with him but asks him to remove a thorn in her hoof with his teeth. When he bends down, she gives him a good wack with her foot. Henryson probably borrowed this incident for his fable. Overall, however, I believe that The Trial of the Fox, down to its title, is a masterly reworking of Le Jugement de Renart (FHS 10, M 1, R 1). In this branch Renard is contumax; it will take three summonses to bring him to court. Renard tricks the first messenger, Brun the bear, into placing his head in the gap of an oak tree partially split. Eventually Brun escapes but with his head wounded and blood all over, and Renard mocks him for being a monk with his red hood, just as, in Henryson, Lowrence and the king laugh at the doctor of divinity with his red cap: “De quel ordre volez vos estre, Qui rouge chaperon portez?”

(FHS 6366–7; M 1: 698–9; R 714–15)

“This new-maid doctour off diuinitie, With his reid cap can tell ȝow weill aneuch.” … The lyoun said, “Be ȝone reid cap I ken This taill is trew, quha tent vnto it takis.”

(Fables 1052–3, 1062–3)

Lowrence is brought to justice by the ewe’s accusation of murder and because he broke the king’s peace. Now, although, in the French, Renard had only desired fresh chicken during his return to the court, earlier in Branch 10 Chantecler the rooster and Pinte the hen accuse the fox of having slain their sister and thus having broken the king’s peace: “Renart, la male flambe t’arde! Tantes foiz nos as dessolees Et chaciees et vilanees Et descirees nos pelices

96  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric Et enbatues jusqu’as lices! Et hier main de devant ma porte Me jetas tu ma seror morte, Puis t’en fouis par mi .I. val.”

(FHS 5992–9; M 1: 324–31; R 338–45)

“This harlet huresone and this hound off hell, He werryit hes my lamb full doggitly Within ane myle, in contrair to ȝour cry. For Goddis lufe, my lord, gif me the law Off this lurker!”

(Fables 1071–5)

This is why he is summoned. Henryson tightens the Roman de Renart action by making the fox guilty of a crime inherently part of the narrative and in its erzählte Zeit – not in a previous episode – and by having the wolf himself and not a third party be wounded. He adds the delicious irony of making Lowrence seek absolution from the “new-maid doctour,” the very wolf whom he mocked and deceived. Last of all, Henryson moralizes the narrative, making Lowrie more despicable than Renard by denouncing him in the implied author’s own voice and by having him punished. Like his father in the previous fable, the fox is slain, in contrast to the French Renard who lives on and on and on. The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger retells a delightful episode in Le Roman de Renart. Lowrence the fox, against his will, becomes the wolf’s steward. Along comes the cadger, that is, an itinerant fishmonger. Lowrence plays dead on the road. The cadger, with dreams of red fur mittens in his head, tosses the seeming corpse onto the basket of herring on his cart. The fox tosses out herring to be gathered by the wolf, then exits to an exchange of words. Lowrence subsequently convinces the wolf to play dead in turn, in order to steal from a basket of fish. When the wolf does so, the cadger gives him a powerful thrashing, while the fox repairs to his lair with all the herring. Renart et les poissons, the branch referred to previously, tells how Renard plays dead before several merchants, is tossed onto the cart, devours thirty herring on the spot, and takes three eels home to cook. The ruse is similar in the French and in the Scots: Ainz ne s’en porent aparçoivre, Lors s’est couchiez en mi la voie. Or oez conment les desvoie: En .I. gason s’est touoillez

Robert Henryson  97 Et conme mort apareilliez. Renart qui tot le mont engingne, Les eulz clot et les denz rechingne, Si tenoit s’alaine en prison.

(FHS 752–9; M 3: 40–7; R 12974–81)

When Isengrin arrives, Renard tonsures him with boiling water but, then, to procure more fish, convinces Isengrin to place his tail in the water of a pond overnight as line and bait. Since it is winter, the pond freezes, peasants arrive, and the wolf escapes with his life but sans tail. In Renart et le loup Primaut, also discussed above, after Renard tonsures Primaut, the latter is beaten for his pains, and in one or two additional episodes Renard deceives merchants and purloins their herring, precisely as in Renart et les poissons: El chemin se met de travers, Si s’estoit couchiez a envers, Et prant les dens a rechinier Por plus tost la gent enginier. Si a son balevre retret, Les eulz clot et la lange tret, En l’ardille s’est tooilliez Tant que il estoit toz soilliez.

(FHS 3493–500)

The fox then gives the wolf a herring. Renard tells Primaut how he played dead and seized the herring. He urges Primaut to do the same, and Primaut does so, with the expected result: the poor dupe is beaten to within an inch of his life. The juxtaposition of Renard playing dead and Primaut playing dead is to be found only in the FHS edition, which contains the best and most complete version of the beast epic. The trouvère who composed Branches 7 and 8 had the idea of repeating, more or less verbatim, the episode from Renart et les poissons – the fox tricking the merchants – and adding to it his own continuation of the fox tricking the wolf to make one continuous comic episode, just as in Henryson. This would be the most likely version that he knew and the one which he adapted so closely. Also worthy of consideration is Le Bacon enlevé (FHS 22, M 5, R 17), where Renard enters into a subservient bond with Isengrin and offers to procure him food (as in Henryson). A peasant comes along with a large piece of smoked pig. Renard pretends to be wounded, the peasant chases him and drops the meat, which is picked up and devoured by the wolf. The fox gets even in due course.

98  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

In The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman the farmer, irate over the lax plowing performed by his oxen, curses them: “‘The volff,’ quod he, ‘mot haue ȝou all at anis!’” (2244). Unfortunately for him, the wolf and the fox, lurking nearby, overhear him. The wolf claims his property, with the fox as witness. The farmer refuses. Lowrence offers to adjudicate the quarrel. First he accepts a bribe of chickens from the farmer. He then convinces the wolf to drop the charges in exchange for a large cheese. Having come to a draw-well, Lowrence tells the wolf that the reflection of the moon in the water at the bottom of the well is the cheese. He jumps in one bucket and plummets down. Then he convinces the wolf to jump in the other bucket with the result that Lowrence rises and escapes, whereas the poor stupid wolf is stuck at the bottom of the well. Henryson combines two distinct episodes from Le Roman de Renart. In Liétart, Renart et la mort de Brun (FHS 28, M 9, R 10), the peasant Liétart curses his underperforming ox to be eaten by a wolf or a bear: “… je voroie que ors et leus vos eüsent ore avoc eus ce peliçon sanz demorance … maus ors orendroit vos requiere!” (R 9325–7, 9330; FHS 16515–17, 16520; M 9: 73–5, 78)15

Brun the bear overhears and demands his property. Renard overhears and offers counsel in exchange for Blanchet, Liétart’s rooster. Renard then blows a horn, attracting hunters, and Brun hides only to be killed later by Liétart. Henryson substitutes the wolf for the bear, tightening the narrative in a fable collection in which bears have not played a role; also it is a wolf who is the fox’s dupe in the second half of the fable. And he avoids the cruel vindictiveness of both Renard and the peasant. He uses the Liétart story as a lead-in to the adventure at the well. In addition, the Scots Makar, like the Old French trouvère, indulges in some delicious social commentary. The farmers address the fox and bear / wolf as lords – Sire, Schir – whereas the animals address the farmers as peasant underlings: vilain, carll. In Renart et Isengrin dans le puits (FHS 23, M 4, R 2) Renard sees his reflection in the well, thinks it must be his wife Hermeline, and jumps into one of the buckets. Enter Isengrin who sees Renard and the reflection of a wolf in the well and thinks it must be his wife Hersent, alone with the fox. Renard says he has died and dwells in heaven, a wonderful place teeming with animals. Isengrin jumps into the other bucket, he drops, and Renard

Robert Henryson  99

rises, proclaiming that he indeed goes to heaven and the wolf to hell. Isengrin is mistreated when discovered by monks. Renard’s burlesque mockery of Isengrin – “Je vois en paradis la sus, / Et tu vas en enfer la jus” (FHS 12425–6; M 4: 355–6; R 3609–10) – finds a serious echo in Henryson’s moralitas where, allegorice, the bucket “dounwart drawis vnto the pane of hell” (Fables 2453). Henryson joins the two episodes, using the cheese as bribe and as ­seduction. By so doing, he deletes the sexual element in the Old French (lust and jealousy over reflections in the water) and the bantering over mysteries of the faith. And by leaving open what happens to the wolf, he dampens the cruelty in the French. One can regret the loss of some of the richness, complexity, and zest of the beast-epic while also recognizing that Henryson’s version is totally coherent in terms of morality and as a work of art, a magnificent, structurally complex fable on its own terms. With regard to the Aesopian fables, the Isopets function as Henryson’s principal source. They also launch certain tendencies in the fable genre, tendencies or trends that Henryson will amplify. It will be the next step on the road from Aesop and Phaedrus to the summit of the genre in La Fontaine and Krylov. As Powell observes, compared to Walter, the Isopets are richer in detail, the narrative is amplified, and there are some specifically Christian references.16 In addition, Marie and the Isopets expand the role of dialogue and relate persecution of the weak by the strong to contemporary feudal practices and institutions. Narrative becomes more important than the message; we find a certain amount of flexibility in the story itself and in its relation to the moral; the dialogues are couched in concrete, popular discourse. In this literature, which is clerical and pedagogical, we find elements carefully blended: the literary / fictional, the allegorical, and the didactic. In a series of fables where the strong conquer the weak or the shrewd conquer the naïve, the Isopets will vary occasionally in the moralitas, the one accenting this and another accenting that. Sometimes the moral appears to be appropriate; at other times, it appears to be imposed artificially and is superficial or inadequate. The same has been said of the moralitates in Henryson’s corpus. Not only does the Le Roman de Renart serve as the probable source for all but one of the Reynardian fables. The Renart cycle helps explain, and may have been the direct cause for, some of Robert Henryson’s most exciting innovations. Although none of the major French manuscript traditions tells the Reynardian saga in strict chronological order – from the fox’s birth to his death – a narrative sequence is created and adhered to, with any number of episodes tied directly to preceding episodes which are

100  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

then incorporated intertextually. Similarly, Fables 3, 4, and 5 in the Denton Fox edition of the Morall Fabillis – the ordering in the Bassandyne print – are linked: the Lowrence who won and then lost his prey Chantecleir in The Cock and the Fox, confesses his misdeeds, relapses, and is slain in The Fox and the Wolf; it is then his son who disposes of the corpse, commits misdeeds, and is hanged in The Trial of the Fox. In all the Reynardian ­fables the fox has a name – Lowrence – thus corresponding to the one and only Renard le goupil. Adhering partially to the beast-epic tradition, Henryson’s Reynardian fables concentrate more upon the narrative and less upon the moralitas; we find still greater expanded and detailed narrative, with often a two- or even three-part structure. The fox, the wolf, and their victims are individual beings with distinct character traits; Henryson innovates by characterizing his wolf as an older animal with clerical pretensions. And, in a delightful twist borrowed from the Renart, the animals are portrayed as great lords, human pugnatores or bellatores subject only to the king lion, and the humans are portrayed as rather low, beneath them in the order of laboratores. In the beast-epic and in the Morall Fabillis we find the structure of the quest: an animal-like quest for food or a human-like quest for justice, public or private. Although Henryson dampens the amorality and the brutality in the French, much of the moral ambiguity carries over into the Scots. Justice is difficult to obtain; the great lords are impotent or corrupt. Theirs is a world upside-down, beyond the law, beyond good and evil. Even though the Scots Lowrence and his son Lowrence are punished for their crimes, there will always be another Lowrence and another wolf to continue the struggle and to perpetuate the reign of evil, just like Isengrin, Primaut, and the all-but-immortal Renard. Finally, if Henryson deletes the sexual innuendo and the topic of sexual rivalry in his sources, he retains and perhaps augments the thematic of language. Speech gives rise to deception, seduction, and crime; speech gives rise to appeal, confrontation, and the handing out of justice to punish crime; and speech serves not only to tell the story but also to interpret it in the moralitates. Robert Henryson brought to the fable much of the verve, play, and satire inherent in the beast-epic. He also gave the fable his own personal verve, play, and satire, his magnificent command of Middle Scots in its various registers. In addition, and some would say above all, he Chris­ tianized the moralitates, substituting the standard Christian allegorical reading – the tropological or moral level in exegesis – for the relatively simplistic, straightforward morals in Walter and the Isopets.

Robert Henryson  101

How the implied reader should interpret each individual moralitas in relation to each individual fable remains an open question, fiercely debated by the scholars. To give an example, in The Preaching of the Swallow the swallow stands for the good preacher of the Word; the farmer represents Satan; the chaff, earthly goods; the flax and nets, growing sins; and the little birds, fallible human sinners – this seems eminently appropriate. On the other hand, in The Trial of the Fox, the wolf stands for the sensualist; the fox, temptation; the mare, the contemplative life; and the lion, life in the world; these juxtapositions appear to me to be an imposed, artificial allegory which fails to do justice to the Reynardian tale. Most of the critics insist upon the coherent Christian vision which permeates the collection as a whole and argue that, if the reader makes false assumptions in the course of reading, the moralitates will set him right and will teach him what the characters in the fable itself failed to learn. These critics relate Henryson’s allegorical reading of his own text to the philosophical and theological concerns of the times.17 While respecting their convictions, I prefer those other scholars who suggest several levels of irony and interpretation and point out that each fable offers a fresh occasion for telling a tale, interpreting the tale and the telling, and problematizing both.18 La Fontaine and Krylov, Christian poets writing for a Christian public, were capable of ironic, ludic moralitates. I see no reason to deny the same achievement to Henryson. Although not everyone stands in agreement, Fox, Spearing, and Gopen argue persuasively for the unified structure of the Morall Fabillis as it appears in the Bassandyne print and, consequently, in the Fox edition.19 This ordering is only partially narratological. We saw how Fables 3, 4, and 5 are connected: Lowrence’s failed exploit, Lowrence’s successful exploit and death, and his son’s successful exploit and death. However, Lowrence (a Lowrence?) reappears in Fables 9 and 10, which are tied neither to the preceding cluster nor to each other. The structure is symbolic and moral, not narrative. In something resembling a circular pattern the first six fables offer a largely comic vision of the world, and the last six a darker, more tragic vision. At the centre we find The Lion and the Mouse, a fable which depicts a bond of charity from lion to mice and from mice to lion, charity absent from the other fables. And it offers a lesson in kingship and statecraft, a model of justice absent from the other fables. Last of all, this central fable is the only one in which the narrator / implied author constructs a dreamvision extradiegetic frame in which Aesop himself comes to the narrator,

102  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

discourses on the ethics and aesthetics of fables, and, upon request, tells him the story of the lion and the mouse. This frame or prologue makes a (playful) claim of authentication for The Lion and the Mouse and the Morall Fabillis overall. It dignifies the narrator / implied author, authenticating his authorial stance. And if, on a different level of allegory, the lion stands for Aesop and the mouse for Robert Henryson, it argues playfully that a bond exists between the giants of Antiquity and the dwarfs of today who both contribute to the intertextual translatio studii, imperii, et litterarum.

7 William Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and Public Court Didactic Verse

To assess the literature in Middle Scots from the French perspective in a broader intertextual context proves to be especially apt in the case of the 530-line Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, William Dunbar’s longest, most ambitious work and a masterpiece in the Scots corpus.1 The narrator overhears three ladies, dressed in green, who, after a sumptuous repast, discourse on love and marriage. The first wife complains that her husband is jealous, old, and impotent; she would like to trade in for a new husband each year. The second wife has a younger husband, but he too is used up: as we say, he talks the talk but cannot walk the walk. The widow urges the two married women to follow her example. First she had a rich old husband; she humoured and cuckolded him. She then had a second rich husband of the merchant class; she humiliated, degraded, and cuckolded him. Now rid of both, she is free to live and enjoy. This self-­ proclaimed fox in lamb’s fleece has numerous suitors and rewards any and all whom she fancies. The narrator asks: Of the three ladies, which one would you choose to marry? Janet Smith was not at her best on the Tretis. She mentions one French source: a chanson de mal mariée, in which the narrator overhears three newly-married girls, garlanded in green. One says that she will love her husband instead of a boyfriend; the second, that she will find a boyfriend to set against her husband; the third, that if she had had such an ami, she would not have married in the first place. Smith cites two other songs where young married ladies complain about their husbands.2 On the contrary, I find in the Karl Bartsch collection some twenty-four chansons d’amie and chansons de mal mariée where the husband is berated for being of low social class, ugly, old, impotent, jealous, churlish (he has bad breath), and suffering from a choleric imbalance (he beats her).3 These

104  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

young women complain again and again that they were married, against their will, to a man who is a vilain (peasant) or a greybeard or both: on m’apeleivet fille d’anpereor, et on ait fait d’un vilain mon signor.

(4: 12–13)

mes pere m’a a un viellart donee …

(9: 8)

Vilains, car vos traites an lai, car vostre alainne m’ocidrait. … Vilains, cuidiez vos tout avoir, et belle dame et grant avoir? … vilains floris … Vilains bossus et malestrus et toz plains de graipaille …

(25: 9–10, 15–16)

(35: 5, 25–6)

il est viels et rasotes et glos come lous, si est magres et peles et si a le tous.

(38: 77–80)

dans vilains, barbe florie … mauvais vilains rasoutes.

(41: 26, 40)

cuidies vos que je vostre soie, vilains, por vostre rioteir? … Qu’est ceu, vilains, ke je t’o dire? Par un ort vilain roufflant … viellart recreant, qui prent jone enfant … de men ort vilain puant … tant felon vilain le truis … vilain cuer … chi le me foule le vilain. honis soit qui a vilain me fist doner! … Mal ait qui me maria,

(42: 5–6, 13)

(51: 26, 47–8)

(67: 4, 24, 27, 45)

William Dunbar  105 tant en ait or li prestre: a un vilain me dona, felon et de put estre. j’ai un vilain ki m’a trai. mes peres ne fu pas cortois quant vilain me dona mari. … honie soit dame de pris ke a vilain done s’amor.

(68: 8, 31–4)

(69: 14–16, 45–6)

The second wife utters a similar reproach: Than ly I walkand for wa and walteris about, Wariand oft my wekit kyn that me away cast, To sic a craudoune but curage that knyt my cler bewte, And ther so mony kene knyghtis this kenrik within.

(Tretis 213–16)

The respective young women complain about or defy their husbands; they have or soon will find appropriate surrogate bedpartners. In three of these texts the narrator overhears a dialogue between two ladies, one who complains about her dreadful husband, and the other who urges her to take a lover: vol. 1: 36, 47, and 67. It is significant that Dunbarian motifs abound in the early courtly literature, as one manifestation of the courtly Eros and one set of images to be taken seriously in fin’ amor. Pierre Bec has argued, convincingly, that the chanson de mal mariée develops a “registre popularisant” which contributes to the same worldview and speaks to the same public as the better-known “registre aristocratisant.”4 The truculent, zestful, obscene speech of the ladies would be Dunbar’s own cultivation of a “registre popularisant,” a register which is not, either in France or in Scotland, an emanation from the Volksgeist, whatever that may have been.5 Here it should be noted, all too briefly, that Dunbar’s narrative structure – an obtrusive narrator overhears something like a debate between three ladies and then asks his implied audience which one they prefer – parodies a common element in the late medieval French dit amoureux genre studied in Part I, in those texts where the narrator overhears a debate between two or more figures on a question of fin’ amor and then either offers to find an authority-figure to judge the debate or leaves the question open, to be decided by the implied audience. Examples are to be found in Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, Le Jugement

106  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

dou roy de Navarre; Christine de Pizan, Le Livre du Debat de deux amans, Le Livre des Trois jugemens, Le Livre du Dit de Poissy; Alain Chartier, Le Debat des Deux Fortunés d’Amours, Le Livre des Quatre Dames; and others. Dunbar undermines the convention of secrecy and discretion in fin’ amor and the bucolic locus amoenus of the dit amoureux; in his hands the bucolic discursive space becomes a locus containing at its centre vile, animal sexuality. Now on to the rich, copious, and glorious tradition of French medieval misogyny, the texts that Smith did not cite, perhaps out of pudor aca­ demicus, a contagion prevalent in scholarly circles back then. Consider the fabliaux. Roy J. Pearcy discusses several texts – two versions of Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’Anel, and then Le Jugement des Cons and Les Trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne – which adhere to a competition / judgment pattern.6 Three ladies find a ring and agree that she shall have it who performs the worst deception on her husband on behalf of her boyfriend. Or three nuns, well-versed in erotic matters, invite the narrator to be wined and dined and to recite bawdy poems while they have him judge who of  the three makes the “best” wish. Or three sisters answer the riddle: who is older, you or your cunt? Still another fabliau, unnoticed by Pearcy, Les Trois Meschines, tells of three naive and obscene girls discussing who should pay for their cosmetic powder, blown away by a fart. In addition, a number of the fabliaux exploit Dunbar’s thematic. We read of a young man who wanted twelve wives and finds he cannot satisfy even one (The First and the Second Wife); of a girl who, being raped, orders that the man continue until he drops; of the young man who claims to be a fouteres by profession, and the married woman and her maid are most willing to pay for his services; and of the woman who weeps and wails over her husband’s death and all too quickly finds a replacement (the Widow) who, however, is deemed to be as fragile in bed as the first husband (First and Second Wife).7 Although the vocabulary is quite different, the narrator of Le Vallet aus douze Fames revels in the depiction of masculine inadequacy, as do Dunbar’s First and Second Wives: Fu il si las, si recreans, Si ot si megres les meiseles Que ce semble deus viez asteles, S’est plus jaune que pié d’escoufle; Son cors ne vaut une viez moufle, Si a les euz si enfossez Et si parfont el chief plantez Que ce samble qu’il eit langui.

(Vallet 46–53)

William Dunbar  107 I haue ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle, A waistit wolroun na worth bot wourdis to clatter … As birs of ane brym bair his berd is als stif, Bot soft and soupill as the silk is his sary lwme. … For he is waistit and worne fra Venus werkis, And may nought beit worght a bene in bed of my mystirs. (Tretis 89–90, 95–6, 127–8) For he is fadit full far and feblit of strenth. He wes as flurising fresche within this few ȝeris, Bot he is falȝeid full far and fulȝeid in labour. He has bene lychour so lang quhill lost is his natur, His lwme is vaxit larbar and lyis in to swoune.

(Tretis 171–5)

The fabliau world is inhabited by two sets of characters: the tricksters and the tricked, knaves and fools, winners and losers, masters and slaves. Normally the woman stands between two men: her husband and her indicative or subjunctive boyfriend. Normally it is her decision, which of the two she rewards and which she degrades. On one hand, the relations between men and women are limited to the sexual; on the other hand, the sexual is grounded in and subject to questions of money and power, and specifically whether the man or the woman will dominate, spend, and enjoy. The realm of material things functions to undercut courtly and Christian ideals; it exists also for its own sake. Such is the joy of clothes for wives and of rich food and ample drink for wives and lovers, in what Charles Muscatine calls a world of hedonistic materialism.8 This results in the exaltation of the pleasure principle, of self-gratification by, for, and to the most intelligent, gratification being the reward accorded the winners in the eternal fabliau competition and game. All this is in the spirit of Dunbar’s Tretis; all this contributes to the intertextual matrix which he exploits. Jean de Meun’s part of the Roman de la Rose is one of the great medieval masterworks; it is also one of the world’s great monuments of antifeminism.9 Two sections are relevant to the point under discussion. The first is comprised of the Jalous’s speech of some 1000 lines, as recounted by Ami to the narrator. He perorates against his wife, who is interested only in pretty clothes, which she wears in her husband’s absence in order to attract other men. Li Jalous does not fancy the clothes, for he wants her naked in bed. There, however, she does not allow him to approach her; claiming to be ill or disgusted by him, she becomes “dangereus” and refuses altogether. So, he beats her. This pattern is repeated in the First

108  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

Wife’s confession and, in one respect (pretty clothes, many suitors), in the Widow’s confession: Neïs la nuit, quant vos gisiez en mon lit lez moi toute nue, n’i poez vos estre tenue; car quant je vos veill embracier por vos besier et soulacier, et sui plus forment eschaufez, vos rechiniez conme maufez ne vers moi, por riens que je face, ne volez torner vostre face, mes si malade vos faigniez, tant souspirez, tant vos plaigniez, et fetes si le dangereus que j’en deviegn si poereus que je ne vos ros assaillir, tant ai grant poour de faillir. Ay quhen that caribald carll wald clym on my wambe, Than am I dangerus and daine and dour of my will. Ȝit leit I neuer that larbar my leggis ga betuene, To fyle my flesche na fummyll me. Mes, por le filz seinte Marie, que me vaut ceste cointerie, cele robe couteuse et chiere qui si vos fet haucier la chiere … Que me fet ele de profit? Conbien qu’el aus autres profit, a moi ne fet ele for nuire … Toutes font a Venus homage, sanz regarder preu ne domage, et se cointoient et se fardent por ceus boler qui les regardent, et vont traçant par mi les rues por voair, por estre veües, por fere aus compaignons desir de volair avec eus gesir. … Mes sachez, et bien le recors,

(Rose 9058–72)

(Tretis 131–4)

William Dunbar  109 que ce n’est pas por vostre cors ne por vostre donaiement, ainz est por ce tant seulement qui’il ont le deduit des joiaus, des fermauz d’or et des noiaus et des robes et des pelices que je vos les con fos et nices.

(Rose 8813–16, 8821–3, 8995–9002, 9223–30)

… And thoght my fauoris to fynd throw his feill giftis. He grathit me in a gay silk and gudly arrayis, In gownis of engranyt claight and gret goldin chenȝeis, In ringis ryally set with riche ruby stonis, Quhill hely raise my renovne amang the rude peple. … And thoght I likit him bot litill, ȝit for luf of othris I wald me prunȝa plesandly in precius wedis, That luffaris myght apon me luke and ȝing lusty gallandis, That I held more in daynte and derer be ful mekill Ne him that dressit me so dink – full dotit wes his heyd! (Tretis 364–8, 373–7)

The speech of la Vielle – some 1800 lines – presents the war of the sexes from the woman’s vantage point and in her voice, and thus inspired Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Villon’s Heaulmière, and Dunbar’s Widow. La Vielle lectures Bel Acueill, one manifestation of the Rose, on how to deal with men. Like the First Wife and the Widow, she calls for free love and freedom in love, the freedom that is in nature, so that no one be constrained by marriage vows: … en pluseurs leus le queur aiez, en un seul leu ja nou metez … Ausinc doit fame par tout tendre ses raiz por touz les homes prendre … car Nature n’est pas si sote … ainz nous a fez, biau filz, n’en doutes, toutes por touz et touz por toutes, chascune por chascun conmune et chascun conmun a chascune, si que, quant el sunt affiees, par loi prises et mariees, por oster dissolucions

110  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric et contenz et occisions et por aidier les norretures dom il ont ensemble les cures, si s’efforcent en toutes guises de retourner a leur franchises … Je le sé bien par moi meïsmes, car je me sui tourjorz penee d’estre de touz homes amee. (Rose 13008–9, 13559–60, 13849, 13855–66, 14074–6) It is agane the law of luf, of kynd, and of nature, Togidder hartis to strene that stryveis with vther. Birdis hes ane better law na bernis be meikill, That ilk ȝear with new ioy ioyis ane maik And fangis thame ane fresche feyr, vnfulȝeit and constant, And lattis thair fulȝeit feiris flie quhair thai pleis.

Bot with my fair calling I comfort thaim all … To euery man in speciall speke I sum wordis, So wisly and so womanly quhill warmys ther hertis. Thar is no liffand leid so law of degre That sall me luf vnluffit, I am so loik hertit. And gif his lust so be lent in to my lyre quhit That he be lost or with me lak, his lif sall not danger.

(Tretis 58–63)

(Tretis 489, 495–500)

Like the Widow, la Vielle urges trickery and deception – that Bel Acueill take any number of boyfriends, pretend to love each one, and enjoy herself and the game she plays. If you have a husband, deceive him, of course! Even more, she urges that the Rose be paid by her suitors / lovers, with no favours accorded gratis. Also, like the Widow, la Vielle delivers a confession as well as a lecture or sermon: I followed my own advice for years, she says, but then made the mistake of falling for a shady trickster who took all my money and abandoned me, old, poor, and wretched. Do not make my mistake. Follow what I say, and not what I did. The intertextual parody of a Christian confession, sermon, and for that matter, vita, is striking. The Widow parodies la Vielle, who parodies the God of Love in the first part of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris delivering the Ten Commandments of Love, who parodies Moses, Christ, and the latter’s deputies on earth:

William Dunbar  111 Mes se mon conseill ensivez, a bon port iestes arivez. … car, se Dex plest, quant la vendra, de cest sarmon vos souvendra. Car sachiez que du retenir si qu’il vos en puist sovenir avez vos mout grant avantage par la reson de vostre aage … Biau filz, qui veust joïr d’amer, des douz maus qui tant sunt amer, les conmandemenz d’Amors sache.

(Rose 12729–30, 12853–8, 12981–3)

God my spreit now inspir and my speche quykkin, And send me sentence to say substantious and noble, Sa that my preching may pers ȝour perverst hertis … I schaw ȝow, sister, in schrift, I wes a schrew euer … Wnto my lesson ȝe lyth and leir at me wit … Ladyis, leir thir lessonis and be no lassis fundin. This is the legeand of my lif, thought Latyne it be nane. (Tretis 247–9, 251, 257, 503–4)

On another level, the Widow offers comfort to the two complaining wives, a counter-structure to the complaint and comfort pattern in Jean, Machaut, and Froissart. Dunbar found two essential elements in Jean de Meun. The first is the universe of the Rose – its phenomenology. Jean’s is a world of disguise, hypocrisy, deceit, and manipulation, of falsity, treachery, and delusion, one in which masters dominate slaves, and, again and again, reality proves to be ­illusion, and illusion reality. The nastiness, the mean-spiritedness in Dunbar that offends some Anglicists is simply the world viewed from a less sentimental perspective on the Continent. Second, as noted earlier, with la Vielle Jean tells the war of the sexes from the woman’s perspective. All the misogynistic traits allotted to women, all the misogynistic diatribes against women, are accepted at face value by la Vielle, who then applauds them, justifies them, and urges that her pupil do the same. The difference lies in the fact that la Vielle is a loser who was defeated according to her own rules by someone who adopted her program. Dunbar’s widow is or appears to be a winner. Coming after Le Roman de la Rose, two French books dating from the  period 1350–1410 launch a frontal attack on the devious sex: Les

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Lamentations de Matheolus by Jehan le Fèvre de Resson, the translation / adaptation of the Latin Lamentationes Matheoli; and Le Miroir de mariage by Eustache Deschamps.10 Although these books are less subtle and less complex than the Rose, they have their own rhetorical power as satire and invective. Both develop the “Ought a man to marry?” topos along with the rhetorical genre dissuasio. Some of the points made by Le Fèvre are not relevant to our discussion: the sacrifice that a clerk makes in getting married; and the absolute insanity of the former clerk or the layman who remarries; or the statement that husbands will occupy a higher place in heaven than the most austere monks because husbands suffer more. However, much of the rest can be taken from the Lamenta­ tions and the Miroir and inserted directly into the Tretis. Women are creatures of lechery who drain their husbands dry and then complain of the subsequent desert or refuse sexual advances in order to extort money and pretty clothes. If a woman is noble and her husband old and rich, she will scorn him, drive him to the grave, and wed another. Women are prone to gluttony and drunkenness, upon which they gossip and betray their husbands’ secrets. Women love to prance about and attract the attention of prospective lovers, both in church and on a pilgrimage. Given to pride, women talk and fight incessantly in order to dominate. Women resemble a serpent, a lion or tiger, and a basilisk. Finally, echoing la Vielle and Dunbar’s First Wife and Widow, marriage is dreadful because it enslaves us for life contra Naturam; freedom and only freedom ought to be a man’s goal. Irony is generated when gender roles are questioned and writers compete as to whether men or women suffer the most from their loss of freedom in matrimony. In fifteenth-century France perhaps the major work of literature on the war of the sexes takes the woman’s side: Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames.11 However, sons of Jean de Meun and Eustache Deschamps are not lacking. Les .XV. Joies de mariage is a masterpiece of irony: a wicked parody of the Joys of the Virgin, it recounts fifteen stories of men who leap into marriage only to discover that they are fish caught in a net and doomed to a brief and miserable life.12 These stories are so close to Dunbar’s poem that they may well have functioned as a source, direct or indirect, as the following examples demonstrate. In the first story the wife hounds her rich husband in bed for clothes and money; having driven him to poverty, she complains even more (First Wife). In the second story the young men flock to the wife: one suitor speaks nicely to her, a second plays footsy or caresses her hand, a third gazes lovingly at her, while a fourth gives her presents (Widow):

William Dunbar  113 Lors les gallans, qui la voient bien abillee et bien emparlee, se avencent chacun endroit soy de luy ouffrir raison l’un plus que l’autre … L’un lui presente beaux moz plaisans et gracieux, l’autre lui marche dessus le pié ou lui estraint la main, l’autre la regarde d’un regart trenchant et piteux de cousté, l’autre lui presente ung ennel, ung dyamant ou ung rubi. (Quinze Joies, p. 15–16)

… quhen baronis and knychtis And othir bachilleris blith, blwmyng in ȝouth, And all my luffaris lele my luging persewis … Sum plenis and sum prayis, sum prasis mi bewte, Sum kissis me, sum clappis me, sum kyndnes me proferis. … For he that sittis me nixt I nip on his finger, I serf him on the tothir syde on the samin fasson, And he that behind me sittis I hard on him lene, And him befor with my fut fast on his I stramp, And to the bernis far but sueit blenkis I cast. (Tretis 476–8, 482–3, 490–4)

In the fourth story, the wife, of a higher class, degrades her husband, and he is goaded like a tired old horse (Widow). In the fifth story she meets her lover in church and cajoles her husband for new clothes (Widow). In the seventh story she has a fragile not sufficiently ardent husband and takes a lover; as a widow, she repeats the experiment (Widow). In the fourteenth story, the man weds a widow, who rules over him, treating him like a ­muzzled bear (First Wife, Widow). It is in these late medieval texts – Lamentations de Matheolus, Miroir de mariage, and Quinze Joies de mariage – that we find something akin to the vision of Dunbar’s Tretis: insatiable, selfish, animal-like women revelling in their strength and cruelty, riding, dominating, and castrating their men. They are champions in the war of the sexes or, rather, creatures before whom one can only recoil in terror. François Villon’s contribution to the tradition is the acclaimed passage in Le Testament that contains the regrets of la Belle Heaulmière, who is Villon’s up-to-date version of la Vielle in Le Roman de la Rose.13 She confesses that, as a girl, she was too prudent, too choosy. As a result, she had one great love, he is now dead, and she is old and poor, with nothing to show for her life. She urges others not to do as she did, and to avoid her pitfalls. Unlike Jean de Meun and Dunbar, or for that matter, unlike just about all writers who cultivate this particular brand of antifeminism, Villon manifests compassion. The implied audience feels pity for these

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miserable old women – huddling together like sticks of wood, with their loveliness, the sweet freshness of life, gone from them: Aussi ces povres famelettes Qui vielles sont et n’ont de quoy … Ilz demandent a Dieu pourquoy Sy tost nacquirent n’a quel droit. … Advis m’est que j’oy regrecter La belle qui fut hëaulmiere, Soy jeune fille soubzhaicter Et parler en telle maniere: “A! Viellesse felonne et fiere, Pourquoy m’as si tost abatue? Qui me tient, qui, que ne me fiere Et qu’a ce coup je ne me tue? … Ainsi le bon temps regretons, Entre nous, povres vielles soctes, Assises bas, a crouppetons, Tout en ung tas, comme peloctes, A petit feu de chenevoctes, Tost alumees, tost estainctes … Et jadiz fusmes si mignotes! Ainsi en prent a maint et maintes.” (Testament 445–6, 449–50, 453–60, 525–32)

The compassion is seasoned but not destroyed by the speaker’s knowledge that they all were and, to the extent that they still can be, are prostitutes. What conclusions can be drawn? First of all, I wish to deny two traditional readings of Dunbar’s Tretis, still upheld by noted scholars. These are what we can call the nativist / progressive and the first-stage feminist readings. The first approach states that Dunbar’s satiric, ironic, and anticourtly text presents a fresh theme, for it is an eminently Scottish response to outdated foreign artifice, a progressive statement of bourgeois materialism to refute moribund aristocratic conventions.14 The second approach attacks William Dunbar the man, alleging that he was a frustrated, neurotic cleric, deformed by the celibate life he was forced to lead, and, twisted by his sexual inadequacy, displaced onto the married women and the widow his own obscenity, nastiness, mean-spiritedness, and his dread of both love and death.15 My response is brief: tradition and literary convention. Historically, literary misogyny is as old, as rich, and as much part of the medieval

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worldview as the very pro-woman courtliness it opposes. Both conventions are centuries old, vital in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, and in the twentieth. One of Dunbar’s achievements in the Tretis is the undermining and the mockery of courtly conventions; this he does by a magnificent assault on the conventions and on the women who purportedly benefit from them. Second, it is an accepted dictum in literary criticism, for decades now, that we no longer have the right to identify the speaker or narrator in a work of fiction with the flesh-and-blood author who gave him being. Guillaume is not Machaut, Geoffrey is not Chaucer, Marianne and Jacob are not Marivaux, Marlow is not Conrad, and Marcel is not Proust. William Dunbar adopts any number of personae in his poems; these personae adopt any number of stances. The personae and the stances are determined by the generic needs and the stylistic register of the work in question, not by the psychology of the author. Third and lastly, we know nothing of Dunbar’s personal life. Yes, he took Holy Orders; yes, consequently, he never married. Celibacy, chastity, for that matter virginity, are expected of monks and priests in relatively recent times. Such was not the case in the real world in Dunbar’s time. Ronsard and Desportes penned passionate love poetry to a number of implied recipients. Rabelais had at least one bastard child. Dunbar? Who knows? One thing is certain: critically we have no right to offer a naive, simplistic psychoanalysis of Dunbar the poet based upon a naive, simplistic, and unhistorical reading of his creation, the Tretis narrator. If scholars are appalled by what they call Dunbar’s mean-spirited misogyny, his crude, neurotic hatred of women, his aggression as displacement of sexual inadequacy, they reveal only how English they are. If they were as conversant with the French tradition as Dunbar was, they would recognize a worldview, Zeitgeist, and mental structure as universal as courtly love itself. As in Le Roman de Renart, this is the world of master and slave, torturer and victim, knave and fool, deceiver and deceived, a world ruled by the desire for sex, money, and power, where the masters use sex in order to attain money, power, and free sex, a world the reality of which is disguise, manipulation, and deceit, reality being the illusion of the real / ideal by means of disguise, manipulation, and deceit. It can be designated as Bakhtinian carnival (from the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin), with its positive evocation of food, drink, and sex, the “material bodily lower stratum” of generation and defecation. It can perhaps be more precisely aligned with Northrop Frye’s notion of irony – in the case of Dunbar’s Tretis with the courtly locus amoenus transformed into a metaphoric waste land, where men are depicted as beasts and women are

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depicted as witches, monsters, demons, castrators of the vagina dentata type or, as some refer to them nowadays, phallic mothers, and with no children in sight. Is this vision meant to be taken pejoratively? Is it pejorative? Not necessarily. One can envisage Le Roman de la Rose as a sequence of speeches by a number of doctores amoris. Nothing in the text compels us to choose one position or one speech over the others. Interpretation is left open. The same is true, I submit, for most of the books in the “Ought a man to marry?” tradition, the fabliaux, the Canterbury Tales, and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. The French always prefer intelligence to brute force and to being nice – Reynard the Fox over Isengrin the Wolf and over Forrest Gump (that is, Bernard the Ass). The convention of the narratorwitness, taken from the courtly dit amoureux, adds narratological complexity and distance. Against the women who discover and then reveal men’s secrets, the narrator spies on the wives and the widow, overhears their secrets, and reveals them in his “tretis.” Yet is he any better than them? They castrate their men, and he, voluntarily, adopts some of the worst feminine traits and, consequently, becomes a woman. The implied audience can rant against all three ladies or against their husbands or against the snide, arch eavesdropper. It can feel sympathy for the husbands and suitors or for the wives and widow. Unlike la Vielle and la Belle Heaulmière, and for that matter, unlike the Wife of Bath, this woman – the widow – appears to be a winner in all respects. In the prime of her life, beautiful and intelligent, with a coherent, consistent philosophy, she is free to enjoy life to the full, and she does. Should I choose to marry her? Hardly. However, to function as one of her suitors, to function in her orbit, would enrich any man’s life. Or not … for interpretation is open and all readings licit within the very structure of a narrative which concludes with an unanswered demande d’amour. Dunbar’s Tretis is more complex, more ambivalent, and more literary, coming as it does at the end, rather than at the beginning, of a tradition; it is an intertextual masterpiece created by a great intertextual poet. The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois, plus some other texts, are written in the lofty mode – genus grande or sermo gravis. The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and a number of other, magnificent comic pieces including The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, and Fasternis Even in Hell, are written primarily in the low style – genus tenue or sermo humilis. William Dunbar also authored a significant corpus of texts in the genus medium or sermo mediocris. These works, largely didactic and satirical, make up the vast majority of his corpus. Priscilla Bawcutt argues to

William Dunbar  117

general agreement that Dunbar’s verse is not autobiographical and that he is not a profound original thinker.16 Rather, he is a court poet writing on court matters and expressing the generally held sentiments of the court. The court is to be imagined as an intimate, enclosed society, a small group of people who know each other intimately. In this social world poetic production will be public, topical, and celebratory, or public, topical, and playful – the poetic extension of conversation, recreation, and play. Although Edmund Reiss claims that Dunbar manifests no direct French influence, other scholars emphasize the “Frenchness” of his corpus.17 Stuart Lucas reports Dunbar’s extensive French-derived lexicon, and Jean-Jacques Blanchot follows Janet Smith and others positing travel or even an extended stay on the Continent.18 Florence Ridley finds some fifty lyric pieces composed in a French pattern of stanza, rhythm, and rhyme not to be found in Chaucer.19 Where to place Dunbar in terms of Geistesgeschichte is an equally perplexing matter. The humanist orientations in his work have been explored. I find Dunbar’s public court verse to be especially medieval and revelatory of a medieval mindset and of medieval social and intellectual history. I say this having been struck by the extent to which the themes, motifs, and formal features in Dunbar’s corpus resemble those in the works of the fourteenth-century French poet, Eustache Deschamps.20 Deschamps’s output, including Le Miroir de mariage, which Dunbar may have known when he composed The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, is made up of some 82,000 lines contained in 1,500 pieces, almost all of them fixed form lyrics: ballades, chansons royales, rondeaux, and virelais. I am convinced that Dunbar was acquainted with Deschamps and imitated some of his poems. Much more important, in my opinion, is the existence of a common literary culture of the courts outside of fin’ amor and the dit amoureux that extended over significant parts of Western Europe through at least two centuries. A typology of these poems – the ones in Middle French and the ones in Middle Scots – reveals a relatively coherent thematic in a corpus composed under the aegis of Boethius and Horace. A sizable quantity of texts are constructed roughly along the line of the topos Contemptus mundi. We are told, again and again, that all is change and mutation; everything in life is unstable. Do not count on money, power, and position. Do not aim for money, power, and position. Fortune’s wheel will turn, and you will lose everything – if not now, then when you die, and you will die, probably sooner than later. Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas, and Vanitas vani­ tatum, et omnia mors.

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Thus, Dunbar’s refrain, literally “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas” (Poems 42), corresponds to Deschamps’s refrain “Qu’en ce monde n’a fors que Vanité” (Œuvres, vol. 1, no. 119). Dunbar’s refrains “Quod tu in ci­ nerem reuerteris” (Poems 32), “All erdly ioy returnis in pane” (Poems 49), and “Timor mortis conturbat me” (Poems 21) correspond to Deschamps’s refrains “Il n’est homme qui ait point de demain” (Œuvres 2: 198), “Mais vis ne mors tu ne puez valoir riens” (Œuvres 2: 274), “Que chascun muert et ne puet sçavoir quant” (Œuvres 2: 282), “Advise qu’il te fault mourir” (Œuvres 1: 79), “C’est tout neant des choses de ce monde” (Œuvres 6: 1124), and “Qu’est ce de nous? Par ma foy, ce n’est riens” (Œuvres 6: 1175). Anticipating Villon, Deschamps paints a lugubrious portrait of human flesh, physically or morally turning to rot: Charoingne a vers, fiens pourris et ors, Arbres chargiez de toute pourreture, Delicieus, convoiteus en tresors, Garnis de poulz, de lentes et d’ordure, Pissat, crachat, portes de ta nature …

(Œuvres 2: 274, 1–5)

Both poets underscore the fact that members of all segments of society, of all estates and in all situations, will die unprotected: Certaineté n’as en science, Tu n’es en force permanens, En seignourie, en eloquence, En richesce: ce n’est que vens Du monde qui est decevens.

(Œuvres 1: 79, 17–21)

Pour les estas qui sont si perilleux, Et pour le corps qui muert en un moment … Car les estaz mondains sont dolereux, Des quelz l’en chiet a coup soudainement …

(Œuvres 6: 1175, 1–2, 23–4)

No stait in erd heir standis sicker. … On to the ded gois all estatis, Princis, prelotis, and potestatis, Baith riche and pur of al degre … He [death] sparis no lord for his piscence, Na clerk for his intelligence; His awfull strak may no man fle.

(Poems 21: 13, 17–19, 33–5)

William Dunbar  119

The allusions to the estates of man remind us the extent to which individual success or failure is always connected to the social. A second group of poems, closely related to the first, laments the situation in the world at large, the fact that the world has gone to rot. Things are worse now than in the past; we can observe evils that are new to the kingdom, that our forefathers had not experienced. In other words, vice flourishes and virtue is ne’er to be seen. The old values of chivalry, honour, moderation, and self-respect are lost. Deschamps cultivates again rich imagery of rot, filth, and decomposition. This is verkehrte Welt transferred from medieval Latin to the vernacular. Which vices flourish? First and most of all, greed. Dunbar’s refrain “And all for caus of covetyce” (Poems 13) recalls Deschamps’s refrains “Tout est fondé sur pure convoitise” (Œuvres 5: 986) and “Qui se destruit par couvoitise pure” (Œuvres 7: 1307). Couvoitise / covetyce here means simply lust for money, rather than cupiditas in the Augustinian sense – lust for money and all that money can buy. For Deschamps and Dunbar greed is prevalent and dominating, an obsession in their world and in their verse. Where do people practice their couvoitise / covetyce? Pretty much everywhere but especially at court. Hence, the delicious irony of two government officers and court poets perpetually denouncing life at court. At court there is no justice; at court there are lawyers; at court there is no honour; at court money talks; at court merit is never appreciated. Whose merit is never appreciated? In particular, the merit of loyal old servitors who are passed over in favour of parvenu upstarts – loyal servitors who have been forgotten, who are not rewarded for their service, that is, who are not being paid. Who are not being paid? Primarily the speakers in poems by Deschamps and Dunbar – Deschamps and Dunbar themselves as author-figures and implied authors. A good number of texts from the corpus are (in sermone grave) petitionary poems or (in sermone humile) begging poems. And beg they do, beg, coax, wheedle, cajole, and, on occasion, demand. Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer launched the genre with charming, witty begging poems. Deschamps, Froissart’s and Chaucer’s contemporary, partakes of the tradition and amplifies it as do Dunbar and Clément Marot a century later. The begging poem is a peculiarly medieval mode; poets of the Renaissance such as Petrarch and Ronsard adopt a quite different stance vis-à-vis their patrons, one of pride in their personal glory and scorn for all who fail to recognize it. Along with the begging poems, Deschamps, preceding Charles d’Orléans and Villon, authors quite a few texts that treat his (that is, the speaker’s) melancholia, ill health, and old age.21 Dunbar’s speaker is also, on occasion,

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melancholic, sick, and old. Is this evidence for autobiographical con­ fession? For “personal poetry”? Probably not, given that these private symptoms of decay reflect and corroborate public manifestations of decay ­(corruption at the court) plus the fragile evanescence of the human condition in general, subject to the vicissitudes of Dame Fortune. What is to be done? Although there is little hope for the world, apart from God’s infinite mercy, the individual can and must lead a better life. First of all, obviously, he should leave the court. All other things being equal, says Deschamps, do good and serve God. Deschamps and Dunbar agree: Be content with what you have, moderate your desires, and rule over yourself, the only entity subject to your will. Be merry! says Dunbar, his refrains “Without glaidnes avalis no tresure” (Poems 6) and “For to be blythe me think it best” (Poems 14) echoing Deschamps’s “Fors faire bien et de soy esjouir” (Œuvres 2: 194), “Car don de Dieu est de vivre en leesce” (Œuvres 6: 1218), “Poursuy honneur et vif joyeusement” (Œuvres 6: 1177), and “Bon fait vivre liement” (Œuvres 2: 218). Indeed, it would a­ ppear that Dunbar patterned the first two stanzas and the refrains of “Full oft I mvse and hes in thocht” (Poems 14) after the first two stanzas of Deschamps’s 218, “Je voy que riens n’est estable”: Je voy que riens n’est estable, De jour en jour tout se mue, Riens n’est seur, mais tout doubtable, Toudis propos se remue; Nulz n’a certaine attendue Es gens de l’aage present; Qui se courroce, il se tue; Bon fait vivre liement. … Tousjours tourne ciel et nue Aux elemens acordable, Jasoit ce qu’aucun argue Que c’est le temps qui inmue; Mais certes ce fait la gent Qui est tele devenue; Bon fait vivre liement. Full oft I mvse and hes in thocht How this fals warld is ay on flocht, Quhair no thing ferme is nor degest; And quhone I haue my mynd all socht, For to be blythe me think it best.

(Œuvres 2: 218, 1–8, 10–16)

William Dunbar  121 This warld dois ever chynge and varie. Fortoun so fast the quhele dois carie, No tyme in turning can it tak rest, For quhois fals chynge sould none be sarie. For to be blythe me think it best.

(Poems 14: 1–10)

In addition, both of these demystifiers of vice at court perform their usual court duties such as praising the king and other illustrious persons, offering New Year’s greetings (the estrenne), delivering eulogies, and praising / invoking God and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The eulogies are ­especially significant. Dunbar first celebrated the arrival in Edinburgh of Bernard Stewart, lord of Aubigny, an illustrious Scot who had won renown in France as a general and diplomat. Upon Bernard Stewart’s untimely death, Dunbar then penned his eulogy. The first stanza and the ­refrain of this text, “Illuster Lodouick, of France most cristin king,” ­is  patterned after the first of two Deschamps eulogies for Bertrand du Guesclin, the great general in the English wars: “Estoc d’oneur et arbres de vaillance”: Estoc d’oneur et arbres de vaillance, Cuer de lyon esprins de hardement, La flour des preux et la gloire de France, Victorieux et hardi combatant, Saige en voz fais et bien entreprenant, Souverain homme de guerre, Vainqueur de gens et conquereur de terre, Le plus vaillant qui onques fust en vie, Chascun pour vous doit noir vestir et querre: Plourez, plourez flour de chevalerie. Illuster Lodouick, of France most cristin king, Thow may complain with sighis lamentable The death of Bernard Stewart, nobill and ding, In deid of armes most anterous and abill, Most mychti, wyse, worthie and confortable Thy men of weir to governe and to gy. For him, allace, now may thow weir the sabill, Sen he is gon, the flour of chevelrie.

(Œuvres 2: 206, 1–10)

(Poems 23: 1–8)22

There are, of course, differences between the two poets. Deschamps authored a significant corpus of poetry in the line of fin’ amor. These

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pieces are scarcely his best work; passion and amorous pain are not veins that he cultivated with joy, and verbal sonority was beyond his powers. He nevertheless composed some 100 ballades in this line; Dunbar composed only one. Deschamps pokes fun at marriage, developing a number of themes in his lyrics that are also to be found in Le Miroir de mariage; these include the folly of coupling an old man with a young wife or a young man with an old wife, and the still greater folly of a clerk abandoning the privileges of the clerical life to marry anyone, and of a widower remarrying anyone. However, as Deborah H. Sinnreich-Levi has observed, this very same misogynist Deschamps composed more than fifty lyrics in a woman’s voice.23 Charming, witty, and clever, they evoke the woman’s need for love, pleasure, and freedom. In addition, it has been argued that the misogyny in Le Miroir de mariage functions as a rhetorical device to critique contemporary events and to offer good teaching and wisdom.24 Two or three ballades treat a personal motif that must have been a ­standing subject of humour in court circles: Deschamps’s insistence that one person sleeping in a bed is infinitely more comfortable than two to a  bed. Separate rooms for a married couple were already known as the Florentine model. Another standing subject of humour would be the older Deschamps’s purported impotence. A number of ballades develop the theme with, among others, the following refrains: “Toutes mes forces sont estaintes” (Œuvres 8: 1487), “Se j’eusse mon vit d’Orliens” (when I was a student in Orléans) (Œuvres 6: 1105), “Je ne puis la queue mouvoir” (Œuvres 6: 1226), and “Par deffault de bon vit avoir” (Œuvres 6: 1227). Little here finds an echo in Dunbar’s lyric corpus although, as we have seen, he did satirize marriage in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and also in one ballade encapsulating the Tretis. Especially significant is the motif of male impotence, and more significantly the sad state of the underperforming penis, when expressed from the man’s perspective (Deschamps) or from the woman’s (Dunbar): Qui grans fut et roide enhantez, Gros et nervus, au dire voir, Bien venuz et bien hostelez En mains lieux; or faiz a sçavoir Qu’il est muez de rouge en noir, Pale et destaint, sanz lui drecier, N’il ne sert mais que de picier, Dont je suis huez comme uns chiens.

(Œuvres 6: 1105, 21–8)

William Dunbar  123 Bot soft and soupill as the silk is his sary lwme. … Bot I may ȝuke all this ȝer, or his ȝerd help. … His lwme is vaxit larbar and lyis in to swoune. Wes neuer sugeorne wer set na on that snail tyrit, For efter sevin oulkis rest it will nought rap anys. … He dois as dotit dog that damys on all bussis, And liftis his leg apon loft thoght he nought list pische. … Bot in to derne at the deid he salbe drup fundin. (Tretis 96, 130, 175–7, 186–7, 192)

Both Deschamps’s speaker and Dunbar’s Wives account for the erectile dysfunction as the result of excessive sexual performance in the man’s younger days, the male speaker with a touch of pride and the Wives with disgust: Bien venuz et bien hostelez En mains lieux … Trop ay frequenté le mestier.

(Œuvres 6: 1105, 23–4; 6: 2226, 11)

For he is waistit and worne fra Venus werkis … He has bene lychour so lang quhill lost is his natur … He has bene waistit apon wemen or he me wif chesit.

(Tretis 127, 174, 178)

In addition, Deschamps comments regularly on public events, especially war with the English. He denounces the English at every opportunity, even repeating the old saw about the sons of Albion born with tails. He also pleads for peace and urges the warring factions to end their differences or to deal with them other than by destroying the countryside. This political journalism is one of the key topics in the article collections ­devoted to Deschamps. He offers good, general moral advice to King Charles VI. And, last of all, the Deschamps speaker declares consistently how miserable he is when in foreign parts – Flanders, Germany, Bohemia, and also Scotland – anywhere but in Paris. Dunbar’s official duties, as far as we know, did not entail extensive foreign travel, nor was he apparently on as intimate a footing with his king as were Deschamps and, for that matter, David Lyndsay with theirs. For whatever reasons, Dunbar did not treat these motifs. All this said, in addition to some probable textual borrowing, the overlap in the two poets is dominant and quite fascinating. What conclusions can be drawn? First of all, as observed earlier with regard to Dunbar alone,

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neither Eustache Deschamps nor William Dunbar were personal poets ­expressing their newly-discovered early-modern subjectivity. Neither of them was a deep or original thinker. They both expressed the generally accepted ideas of the time. They both worked within the literary conventions of the time, cultivating the by-then traditional French lyric forms and adopting the by-then traditional stance and voice of the court poet. Such adherence to the old archetypes and cultivation of the standard forms and voice are not unique to the later Middle Ages; they are the dominant current in Western verse up to the age of romanticism. Given how con­ ventional the stance of, say, Shelley or Lamartine appears to us today, it may well be that the voice and stance of the romantics are also largely conventional.25 It is also the case that the speaker in our corpus is occasionally identified as Eustache Morel, aka Deschamps, and as William Dunbar, and that the court public, like our twentieth-century public, will assume some sort of equivalence between the speaker in the text and the implied author, Deschamps or Dunbar. Indeed, some delightful comic effects were no doubt produced by the tension or the gap between the speaker and the implied author reading or having someone read his text to the court public. For example, one can imagine Deschamps reciting a ballad of fin’ amor or one concerning his erectile dysfunction, while gazing at one of the great ladies – her husband present or absent – or while caressing a servant girl. One can imagine Deschamps or Dunbar reciting a begging poem while dressed in rags for the occasion or while dressed in all his finery. There is an entire facet of medieval reality – the reality of the reader- and audience-response – that we can never know and that will ever remain a realm for speculation. Both Eustache Deschamps and William Dunbar wrote for a royal, aristocratic, and clerical public, a closed, intimate society – a community actually – in which, despite the conventional caveats, they flourished and were at home. The caveats are uttered in a conventional voice and according to a conventional mask: that of the lettered moralist and faithful servant. With the begging poems and many of the other texts, we see the two ­writers adopting something like the Horatian voice, seeking a privileged position, as counselor and friend, vis-à-vis the patron, who is also the monarch. On the way to the position of a Horace, both poets dismiss, indeed denounce in scathing terms, low-class parvenus who leave their given social standing and rise too high at court, who are, so to speak, too big for their britches. For this reason and a number of others, Deschamps does not, any more than Jean de Meun or the fabliaux or Le Roman de Renart,

William Dunbar  125

represent the rise of the bourgeoisie. The author of The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois was no bourgeois either. This said, I believe that we can agree that Deschamps (and, even more, Dunbar), by adopting a number of voices and stances and by the ferocity of his moralistic critique, does negotiate a partially new relationship to his surroundings and a partially new type of auctorial authority. For all these reasons, William Dunbar does not repudiate the French heritage after having purportedly succumbed to it in his works in the aureate mode (genus grande); nor is his verse quintessentially Scottish when he descends to the middle and lowly registers (genus medium, genus humile) and turns purportedly to folk themes, folk wisdom, and the purportedly vital, living demotic of das Volk. The didactic verse and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo are as literary, cosmopolitan, and international as The Goldyn Targe. When we speak of French court or courtly verse in the later Middle Ages, we have usually in mind the major narrative works of Machaut, Froissart, Christine, and Chartier – works that C.S. Lewis called allegories of love and that today we identify as dits amoureux. Or we have in mind lyrics and lyric sequences, extending from Guillaume de Machaut to Charles d’Orléans, that also focus, in one way or another, on fin’ amor. The Scots example helps us to recognize to another mode of poetry, one that is less explored up to now, and is didactic and satirical, occasional verse often and public verse always. This mode is to a large extent of clerical provenance, the work of educated authors who know their Horace and Boethius, who function as royal officers and have a place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. At the same time, like the texts of fin’ amor, this mode of writing was destined for and subsidized by the courts. It had to be dulce as well as utile; indeed its goal, first and foremost, must have been to please. In these court circles a ballade or chanson royale by Deschamps or Dunbar was surely relished by connoisseurs in much the same way that the court culture of classical Japan relished a tanka or a haiku. The social and societal facet of early literature has been lost to our culture after centuries of private reading and the overt stimulus of a private and undivided reader response. Only now are we beginning to recover that social nexus, due to our own visually or orally disseminated cultural practices: radio, cinema, television, and video, among others. In this, as in other ways, the contemporary embodies a return to the medieval and justifies the notion of a ­cyclical theory of the history of cultures in place of the linear one.

8 David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, The Testament of the Papyngo, and Squyer Meldrum

Why do I range Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount under the rubric of writers and writings in the clerical tradition, that is, in a tradition ultimately of clerical origin? For two reasons. First of all, Lyndsay resembles Dunbar and, for that matter, Deschamps as a public figure and court poet who is close to the reigning monarch and who utters the standard views of the age. As with Deschamps, and more than Dunbar, Lyndsay authored a ­significant corpus of didactic and satirical verse, which includes his play on the three estates. Second, his major concern is with the Church. A reformer in the blood, so to speak, he is obsessed with clerical abuse and with the measures that must be taken to restore piety, learning, chastity, sobriety, and charity to the clergy in Scotland. In this, he stands clearly as a man of the generation following Erasmus, of the early Reform in Scotland, yet he is also an inheritor of the satirical anti-clerical tradition of the Middle Ages, which includes Jean de Meun. David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis is generally recognized as the single most important and most beautiful play in Scottish literature, medieval and modern, and arguably the best in all the British isles prior to Shakespeare.1 A quite brief “interlude” – an early version of the later Thrie Estaitis – was performed indoors at Linlithgow Castle in 1540. The complete play was presented outdoors, in 1552 at the Castle Hill in Cupar, Fife, and in 1554 at the Greenside playfield on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. The play was revived to enthusiasm for the Edinburgh Festival of 1948 and has been performed regularly since. In Part 1, after the Proclamation, Rex Humanitas is convinced by Wantonnes and Placebo to welcome Dame Sensualitie into his court. He does so with ardour. Flatterie, Falset, and Dissait, in disguise, having become ministers of the crown, chase away Gude Counsall. The three rogues

David Lyndsay  127

and Spiritualitie place Veritie in the stocks; Chastitie also is condemned to the stocks. However, Divyne Correctioun arrives to set matters right. Veritie, Chastitie, and Gude Counsall are restored; Sensualitie, welcomed by Spiritualitie, sets off for Rome; and the three estates are convened in parliament. Part 2, after a comic Interlude, depicts the session of parliament. Johne the Common-weill and the Pauper complain of mistreatment and call for reform. Most of the attacks are directed against the Church. Spiritualitie seeks to indict Johne for heresy. He fails. The Church will be reformed, with particular emphasis on having learned, virtuous priests, and the elimination of greed and lust in the clergy. Fifteen acts of parliament speak to these concerns. The play ends with the arrival of Foly and his mock sermon. Work remains concerning the French contextualization of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. It is only during the last twenty years that we have modern critical editions of all the medieval and Renaissance French ­farces, all the fabliaux, and a good number of the morality plays. The year 2000 saw the first critical edition of Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte by Pierre Gringore.2 Aside from a printing of Gringore’s œuvres complètes of  the 1850s that is difficult to find and to read, all other editions were of parts – fragments – of the play, a situation which bred confusion among Scotticists and French scholars as well. It should be noted that Lyndsay, in his career and in his work, closely resembles Gringore: both were king’s men; both “composed” royal entries; and Gringore, like Lyndsay, voiced the official court doctrine in its specifically political domain.3 I would like to begin by contesting a position adopted by Anna J. Mill and Janet Smith in the 1930s: that we can envisage The Thrie Estaitis as an effort to reproduce the structure of Gringore’s play and the ordering of a day-long theatrical performance in the French style. Thus, after the Banns or Proclamation, Part 1 would be a morality play, the Interlude a farce, and Part 2 a fool’s play.4 I beg to differ for two reasons. First, Le Prince des Sotz and French performance practice reveal a different ordering than is the case with Lyndsay. The cri comes first, and is followed by a sottie, then by a moralité or mys­ tère; the spectacle ends with a farce. Gringore adheres to the pattern; Lyndsay does not. Second, although scholars have, with accuracy and insight, developed the theme of folly in the Thrie Estaitis, thereby justifying the presence of Foly at the end, arguing even that Foly contributes a unifying structure to the play, nevertheless Part 2 cannot be identified as a sottie,

128  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

a radically different and highly stylized dramatic form.5 In addition, there are obvious farcical elements at the beginning and in the Bannatyne Banns as well as the one in the Interlude. Lyndsay’s Thrie Estaitis is a morality play, from beginning to end, with farcical and foolish elements inserted; the folly increments actually serve as a frame. This in no way reduces the French presence in Lyndsay. However, that presence, that impact, will be a bit more subtle than Mill or Smith realized. Farce6 In the Bannatyne Banns or Proclamation which opens the play an old man is cuckolded by his wife. He had forced her to wear a chastity belt and, prior to taking a nap, he places the key beneath his head. The lover makes away with the key. Then factum est. Upon awakening the husband is suspicious. However, the wife covers his eyes by trying on a shirt she had made for him, whereupon the lover replaces the key: Bessy My hairt, evin sewand yow ane sark Of Holland claith, baith quhyt and tewch: Lat pruve gif it be wyid anneuch.

(Thrie Estaitis, Appendix 223–5)

In the French farce Lucas, sergent boiteux et borgne, et le bon payeur, the one-eyed husband is suspicious.7 The wife, claiming she had dreamt that his vision was restored, to test the hypothesis covers his good eye, enabling the lover to escape. Ameline fine Je me dormoyee; Et en me dormant je songoyee Que Dieu vous avoyt pour le myeulx Enlumyné tous les deulx yeulx. Je n’us oncques ausy grand joyee, Helas! Mon amy, que je voyee, Car g’y ay ma credence ferme. Voyés-vous pas cler quant je ferme Cestuy cy qui est destouppé?

(Lucas 311–19)

David Lyndsay  129

In an earlier fabliau the wife covers the cuckold’s head with the bed­ covering:8 Sour sen lit a pris sem pliçon, Celui le gieta sour le cief, Et puis l’acola de recief Parmi le visaige et le col: Ensi a aveulé le fol.

(Pliçon 80–4)

This is a standard motif in French comedy – up to the nineteenth century actually – and the analogues may have been a Lyndsay source. Whether David Lyndsay knew of Lucas or not, it is instructive to compare the French farce to the farcical element in the Thrie Estaitis. In the French the cuckold, one-eyed and lame, knows that his wife has tricked him. She argues with him. She and her lover appear to have a continuing relationship. In the Scots, Bessy clearly outdoes Ameline. The old man never suspects the deception and never loses his affection for his wife. She seemingly obeys and defers to him throughout. Yet this paragon of wifely virtue chooses a perfect stranger for that day’s tryst. The motif of the nasty, lecherous spouse, in the Scots play, is embodied in the cotter’s wife, who, with her husband, appears also in the Proclamation. In Pierre Gringore’s Prince des Sotz, the last increment – the farce – tells how the old, doting husband is tired and has failed to work his wife’s vineyard, to dig and to plow it, for he lacks the proper tools or his tools are not firm enough: Raoullet Je m’y employe De bon cueur, mais ma besche ploye. Entendez vous pas bien le terme? Doublette Fy, fy! Se une besche n’est ferme, Je n’en donroye pas ung festu.

(Gringore, Farce 99–103)

Two neighbours offer their services: Dire and Faire. We can translate their names by Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk. Faire blasts away three times.

130  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

When the husband takes his wife to court, the judge dismisses the charge, for, as he says, the ladies always prefer “faire” to “dire”: Le Seigneur Et toutesfois on conclura Que les femmes, sans contredire, Ayment trop mieulx Faire que Dire.

(Gringore, Farce 298–300)

Now, in Lyndsay’s farce, a courtier, merchant, clerk, and fool all offer, as Marchand says, “to luge in to your chalmer” (app. 153). The fool is accepted because he can pilfer the key but also perhaps for the geir that he shows her: Fule Fair damessell, how pleiss ye me! I haif na mair geir nor ye sie – Swa lang as this may steir or stand It sall be ay at your command. Na! it is the best that evir ye saw!

(Thrie Estaitis, app. 160–4)

In a fool’s garb the geir would be a stylized, enhanced penis – again, a delightful analogue which could be more. Lyndsay’s Interlude between Parts One and Two features a cowardly and devious pardoner who vaunts his phony relics and, assuming ecclesiastical prerogatives that are not his, divorces, for a fee, a mismatched old soutar and his young wife. To finalize the divorce, they must kiss each other’s nether parts. In the French farce Le Pardonneur, le triacleur et la tavernière a devious pardoner and his fellow in fraud, a snake-oil salesman and undocumented apothecary, unveil each other’s secrets.9 The French pardoner and the triacleur precede their Scottish confrere in employing a series of dubious relics. The French pardoner cites fictional saints with obscene connotations: Le Pardonneur Cestuy monsieur sainct Couillebault Delivra, je le vous afferme,

David Lyndsay  131 Une juifve estant à l’assault D’enfant, et si estoit à terme. Item après, que fist [sa seur] Saincte Velue, prudente et sage? A un[e] autre, j’en suis tout seur, Elle rendit son pucelage … . Je vous vueil cy monstrer les os De la teste de bigourdin: L’un est de monsieur sainct Boudin, Voicy l’autre de saincte Fente.

(Pardonneur 16–23, 204–7)

The Scottish pardoner has nothing to do with the likes of Saint Balls, Saint Furry, Saint Sausage, and Saint Slit. However, he invokes relics from literary and historical characters; in this he resembles the triacleur: Pardoner Heir is ane relict lang and braid, Of Fine Macoull the richt chaft blaid, With teith and al togidder; Of Collings cow heir is ane horne, For eating of Makconnals corne Was slaine into Balquhidder; Heir is ane coird baith great and lang Quhilk hangit [Jonnye] Armistrang.

(Thrie Estaitis 2093–100)

Le Triacleur J’ay des oignemens de bresmes Que j’ay prins sur le prebstre Jehan. … J’ay cy, en mes deux petis caques, De la teste de Cerberus … Et j’ay cy tout pareillement De la barbe de Proserpine. … Voicy du pied de Hanibal Et de la teste et des cuysses.

(Pardonneur 88–9, 158–9, 164–5, 186–7)

Both pardoners possess the same bit of anatomy from Saint Anthony’s pig: the animal’s snout:

132  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric Le Pardonneur Je vous ay apporté le groing Du pourceau monsieur sainct Anthoine.

(Pardonneur 105–6)

Pardoner The gruntill of Sanct Antonis sow, Quhilk buir his haly bell – Quha ever he be heiris this bell clinck, Gif me ane ducat for till drink, He sall never gang to Hell, Without he be of Baliell borne.

(Thrie Estaitis 2106–11)

Both pardoners claim that the authenticity of their relics is guaranteed by grand figures from the Orient: in the French, Melusine and le Turc (53–8); in the Scots, the Can (Khan) of Tartarie (2087–9). Finally, the French pardoner and triacleur band together to trick the innkeeper out of payment for their meal, and the Scots pardoner takes five shillings and a knife from the soutar and a pair of shirts from his wife in payment for an invalid divorce. In twelve of the French farces the cuckolded husband is a savetier, that is, a soutar. In most of the twelve he is old and impotent. Indeed, these plays manifest a predilection for shoemakers; it is the majority profession for husbands. Last of all, consider the motif of the Bakhtinian material bodily lower stratum. In Lyndsay the wife accuses the husband of lower stratum corporeal inactivity. He accuses her of too much activity, and complains that she scolds and stinks, and that he can’t sleep: Sowtar All the lang day scho me dispyts, And all the nicht scho flings and flyts, Thus sleip I never ane wink. That cockatrice, that common huir, The mekill Devill may nocht induir Hir stuburnnes and stink!

(Thrie Estaitis 2147–52)

And when it is time for the soutar to administer the osculum in cullo, he pleads: “I pray yow, Sir, forbid hir for to fart!” (2182). So too in the

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farces Le Pet and Tarabin, Tarabas et Triboulle-Ménage, husbands accuse their spouses of bodily stench and, more specifically, of aggressive, hostile farting.10 In Tarabin the husband claims she incenses him three hundred times a night. In Le Pet, brought before a judge to determine who is responsible, the couple are informed that they both are, since, having married, they are now one flesh, and marriage is all about sharing. Finally, a well-known fabliau recounts how a cowardly husband, defeated in battle by his wife, must pay hommage to her nether regions, with which he has had presumably only superficial acquaintance.11 One common thread in these texts is the struggle of the man, with his spiritual nature, against the woman, with her body, high versus low, deliciously complicated by the fact that the woman, spiritual or not, masters the art of speech in order to confound her adversary. The Thrie Estaitis makes a  place for the farce universe: a world of knaves and fools where the knaves trick the fools once, and then again, thereby mastering them; a world where the knaves see the truth and the fools are blind; and where the  trickery and mastery centre on the material bodily lower stratum, the physical zones of sexuality and excretion, associated with those most physical of God’s creatures – women. In so doing, David Lyndsay and some of the French writers exploit the situation in order to mock pardoners and, more generally, the clergy. Lyndsay, the master of irony, even makes his pardoner, a self-confessed fraud, denounce the new versions of the Gospels in the vernacular; he attacks specifically Luther, Bullinger, and Melancthon, plus Saint Paul! (2057–86). Morality12 The French morality plays can be divided into three categories: the personal, the social or political, and the spiritual or sectarian. Lyndsay grounds his morality in all three, including, perhaps synthesizing, all three. French plays that treat the life of man – Gouvert d’Humanité, Les Quatre Elements, Lymon de la Terre, Les Enfans de Maintenant, Bien advisé Mal advisé, L’Omme pecheur, L’Homme juste et l’Homme mondain – have one or two male protagonists.13 If there are two men, both are seduced by bad allegories; one then repents and atones while the other literally goes to hell. If there is only one hero, like Lyndsay’s Rex Humanitas, he commits evil but then does good. The protagonist can be named Humanité or Chascun (Middle French everyman); active in corrupting him is the equivalent of Lyndsay’s Sensualitie: Luxure or one of her sisters. An important level of interpretation in these moralités concerns the salvation or damnation of the

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individual Christian soul; this level of the Thrie Estaitis, Part 1 especially, cannot be neglected. Quite a few of the moralities critique contemporary society and social institutions. They are inherently conservative (one could say reactionary) in that they presume a good, functioning, organic society in the ­recent past that has since degenerated into corruption and vice. Some of them are ­satires on the three estates, such as Moralité nouvelle a cinq parsonnages: Des trois estatz reformez par Rayson, in which Rayson plays a role similar to that of Gude Counsall in The Thrie Estaitis.14 Others function as estates satire given the makeup of their dramatis personae. In Farce nouvelle de Bien Mondain Honneur Spirituel and Pouvoir Temporel divide the world’s goods between them over the objections of ­Vertue. In L’Eglise, Noblesse et Pauvreté qui font la lessive, and also in Moralité de Povre Commun and Moralité de Pauvre Peuple, Pauvreté complains and gets nowhere.15 As in Lyndsay, most attention is paid to  the Church. Also, as in Lyndsay, the poor people complain about the scourge of war and about how the nobles are not doing their duty to defend them. Le Ministre de l’Eglise presents, as it were, four estates: Eglise, Noblesse, Laboureur, and Commun.16 Laboureur presumably represents the peasantry, and Commun the urban classes – artisans and merchants. Although I don’t believe that these figures correspond precisely to the Pauper and Johne the Common-weill in the Thrie Estaitis, the similarity is suggestive. Most suggestive of all is the number of French moralities devoted entirely to ecclesiastical, and indeed theological and sectarian matters. Pierre Gringore’s Prince des Sotz is an attack on Pope Julius II, who was at war with the French King Louis XII. In the morality section, the pope is represented by l’Homme Obstiné; the Scots equivalent is Spiritualitie. Both embody the luxury, corruption, and decadence presumed to be the hallmarks of the prelates, the Church in its highest members: L’Homme Obstiné Je ne veuil droict ne raison soustenir; Les innocens prens plaisir à pugnir; Brief, je commetz maint peché execrable. … De mon ame ne suis point pitoyable; Il m’est advis que je suis permanable. En ce monde maint mal ay machiné. De tous humains suis le plus redoubtable.

David Lyndsay  135 … Parquoy fault à mon cas penser. Je puis pardonner, dispenser, Je maulditz; quant je vueil je absoubz. (Gringore, Moralité 98–100, 103–6, 127–9) Spiritualitie I gat gude payment of my temporall lands, My buttock-maill, my coattis and my offrands, With all that dois perteine my benefice. … Howbeit I dar nocht plainlie spouse ane wife, Yit concubeins I have had four or fyfe, And to my sons I have givin rich rewairds, And all my dochters maryit upon lairds. (Thrie Estaitis 3381–3, 3387–90)

As in Lyndsay, Gringore’s Church is served by Simonie and Hypocrisie. As in Lyndsay, all of society is criticized. As in Lyndsay, the long-suffering people protest against and denounce the inequities of the time. Here Peuple François and Peuple Italique prefigure the Scots Pauper and Johne the Common-weill: Peuple François Vous n’avez grain De vertu; plaine estes d’offences, Folz desirs et concupiscences, Soubz umbre de devotion, Vous font avoir preeminences … Vous usez de deception, Et faictes plus de exaction Que les seigneurs. Vous contredictes A raison et choses licites. … Je ne sçay d’ou vient la cautelle. L’eglise mect son estudie A avoir biens, qui que en grumelle. Brief, tout sera tantost à elle Puis qu’il fault que je le vous die. … Que ne laissez vous Symonie Qui vous fait faire maintz forfaitz? Foy que doy la Vierge Marie,

136  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric Soubz umbre de bigoterie, Vous faictes pis que je ne fais. … Rien ne faictes qui soit utille Fors rapiner et amasser. … En secret mainte femme et fille Fait par dessoubz ses mains passer. (Gringore, Moralité 299–303, 308–11, 367–71, 395–9, 404–5, 407–8) Pauper Behauld sum prelats of this regioun, Manifestlie during thair lustie lyfis Thay swyfe ladies, madinis and uther men[ni]s wyfis, And sa thair cunts thay have in consuetude! Quhidder say ye that law is evill or gude? … Our bishops with thair lustie rokats quhyte, Thay flow in riches, [royaltie] and delyte; Lyke Paradice bene thair palices and places, And wants na pleasour of the fairest faces. Johne the Common-weill Sir, I compleine upon the idill men. For quhy, Sir, it is Gods awin bidding All Christian men to wirk for thair living. … Quha labouris nocht, he sall not eit. … This bene against thir great fat freiris, Augustenes, Carmleits and Cordeleirs, And all uthers that in cowls bene cled, Quhilk labours nocht and bene weill fed – … Lyand in dennis lyke idill doggis, I them compair to weil-fed hoggis. … Tak tent now how the land is clein denudit Of gould and silver, quhilk daylie gais to Rome For buds, mair then the rest of Christindome. (Thrie Estaitis 2031–5, 2756–9, 2599–601, 2607, 2620–3, 2626–7, 2843–5)

Finally, as in Lyndsay, an external authority-figure comes to set matters right: her name is Pugnicion Divine – in Scots translation Lyndsay’s own Divyne Correctioun:

David Lyndsay  137 Pugnicion Divine De vos meffaitz vous recordez, Autrement je vous pugniray. Peuple François, se n’entendez A vous corriger et tardez Tant soit peu, je me courceray Et si asprement frapperay Sur vous, que jusqu’à la racine De voz membres vous navreray. … Dieu vous envoye des biens mondains Plus que vous n’avez deservy. Force avez de vins et de grains, Et de peché estes si plains Que c’est pitié. Dieu mal servy Est de vous. Jamais je ne vy Dedans l’eglise tant de foulx. (Gringore, Moralité 316–23, 325–31) Divyne Correctioun To rich and puir I beir ane equall band, That thay may live into thair awin degrie. Quhair I am nocht is no tranqu[i]llitie. Be me tratours and tyrants ar put doun, Quha thinks na schame of thair iniquitie Till thay be punisched be mee, Correctioun. … And als, my Lord Temporalitie, I yow command in tyme that ye Expell oppressioun aff your lands; And als I say to yow merchands, Gif ever I find be land or sie Dissait be in your cumpanie, Quhilk ar to Common-weill contrair, I vow to God I sall not spair To put my sword to executioun, And mak on yow extreme punitioun. (Thrie Estaitis 1607–12, 2678–87)

Gringore’s drama is overtly political. The majority of the other ­ oralités polémiques are strongly reformist in message. Their attacks m on Holy Church (Roman version) are identical to those in Lyndsay’s

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Thrie Estaitis: simony, bribery, greed, hypocrisy, lechery, ignorance, and hostility to the New Testament in Greek and to the entire Bible in the vernacular. I wish to underscore the popularity and the vitality of  the satirical, anticlerical, spiritual morality plays, and the literary value of these texts that have been neglected; this is the tradition in which and from which Lyndsay wrote his satirical, anticlerical, spiritual morality. Sottie17 The French fools’ plays are the expression of exuberance and sheer fun. Or they are, like the moralities, a theatre of combat, the critique of society and denunciation of vice, even the undermining of social order. Among the structures paralleled in Lyndsay’s Thrie Estaitis we find the procession and the trial. Like the moralities, when critiquing society and denouncing vice, the Church receives the most attention, and the figures of poverty are accorded the most favour. Among the plays are Sotye ­nouvelle des Croniqueurs, Moral de Tout le Monde, Farce nouvelle: Troys Brus et deulx Hermites, and Sottie des sots ecclésiastiques qui jouent leurs bénéfices.18 Among the themes are to be found disorder, the world gone awry, old moral values replaced by new vices, hypocrisy, disguise, and manipulation. With regard to the Scottish play, particular attention should be paid to the sottie-increment in Gringore’s Prince des Sotz. The Prince of Fools, a figure for King Louis XII, can be compared to Lyndsay’s Rex Humanitas. He is always accompanied by Seigneur de Gayecté, not ­unlike Solace, Wantonnes, and Placebo. Sotte Commune is the victim; she asks only for peace and equity. She is mocked, not unlike Lyndsay’s Pauper: Le Tiers Sot Tousjours la Commune grumelle. Le Premier Sot Te vient on rober ta poulaille? Le Second Sot Je ne sçay pour quelle achoison A grumeller on te conseille.

David Lyndsay  139 Gayecté La Commune ne sçait tenir Sa langue. Le III N’y prenez point garde. A ce qu’elle dit ne regarde. Le I Tu dis tousjours quelque mot sot. Le II Tays toy, Commune, parle bas! (Gringore, Sottie 306, 313, 318–19, 332–4, 569, 645) Diligence Quhair have wee gotten this gudly companyeoun? Swyith, out of the feild, fals raggit loun! God wait gif heir be ane weill keipit place, Quhen sic ane wilde begger carle may get entres … Quhat now? Me thinks the carle begins to crack! Swyith, carle, away, or be this day, Ise break thy back! Spiritualitie Yea, that I sall. I mak greit God a vow He sall repent that he spak of the kow. I will not suffer sic words of yon villaine. … Fals carle, to speik to me stands thou not aw? … I mak an vow, thay words thou sal repent! (Thrie Estaitis 1938–41, 1948–9, 2792–4, 2796, 2804)

The enemy is Mere Sotte, a figure for Pope Julius II, who is accompanied and supported by the prelates. When Mere Sotte is defeated, we discover underneath the papal robes her fool’s motley, a motif carried over to Flatterie, disguised as a friar, in the Thrie Estaitis:

140  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric Le Prince des Sotz Pour en parler reallement, D’Eglise porte vestement, Je vueil bien que chacun le notte. Le Premier Sot Peult estre que c’est Mere Sotte Qui d’Eglise a vestu la cotte, Parquoy y fault qu’on y pourvoye. Gayecté C’est Mere Sotte, par ma foye. La Sotte Commune Affin que chascun le cas notte, Ce n’est pas Mere Saincte Eglise Qui nous fait guerre: sans fainctise Ce n’est que nostre Mere Sotte. (Gringore, Sottie 612–14, 617–19, 621, 654–7) Flatterie Wee man turne our claithis, and change our stiles, And disagyse us, that na man ken us. Hes na man clarkis cleathing to len us? … Now, be my faith, my brother deir, I will gang counterfit the freir. Gude Counsall Sir, be the Halie Trinitie, This same is feinyeit Flatt[e]rie: I ken him be his face. Beleivand for to get promotioun, He said that his name was Devotioun, And sa begylit your Grace. (Thrie Estaitis 719–21, 738–9, 3673–8)

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In the end, Prince des Sotz presides over order restored. According to Jean-Claude Aubailly, the French fools’ plays, performed by the Basoches, present what he calls a prophetic structure, with good triumphing over evil due to the intervention of a just monarch – in other words, an enlightened parliamentary monarchy – the political philosophy often attributed to David Lyndsay.19 Pierre Gringore’s Jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte is directed against Pope Julius II and, by implication, against his supporters among the prelates, those who oppose the king of France. David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis is directed primarily against those in the first estate, especially the prelates, who corrupt the kingdom and threaten the king in his powers of good governance. Both texts are anticlerical: the French play on a relatively narrow range of issues; the Scots play both broader in its ideological range and also more concrete in its bill of accusation. Both texts underscore the sufferings of the people, caused by clerical overreaching. Both are théâtre de combat. Le Prince des Sotz generates its anticlerical satire in the sottie and mo­ ralité. Although the farce appears to remain outside the central focus of the play, it can be argued that its theme – a shrewish, lecherous female giving battle to and conquering her older, less rigorous male partner – underscores the conflict between a corrupt, degenerate, effeminate papacy and the decent, upright yet not overpowering French crown. The pope, as a woman (Mere Sotte), is not only guilty of the usual female vices, but seeks also to usurp the natural, God-given authority of the male monarch. Scholars have argued, convincingly, that a similar situation occurs ­in  the Thrie Estaitis where Rex Humanitas is corrupted by Sensualitie, and the kingdom is corrupted by Spiritualitie; consequently, the farcematerial in the Proclamation and the Interlude offer similar examples (ge­ nus humile) of such corruption, symbolized by marriages gone awry or by the base actions committed by the clergy because they are not allowed to marry.20 The Fule at the end also contributes to a unified doctrinal and narrative line (see note 5 above). Finally, Part 1 and Part 2 of the Estaitis correspond, mutatis mutandis, to the two engaged or combative parts of the Jeu: the sottie and the moralité, the difference being that Lyndsay has ­created a structure of evolution with his Parts 1 and 2: the personal and then the political, the physical and then the spiritual, or the past and then the future. In conclusion, except for Gringore’s work and perhaps one or two other texts, I do not claim that David Lyndsay read or saw performed specific French plays. However, like most medieval writers he had a great memory,

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and we do find so many strands in his drama. French farce, moralité, and sottie all contribute to the Scottish work in theme, motif, and tone. We find also an intellectual tradition, wherein French morality and fools’ plays denounce the vices of society, especially those of the Church, and even adopt the Reformist and Catholic stances, primarily through denunciation of and satire on their adversary. A larger drama such as Gringore’s Jeu du Prince des Sotz, made up of a sottie, a moralité, and a farce, plus one or two of the monster 30,000 line morality plays, combining or juxtaposing earlier genres and having a public function – stating reformist or political ideas in the public sphere – are texts which also characterize and may have influenced David Lyndsay when writing his masterwork. Finally, we must not forget the ambiance of farce and foolery – a world of derision, denunciation, song, dance, acrobatics, and slapstick, and also of sex and defecation – that is, a world of carnival. In our twentieth-century revivals of these plays we cannot overdo stage business of this kind. Those who delete it from their performances and their translations betray the past in both cultural and aesthetic terms.21 David Lyndsay had a much broader career as a writer than simply as the author of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Like Dunbar, he was something of a court poet, although he cultivated different stylistic registers and ­poetic forms. Lyndsay authored several long didactic works. The Dreme and The Monarche evidence this didactic strain, to be found in so much late medieval literature, whether in English, French, Scots, or Latin.22 Of greater literary interest, in my opinion, are The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo and Squyer Meldrum. Both texts are firstrate works of art; both relate in interesting ways to the French tradition. In Testament of the Papyngo the narrator explains that he accompanied the monarch’s pet parrot to a lovely garden.23 Against the narrator’s counsel, the portly Papyngo climbs up the tallest tree. There, the wind blows her off the tree, and she falls to the ground onto a stake. Mortally wounded, she bewails her ambition, recognizing that she should never have frequented the court. She then delivers orally two epistles to be sent to her master, King James V. In the first letter she urges James to learn to become a good king and to be cognizant of the decrees of Lady Fortune. To do this, he should read chronicles and mirrors to princes. In the “Secunde Epistyl” James is told about the evil to be found in the courts; courts are bad, and court life is never governed by constancy or continuity. As ­witness, all recent Scottish kings ended badly. At this point three wicked birds – the magpie, kite, and raven – come to offer Papyngo absolution in exchange for her “geir”: her worldly goods. The parrot denounces these

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cleric / monk intruders. She bequeaths her possessions to the poor, her heart to the king, her spirit to the queen of faerie, and her tripe to the would-be confessors, who, in fact, devour her. Lyndsay may have had some acquaintance with the two most important avian texts in French that precede chronologically the Scots Papyngo. The first of these is Les Épîtres de l’Amant Vert by the greatest of the Burgundian poets, Jean Lemaire de Belges.24 In the first epistle Amant Vert, Margaret of Austria’s pet parrot, writes to her that, as a true courtly lover, driven to distraction by her absence (she went without him on a trip to inspect her German lands), he chooses to commit suicide by flinging himself into the maw of a dog. In the second letter he writes to her from beyond the grave. Mercury accompanies him to hell where wicked birds and animals are punished, and then guides him to the Elysian Fields where the good ones dwell. The divergences between these texts are enormous although, as we shall see later, no more so than those between René d’Anjou’s Cuer d’Amours Espris and the Scots King Hart. Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Amant Vert is a charming, witty, courtly lover and a martyr to fin’ amor whereas David Lyndsay’s Papyngo is a didactic, philosophical moralist and a martyr to her own ambition. This said, both parrots are letter-writers. And, just as Amant Vert addresses two epistles to Margaret of Austria, so also Papyngo addresses two epistles to James V. There is no particular justification for the two Scots letters, given that they follow, one directly upon the other, both uttered in turn by the dying parrot. The moral commonplaces laid out in the two epistles could have been contained in just one. In addition, Lemaire and Lyndsay underscore their respective birds’ linguistic accomplishments: Amant Vert forgot his native language in order to learn French, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin: Sa langue malheureuse Laboura tant à son futur dommaige Qu’elle oublia son langaige ramaige Pour sçavoir faire ou sermon ou harengue, Tant en françois comme en langue flamengue, En castillan et en latin aussi, Dont à l’aprendre il souffrit maint soucy.

(Amant Vert 1: 240–6)

Papyngo speaks only one language, her own, which the narrator, portrayed as her servitor, learned in order to communicate with her; however, Papyngo can imitate the sounds of all the other birds and of some beasts:

144  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric … On quhome I did my delygence and cure To lerne hir language artificiall, To play Platfute, and quhissill Fute before. Bot of hir inclynatioun naturall Scho countrafaitit all fowlis, les and more. Of hir curage, scho wald, without my lore, Syng lyke the merle, and crawe lyke to the coke, Pew lyke the gled, and chant lyke the laverock.

(Papyngo 86–93)

It is as if Lyndsay is correcting Lemaire’s phantasy with a humorous dose of realism which generates its own phantasy: Papyngo’s accomplishments are less lofty and more “natural” than Amant Vert’s, with, however, the proviso, that if a parrot does not really learn the standard European tongues, nevertheless it speaks its Parrotish (which Amant Vert forgot), for the various species of birds have their own speech, which then can be learned or imitated, just like ours. Amant Vert dies by falling down from his perch into the dog’s maw where he is torn apart; Papyngo falls down from her perch onto a stake where she is torn; she will be torn apart in toto by the devouring predators. Papyngo delivers her testament just as Amant Vert gives instructions for his burial and the epitaph to be carved on his tomb. The good and evil birds in the French text, associated with Christian martyrs and their persecutors, correspond to the good and evil birds relating to Papyngo’s last rites: the bad ones who offer her absolution versus the nice birds whom she would prefer to be present at her last moments. For the good birds: Si aymerons ces castes tourterelles … Ne vecy pas bien belle compaignie Pour s’esjouÿr en plaisance infinie? … Simples coulons, arondes salutaires, Rossignoletz doulx et melodïeux, Et chardonnetz d’aprendre estudïeux, Cocqz liberaulx, hardiz et diligens, Serins, tarins, qui sont plaisans et gens, Merles faictiz, gelinettes utilles, Cignes tous blancz, aloëtes gentilles [etc.]. (Amant Vert 2: 389, 393–4, 398–404) But had I heir the nobyll nychtingall, The gentyll ja, the merle, and turtur trew,

David Lyndsay  145 … The plesand pown, moste angellyke of hew … The myrthfull maveis, with the gay goldspink; The lustye larke, wald God thay war present! My infortune, forsuith, thay wald forthink, And conforte me, that bene so impotent. The swyft swallow, in prattick most prudent … (Papyngo 724–5, 728, 731–5)

Last of all, Lemaire’s texts directly or indirectly – 1006 lines in all – and most of Lyndsay’s text – 910 out of 1185 lines – are spoken by the parrots. The one elaborates a courtly code, the other a moral code. The first plays with the conventions of love, the second with the conventions of statecraft. Both speakers address active rulers – Duchess Margaret and King James. Or, from a different perspective, Lemaire and Lyndsay address their rulers and patrons borrowing the voices of the dead parrots. Part of the charm of both texts comes from these avian author-figures, speakers of verse who declaim their own verse just as we wish parrots could. I have argued elsewhere that the Amant Vert epistles are late medieval manifestations of the mock-courtly and the mock-epic.25 The standard means of generating humour is to underscore the incongruity inherent in Amant Vert – he is a parrot with human traits, a parrot who acts like a human being. Hence the paradox of a parrot dwelling in the intimacy (the bedchamber) of his mistress who lusts after her body and suffers pangs of jealousy when her husbands make love to her: Et me baisois, et disois: “Mon amy.” Si cuidoie estre ung dieu plus que à demy. … Que diray je d’aultres grandz privaultéz, Par quoy j’ay veu tes parfaictes beautéz, Et ton gent corpz, plus poly que fine ambre, Trop plus que nul autre varlet de chambre, Nu, demy nu, sans atour et sans guimple, Demy vestu en belle cotte simple, Tresser ton chief, tant cler et tant doré, Par tout le monde aymé et honnouré? … Quel autre [amant] aussi eut oncq en fantasie Plus grand raison d’entrer en jalousie, Quand maintes fois, pour mon cueur affoller, Tes deux mariz je t’ay veu accoller? (Amant Vert 1: 105–6, 109–16, 119–22)

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Another example is the paradox of a court gentleman named Amant Vert, who is consequently the equivalent of the Green Count and the Green Knight, yet his heraldry is derived uniquely from his plumage, for he is only a parrot. Add to this the witty concetto elaborated by Amant Vert who notices that his mistress wears black in mourning over the death of her most recent husband and, since he was not capable of giving her solace, wishes to accompany her in wearing black – that is, to be metamorphosed into a crow with its black plumage: Or pleust aux dieux que mon corpz assez beau Fust transformé, pour ceste heure, en corbeau, Et mon colier vermeil et purpurin Fust aussi brun que ung More ou Barbarin! Lors te plairoye, et ma triste laideur Me vauldroit mieulx que ma belle verdeur.

(Amant Vert 1: 65–70)

Here can be observed the Bergsonian functioning of comedy, with the parrot acting mechanically as if he were a man, or the almost-man acting mechanically given that he remains a parrot. We can also observe something akin to the Bergsonian snowball effect, when the death of a mere household pet gives rise to lamentations in the grand fin’ amor register and, post mortem, to an epic voyage, escorted by the god Mercury, to the Elysian Fields, a hell and paradise inhabited uniquely by birds and animals. Although to a lesser extent, Lyndsay’s Papyngo cultivates the same vein of comedy. David Lyndsay tells us of a courtier who climbs too high at the court for her own good and fails in her endeavours – that is, a bird who climbs the tallest tree and, when blown off, because she is too fat, falls directly onto a stake: O fals Fortune, quhy hes thou me begylit? … That ever I wes brocht in to the court, allace! … Prudent counsell, allace, I did refuse, Agane reassoun usyng myne appetyte. Ambitioun did so myne hart abuse That Eolus had me in gret dispyte. Poetis, of me, haith mater to indyte, Quhilk clam so heych, and wo is me thairfore, Nocht doutyng that the deth durste me devore. (Papyngo 192, 196, 199–205)

David Lyndsay  147

He tells of a mere parrot, who, in real life, can utter only a few sounds but who, here, lectures the king on personal ethics and good governance; of a kite raiding a hencoop and claiming that he is only collecting tythes for the Church: “I did persave quhen prevelye ye did pyke Ane chekin frome ane hen, under ane dyke.” “I grant,” said he, “That hen was my gude freind, And I that checkin tuke, bot for my teind …”

(Papyngo 678–81)

And he tells of three avian creatures who, as clergymen, offer absolution to the dying Papyngo and then who, as hungry birds, devour the just deceased corpse. There are even sexual overtones in Papyngo’s rapports with the king;26 thus Lyndsay rejoins Lemaire. Lyndsay also joins Lemaire in another important feature: the theme of the court poet. The Burgundian evokes implicitly the precarious situation of the creative writer at court: alienated, reduced to solitude, with rapacious enemies lurking everywhere, he is treated as a household pet, and any thought of genuine affection or of human intercourse with his masters is inherently absurd, as absurd as for a bird to desire a woman sexually. For Lyndsay, the theme is made explicit. Papyngo dies as a direct result of her ambition; she failed to heed the elementary wisdom of not leaving herself open to the vicissitudes of Fortune. Because of her ambition (and because of corruption in the Church), she not only dies but falls into the talons of evil creatures who deny her even the last rites. One can read Papyngo’s story as an intertextual critique and demystification of Amant Vert’s story, the explicit denunciation in the Scots of what appears to be implicit in the French. From this vantage point, Amant Vert’s high courtly desire for Margaret is shown to be only a desperate effort to rise in social class (Papyngo climbing the tree) and, like all courtly presumption, doomed to failure. The French parrot choosing his resting place and epitaph serves only to veil the physical truth: that his corpse will be devoured if it has not already been. Instead of indulging in French fantasies about the avian Elysian Fields and other such dreams of glory, the Scottish parrot is concerned with the state of her soul in a Christian world, and her discourse is one of Christian wisdom to a Christian king. Evil in the world is focused not on the neutral French dog, who does what dogs do, but on the three Scots avian clerics who misuse their power and their estate and who, therefore, sin against the Holy Spirit. David Lyndsay could have come to what is, after all, an allegorical reading of his own text by way of another major French work: La Messe des

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Oiseaux by Jean de Condé.27 In this poem the parrot, Venus’s envoy, summons all the birds. Venus arrives, and birds sing the Mass. The nightingale is the presiding priest; however, it is the parrot who delivers the homily (204–96), extolling the virtues of obedience, patience, loyalty, and hope in the domain of love: “A avoir en vous cuers atendeis .IIII. vertus de mout grant pris, Par coi amans puet estre apris Et a perfection venir. Or les veulliés bien retenir: La premiere est obedience Et la seconde pascience; La tierche n’iert mie celee: Elle est loyauteis appelee; Et la quarte, c’est esperance, Qui maintient en perseverance L’amant de son penser poursievre.”

(Messe des Oiseaux 206–17)

After Mass a meal is served; then lady canons bring forth a suit in law (Venus’s law) against Cistercian nuns. The canons accuse the nuns of stealing their boyfriends. The nuns reply that the canons lost their men because they are too haughty. Venus decides in favour of the nuns: all God’s creatures have equal rights in the game of Eros, and all is fair in love and war. The narrator then states that, although he has spoken in all good fun, one can also learn from his story: Oÿ aveis boenes risees Et choses asseis desguisees. Si y puet on example prendre U on puet mout de bien aprendre, Car li plus est diviniteis, Encor samble che vaniteis.

(Messe des Oiseaux 1219–24)

He proceeds to give his tale an allegorical reading. The cuckoo who disturbed the services is a priest; alas! far too many clerics are ignorant or lead bad lives. The birds who assisted in the Mass are clerks; among them also are to be found the good and the bad. The groups of contending women, indulging in bad love, should transcend it through good love in Christ. And the parrot’s four virtues are then interpreted in a Christian sense: spiritual obedience, patience, loyalty, and hope.

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In Jean de Condé’s poem the parrot is a minor figure at best, and nobody speaks or writes letters. However, the parrot delivers a homily, which can be read in Christian terms praising Christian virtues. As with Lemaire de Belges and Lyndsay, he is an orator, the only avian creature with the gift of Mercury’s eloquence. Among the clerks who assist the nightingale – good clerks – are several who are the good clerks in Lyndsay, the ones from whom Papyngo is eager to take absolution. The cuckoo, who interrupts the Mass and is assimilated to ignorant and wicked priests, is the equivalent of Lyndsay’s magpie, kite, and raven. Jean de Condé’s reading of the story is quite close to Lyndsay’s reading of his story. The Messe des Oiseaux narrator denounces wicked and ignorant clergy, and he corrects his own courtly comedy in order to proclaim good love in Christ. Similarly, David Lyndsay’s Papyngo denounces wicked and ignorant ­clergy, and he perhaps corrects Jean Lemaire’s courtly comedy in order to  proclaim good action in the world. On the one hand, it may be that Lyndsay concretizes the relatively abstract denunciation of clerical vice in Jean de Condé by bringing three exemplars of such vice directly into the narrative and having them speak with hypocrisy and act with cruelty and violence. On the other hand, his lesson is secular and practical in contrast to Jean’s spiritual argument, for the Papyngo addresses James V on the immorality of the court and the necessity of good statecraft, necessary because of the inconstancy of our life in the century always under the sway of Dame Fortune. Squyer Meldrum is a delightful biography of William Meldrum of Cleish and Binns, a Fife laird and good friend of Lyndsay.28 The 1594-line text was written shortly after Meldrum’s death, sometime after 1550. On a maritime expedition to France, the Scots raid the Irish community of Carrickfergus, where Meldrum rescues an heiress on the point of being raped. Having arrived in France, Meldrum defeats the English champion Talbart in single combat. After peace is made, the English and the Scots continue to fight. Meldrum rescues an outnumbered Scottish contingent and overpowers the English. He wins a tournament. Upon the return voyage, his ship comes across an English man-of-war; Meldrum and his men board and capture the vessel. Once in his homeland, Meldrum stops by a castle belonging to the Lady of Gleneagles. They fall in love and make love. Helping the oppressed lady recover her lands, Meldrum retakes a castle from her oppressor. They have a daughter. Although they hope to marry, the necessary dispensation is mismanaged. A cruel enemy knight ambushes Meldrum and Gleneagles outside Edinburgh. Outnumbered sixty to eight, Meldrum’s side loses. The lover is severely wounded, and the lady

150  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

captured. Back in her own lands, she is forced to wed someone else. Meldrum remains faithful to Gleneagles and never marries. He lives a long and full life, with many triumphs in arms. He becomes a fine magistrate, ending his career as Sheriff Deputy for Fife. The majority scholarly opinion, argued most persuasively by Felicity Riddy and, more recently, by Carol Edington, states that, on the one hand, the story closely resembles medieval romance.29 They list the romance motifs that permeate Lyndsay’s text: victory over odds, the hero outnumbered, the tournament, an allegorical prophetic dream, lovesickness and love insomnia, the lady making the advances, the lady’s lament over a ­fallen knight, and the swoon from grief. On the other hand, Riddy and Edington see the text also as the questioning and undermining of romance. Riddy observes pertinently that Meldrum reveals a two-part structure. Part 1, with Meldrum abroad, committing great deeds in arms in Ireland, in France, and on the open sea, would be largely romance, especially when the Irish heiress offers Meldrum her love, which, like a good Lancelot, Yvain, or Perceval, he declines, for duty calls elsewhere. In Part 2, with Meldrum at home in Scotland, the romance structure breaks down, undermined by prosaic contingencies in the real world. For example, Meldrum and Gleneagles wish to get married yet cannot because Meldrum is a kinsman of her late husband. Above all, there is no happy ending. Meldrum is ambushed and defeated. Gleneagles marries another man. Although the evil ambushing knight is eventually slain, the deed is performed by someone else in unrelated circumstances – we could say, in someone else’s story. Consequently, yes, Meldrum grows and matures in the course of his life story and achieves renown as a warrior; yet that growth and maturity is concretized as the transformation of the romance hero into a country gentleman, the master of militia into a magistrate.30 To this I can add that some elements in Meldrum are typical of chanson de geste as much as of courtly romance, if not more so. Such elements would include the ambush at the hands of a “traitor” and the tone of the more military sections of the text, which tell of a captain with his men ­performing specific, planned engagements with the enemy. Another point ­concerns the problem of relating stylized courtly passion to the reality of feudal marriage. This theme, which does serve to question and to undermine the courtly ethos, did not wait for David Lyndsay in the sixteenth century. During the formative years of romance Chrétien himself poses the problem in Erec et Enide and Yvain; and in Yvain the hero weds a widow. These are mere details. Grosso modo, I agree with Riddy and Edington. I would like, nevertheless, to propose for consideration another literary

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genre from the French tradition, one which pertains to Lyndsay’s Squyer Meldrum directly: the aristocratic or chivalric biography. A number of texts in French illustrate the genre from the early thirteenth well into the sixteenth century. I consider the most important to be History of William Marshal / L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, La Vie du Prince Noir by Chandos Herald, La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin by Cuvelier, Le Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, Le Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing probably by Jean Lefèvre de Saint-Rémy, and L’Histoire du Seigneur de Bayart, le chevalier sans paour et sans ­reprouche probably by Jacques de Mailles.31 William Marshal, the Black Prince, Bertrand du Guesclin, Boucicaut, Lalaing, and Bayard were all great heroes and leaders of men, legends in their time, yet these legends flourished and endured because of their biographies. Although the chivalric biography is neglected by scholars, a number of these texts have received good modern editions, and the genre as a whole is the subject of a French doctorat d’état by Élisabeth Gaucher.32 Much of what can be said about chivalric biographies is applicable to romance, and certain elements in Lyndsay’s Squyer Meldrum can be identified as adhering to the typology of romance or of biography. Gaucher develops at some length the textual influences on chivalric biography; these include chanson de geste, courtly romance, and the more recent Burgundian romance. Writing on the life story of Boucicaut, Denis Lalande portrays his text as a biographie romancée as well as a biographie héroïque.33 He detects an atmosphere of old-fashioned, stylized virtue, history shaped by romance, and the harsh reality of the times veiled by stylization and nostalgia. The Meldrum narrator states that stories of old, of great men in the past, should be told to serve as mirrors for people today. He will do this. Now such a prologue is typical of the aristocratic biographies: the chronicler of William Marshal says that his man is the worthiest knight of his age; Chandos Herald says that, for the benefit of posterity, he writes of the most valiant since Caesar and Arthur; and the chronicler of Boucicaut says that he celebrates the man and his chivalry for future generations: Ma matire est del plus prodome Kui unkes fust a nostre tens. Ore me laisse Dieux avenir, Car je voil mettre m’estudie A faire et recorder la vie

(William Marshal 16–17)

152  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric De le plus vaillant prince du mounde Si come il est tourny a le rounde Ne qui fuist puis les tamps Claruz, Jule Cesaire ne Artuz, Ensi come vous oier purrez Mais qe de bon coer l’escoutez.

(Prince Noir 46–54)

… ce present livre est fait, a vouloir et desirer que le nom du vaillant homme de qui nous voulons traicter en cestui volume soit mis en perpetuelle memoire au monde, pour donner, si que devant est dit, exemple a tous ceulx qui desirent avenir au hault honneur de proece et chevalerie. (Bouciquaut, pp. 35–6) Quho that antique stories reidis, Considder may the famous deidis Of our nobill progenitouris, Quhilk suld to us be richt mirrouris, Thair verteous deidis to ensew And vicious leving to eschew. Sic men bene put in memorie That deith suld not confound their glorie; Howbeit thair bodie bene absent, Thair verteous deidis bene present.

(Meldrum 1–10)

Overall, chivalric biographies praise their subject compared to other heroes, insist on the accuracy of their account, state the didactic import of their text (a model to follow and which will encourage virtue), and affirm the public’s pleasure in reading them. Lyndsay as implied author authenticates his narrative by claiming that he knew Meldrum and can vouch for the truth of his story, and that what he didn’t know personally Meldrum told him: Ane nobill squyer to discryfe, Quhais douchtines during his lyfe I knaw my self. Thairof I wryte, And all his deidis I dar indyte. And secreitis that I did not knaw, That nobill squyer did me schaw.

(Meldrum 29–34)

David Lyndsay  153

Such an authenticating device is prevalent in the French biographies. Significantly, a number of the biographies were written by subordinates close to the great man who followed his career and served in his affinity. On more than one occasion the biographer was a herald, chosen for the task because he would have had knowledge of war and knightly doings plus the ability to depict a tourney or a siege accurately and in good language. Such would be Chandos Herald, Guillaume Leseur who wrote the life of Gaston de Foix, the Charolais Herald partly responsible for Jacques de Lalaing, and the Lyon King of Arms of Scotland, Sir David Lyndsay. Of course, a man of letters, that is, a genuine writer, was also required for such work, hence the genuine literary artistry of the biographies of William Marshal, Bertrand du Guesclin, Boucicaut, and William Meldrum. Finally, concerning patronage, a biography could be solicited as an official project (Du Guesclin by King Charles V) or written while the subject was still alive and due to his own encouragement (Boucicaut), but was more likely to be commissioned by the deceased’s family, shortly after his death. Such is the case for William Marshal, Gaston de Foix, Jacques de Lalaing, and Bayard. Such is the case for Squire Meldrum. A number of key motifs in Squyer Meldrum are common in the French biographies. Meldrum is accomplished in feats of arms. He triumphs over extreme odds in battle, he seizes a castle, and he wins in tournament play. The same is true for William Marshal, the Black Prince, Bertrand du Guesclin, Boucicaut, Jacques de Lalaing, and Bayard. For all these figures the spectacle, the ostentation so to speak, of victory in a martial competition is at least as important as the material fruits of victory. Meldrum enjoys also a naval victory, capturing an English man-of-war, a feat largely nonexistent in romance yet which parallels similar accomplishments in the careers of William Marshal and Boucicaut. Like the heroes of biography, Meldrum can be ambushed and severely wounded, but at least he is never (it would appear) taken prisoner, a fate however shared by Marshal, Du Guesclin, Boucicaut, Lalaing, and Bayard. Meldrum is chivalrous to the ladies. He rescues the Irish damsel from violence and then has an affair with Gleneagles, also helping her recover one of her castles. Although the courtly erotic does not play a significant role in the French biographies, nevertheless it is presumed that these ideal heroes and role models for posterity embody all the chivalric virtues. Thus we hear of William Marshal’s kindness towards a damsel of Lancaster, a relationship which does not lead to marriage, and of how Boucicaut reunites with an old girlfriend and wears her colours in battle. Boucicaut and

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Lalaing both “serve” ladies, the love service being one element in drawing forth and establishing their grandeur. And in 1399 Boucicaut founds a chivalric Order: l’Écu vert à la Dame blanche, meant especially to protect and exalt ladies in distress. Finally, just as a change in government at Edinburgh allows Meldrum’s wicked adversary to go free, and the man is eventually slain by someone else, so also the biographers underscore the shifting back and forth of the external political forces which have an impact on their heroes’ lives. Alliances made and broken, the demise of old, sure allies including rulers, and the consequent empowerment of new, less-sure non-allies, plus the inscrutable will of divine providence or of Lady Fortune and her wheel – these themes highlight the biographies and are cited repeatedly when things go bad (as they do so often) for champions who, otherwise, ought never to fail. This type of situation occurs especially when individuals or whole groups plot against the hero – be he ever so high as the Black Prince or ever so relatively low as Lalaing and Meldrum. Although Lyndsay’s text adheres in so many ways to the aristocratic / chivalric biography model, it differs from genre expectations in a number of other features. Squyer Meldrum does not recount the protagonist’s childhood and earliest feats in arms, or the muster of the troops, or the details of a battle or a siege, or the protagonist’s own “dirty tricks” (ambushing his adversaries, plotting to set one group against another), or the political background, or the protagonist’s admirable, stylized death cum speeches by all concerned. As it turns out, William Meldrum, a relatively low-level Fifeshire laird, may never have participated in a major battle or siege; the shifting politics of the time may have had little impact on his life except for the liberation of his one enemy; he may have died suddenly without offering an occasion for exemplary spectacle in the line of William Marshal and Bayard. It is also possible that the relative sparseness of detail and brevity of narrative may be due to another sort of stylization. The erzählte Zeit covers the period 1513–17. As Riddy observes, the story recounts William’s growth from youth to maturity, and from a boy into a lover and a man of substance. It is also true that once the Squire’s life ceases to highlight war and love (at least the love that one can discuss in polite society), the narrative ceases. William Meldrum the man of law – a respected chancellor and magistrate – is material for praise but not for storytelling. Thus, in a concrete literary sense, fortitudo is valued over ­sapientia, and the feats of the captain over any strategic vision of the king. This trait, the effect of stylization, is endemic in romance (Lancelot and Arthur, Tristan and Mark) and in the chivalric biographies which always

David Lyndsay  155

tell of a knight sans peur et sans reproche rather than of the monarchs who were more responsible for and responsive to the reality of history. History is, I dare say, at least as responsible as antiromance for the undermining of chivalric narrative in the second, Scottish section of Squyer Meldrum. Meldrum is a historical, contemporary figure, and the main facts of his career, however enhanced, have to be respected. As with the French biographers, Lyndsay has to respect the “pacte biographique” between the author and his public, one which functions much as the “pacte autobiographique” does.34 This said, the reality of history is also determined by the mental structures or mindsets of the age, as expressed in romance and biography. The ideology of the biographies and the romances is reflected in Squyer Meldrum. In more specific class terms, the exaltation of martial virtues and, secondarily, of courtly chivalric virtues, endemic to the distant past and performed still in the recent past, can serve as a lesson to the present – to the present of William Meldrum’s boon companions of the petty nobility – knights and squires including Sir David Lyndsay. This state of affairs is underscored in The Testament of Squyer Meldrum, a 253-line stanzaic text which follows directly after the life narrative.35 We saw already, with regard to The Testament of Cresseid, the importance of the French genre of poetic testaments. Julia Boffey has written on the English testaments, citing a number of burlesque ones.36 The French con­ gés – by Jean Bodel, Baude Fastoul, and Adam de la Halle – have major comic elements, as do the Lais and Testament by François Villon. Lyndsay’s Testament, cast in Meldrum’s own voice, is delightfully comic in a different way. The genre is paganized, dechristianized so to speak, in order to highlight Meldrum’s secular, martial, and amorous character. Hence the comic twisting of standard Christian motifs. Yes, Meldrum bequeaths his soul to God. But then he requests burial in the Temple of Mars. He bequeaths his body to Mars, his tongue to Mercury, and his heart to Venus. The funeral rites are to be celebrated with no friars or monks, no one dressed in black, and no ringing of bells. Instead, Meldrum shall be accompanied by men-at-arms clad in red, green, and blue, the firing of canons, and minstrels performing joyful music – all this presided over by a priest of Venus. An orator shall, in place of the scriptural readings, read out the story of Meldrum’s life from a book which shall be buried with him: Than to the pulpet gar ane oratour Pas up, and schaw in oppin audience, Solempnitlie, with ornate eloquence,

156  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric At greit laser the legend of my life, How I have stand in monie stalwart strife. Quhen he hes red my buik fra end till end, And of my life maid trew narratioun, All creature, I wait, will me commend And pray to God for my salvatioun. Than efter this solempnizatioun Of service, and all brocht to end, With gravitie than with my bodie wend.

(Testament 164–75)

Consequently, the life of Meldrum is included, incorporated into the testament of Meldrum; it becomes a mise en abyme in the testament, the testament the hypertext which includes its intertextual hypotext. All this is in the spirit of good humour, on the level of comedy. It is also high art, rather than a barracks joke; the substitution of Mars, Venus, and Mercury for the Holy Trinity, and the substitution of Lyndsay’s “legend” of the deceased for the prescribed readings at a funeral service, are inspired by clergie (learning) as much as by chevalerie (the warrior code). Squyer Meldrum and the Testament of Squyer Meldrum prove to be another literary triumph for David Lyndsay, who is a master poet and dramatist as well as a courtier, diplomat, and Lyon King of Arms.

9 The Freiris of Berwik

Despite the presence of what we can call the fabliau mindset, and the probable influence of French fabliaux on William Dunbar and David Lyndsay of the Mount, only one Scots fabliau is extant: The Freiris of Berwik.1 This gem of a poem, a masterpiece of wit in 566 lines, was once attributed to Dunbar. Rather like King Hart, once attributed to Gavin Douglas, it has suffered from relative neglect now that it has lost its author. Two Dominican friars, Alan and Robert, realize that they have dallied too long outside the walls of Berwick and that the city gates will soon be closed, forcing them to spend the night ex urbe. They seek hospitality from Alison, the inn-keeper’s wife. Although claiming to be afraid of her husband’s reaction to her having men in the house during his absence, she finally allows them to bunk down in the loft, keeping the guest room for other purposes. Arrives other purposes, John, also a friar, and Alison’s lover, who, in his affluence (he is, it would appear, the prior or superior of his convent: “He governit alhaill the abbacy,” 127), brings partridges, savoury bread, and wine. Simon, the husband, returns unexpectedly, and John hides under an upside-down trough while the victuals are hidden in a cupboard. Meanwhile, Robert had carved out a spy hole in the attic floor and has observed the action. He and Alan make noise and descend to the main room where they are welcomed by Simon. Alison states that she has nothing worthwhile to eat. Robert claims that, having been to Paris, he learned magic and will use it to improve the fare. Moaning as if in a trance, he utters spells. Robert then points to the cupboard where Alison hid John’s gifts. Joy of Simon, consternation of Alison. When Simon queries how the young friar brought such elegant sustenance so quickly, Robert answers that he has control over a servant – a supernatural demon – who obeys his will. Robert can make him appear in the guise of a friar. Conjured

158  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

by Robert, John comes out from under the trough and heads for the door where Simon, at Robert’s command, strikes him with a cudgel. Losing his footing, Simon trips and gashes his head while John falls out the door into slime. A number of French fabliaux develop some of the structural increments that we find in The Freiris of Berwik. However, scholars have recognized one fabliau in particular to be the Scottish poet’s source: Le Povre Clerc, 254 lines, contained in volume vii of the Noomen-Van den Boogaard Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux.2 A clerk / student, reduced to poverty, is compelled to return home from Paris. Worn out and having eaten nothing all day, he seeks hospitality from a vilain’s (peasant farmer’s) wife. Claiming to be afraid of her husband’s reaction to her having a man in the house during his absence, she sends him away. While in the door he observed her and the servant preparing pork, wine, and cake. Upon leaving, the clerk crosses paths first with a priest walking towards and entering the house, and second with the husband returning home. As the clerk muses aloud about his poor and famished state, the husband invites him for supper. Upon their arrival, the priest hides in a manger (or trough), and the wife claims she has nothing at all to eat. She accepts only to bake bread from the flour her husband brought from the mill. To bide the time, the husband asks the clerk / student to sing a song or tell a story, for, he says, you people are good at that. The clerk states that he knows no stories but will tell the truth. In the woods, he says, a wolf seized a pig as nice and plump as the pork your servant just removed from the pot. Blood flowed from the wolf’s mouth like the wine the boy brought into the house. I then threw a stone at the wolf almost as big as the cake your servant made. Each time the husband asks his wife about the alleged food and is overjoyed that it is truly in the house. Lastly, says the clerk, the wolf stared at me like the priest in the manger. The husband seizes the priest, perhaps gives him a thrashing, and most definitely seizes his clothing, which he donates to the poor clerk. I shall endeavour to show, as I did in another context concerning The Reeve’s Tale, that although the Scots poet adapts his material in a number of significant ways, the French fabliau is an excellent brief comic text in its own right, and that both works illustrate superbly the substance of a fabliau.3 The Freiris of Berwik corrects some of the hard-to-believe features in Le Povre Clerc, so that the plot manifests greater credibility or even, if you will, greater realism. Instead of the husband overhearing the clerk’s lamentations and then bringing him home, Alan and Robert are invited in by the

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wife. Consequently, Robert has seen not only the preparations but precisely where the victuals and John are hidden. In addition, since Robert performs his magic, Simon does not discover that his wife is a liar concerning the food and Friar John; therefore, it is appropriate that the husband takes no action against her. Finally, the Scots poet deletes the student’s reward – receiving the clothes of the now naked priest – which would be perfectly natural in a thirteenth-century context but less so at the end of the fifteenth century. Other changes are of a more artistic inspiration. With two friars in place of one clerk, the Scots poet can create interplay between the prudent older man and the devil-may-care younger one. The Freiris of Berwik amplifies the bond between food and sex, with the wife proclaiming that her vagina is famished yet will soon enjoy a feast: Scho pullit hir cunt and gaif hit buffettis tway Upoun the cheikis, syne till it cowd scho say: “Ye sowld be blyth and glaid at my requeist; Thir mullis of youris ar callit to ane feist.”

(Freiris 139–42)

The Freiris begins with ironic praise of the town for its walls and gates, for being a walled fortress that cannot be taken, implicitly to be compared to Alison’s open door, bed, and body, and the herbrye, partly sexual, offered or refused by her lodging: And syne the castell is so strang and wicht, With strait towris and turattis he on hicht; The wallis wrocht craftely withall; The portcules most subtelly to fall Quhen that thame list to draw thame upoun hicht, That it micht be of na maner of micht To win that hous be craft or subteltie. “… To luge owt of the toun bot gif that we In sume gud hous this nycht mot herbryt be.” … Than the gudewyfe thay prayit for cheritie To grant thame herbrye that ane nicht. “… And God it wait gif I durst be so bald To herbry freiris in this hous with me.” … “Go hens,” scho sayis, “for Symon is fra hame And I will herbry no geistis heir perfey.”

(Freiris 11–17)

160  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric …“Be thay come heir it wes so verry lait, Houris wes rung and closit wes thair yait And in yone loft I gaif thame harbrye.” (Freiris 49–50, 80–1, 84–5, 230–1, 273–5)

From another vantage point, however, Le Povre Clerc can be justified on its own terms. In an oral culture it is by no means outlandish for one to lament his fate out loud and to be overheard by another. The Scottish wife, by allowing the friars into her home even though she anticipates a discreet dalliance with her lover, acts less consequently than the French wife who refuses entry altogether: “Ye byd nocht heir, be Him that us all coft. Bot gif ye list to lig up in yone loft, Quhilk is weill wrocht in to the hallis end. Ye sall fynd stray, and clathis I sall yow send; And gif ye list, to pas bayth on in feir, For on no wayis will I repair haif heir.” “Danz clers, fait ele, mon seignor N’est mie ceianz orandroit, Et je cuit qu’il me blasmeroit Se je avoie herbergié Vos ne autrui san con congié. … Danz clers, ne vos voil herbergier: Alez vos aillors porchacier!”

(Freiris 101–6)

(Clerc 28–32, 51–2)

The “herbergié” and “herbergier,” in the French, are taken over directly in the Scots. Le Povre Clerc offers a stark simplicity of structure – one clerk, one priest, one wife, one husband – compared to the more diffuse Freiris of Berwik. The French clerk acts entirely on his own with no help or advice; he even determines where the priest had been hiding, either by actually seeing his eyes through an opening in the manger or by deducing that, in a one-room peasant house, the manger is the only place where a man could have hidden. The French husband does not lash out at his wife perhaps because he is used to her lies and, therefore, is content to enjoy the food without histoires supplémentaires. Then, perhaps because he is so henpecked, he takes out his frustrated, held-in choler by attacking the priest. The Scots husband is shown to be almost too gullible in his acceptance of fake black magic. Finally, as R. James Goldstein observes insightfully,

The Freiris of Berwik 161

the French text has a metanarrative element in that the clerk / student tells a  story reflecting the creative act of the trouvère writing the fabliau as a whole:4 “Dan clers, se Deus me beneïe, Mainte chose avez ja oïe: Car nos dites une escriture O de chançon o d’avanture En tant de tans comme l’an cuist Ce que mangier devons enuit.” Li clers li respondi briemant: “Sire, fait il, ne sai commant Fables deïsse, que ne sai: Mais une peor que eüe ai En mon errer vos diré bien, Car de fablel ne sai je rien: La peor, je la vos dirai.” – Et je quite vos clamerai, Fait li sires, por la peor, Car je sai bien que fableor N’estes vos mie par nature. Mais or nos dites l’avanture!”

(Clerc 127–44)

In this case, I should argue, the encounter with the wolf functions as a mise en abyme, a structure which reflects and comments on the larger structure that contains it. The ravenous wolf symbolizes the no less ravenous priest, driven by sexual hunger rather than an animal’s need for food. The wolf and, by analogy, the lover embody an external, antisocial element which breaks into the home and the wife, thus undermining the social bonds of the community. The clerk, however, who may have succeeded in thwarting the wolf, also succeeds totally in thwarting the priest, who is punished and driven out of the home naked. All this is presented in the ironic mode. In conclusion, both fabliaux are excellent narratives; both are first-rate comic texts. There is no need to prefer one over the other or to indulge in the fallacies of Whig literary history, the state of mind which assumes that the text I am working on always improves on its sources. Le Povre Clerc and The Freiris of Berwik adhere to the same literary genre, the fabliau, and their similarities hugely outweigh their differences. Although we do find evidence of the concrete material aspects of life – what Charles Muscatine calls hedonistic materialism, that is, aspects of

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small-town or rural life in its humdrum detail, the everyday life of the third order – realism is not what these fabliaux are about.5 Theirs is a parody of fin’ amor and the thematics of courtly lyrics, courtly romance, and the dit amoureux. Did not the French husband bid his guest to tell an es­ criture of avanture? And did not the host, after the clerk had pleaded he can only tell the truth about a personal encounter on his travels, bid him to recount this adventure? “Mais or nos dites l’avanture”? The adventure is, of course, a parody on all the adventures in courtly romance, with the clerk imitating on a lower register and in the comic mode, the feats of a Lancelot or a Gawain. Indeed, instead of chivalric exploits, which would be fictions (he doesn’t know anything about them), the clerk will tell the truth about an event which recently took place. In it he acts as a clerk should, manifesting fear. He calls his adventure a peor and he will tell of it: “Mais une peor que eüe ai En mon errer vos dirai bien … La peor, je la vos dirai.”

(Clerc 136–7, 139)

Additional irony is generated from the fact that the clerk, claiming to tell the truth, does instead invent a fiction, making him a fableor, just like the author of the fabliau in which he is the protagonist. Both the French and the Scots fabliaux exhibit a parody and demysti­ fication of the institution of marriage. The coarse lechery of the wives and the lovers is set against noble, chaste fin’ amor, the kind practiced by Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolt; the blind, loutish, henpecked husbands form a contrast to the yet noble and dignified King Arthur and, on occasion, King Mark. In this countergenre expressing a counterlove, marriage is portrayed as a constraint at best, and a lie or a fraud at worst. The husband is blind to his surroundings and, to say the least, undersexed. Significantly, in both texts he enjoys the good food and wine with a young male friend; he does not include his wife in this feast and is not aroused by it to assert his conjugal rights.6 Although the lover is sensual enough, we have no evidence that he feels genuine affection for his mistress. What he does manifest is cowardice, primeval fear at being caught by a member of the lowest order. And when he is caught, he loses his clothes or is bashed. The wife is hostile to her husband; she mocks and humiliates him. Otherwise, she is vain, sensual, fickle, unfaithful, and adulterous, and will resort to all sorts of lies and trickery to achieve her ends. On this one occasion, however, she is defeated by a young clerk or friar who is more intelligent and has greater powers of lying and trickery – the powers of the imagination.

The Freiris of Berwik 163

Does this mean, as Evelyn S. Newlyn and, to a lesser extent, Goldstein maintain, that The Freiris of Berwik reinforces the male hierarchical and patriarchal order with the woman’s desire and her sexual self-determination frustrated?7 I do not believe so. This type of feminist reading is perhaps valid for Le Povre Clerc because the fabliau ends with the clerk and the husband enjoying each other’s company plus a gift from the husband to reward the clerk’s good service. However, even here the wife gets off scot free whereas the scapegoat proves to be another man, the priest, forced to run home to his presbytery naked, a man who is, after all, the embodiment of another patriarchal order. In the Scots poem not only does the wife get off scot free; both the husband and the lover are degraded: one has his head gashed open and the other runs home to his convent beaten and covered with slime. The Scots poet indulges in violence and insult for its own sake, that is, the expression of Robert’s supreme mastery and his joy in mastery. If women are punished for their sexuality, so are men. In any case the wives will soon revert to their old ways and, with no young clerks present to help, the husbands will offer no resistance. If anything, institutions such as patriarchy are held up to scrutiny and are undermined; they are shown to be artificial constructs that do not relate to the reality of everyday life, especially the reality of desire. They embody what ought to be, not what is; what higher genres claim to be but are not. In one of the most acute studies on the fabliau, Mary Jane Schenck lists the structural functions of the genre: arrival, departure, interrogation, communication, deception, misdeed, recognition, retaliation, and resolution.8 The French and the Scots texts adhere to this pattern. The clerk / friars arrive at the locus of action; so does the lover; so does the husband. The clerk / friars request lodging. The wife refuses or partially accepts, providing a false excuse. She deceives the clerk / friars as she deceives her husband. The misdeed is double: lack of hospitality to the guests and adultery to the husband. However, the clerk / friars recognize the wife’s subterfuge and the deception. He / they deceive in turn both the wife and the husband. The husband then recognizes the lover when he is forced out of his hiding place. Retaliation occurs, from the clerk / friars to the wife, and from the husband to the lover. The conflict is resolved, in Le Povre Clerc, by the husband granting the clerk a reward, and, in The Freiris of Berwik, by everyone except the friars thwarted in their endeavours. The usual fabliau plot is comprised of the eternal triangle – husband, wife, and lover – with the lover and wife triumphing over the husband. In our two comic texts, the triangle becomes a parallelogram with the addition of a fourth element: the clerk / friar. The plot thickens, so to speak,

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when this outside element chooses to side with the husband and, thus, to counter the usual fabliau ending. In this more complex structure, whereas the wife’s intelligence and ruse conquer the husband’s brute force and, at first, the intelligence and ruse of the outsider(s), in the end his / their intelligence and ruse conquer the wife’s in turn, allowing the husband’s brute force to exercise itself freely on the lover: – Prestes? li sires s’escria, A il donques preste ceianz?” Lors sailli en piez ne pot ainz: Tantost corut lo preste prandre. Li provoire se volt desfandre: De mout grant noiant s’antremist! Et li prodom tantost lo prist, Si li avoit la robe ostee … Et li prestes ot assez de honte! With that, Symone a felloun flap lait fle. With his burdoun, he hit him on the nek, He wes sa ferce … Be this, Freir Johine attour the stair is gane In sic wyis, that mist he hes the trap And in ane myr he fell – sic wes his hap – Wes fourty futis of breid undir the stair, Yeit, gat he up with cleithing nothing fair; Full drerelie upoun his feit he stude And, throw the myre, full smertly than he yude.

(Clerc 230–7, 241)

(Freiris 528–30, 532–8)

Thus the fool is duped, and the knave, who made others to be fools, is rendered a fool in turn by a more intelligent, more resourceful knave. In Bergsonian terms, the central comic structure is repeated, the repetition underscoring the mechanical and artificial nature of the husband’s relation to his wife and her relation to husband, lover, and guest(s). The world of the fabliau, similar to that of the Roman de Renart cycle, is one of violence, greed, lechery, animal pleasure, and the contest of wills over who shall enjoy what. A degree of sadism surfaces at the beating and besmirching of the hated priest or friar and that the hated priest or friar is forced to return home degraded in his clothing, the emblem of his status in society. The one rendered naked, the other covered in slime – these are castration images, the stuff nightmares are made of. Bakhtin’s notion of

The Freiris of Berwik 165

the “material bodily lower stratum” can be invoked here as banquet and dalliance are fused, with the lovers expecting to indulge their senses in both the digestive and procreative spaces. However, carnival is disrupted or, rather, it takes place in the deprivation of the senses in the lovers and the indulgence of the digestive, at least, in the husbands and friends. Standing in the lovers’ way, we discover, are the higher, “spiritual” elements of wit and speech, the mind and the tongue employed to defeat the lower bodily functions. There is a joy in cleverness for its own sake, in one cleverness triumphing over another cleverness and in the knave triumphing over the fool(s). Stupidity is scorned and punished in an amoral world where wit makes right. Thus the denouement of The Freiris can be justified: yes, the husband is a perfectly nice man and a good host. However, he is stupid. Therefore, he gets a bit of thrashing in his own right. Note also that the contest of wills concerns wealth – the sumptuous victuals that the wife prepares for the lover and refuses to the husband or that the lover brings to the wife – and the reversal of fortune as the clerk / friars and the husband come to enjoy the victuals and the clerk comes to enjoy the priest’s clothes. Wit makes right, and wit leads to power, a power which shifts in the course of the narrative from wife to husband to clerk / friars. In chanson de geste and courtly romance the hero most often attains the highest status through feats in arms. Such are Roland, Guillaume d’Orange, Lancelot, and Perceval, masters of fortitudo. In the fabliau countergenre the heroes, if heroes they be, practice a debased form of sapientia, the ruse, wit, and cleverness that enable them to triumph. In our two fabliaux the debased sapientia is made manifest in speech, discourse which is the means for trickery and for establishing authority. In that sense we find a parallel between the fabliau hero master of oral discourse, and the fabliau writer master of written discourse. The French clerk’s story is a mise en abyme for the fabliau as a whole, for it validates the ironic claim to truth made by a clerk for his fictional story in contrast to the obvious fictionality of the fabliau narrative written by another clerk. Although less explicit, the same occurs in The Freiris of Berwik where the riotous, carnivalesque imagination of friar Robert corresponds to the riotous, carnivalesque imagination of the author who conceived of Robert and his imagination. Both the clerk and Robert speak; their discourse gives rise to, seemingly creates, food where there was, seemingly, none. When Robert says that he learned his arts in Paris – “For I haif mony sindry practikis seir, / Beyond the sey in Pareis did I leir” (305–6) – his author may be alluding to the land where the source-narrative takes place and where the previous author (the sourceauthor) composed his fabliau.

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These fabliaux are comic narratives in which the young triumph over the somewhat older, sons over surrogate parents, the educated over the uncultured, outsiders over insiders, freedom over authority, and flexibility over rigidity. In Frye’s terminology, an eiron or dolosus servus triumph over alazons and agroikoi in texts powerful in their irony and sarcasm.9 Such is one element in medieval comedy.

10 King Hart

On occasion the French courtly tradition had an impact on Scottish books that partake of a different current and with different conventions. One example would be the 960-line allegory entitled King Hart (late ­fifteenth or very early sixteenth century).1 Hart leaves his castle for a good fight. He is taken prisoner by Bewtie and imprisoned in the castle of Dame Plesance. Danger and Piete debate. However, New Desyr and Grene Luif conquer Plesance on Hart’s behalf, so that she makes him the master of her domain. Manifestations of joy, followed by a banquet! But, then, Age arrives with a retinue of old men. Conscience, Ressoun, and Wisdome now counsel Hart. Although he resists, Youthheid and Plesance herself leave. Hart returns to his own castle, kept for him all these years by Hevines, upon which Decrepitus arrives with an army and wounds Hart to the quick. This text has been relatively neglected by scholars. C.S. Lewis, who did so much to rehabilitate the literature in Middle Scots, stated that “King Hart … is an admirably ordered little work … Its content represents the fusion of erotic and homiletic allegory to perfection.”2 Priscilla Bawcutt published an impeccable edition of the book with a first-rate literary and historical introduction.3 Nevertheless, only one-half of one sentence is devoted to King Hart in the monumental four-volume History of Scottish Literature, in which Bawcutt observes that “[Gavin Douglas’s] authorship of King Hart, an excellent moral allegory once attributed to him, is now thought unlikely.”4 That King Hart is not discussed in the History is the fault of no one; it testifies only to the fact that in multi-authored literary histories something will occasionally slip through the cracks, as we say. Inevitably a book authored by a major writer will have greater visibility than the work of Mr Anonymous. Rather like the case of The Freiris of

168  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

Berwik, here is an important text which has, to a small extent, escaped notice in the scholarly community. I would like to suggest that we find in King Hart the intertextual presence of works by René d’Anjou, Count of Provence and King of Naples, and especially Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris (1457).5 This text is a pro­ simetrum, an experiment in quest allegory whereby René fuses the allegory of love (Le Roman de la Rose in verse) with the romance of chivalry (The Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle and, more particularly, La Queste del saint Graal in prose). The plot is rich and convoluted. In brief, in the narrator’s dream, Cuer, along with his companion and mentor Desir, seeks to rescue Doulce Mercy, held prisoner by Reffus and Dangier. Although they fall into all kinds of trouble on the road, Cuer reaches the God of Love’s castle and becomes Amours’s vassal. He succeeds in freeing Doulce Mercy and wins a kiss. However, on the road back they are ambushed by Reffus, Dangier, and a contingent of men sent by Mallebouche. Doulce Mercy is recaptured and Cuer gravely wounded, upon which the narrator wakes up. What does Janet Smith have to say? That René’s book “may have given [the Scottish poet] some hints for his own work … not much certainly, but worth considering.” Why so little? Because, she says: “René’s Livre du Cuer is a love romance, not a moral allegory. It ends not with a death-bed scene, but with the hero left upon the island of love, where the air is clean and pure, without wind or clouds. Love, to René, is the spirit’s goal, not the body’s temptation.”6 In other words, because the two works are so different, because King Hart diverges so much form René’s Livre du Cuer, the French text ought not to be considered a source or analogue for the one in Scots. Because the resemblance is slight, the French had little impact on the Scots. But, is that the way we should go about things? Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de la Vie humaine differs enormously from Le Roman de la Rose in much the same way: a moral and religious allegory of the life of man wherein carnal love proves wanting is opposed to an allegorical romance of carnal love. However, Guillaume de Digulleville states that he is writing spe­ cifically against Le Roman de la Rose in order to counter the errors to be found in the Rose.7 Could the Scottish poet not be doing roughly the same thing? Writing an anti-René and a super-René? Are the differences that great? Le Livre du Cuer takes the form of a quest romance whereas King Hart assumes in part the form of a psychomachia. Yet the dominant imagery is the same: the imagery of war. In the Scots book Hart’s people and Plesance’s people fight a battle, Hart is taken prisoner, and then he is rescued. Later, back in his own castle, Hart

King Hart 169

is mortally wounded by Decrepitus, who had broken in with his army. In René’s book Cuer is a warrior, brave and impetuous, accepted by Desir because of his military attributes. He wanders through the countryside in the guise of a knight errant. Among the traditional Arthurian motifs we find a perilous bridge as in Chrétien’s Lancelot, a fountain of storms defended by a giant as in the Yvain, and travel by boat to a sacred island as in La Queste del saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu. Battles are fought. At different points in the narration Cuer, Bel Acueil, and Doulce Mercy are taken prisoner and then rescued. The gatekeeper (Dangier) in Cuer, who fails to keep the pro-love figures out, corresponds to the gatekeeper (Wantownnes) in Hart, who fails to keep the anti-love figures out. Furthermore, the endings of the two texts are actually quite similar. In King Hart Hart is mortally wounded by Decrepitus: He socht king Hart, for he full weill him kend, And with ane swerde he can him smertlie smyte His bak in twa, richt pertlie, for dispyte, And with the brand brak he both his schinnis.

(Hart 883–6)

In the Livre du Cuer Cuer, ambushed by Dangier and Reffus, is deeply wounded: Dangier … lui ramena ung coup sur la teste tellement que la coiffe de fer ne le garentist qu’il ne lui abatist une des machoueres, et si cruellement l’ataindit que la cervelle de la teste lui paroissoit. (Cuer, p. 200)

His retinue sets off to Amours’s castle whereas he is ready to repair to the Hospital d’Amours, to spend the rest of his days in prayer and to be buried there. Admittedly, the Hart-poet could hardly approve of fin’ amor as it is portrayed by René; after all, in King Hart any number of the sins – Falset, Invy, Gredie Desyr, Glutony, and Vainegloir – are associated with Plesance and the life that Hart leads with her. Upon the arrival of Conscience and Ressoun, they leave. In Le Livre du Cuer Desir is a delightful, witty young man, and Honneur aids Cuer in his function as vassal to Amours. Jalouzie is a hideous dwarf, Melencolie a disgusting hag, and Dangier a peasant-like brute. At the cemetery next to the hospital / hospice of love we find the  blasons and devices of any number of the great heroes of love who voyaged to Amours’s realm. They include, among others, Achilles and Hercules, Caesar and Augustus, Lancelot and Tristan, and also David and

170  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

Solomon, plus a sample of the contemporary French aristocracy. Especially honoured are the six great poets of love buried there: Ovid, Jean de Meun, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Guillaume de Machaut, and Alain Chartier. The blasons and any numbers of other works of art reveal, as Daniel Poirion argues, a courtly ideology enriched by artistic culture and ancient myth.8 Indeed, one aspect of René’s book is the exaltation of art – on the great portals of the castle of Plaisance we find the “images” of Fantaisie and Ymagination – as a natural companion to fin’ amor and perhaps its ultimate flowering. Finally, the Scottish poet would have recoiled from the religion of love, as René depicts it. Amours is a god as well as a feudal lord. Next to his chapel we find his hospice, directed by a prioress, where the relics of love are honoured. These include a ewer containing water from the sea where Leander perished swimming to meet Hero, the swords wielded in the slaying of  Corebus and Turnus, and the goblet from which Tancred’s daughter Sigismunda drank poison. Bad lovers, the excommunicated, are condemned to rot in a ditch outside the cemetery. No need to pray for the six great poets, explains Courtoisie, for their souls dwell already in Love’s Paradise: … lors commença le Cueur a prier pour eulx, et dame Courtoisie lui dist qu’elle avoit ferme creance qu’il n’estoit ja besoign, car leurs esperilz estoient en grant joye et repos pardurable ou paradis d’Amours. (Cuer, p. 146)

The hospice and the castle, where Mass is said every morning, evoke a Mediterranean-like syncretism, according to which Amor and Caritas are harmoniously juxtaposed if not fused, and the various allegories partake of the rule of the God of Love without tarnishing in the slightest their faith in the one true God. On the other hand, René undercuts the very courtly ideology that appears to pervade his book. The Arthurian motifs can be read as parody, for example, when Cuer jousts on the perilous bridge, loses, and is cast into the river, or when Cuer and his companions set out on the boat, get seasick, and prove to be less courageous and more inept than the female allegorical figures who row them. At their destination Amictié explains that the fish, dear to Amours, on which they are dining is called mackerel: “Or saichez, noble Cueur, et vueillés escouter Que ce poisson ycy, duquel vous voy gouster, Est appellé en France maquereau vrayement, Lequel est savoureux et tressain pour l’amant Qui a le mal d’amer.”

(Cuer, p. 106)

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Humour is generated from the play on words between mal de mer (seasickness) and mal d’amer (lovesickness) and from the second meaning for  maquereau, in fifteenth- and twentieth-century sermo humilis: procurer or pimp. Largesse and Promesse are sent to help Cuer in his quest for Doulce Mercy. Not only is it assumed that having money and bribing people (Dangier) with it is central to a successful amorous career; Cuer is advised to promise more and spend less. In addition, think of how much Cuer has suffered in the course of his travels, from Fortune and Amours: he is forced to eat the bread of Dure Paine and drink the water of Larmes; he is knocked off his horse into a river by Soulsy and almost drowned; he is imprisoned by Tristesse; and finally he is wounded to the quick by Dangier, Reffus, and their band of thugs. The critics stand in agreement that, whatever the ideology, Cuer fails in the end. He fails in love, and love fails him. In other words, love poses as many problems, is as problematic, for René as it does and is for the Hart-poet. Neither text nor, for that matter, Guillaume de Lorris’s Rose and William Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe offer the prospect of continuous love and a happy, bourgeois ending. Moreover, if we follow Joanna Martin’s deft reading of the Scots allegory, King Hart proves to be as powerfully ambiguous as Le Livre du Cuer.9 As Martin sees it, Hart begins as the young monarch subject to bad influence, misguided by unreliable attendants. The mature figure remains much the same, as if predetermined to disorder, thrust to and fro by forces beyond his control. He continually regresses in terms of personal morality and dies a miserable end, unrepentant, ever regretting the loss of joys (sin) in the past. Why relate King Hart to Le Livre du Cuer instead of to a dozen other French allegories? Because of the title of the French book, which is more than a title. René, Count of Anjou and Provence, claimed to be King of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem. Although his political career was one of ­failure, any number of people accepted his claims. Le roi René, as he was called, was recognized to be one of the great French writers of the century, alongside Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, Charles d’Orléans, and, later on, the Burgundians and Jean Lemaire de Belges. Like Charles d’Orléans, he was also extolled as a munificent patron of the arts, a bibliophile, an inveterate builder, and an organizer of festivities who attracted to his court writers and artists from all over. Among the writers are to be found Jean le Prieur, Antoine de La Sale, Arnoul Greban, and Louis de Beauvau. He was known and celebrated throughout Europe.10 Given that the medieval public committed the biographical fallacy as much as our twentieth-century public does, it was readily assumed that Cuer, the protagonist of Le Livre

172  The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric

du Cuer d’amours espris, was his author’s heart, Cuer du roy, and that the text had genuine autobiographical roots. Any reasonably cultured reader or listener of a poem in which the protagonist is named King Hart, and is the implied author of the poem, would recognize at once the intertext – the allegory about Cuer du roy. They could not help doing so. And they would inevitably make comparisons. Then there is Plesance. In King Hart she is the second-most important figure, Hart’s opposant and objet: she who wages battle with him, wounds him, makes him her prisoner in her castle (it glitters with gold and is difficult of entry), grants him overlordship, and when those wretched killjoys – Ressoun, Conscience, and Wisdome – take control, she abandons both Hart and her castle. In the book about Cuer du roy, Cuer, Desir, and Largesse travel to a castle on an island, difficult of entry, all in gold and precious stones, dazzling in the light – the castle named Plaisance, where Amours dwells and where Cuer is welcomed as Amours’s vassal. In both poems the Pleasant Castle is the central locus of symbolic action. In addition, King René wrote another allegory prior to Le Livre du Cuer, a genuine Christian allegory entitled Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance (1455).11 In this text Ame enflammee de l’Amour divin seeks to redeem Cuer egaré par les vanités terrestres, to redeem her heart from its fixation on vile and disgusting worldly things that are embodied in Vaine Plaisance: “Car m’en destourbe le desir abusé de ce Cuer cy avec lequel suis couplee et faitte pelerine du voyage de son mortel cours transsitoire … ainsi sanblablement et souventeffois aprés lui me tyre ce doulant Cuer et trebuchier me fait en la fange et ordure de Vaine Plaisance.” (Mortifiement, pp. 2, 4)

Crainte de Dieu and Parfaitte Contrition convince Ame to act: “Se tu veulz en ce monde de ton Cuer joyr, il te fault oster sur toute riens ce trespuant et sale rouylle de Vaine Plaisance qui obscurcist ta pensee.” (Morti­ fiement, p. 22)

She hands over Cuer to the two, who take him up a mountain where Foy, Esperance, Amour, and Grace Divine nail him to the Cross, so that Vaine Plaisance is forced out of him in a flow of blood. As Foy puts it: “… puis aprés, Grace Divine, avec sa lance, se Dieu plaist, fera sa sainte playe de laquelle ystera l’ort sang abhominable et detestable de Vaine Plaisance que si treffort lui est grevable.” (Mortifiement, p. 52)

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René d’Anjou and the Hart-poet both portray something like a debate or conflict (although Cuer does not speak) between body and soul or ­between the physical, erotic, and worldly versus the rational and spiritual. Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance, like King Hart, exposes the vanity of human wishes in all its forms and, more particularly, in the form of the sensual in Vaine Plaisance. Both underscore the fragility and evanescence of life, its inherent instability and inconstancy due to the sway of Fortune. They both harp on the inevitability of death. In both Mortifiement and King Hart the conflict occurs within the self, the thinking and conscious subject allegorized as the heart (Cuer and Hairt), although René allots subjectivity above all to Ame. In both works the heart – the fallen human self – grows and evolves. The outcome is the same, with Plaisance / Plesance defeated and, consequently, forced out of the self.12 I suggest that the author of King Hart was, to some extent, acquainted with both works by René. If this be the case, his is, in part, a work of appropriation, adaptation, and demystification. His stance would go something like this. Yes, Eros is passion and madness, the most powerful of earthly drives. Yes, it drives us into anguish and melancholy, it tears us apart. Still, let us avoid French extravagance. I will give Doulce Mercy to Cuer so that he can enjoy her at his leisure. Just wait. In time, Age will arrive, and all that was Plesance will be for naught. Drive out Plaisance from Cuer in blood on the cross? Admirable. Yet still more French extravagance. Just wait. With Sadnes, Hevenes, Langour, and the physical ills, she will leave of her own accord. In time all that will remain is Decrepitus, and his army is invincible. What does a king do? Wander about trying to conquer people or to rescue people? Nonsense. What should he do? Rule wisely over his own castle, which is his self. In a sense, for French space the Scottish poet substitutes time. For the static beauty of love and art, mutability and the evanescence of all that we hold dear. For personal freedom and the anguish of an enhanced consciousness, the law of nature in our fallen human condition. For a rich, luxurious, mannerist structure of narrative, a more austere, reduced, linear or binary pattern.13 King Hart manifests its own, highly successful impersonality of tone, clarity and unity of structure, and simplicity of diction. The author of King Hart incorporates the French pre-texts, perhaps misprisions them (he is a Bloomian strong son), adapts them to his own purposes, and creates his own narrative grounded in his own vision of life and art. That is what writers do.

PART THREE Romance

In The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England I wrote that “The question of Middle English romance is one of the most discussed and most controversial in all of medieval studies. Widely divergent and highly challenging theses have been offered concerning the nature of the genre, its origins, its constituent traits, and its public.”1 Although by no means to the same extent, Scottish romance raises comparable issues. Rhiannon Purdie quite rightly emphasizes the problems facing students of medieval romance in Scots, starting with how to define the corpus.2 That is, when referring to specific narrative texts, are they medieval? Are they Scottish? And are they romances? Ultimately, Matthew P. McDiarmid, A.S.G. Edwards, and Purdie agree to a good extent as to which texts should be included in the romance corpus.3 To be rejected are narratives such as Sir Tristrem and the Awntyrs of Arthure, now recognized to have been written in Northern Middle English not Scots; and historical chronicles such as John Barbour’s Bruce and Hary’s Wallace. To be included, on the other hand, are Eger and Grime and Roswall and Lillian, extant only in copies from the seventeenth century. McDiarmid, Edwards, and Purdie arrive at a total of some twelve or thirteen romances, more or less, and all in verse. What distinguishes the Scottish from the English production? According to Sergi Mainer a major constituent element in the Scots narratives and also the chronicles relates to their concern for good governance and statecraft.4 A number of these texts serve implicitly as mirrors for princes – the advice to princes tradition which Sally Mapstone has identified extending through much of medieval Scottish literature – and contain powerful Boethian and Christian elements.5 Significantly, Karl Heinz Göller places the two Arthurian narratives in the category of “moralisirenden

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Romanzen.”6 In addition, Mainer envisages the romances as politically oriented, reflecting an anti-English ideology which, therefore, contributes to calling for something like a Scottish national spirit and a Scottish national identity. The scholars are in accord as to the relative paucity of romance in Scotland compared to medieval England’s ninety-five to one hundred fifteen verse romances, to the relative lateness of romance production in Scotland (ca. 1450–1600) compared again to England (ca. 1300–1500), and to the flourishing of alliterative verse forms in Scots after the alliterative style had ceased to be fashionable in England. Most of these facets of romance production in Scotland can, in my opinion, be accounted for through the notion of belatedness. For example, there is nothing extraordinary about the fact that all the romances in Scots are in verse whereas, during the same time frame, prose romances are to be found in England, or about the fact that two Scots – the authors of Lancelot of the Laik and Clariodus – translated into verse the French Prose Lancelot and the Burgundian prose Cleriadus et Meliadice. In all the great civilizations and all or nearly all the lesser ones poetry stands as the first medium of literary production. Quite often poetry remains the unique medium for centuries. Only when the civilization reaches a certain level of maturity and sophistication, of intellectual urbanity, will works of art be written in prose, and often, as in the West, the shift from verse to prose can take centuries. Major imaginative literature, and specifically romance, appears in prose at the beginning of the thirteenth century in France, and in the fifteenth century in England. English literature evidences belatedness compared to the French. With the vast majority of romances in English translated or adapted from the French during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries, the translations went into verse. Although most of these were based on original texts in verse, we find a number of examples of French prose turned into English verse. These include, from the Lancelot-Grail Cycle alone, Arthour and Merlin, Joseph of Arimathie, Lovelich’s Merlin, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, and the alliterative Morte Arthure. With no tradition of imaginative prose in Scots during this period, it is to be expected that certain Scottish poets translate or adapt from French prose just as their English predecessors did. Belatedness, fortunate belatedness in this case, can also help us understand the extraordinary flowering of alliterative verse in Scots in contrast to the waning of the mode in England, a richness not limited to romance. Golagros and Gawane, Rauf Coilyear, Howlat, Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the Prologue to Book 8 of Douglas’s

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Eneados, and Montgomerie’s Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwarth are shining examples. The poetic form was appreciated and cultivated by ­major writers at court. Alliterative verse in Scotland is as aristocratic and literary as it had been in earlier days south of the Tweed. Belatedness can also help explain the moral and political character of some of the Scots romances; they were influenced by a humanist, pre-Renaissance current of Boethian and Christian concern with statecraft and the good life of the prince. In just about all literary genres Scottish production, in terms of quantity, lags behind production in England. This is true for a number of cultural and demographic reasons. Provincial magnates, again more numerous, played a crucial role in the patronage of literature in England, especially romance. And, as we enter the sixteenth century, which was a literary Golden Age in the North, in the South as in France up-to-date writers, their patrons, and their publics were oriented towards literary concerns other than romance. This is the negative side of belatedness. Scotticists have wisely avoided what I consider to be an error by some scholars in English studies: they do not envisage romance in Scotland to be an inferior genre, oral rather than literary in form and function. Indeed, in my opinion, the publics for romance in France, England, and Scotland are the same: a relatively broad-based public including the nobility but also those with aspirations to nobility, all those who embrace the secular ideology of the courts. The French impact on the development of romance in Scotland was enormous. For a manageable section within a larger book, I limit the purview of this essay to five romances: Fergus, Lancelot of the Laik, Golagros and Gawane, Rauf Coilyear, and Eger and Grime. Lancelot and Golagros are Arthurian romances, both of them adaptations from the Old French. Rauf and Eger are original creations, grounded in conventions and generic constraints which can be traced back to the chanson de geste. Fergus is a Scottish-themed Arthurian romance written in French. Left aside are late Alexander romances (The Buik of Alexander, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour) and a late Burgundian romance (Clariodus), which are, in my opinion, of less interest because they are direct translations from the French and also, most scholars would agree, because they are of less literary value.

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11 Fergus

Before proceeding to the study of Arthurian romance in Scots I should like to examine a French text, one that can be considered the rough equivalent in Scotland of the Anglo-Norman romance in England. I have argued elsewhere that the most exciting phenomenon in Anglo-Norman is the flowering of narrative, and that one of the major contributions to this flowering took the form of romance.1 Marie de France’s Lais, Beroul’s Tristan, Thomas’s Tristan, Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon and Protheselaus, and the anonymous Amadas et Ydoine can be counted among the most notable romances. An especially interesting category of Anglo-Norman romance concerns texts that have specifically English heroes. Included in this group are to be found Horn, Haveloc, Waldef, Boeve de Haumtone, Fouke Fitz Warin, and Gui de Warewic. Guillaume d’Angleterre, also set in England, is not now thought to be Anglo-Norman. According to M. Dominica Legge, these are ancestral romances, composed for the great Norman families recently established in England, families that sought roots and a sense of ­legitimacy in their new home and had a very real interest in, and nostalgia for, its historical past.2 Poets would have composed romance fictions with a local setting, the protagonists identified with figures, real or imagined, associated with the lineage in question. According to Susan Crane, these are feudal or baronial romances and not particularly ancestral at all.3 They exalt the Anglo-Norman aristocracy as a whole, offering an idealized vision of the baronry and upholding seigneurial privilege. The two theories are not mutually exclusive; both contribute to our understanding. Significantly, two of the protagonists – Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton – having obtained both insular and continental notoriety, were adopted as national heroes by the native English population and became figures of legend in England. Their fame has endured until almost the present day.

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Such was not to be the case in Scotland. If the ancestral / baronial romance can be considered the Anglo-Norman epic, the epic strain in Scots is to be found in the chronicles, with their all-too-real national heroes – Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. However, one ancestral or baronial romance written in French treats Scottish material; it predates the earliest Scots romances by a good two centuries: The Romance of Fergus.4 Scholarly opinion differs as to the origins of this text. M. Dominica Legge, followed by other scholars, proposes that the author, Guillaume le Clerc, wrote Fergus at the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth, perhaps around 1209, for Alan of Galloway, great-grandson of the historical Fergus of Galloway, who ruled in the western Hebrides. ­Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, on the contrary, suggests that the romance was composed for Dervorguilla of Galloway and her husband, John de Balliol, to highlight the claims of their sons to the throne of Scotland. More recently, D.D.R. Owen is convinced that Fergus alludes with wit and art to people and events contemporary with the reign of King William (William the Lion), that a likely date of composition can be situated ca. 1207, and that the author could well have been William Malveisin, bishop of St Andrews.5 In spite of the objections to Legge’s thesis,6 and unsure whether to back Legge, Schmolke-Hasselmann, or Owen, I am nevertheless convinced as to the “Scottishness” of the romance. Fergus stands out for its “realism” in terms of geography and local ­customs. The various loci named in the romance correspond to standard, ­easily verified places in Scotland: Ayrshire, Dunfermline, Dunnottar, Galloway, Galway (in Ireland), Glasgow, Jedburgh (formerly Jedworth), Liddel Castle, the Lammermuirs, Lothian, the Maiden Castle (Edinburgh), Melrose, Queensferry, Roxburgh, and Tweeddale. The questing, back and forth, from one locus to another, respects, more or less, the actual topography of historical Scotland. In addition, Guillaume alludes to a number of traits or details that are specifically Scottish: Saint Mungo of Glasgow, peasants going to the plow armed, the moors, local Scottish breeds of horses, knotted riding whips, short broad-bladed swords, the export of hides, the  reputation for beauty of Ayr women, the unsavory reputation of Gallovidians in general, and the depiction of, as D.D.R. Owen puts it: “the primitive Scottish castles of the period, the ‘mottes’ or earthen mounds topped by wooden buildings within timber palissades.”7 All this evokes local colour, offering not reality, of course, but the illusion of reality, for Fergus, like most medieval romances, adheres to traditional archetypes and builds its own mythical universe in terms of King

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Arthur and the Round Table, far from the historical situation in the year 1209. In addition, Guillaume is aware of the earlier romance tradition, especially the works of Chrétien de Troyes, so that the Fergus of 1209 is rich in intertextual allusion and in intertextual structures and imagery.8 In the earlier romance tradition, as in Fergus, the protagonist is immersed in a stylized, poetic world where knights submit to ordeals which test their valour, and the other classes in society live to serve the knights, to oppose them, or to be rescued by them. Adventures come as if miraculously to a tiny elite, and events in the external world are to be interpreted symbolically as a representation of inner struggle and initiation. Adventure, which lies in a realm beyond history and above everyday contingencies, gives meaning to life; it is the essence of life. The chivalric-courtly society alone is worthy of such an experience. King Arthur’s court functions as the locus of civilization, order, and legitimacy. Threatening adversaries arrive at the court and challenge the very bases of civilization. The knights, therefore, leave the court in order to give battle to its adversaries. They also seek adventure for its own sake. Their quests and their battles take place in the forest aventureuse (deep dark woods), a locus of danger and darkness, of the savage, uncontrolled elements that threaten the court. The forest aventureuse also evokes or serves as a threshold to the Celtic Otherworld, again a mythical realm into which the greatest knights penetrate in order to conquer ogres and to wed maidens, attaining sovereignty (when the maiden is a princess) prior to their return to recognition at court. A secondary version of the archetypal romance structure has a young boy – untutored in the ways of militia et amor – drawn to the court where he will commence the learning experience and consequently, like the others, leave the court on a quest. This is the case in Chrétien’s Perceval and in Guillaume’s Fergus. In Fergus King Arthur and his knights set out on a public, collective quest – the hunt for the White Stag. In a nice intertextual touch Perceval is the winner, and it is on the return to Carlisle that a Perceval-figure, Fergus, up to that point a peasant boy at the plow, beholds the knights and insists upon joining them: “Peres, por Diu, car me donés Armes et si m’en adoubés, S’irai le roi a cort servir Que qu’il me doie adevenir.

182 Romance Jo ne l[e] lairoie por nul homme, [Ne pour tout l’empire de Rome] Que je n’i voisse, a coi qu’il tort.”

(Fergus 461–7)

Since his mother is of noble lineage, it is appropriate for Fergus to be given arms and a horse, and to depart. After a first adventure overcoming bandits, the lad arrives at Carlisle. He is instructed in the duties of chivalry and is dubbed a knight. This ends the boy’s first initiation and first quest. The call to adventure comes from an unlikely source, Sir Kay. Kay, mockingly, praises the new boy and proposes for him the most dangerous quest: to challenge the Black Knight at Black Mountain: “Vallet, en moie foi, Bien sanbles consilliers a roi. Bien ait qui t’a ci envoié! … Voirs est que Dius n’oblie mie Cels qui bien le servent tos jor[s]. Or nos a envoié secors, Soie merchi, et biel et grant! … Se li rois mon consel creoit, Par tels couvens vos retenroit Que demain a l’aube esclairie Tos sels sans autre compaignie En la Nouquetren en irés; La guimple nos aporterés Et le cor qui aveucques pent. Le chevalier mat et sangle[n]t Aveuques vos en amenrés; Donques bien vengié averés Tos cels que il a decolés.”

(Fergus 749–51, 756–9, 783–93)

To everybody’s consternation, Fergus takes the suggestion at base value and insists that he be allowed to undertake it. Off he goes, spending one night at the castle of a Hospitable Host with a lovely niece, Galiene. The Hospitable Host, who valourizes the quest and who directs Fergus on his way, recalls a similar figure in Yvain. Galiene, who falls in love with the handsome youth, recalls Blancheflor in Perceval. Spurning her advances – first things come first – Fergus proceeds to the Black Mountain. There he breaks an automaton and defeats the Black Knight, seizing for himself the sacred horn and wimple, talismans of his victory. Because of the talismans

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and the magic automaton, we can read the Black Mountain as forming part of the Otherworld, and that this second quest ends with triumph in the Otherworld over the giant / ogre master of the place. This is Fergus’s first great achievement in militia. But not in amor. Upon returning to Galiene’s castle and now in love with her, he discovers that, out of rage and melancholy at his rejection of her advances, she has disappeared. The implied audience is expected to comprehend that, although the adventures of the Black Mountain validate Fergus’s achievements as a warrior, he has yet to display courtesy and chivalry. Much growth remains for this young protagonist of a medieval Bildungsroman. Off on the new quest for Galiene, Fergus defeats a knight with a wicked dwarf, a bandit, and fifteen bandits. At this point, all the men whom Fergus has vanquished arrive at Carlisle and recount Fergus’s exploits to King Arthur and his knights: Molt s’esmervellent sus et jus Que cil est de si grant poissance. Lors dïent trestot sans doutance Que c’est li miudres chevaliers Qui onques montast sor destriers.

(Fergus 3608–12)

However, ironically, at the very moment of his recognition and consecration at court as a warrior, Fergus falls into the depths of despair because of his failure as a lover. Quite like Yvain, who goes mad after being repudiated by Laudine’s messenger and who wanders about, naked, devouring raw game for a year, Fergus wanders about, bereft, without direction, ill, famished, reduced to skin and bones, devouring only raw game, the portrait of wretchedness. This degradation, this reduction of Fergus to a ­quasi-animal state, can be read as punishment for the coarseness the youth manifested in spurning Galiene; it also can be read as a period for recognition of guilt, therefore for remorse and expiation. The expiation having done its work, at the end of the year Fergus comes across a lovely fountain which restores his health and vigor. Physical regeneration will lead to spiritual regeneration. The dwarf at a chapel predicts that Fergus must first capture the White Shield at Dunnottar, and then he can recover Galiene: “Se tu es tant preus et tant sages Et s’en toi est tels vaselages

184 Romance Qu’a Dunottre vuelles aler Por le blanc escu conquester, Que garde la vi[e]lle moussue, Encor poras avoir ta drue.”

(Fergus 3753–8)

After crossing water, a recognizable barrier to the Otherworld, this third quest will lead Fergus for the second time into the Otherworld. The shining, radiant White Shield protects its owner from death; it is a supernatural token of victory and of superior physical and spiritual attainment, its light symbolic of masculine power in war and justice. To win the shield Fergus has to defeat its two supernatural guardians: a hag of gigantic proportions, and a dragon. He slays both. Now follows the fourth and final quest – to rescue Galiene. After another crossing of water, Fergus is told that he is in Lothian, Galiene’s country. Although the mistress of these lands, she is under siege in Roxburgh by a king seeking to dispossess her. First occurs a side trip to Melrose where Fergus slays a giant, the hag’s husband, and their son, who had kidnapped two maidens and butchered their knights. Like Yvain, Fergus demonstrates that he has learned the meaning of chivalry, one aspect of which is to succour damsels in distress, that is, to defend women and orphans from evildoers who commit violence against them. The evil king sends his nephew to negotiate with Galiene. His terms: the land will be held in fiefdom from the king, and Galiene will be handed over to his varlets: “Si mande que plus n’atendés; Mais ceste vile li rendés Et vos metés en sa merchi. Porveü l’a et establi Tot ice que de vos fera: A ses garchons vus liverra.”

(Fergus 5199–204)

Needless to say, Galiene and the nephew exchange insults. When the nephew challenges any one of Galiene’s knights to dispute his ultimatum, Galiene loses her temper and her common sense by replying that her knight will fight any two of the king’s men in a duel to be held in no more than eight days’ time. After sundry contretemps, the Knight of the Radiant Shield arrives at the last minute, slays the nephew, and vanquishes the king. He then returns to Melrose. Only after Arthur himself announces a tourney at Jedburgh, does the Knight of the Radiant Shield

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win first prize and reveal his identity. Fergus and Galiene wed and are crowned king and queen of Lothian. The youth’s Christian name – Fergus – is first revealed when he arrives at King Arthur’s court, when for the first time he deserves to bear a name. Later he loses his name, socially, and returns to anonymity. After the third quest is accomplished, he becomes known as the Knight of the Radiant Shield, making him equal to any warrior in Christendom. Only at the end, with the victorious tourney, wedding, and coronation, is it revealed that Fergus and the Knight of the Radiant Shield are one and the same. The tourney, wedding, and coronation are quasi-ritualistic events of recognition and consecration. Much of Fergus’s career – his early exploits – were personal feats in arms hidden from public gaze. By having the vanquished report to King Arthur, Fergus is ensured some public recognition. He then loses recognition because of ineptness in the social sphere – his failure to relate appropriately to Galiene. Later, after the year of penance and expiation, Fergus commits feats in arms for the public good, especially in defence of women.9 Now more self-confident, on the road to mastery, he is content to hide his identity and to escape acclaim. In the end the acclaim comes to him; he is recognized and consecrated in spite of himself, as it were, and as a tribute to his greatness. Fergus the Knight of the Radiant Shield has learned of love, of society, and of the public good. He is now  ready to become a husband and a ruler. He has conquered in the Otherworld and in ours, and, upon his triumphant return, is seen to be a master in love and in sovereignty. A crucial subtext of the romance concerns Fergus’s apprenticeship in the ways of the court – in the external trappings of aristocratic sociability, the etiquette of chivalry. This brings us to a second element in the romance, a second register or level of meaning: the comic. Kathryn Gravdal has written a provocative, insightful chapter on Fergus as transgressive parody.10 Whereas Gravdal deems the romance to be, in its entirety, a work of parody and burlesque, I believe that the parodic and comic exist alongside the more serious heroic and chivalric. In sum, Fergus is romance and antiromance, serious and comic, poetry and antipoetry, at the same time. Arthurian in theme and motif, Scots in names and locale, this hybrid grows in Chrétien de Troyes’s field, under his shade, and serves as imitation yet also as parody; it becomes a homage to and a critique of the texts of the Master. Thus Guillaume follows in Chrétien’s wake yet dares to scrutinize the romance conventions that Chrétien so brilliantly helped to elaborate. A first comic element, perhaps the most important, is social. Fergus is a medieval métis: his mother is noble while his father is a

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peasant. Although the son of a well-off landowner dwelling in his own castle, Fergus has been raised at the plow. Like Chrétien’s Perceval, after catching sight of the Arthurian procession, he feels he has to join them. Humour is generated from Fergus’s naively excessive dreams – he aspires to be Arthur’s consilliers – and from the wretched arms Soumillet gives him: rusty chain mail, a rusty helmet, and an absurdly short sword. Still worse, having slain two bandits on the road, Fergus hangs their severed heads from his saddle. As a youth of prodigious strength but lacking the niceties, Fergus resembles Rainouart, the Saracen kitchen boy of chanson de geste. A trait of chanson de geste is battle insult; in the epic world it is perfectly acceptable for a Christian paladin to heap verbal invective on his Saracen or Frenchtraitor adversary, especially after he has conquered him. Fergus adheres to this line, insulting the Black Knight, a knight in the forest, a bandit at the ford, and a giant at Melrose. For example, having wounded the Black Knight, Fergus gloats that the flow of blood must be due to the ministrations of an incompetent physician: “Mastier aviés [or] de saingnier; Jel voi molt bien a vostre sanc Qui pert deseur cel hauberc blanc. Il sainne trop; gardés vos, viaus! Car li sainnieres est nouvials, Si ne sot pas coissir la vaine.”

(Fergus 2402–7)

Since such invective is inappropriate in high courtly romance, Fergus reveals his noncourtly and non-noble upbringing. In addition, he unwittingly imitates Kay, condemned for his wicked tongue, who had mocked Fergus in the beginning. It is ironic yet also perversely a propos that Fergus should offer his last, final insult to Kay when, at the Jedburgh tournament, he knocks the fellow into slime: “En moie foi, biaus sire, Vos estes trop mal afaitiés Qui en ma riviere peschiés Quant n’en avés congié de moi, Si avés fait trop grant desroi. Or puet li rois bien tornoier; A plenté ara a mangier, Au soir poisson se vos pöés.

Fergus 187 Ne puet estre mal conreés Nus hom qui ait tel connestable.”

(Fergus 6462–71)

Other humorous touches, more strictly literary, undermine standard romance motifs. At Carlisle, after making his first appearance at court, poor Fergus wanders about the town, on horseback and in the rain; no one automatically offers him hospitality, and he falls asleep. Later, in the forest, utterly famished, Fergus forgets Galiene for the sake of food; he barges in on the fifteen bandits and seizes their victuals. Eat first and offer to pay later is his way. At the Black Mountain he encounters a bronze statue or automaton, so lifelike that Fergus believes it to be alive; when the object fails to respond to the young knight’s request, he gets angry and starts to break it. From the perspective of fin’ amor, the most amusing sequence occurs during Fergus’s visit to the castle of Galiene’s uncle. In Yvain, the prototype for such scenes, the vavassour and his lovely daughter offer hospitality to the knight errant. That is all. Chrétien amplified this increment in Le Conte du Graal by having Blancheflor fall in love with Perceval and come to his bed at night, she making the advances. She thus breaks with courtly convention. They spend the night together, enjoying either the last or the next-to-the last of the five stages of love – either osculum and tactus or the ultimate factum (the deed). Galiene reacts in the same way to Fergus; here, however, the youth spurns her advances. And he spurns them sans tact. When Galiene begs him to return her heart, lost to him, Fergus replies that he hasn’t seen it and that he is on a quest for martial doings, not love: “Onques nel vi, Ma damoisele, vostre cuer. Je nel renderoie a nul fuer Se je l’avoie en ma baillie; Mais saciés que je n’en ai mie. … Pucele, je vois el querant Que amors ne que drüerie. J’ai une bataille aatie Que je vaurai avant parfaire.”

(Fergus 1944–8, 1962–5)

A Bergsonian reading of the text is apt. The young, inexperienced, and uneducated half-peasant responds in a crude, mechanical way to the complex demands of the higher social world. Or, on the other hand, it is the artificial codes of courtly literature which are shown to be mechanical in

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the face of real life. The repetition of such increments creates a snowballing effect, adding to the comedy. Yet it is also true that, in the course of the narrative, Fergus makes fewer and fewer gaffes; he appears to be a comic character less and less. In the course of the narrative he grows. He can grow because he is of noble blood, and, in medieval literature, nature always wins out over nurture. Thus a great new knight and king is brought into Lothian, one of the newly discovered kingdoms (in Continental literature), and the continued flowering of romance is assured.

12 Lancelot of the Laik

The two Arthurian romances in Scots exemplify the advice to princes theme and thus differ strikingly from Fergus. Lancelot of the Laik, of some 3487 lines, dates, according to Sally Mapstone, from the late 1450s to the late 1480s.1 It is, grosso modo, a translation / adaptation of some early episodes in the Old French Prose Lancelot.2 The text is incomplete, breaking off in the midst of a battle. The author may have ceased writing at this point for any number of reasons, or it may be that only a truncated version has survived the vagaries of time. King Arthur has a dreadful prophetic nightmare. He summons clerks to interpret the dream. Although they do so, the interpretation, like the dream itself, remains opaque because it also is couched in allegorical imagery. A messenger arrives from Galiot (Galehot / Galahot / Galehaut in the French), challenging Arthur for his kingdom. On the first day of battle the outnumbered Arthurian army would have been routed but for the supreme prowess of Gawain, deeply wounded by evening. Meanwhile, Lancelot, prisoner of the lady Melyhalt (Malohaut in the French) is allowed to quit his captivity for one day. Clad in red and eager to fight or die for Guinevere, he performs miracles in battle. The next day a wise man, Amytans, arrives; he interprets Arthur’s dream and berates him at length. According to Amytans, Arthur has been a bad ruler engrossed in his own pleasures. He harms the poor, and his troops fear him instead of loving him. Yet it is not too late. Arthur should become virtuous, keep his word, tell the truth, avoid flatterers, appoint good judges, and help the poor. Galiot, the epitome of chivalry, offers Arthur a year’s truce to enable him to gather more troops, so that their combat be a fair test of valour. Arthur devotes the year to becoming a good monarch. The following spring the war is renewed. Once again Gawain fights superbly in defence of Arthur’s

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outnumbered troops. Once again Lancelot, now clad in black, intervenes magnificently to hold off the enemy. Unhorsed yet superb in strength and courage, Lancelot is rescued by Galiot himself, who offers Lancelot a steed. And the narrative breaks off. This romance has been condemned by some scholars. For example, Robert W. Ackerman states that it is a bad job, in bad verse, badly structured, and that the author reads his French badly.3 Lee C. Ramsey en­ visages Lancelot of the Laik as an example of decline in the romance ­tradition, a text marked by moralizing on the duties of kings.4 These two are in a minority, however. I tend to agree with John MacQueen’s estimate of the Laik as a quite good romance exhibiting the traits common to the best exemplars of the genre (and the French source): courtly love, psychology, politics, free will, and heroism.5 Most scholars who proclaim the literary value and indeed the originality of the Laik cite the importance of the advice to princes element. King Arthur dreams first that his hair falls out and later that his digestive organs do the same (in the French, he loses his hair, his beard, and his fingers): Bot so befell hyme that nycht to meit An aperans, the wich oneto his spreit It semyth that of al his hed the hore Of fallith and maid desolat … He thoght ageine apone the samyne wyss: His uombe out fallith uith his hoil side Apone the ground and liging hyme besid.

(Laik 363–6, 374–6)

According to the clerks, Arthur will lose lands and honour, and his men will fail him: “Presumyth, shir, that we have fundyne so: All erdly honore ye nedist most forgo And them the wich ye most affy intyll Shal failye yow, magré of ther will.”

(Laik 497–500)

Yet he can be saved by the lion in the water and the leech adhering to the counsel of the flower: “Your wordly honore nedis most adew, But throuch the watrye lyone, and ek fyne, On throuch the liche and ek the wattir syne, And throuch the conseill of the flour.”

(Laik 518–21)

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Later on, Amytans explains that the lion is God, the leech is God, and the flower is the Blessed Virgin Mary. All this is to be found in the French Prose Lancelot: “Sire, bien saciés que toute honor terriene vous covient a perdre et chil ou vous plus vous fiés vous fauront estre lor gré, car ensi le covient estre.” (Prose Lancelot 7: 436) “… nule rien ne vous puet rescoure de perdre toute honor terriene, se il ne vous resqueut, li lyons iauvages et li mires sans mecine par le conseil de la flor.” (Prose Lancelot 7: 437)

Where the Scots poet innovates is in Amytans’s sermon.6 He expands on the French, developing at length the duties of the good king, underscoring the need for justice and largesse, and the necessity to avoid frequenting low-class retainers and flatterers. Whether this advice is directed implicitly at King James III, it is dominant in the Scottish text but not at all in the French source. Whereas the dream plus sermon takes up approximately one-third of Lancelot of the Laik, it amounts to between one-quarter and one-fifth of the corresponding section of the Prose Lancelot. More importantly, in what remains of the Scots text, taken as a whole, Amytans is ­located at the centre. The poem is divided into three books with the advice to princes comprising almost all of Book Two. Although in the Prose Lancelot, taken as a whole, Arthur’s confession and contribution stand out and are a bit unusual, they make up only one increment in a never-ending story of thousands of pages. It is, therefore, perfectly understandable that Bertram Vogel believes the Scottish poet chose that particular French passage to translate, not only because of the advice to princes increment but also in order to develop the moral and political, with the result that the moral and political dominate in the Scots and not in the French.7 Equally understandable is Walter Scheps’s argument that Lancelot of the Laik possesses a structural and thematic unity that the source lacks.8 Finally, Sergi Mainer argues most persuasively that the undermining and humiliation of King Arthur contribute to a current of thought which appeals to Scottish national sentiment, a sense of nationhood, directed against the English, and that the sermon comes from a consciously Boethian and Christian mindset not to be found in the French.9 Against this position Flora Alexander states that the critique of King Arthur is less virulent in the Scots than in the French.10 Alan Lupack affirms that the advice to princes plays a subsidiary role in the romance taken as a whole, which is, like Malory’s Morte Darthur, a simple direct

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tale of action and adventure with no concern for psychology, symbolism, and the mystical.11 In addition, working from Lupack’s notion of an “aesthetics of incompleteness,”12 one can posit something like a “fallacy of the unified fragment.” This implies that, given the author’s project to continue the narrative up to the moment when Lancelot and Guinevere consummate their love, one should be wary of proclaiming unity of structure and dominance of the lesson in statecraft, since these traits can be ascribed only to an incomplete fragment. Finally, it can be argued that the expansion of Amytans’s advice in the Scots is not necessarily all that significant. After all, when the Scots poet develops the question of kingship and statecraft, he emphasizes a trait ­already present in the French. Is the resulting text in Scots due to a c­ onscious, willful aesthetic design from an individual artistic consciousness? Here I am reminded of Michel Huby’s now classic analysis of the t­hirteenth-century Hofenstaufen masters, German poets who translated / adapted early French romances.13 According to Huby, Henrik van Veldeken, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram von Eschenbach did not seek to ­create an original structure, world view, or aesthetic. Acting on rhetorical, formal grounds, the German poet is not moved by psychological or moral considerations. He treats the French source as a sequence of rhetorical topoi, not a coherent aesthetic totality. The adapter develops where he has an opportunity, where, in his opinion, the French did not exploit sufficiently the potentiality for rhetorical elaboration. If we accept Huby’s thesis, then the same could have been the case for the Laik-poet vis-à-vis the Prose Lancelot. Important as are these questions of ideology, of no less interest ought to be the Laik-poet’s structural, indeed narratological alterations of the source. In my opinion, some of these occur to facilitate his leaping into a story in  medias res in order to launch his own story ab ovo. In the Scots text the narrative begins with Arthur’s prophetic dream plus discussion by the clerks; this gives rise directly to the arrival of Galiot’s messenger challenging Arthur, followed by a messenger from Melyhalt informing Arthur of the invasion. Deleted, for now, are two episodes of Lancelot in ecstasy thinking of Guinevere, and one episode of Lancelot being taken prisoner by Malohaut. The Lancelot-material would be out of place at the beginning of a narration focused on King Arthur, and the imprisonment relates to previous episodes not relevant to the Laik-poet’s concerns. He also simplifies the narrative by having Melyhalt warn Arthur of Galiot’s depredation, replacing an extraneous Lady of the Marches in the French. Other changes, further on in the narrative, are of particular interest. Two emendations concern Lancelot. The Scots writer introduces or expands on Lancelot’s laments,

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thereby underscoring the love element in a section of the Prose Lancelot devoted primarily to war. He also moves up the episode where Melyhalt and her confidante inspect the state of Lancelot’s horse, armour, and physical person to discover if he is indeed the victorious Red Knight. The Scots poet places this section directly after that day’s battle whereas in the French Malohaut performs her little inquest subsequent to the wise man’s instructions to Arthur on the nature of kingship. This is a clear improvement. In my opinion, the Laik-poet shapes his material in some quite significant ways, his emendations derived from the need to commence a complex, interlaced narrative pattern ab ovo and from the need to balance, in his briefer narrative, the elements of heroism and fin’ amor – militia et amor – scattered throughout the original. In fact, what he does is to establish the dialectic of good versus bad love, known to his public from the Lancelot story but not evidenced in the source passage. In addition, like Malory, to an extent he breaks down the interlace pattern into blocks of narrative that are more appropriate for his times and his public. I do not believe, therefore, that his reworking of the Prose Lancelot ought to be ascribed to the hazards of rhetorical amplificatio here and ­abbreviatio there. The Laik-poet is, in his own way, creating his own Arthurian romance, valid on its own terms. Furthermore, whatever his intentions, however far he had gone in his translation / adaptation, what we have is the 3487 lines of the Lancelot of the Laik as it is found in the Cambridge manuscript. In this text, as we have it, the issues concerning kingship and statecraft – moral, political, and Christian elements – are highlighted. They give the Laik its own cachet, its own literary identity. This is not to say, however, that such matters are absent from the Prose Lancelot or that the Prose Lancelot is concerned uniquely with telling a good story. The good story recounts the rise and fall of the Arthurian kingdom, its power and glory grounded in the person and career of Lancelot. His deeds are the highest that the secular world can know. Yet because both his glory and his achievements derive from the adulterous passion for Guinevere, they and the Arthurian world are stained. Lancelot is necessary to the success of Arthur’s reign, yet once the liaison dange­ reuse is exposed – sooner or later it has to be exposed – the court will be ripped apart, civil war will ensue, and the Arthurian world will collapse. The amorous and the political, and the rise to and fall from glory, are developed throughout the narrative. And in the section translated by the Laik-poet? Consequently, in Lancelot of the Laik? Yes indeed. In that section we are told of the inherent weakness, the inherent flaws built into the Arthurian world. Arthur’s court is located at a symbolic centre, the focus of knighthood, chivalry, and order. Yet the pax arthuriana is shown to be

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so fragile. An invasion from the outside, from the savage uncontrolled ­beyond, perhaps to be identified with the Celtic Otherworld, threatens the king and his kingdom. Arthur is, and always will be, outnumbered. His adversary is a giant of all-but-matchless prowess. Arthur is a king not a captain, a ruler not a hero; he cannot wage battle alone. At times he is even seen to be a bad ruler, with the result that his men will not always do their best on his behalf. In addition, the fearsome giant from beyond manifests greater chivalry and courtesy than Arthur himself. The latter is dependent on his men and on his family (Gawain). Above all, he is dependent on the Red Knight and the Black Knight, that is, Lancelot. But for Lancelot Arthur would fail a hundred times. Lancelot, however, supports him only out of love for Guinevere, who herself attracts evil as well as good and becomes an object of contention, of sexual rivalry, between Galehot / Galiot and Arthur: “His purpos is, or this day moneth day, With all his ost, planly to assay Your lond with mony manly man of were And helmyt knychtis, boith with sheld and spere And never thinkith to retwrn home whill That he this lond haith conquest at his will And ek Uanour the Quen, of whome that hee Herith report of al this world that shee In fairhed and in vertew doith excede, He bad me say he thinkis to possede.”

(Laik 569–78)

Or, in the French: “… je te di de par lui qu’il sera dedens .I. mois en ta terre; et puis qu’il i sera venus, il ne s’en istera devant qu’il l’avra toute conquise et si te taudra Genievre, ta feme, qu’il a oïe proisier de biauté et de valor sor toutes dames terrienes.” (Prose Lancelot 7: 440)

That love – any love – can inspire and can destroy. Dazzled by the sight of Guinevere or by thoughts of Guinevere, Lancelot falls into a trance, risking defeat for himself and for Arthur: With that confusit with an hevy thocht Which ner his deith ful oft tyme haith hyme socht, Devoydit was his spritis and his gost, He wist not of hymeself nor of his ost Bot one his horss, als still as ony ston.

(Laik 1029–33)

Lancelot of the Laik 195 Alone rycht thar he hovit and abaade, Behalding to the bertes whar the Qwenn Befor at the assemblé he had senn Rycht so the sone schewith furth his lycht And to his armour went is every wycht. … The Blak Knycht yhit hovyns on his sted; Of al thar doing takith he no hed Bot ay apone the besynes of thocht In beholding his ey departit nocht.

(Laik 2814–18, 2821–4)

Malohaut / Melyhalt falls in love with her prisoner and endures misery since he loves another. And, just after the point at which the Scottish fragment ends, Galehot’s esteem for Lancelot ripens into friendship and love, with the result that, informed of Lancelot’s presumed demise, Galehot dies of chagrin. In passing, could perhaps not the homoerotic overtones of Galehot’s more-than-friendship for Lancelot – obvious to the medieval public though not to so many modern bourgeois academics – have decided the Scots adapter to cease translation at just this point? Helen Cooper proposes, from a different perspective, that, given the absence of “good,” rewarded adultery in the British romances, the Laik-poet would not have continued beyond Lancelot and Guinevere’s first kiss.14 Cooper cites also the condition of the surviving manuscript, as does Martin.15 Perhaps the most original and innovative element in Lancelot of the Laik is the 334-line Prologue. Here the implied author as narrator assumes the stance of an unhappy courtly lover. He enters a garden and has a dream vision in which a bird berates him for his shyness and urges him to write for his lady a happy tale of love or arms: “Sum trety schall yhoue for thi lady sak, That wncouth is, als tak one hand and mak Of love ore armys or of sum othir thing That may hir oneto thi remembryng brynge, Qwich soundith not oneto no hevyness Bot oneto gladness and to lusteness That yhoue belevis may thi lady pless.”

(Laik 145–51)

The narrator wakes up and decides to obey. Although by no means a great author, he will translate part of the Lancelot story, a story of both love and arms. We can, I think, conceive of the Prologue narrative as a mise en abyme for Lancelot of the Laik taken as a whole. The narrator seeks to win his lady’s love through sapientia much as Lancelot seeks to win Guinevere’s

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love through fortitudo. And the narrator as lover offers a gift to his lady, the story of Lancelot the lover of his lady. In the best dit amoureux manner the book will serve as go-between, for it contains a narrative partially about go-betweens and about itself. Here we see a dit amoureux or Chaucerian extradiegetic frame narrative preceding the Arthurian romance diegetic central narrative. Such a structure, impossible in France at the time of the Prose Lancelot (the dit amou­ reux had yet to come into existence), does come into existence in the later fifteenth century in Scotland at a time when romance and the tale of love are both new genres from abroad, waiting to be exploited. The result is a very fine Arthurian romance which is also a quite exciting literary hybrid. It is one fortunate and creative result of belatedness.

13 Golagros and Gawane

The political / statecraft theme is developed more strikingly in Golagros and Gawane, a 1365-line romance dating from before 1508, than in Lancelot of the Laik and perhaps in a more successful manner.1 The source text for the Scots poem is the late twelfth-century sequel to Chrétien de  Troyes’s Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal: The First Continuation of the Perceval, also called the Continuation Gauvain.2 Ralph Hanna, in the “Introduction” to his edition, relying upon an early doctoral dissertation and upon the notes of W.R.J. Barron, restates an old idea that the French source for Golagros is a late prose redaction, “a prose dérimage of a later recension” (xxxi), “the 1530 Paris printing of the prose redaction” (note 38), which is Perceval le Galloys. I disagree.3 A major increment in the Continuation Gauvain centres on the Chastel Orguelleus.4 King Arthur is irate that one of his finest knights, Girflet, has been held prisoner in that castle for three years.5 Fifteen knights of the Round Table, including Gauvain / Gawain, set out with the king on an expedition to free Girflet. Suffering from the heat and from hunger, they come across a castle built by the king of Meliolant. Keu / Kay goes to request hospitality, insults a dwarf and the master of the keep, Yder the Fair, who gives Kay a thrashing. Gawain then sets forth, speaks and acts with perfect courtesy, with a result that the visitors dine and are ­bedded for the night. Later in the sequence Bran de Lis, brother of a maiden whom Gawain had seduced, after being defeated by Gawain joins the expedition.6 He knows the customs of the country. The Arthurians arrive at the Chastel Orguelleus where a series of single combats remains inconclusive. During the Sunday break Gawain goes hunting and comes across a melancholy knight eager to die and, separated from him, the knight’s beloved. Bran de

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Lis explains that the suicidal knight is the Riches Soldoiers (English translation: the Magnificent / Munificent Warrior), who is head over heels in love with the lady and will die if he can’t have her: “Cil chevaliers, Sire, est li Riches Soldoiers, Qui maintient la riche mesnie Qui tant est preus et seignorie. Cele damoisele tant aime Que dame et pucele le claime, Si dïent tout que il morra Por la pucele, s’il ne l’a.”

(Continuation T 11915–22)

After an exploit by Yvain, Gawain fights in single combat with the Riches Soldoiers. Their prowess is extraordinary. Gawain wins. However, his adversary confesses that the girl will die of chagrin when she is informed that her Magnificent Warrior has been defeated, and when she dies he will die: “J’ai une amie Certes que j’aim plus que ma vie; Et s’ele est morte, je morrai Si tost com je dire l’orrai. … Mais se m’amie le savoit, Si m’aït Diex, tantost morroit, Qu’en nule fin ne volroit croire Qu’outré m’eüssiez, c’est la voire.”

(Continuation T 12283–6, 12299–302)

He proposes a ruse: that Gawain pretend to have lost the duel and to have become the Warrior’s prisoner, long enough for the girl to be sent away on a pretext. To save a maiden’s life and the life of so great a knight, Gawain agrees. In the end Girflet and Lucan (a more recent prisoner) are released, King Arthur is honoured, and, after a week’s feasting, the Riches Soldoiers joins Arthur and Gawain on their return to Carlisle: Molt fu li rois a grant honor Receüs en la maistre tor; Huit jors entiers i sejorna. … Molt desirent le retorner Vers Bretagne si conpagnon. Ne vos vuel faire lonc sermon,

Golagros and Gawane 199 Au nueme jor se mut li rois Et tot si home et leur harnois; Le Rice Saudoier en maine, De lui honorer molt se paine.

(Continuation L 6557–9, 6562–8)

The two increments in the French are not, as a few critics – for example, Karl Heinz Göller and Gillian Rogers – maintain, independent, unrelated, and widely separated.7 They form part of the Chastel Orguelleus expedition, and relate the setting out and the culmination of this particular quest. They both contribute to a thematic of and a reflection on chivalry: hospitality, diplomacy, courtesy, and the very special duty, in this story, to protect the weak, which means to protect and show courtesy to dwarfs and ladies. In both episodes Kay is set in contrast to Gawain. At Yder’s castle Gawain succeeds where Kay fails in courtesy; at the Chastel Orguelleus Gawain succeeds when Kay fails in prowess. Kay and Gawain are mirror opposites at the Arthurian court. Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, stands closest to the monarch; he embodies the best of Arthurian chivalry. Yet the court also finds a place for Kay, who embodies the worst, for the community cannot exist without them both. The Continuation Gauvain explores these and other issues central to the romance ethos. The Perceval continuations do not manifest the richness, subtlety, and complexity of Chrétien’s romances and of the Prose Lancelot. We do not observe growth or evolution in Gawain, Arthur, or any one else. These verse romances do not address the greater moral, political, and religious questions that we find structuring the entire French Lancelot including the section “Scottished” in Lancelot of the Laik. The primary function of the Continuations is narrative: to tell a good story, rich in adventure and in violence. It is perfectly legitimate in this never-ending story that neither the characters nor the public are eager to close out the adventures with a successful Grail encounter. This is a universal phenomenon in Old French. The proliferation of narrative can be observed in both chanson de geste and courtly romance, and in the beast epic Roman de Renart, with entire cycles, containing prequels and sequels, developing around the first few texts and their protagonists. Never-ending stories allow for new episodes to be inserted at will, and new heroes, related in some way to the others, become the protagonists of new adventures, with their prequels and sequels.8 The process is far more important than the product. Keith Busby has studied the Continuation Gauvain in the context of all the French romances in which Gawain makes an appearance.9 As Busby sees it, Gawain is a standard recurring character in so many of the

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romances. He is an expected, recognizable part of the décor, like Kay, Guinevere, and Arthur himself. Close to Arthur, Gawain is the conscience of the court, the bridge between the monarch and his knights, and a paragon of chivalry – in courtesy and in prowess. This is why so often the protagonist of a romance measures his prowess, at the end, against him. Such combats are to be found in Cligés, Lancelot, Yvain, Meraugis de Portlesguez, the Gerbert de Montreuil Continuation, and La Queste del saint Graal. It is also the case that, perhaps for this very reason, only once is Gawain the hero in his own romance – La Vengeance Raguidel. Through all the romances he is easily distracted, so often failing to bring his quest to a happy conclusion. Gawain is also the lady’s man par excellence, seducing any number of maidens and fathering any number of offspring. His lack of fidelity, his lack of a sense of what fin’ amor is all about, set him in contrast to Lancelot. Finally, for all these reasons Gawain does not and cannot succeed in the quest for the Grail. Lacking a spiritual and moral base, he cannot compete with Perceval or Galahad. On the one hand, the Continuation poet or poets are content to tell of his adventures regardless of the fact, or because of the fact, that these adventures are digressions from the Grail mission. On the other hand, as the exemplar of the Arthurian court, Gawain’s failings reflect back on the court. He, the greatest of the “insiders,” fails in the quest for the Grail and fails also to adhere to the strictest codes of chivalry, and consequently no one from his milieu will be able to succeed. Only the greatest “outsiders” – Lancelot, Perceval, Galahad – stand the slightest chance of success. Even their triumphs are limited and short-lived. From the very earliest Arthurian texts – the Lais of Marie and the Tristan of Beroul and Thomas – the Arthurian world is held up to criticism and shown to be at best complex and problematic, and at the worst doomed to failure. Golagros and Gawane develops this problematic in a striking and original manner; the Scots poet alters his source in more striking and original ways than did the poet of Lancelot of the Laik. To begin with, the structural alterations are more significant than was the case for the Laik. Whereas the Laik-poet merely deleted how Lancelot fell into Melyhalt’s prison and that the Lady of the Marches requested Arthur’s assistance, the Golagros-poet suppresses the story of Bran de Lis, his sister, and Gawain’s son. Instead, knowledge of the Golagros country and good advice concerning how Arthur should act towards Golagros are entrusted to a certain Spynagros, otherwise unknown. Similarly, the purpose of Arthur’s expedition in the French – to rescue Girflet, who is held captive by the Riches Soldoiers – is

Golagros and Gawane 201

transformed into a crusade with Arthur first coming across Golagros’s castle by chance. On the one hand, the alterations eliminate some of the intricate structural interlace in the French, a loss certainly, yet inevitable given the purpose of the Scots poet: to narrate a single (or double) adventure, a block of narrative to be separate from all the other episodes in Gawain’s and Arthur’s respective stories. This separation shifts the ethical and ideological content of the original. With no allusion to Gawain’s amorous career – sleeping with Bran’s sister, fathering her illegitimate son, dueling with the girl’s father and brothers, slaying two of the three – he is rendered a more ideal figure of chivalry without the moral frailty which would have disturbed a late medieval Scottish public more than it did the earlier medieval French public. By substituting a crusade and coincidence for Girflet’s rescue, a measure of sympathy is taken away from the king; the example of loyalty to his knights disappears. In addition, Arthur’s decision to return to the castle in order to make it part of his own kingdom is ethically questionable, to say the least. And the crusade, admirable no doubt, places the Scottish narrative in a Christian context, under a Christian aegis as it were, and therefore raises a higher moral and ethical standard for Arthur to attain or to fail to attain. Whereas an element of structural unity in the French is  lost – no quest to rescue Girflet, no common pursuit uniting the two ­episodes – a new element of structural unity is introduced: the two episodes, the two blocks of material, stand in parallel and in antithesis. King Arthur, Gawain, and Kay measure themselves against the two castellans. And Golagros, the proud independent master of his realm, is measured against the anonymous castellan of the first episode, surpassing him in dignity and power, for although the first castellan is the paragon of hospitality, Golagros is the paragon of honour. As W.R.J. Barron and a number of other critics have argued, the Scots poem has two heroes – the Arthurian Gawain and the feudally independent Golagros.10 We can say that Gawain embodies the spirit of the court and the nomadic life of the courtly chivalrous knight in search of adventures, whereas Golagros embodies the spirit of the outlying regions and the more sedentary life of the feudal lord and ruler of his people. The clash between the two men, and between the two value systems they represent, replaces the more linear and ideologically more univocal French quest for the liberation of a prisoner, which serves as a cover for the quest for adventures. In this line, the major “correction” the Scottish poet makes to his source is to substitute a question of politics and feudal law for the question of fin’ amor and high courtly chivalry which dominates this portion of the Continuation Gauvain. In the Continuation Arthur’s purpose is

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to free Girflet, and Gawain pretends to have been defeated by the Riches Soldoiers so that his adversary’s reputation for prowess not be sullied and consequently that he and his beloved not die of chagrin; in Golagros, however, Arthur vows to return to the castle in order to conquer it and thus hold lordship over it, making the master (Golagros) his vassal: “Sal neuer my [saull] be in saill na in liking. Bot gif I loissing my life or be laid law, Be the pilgramage compleit I pas for saull-prow, Bot dede be my destenyng, He sall at my aganecumyng Mak homage and oblissing – I mak myne avow!”

(Golagros 267–73)

Gawain pretends to have been defeated by Golagros so that his adversary will not be shamed before his people, the shame residing in the fact that defeat by Gawain will lead to Arthur claiming Golagros’s lands. Golagros insists again and again that his ancestors have always held the castle and its lands as an independent alodial domain; they have never been vassals to an overlord. Golagros declares that he would deserve to die rather than become someone’s vassal and see his people lose their freedom: “Had euer leid of this land that had bene leuand Maid ony feute before freik to fulfil, I suld sickirly myself be consentand And seik to your souerane, seymly on syll. Sen hail our doughty elderis has bene endurand Thriuandly in this thede, vnchargit as thril, If I for obeisance or boist to bondage me bynde, I war wourthy to be Hingit heigh on ane tre That ilk creature might se To waif with þe wynd. … Bot nowthir for his senyeoury nor for his summoun Na for dreid of na dede na for na distance, I will nogth bow me ane-bak for berne that is borne, Quhill I may my wit wald. I think my fredome to hald As my eldaris of ald Has done me beforne.” (Golagros 432–42, 449–55)

Golagros and Gawane 203

In the end, Golagros has to accept defeat and become King Arthur’s vassal, although, after feasting and revelry, Arthur’s generosity proves to be worthy of his nephew’s; he releases Golagros from the feudal bond and thus restores the latter’s independence: Quhen the ryal roy maist of renoune With al his reuerend rout wes reddy to ryde, The king cumly with kith wes crochit with croune; To Schir Gologras þe gay said gudly þat tyde, “Heir mak I the reward, as I haue resoune, Before their senyeouris in sight semely beside: As tuiching þe temporalite in toure and in toune, In firth, forest, and fell and woddis so wide, I mak releisching of þin allegiance. But dreid I sall þe warand, Baith be sey and be land Fre as I the first fand Withoutin distance.”

(Golagros 1353–65)

Such issues pertaining to politics, political ethics, feudalism, and kingship form an important element in the Prose Lancelot, as we have seen. They are largely absent, however, from the earlier French Arthurian romances, including the Continuation Gauvain. In what the trouvères recognized to be a Celtic prefeudal universe, feudalism and the problems of the monarchy either do not exist or are largely brushed over. In this ­respect, the earlier romances differ strikingly from contemporary chansons de geste, which explore the political with depth and penetration. Or, one could posit that romance feudalism reverted to its earliest, most ideal formulation: the personal bond between master and man. Lancelot, Gawain, Yvain, Perceval, and the others quit the civilized amenities of the court to wander the countryside waging combat with nefarious evildoers. The Arthurian hero wins and, having won, sends the defeated adversary to King Arthur to tell the story and to place himself at Arthur’s mercy. Needless to say, Arthur is merciful to the newcomer, whatever his previous misdeeds, and enrolls him in the Round Table. As I suggested previously, the chief political outcome for the Arthurian knights who undergo quests and adventures becomes the recruitment of new knights for the king’s court, who then undergo more quests and adventures. Whatever happens to the recruits’ castles, lands, and kingdoms remains unsaid.

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The Scots Golagros and Gawane, on the contrary, evokes a contemporary political situation of competing kings and magnates, where allodial freedom versus feudal vassaldom is perceived to be a major issue of conflict between nations – France and England, or England and Scotland. King Arthur himself and, at a lower level, Kay the Seneschal embody the primitive will to conquer: in Part 1 Kay’s brutal demand for food, in Part 2 Arthur’s brutal demand for homage. On the physical plain and on the spiritual plain these aggressors are found wanting. Golagros embodies the spirit of resistance. He will do anything to maintain his personal independence and the independence of his people. He embodies the courtesy and chivalry that Arthur and Kay lack. Spynagros and Gawain, although serving in Arthur’s army and with close bonds to him, each in his own way offers wise counsel – of tolerance, forbearance, and peace – to the aggressor. They, like Golagros, stand for a personal and public ideal that Arthur and Kay lack. They bring the romance into the advice to princes tradition. How can one not see in the configuration of this romance an allusion to Scottish identity, Scottish nationhood, and Scottish independence vis-­à-vis their ancestral adversary, the English, represented by Arthur, the mythical epitome of English / British kingship?11 It would be a mistake, however, to envisage Golagros and Gawane as adhering to a simplistic structure of binary opposition: Golagros versus Arthur, Scotland versus England, good versus evil. The romance is divided into two parts. In Part 1 Kay is brutal and discourteous; he anticipates the brutal and discourteous Arthur of Part 2. Part 1, which concerns food and hospitality, leads to Part 2, which concerns land and independence. However, as R.D.S. Jack observes in an insightful Christian reading of the text, the brutal and aggressive Arthur undertook a crusade.12 The two episodes, the second one situated at Golagros’s castle on the Rhone, are sandwiched around a non-recounted episode in Jerusalem. At the key moment, in Part 2, when Gawain’s life is in jeopardy, the monarch prays to God on his behalf. And, at the end, urged on by no one, he restores Golagros’s kingdom. Arthur has evolved through the course of the narrative, while Gawain, Golagros, and Kay remain static figures, exhibiting the traits they were endowed with from the beginning. Rather like the Arthur in Lancelot of the Laik, though less overtly, the monarch has learned how to rule; he has become a good Christian king, and his generosity and magnanimity bring about the happy denouement which Gawain and Golagros alone could not possibly have achieved. Are there then three major figures, three “heroes” to this romance? Why not?

14 The Taill of Rauf Coilyear

The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (ca. 1470) is one of the more curious romances in medieval literature.1 Off on the chase outside Paris, Charlemagne loses his way in a storm. He accepts hospitality from Rauf, a coal-carrier, who does not recognize the emperor. Charlemagne, who gives his name as Wymond of the Wardrobe, is offered a splendid meal and the most opulent of beds for the night. The only contretemps occur when Charles, as king, expects Rauf to precede him into the house and to table, and Rauf, aware that he is the master in his domain, insists that the guest go before him. Rauf smacks the guest to teach him etiquette. Wymond, then, offers to reward Rauf at court. Rauf sets off with his coals to Paris. Charles had sent Roland to welcome, guide, and accompany Rauf. However, they fail to communicate, given that Roland speaks of Charlemagne whereas Rauf is concerned uniquely with finding Wymond. Rauf brazens his way into Charles’s presence and is dubbed a knight. The next day he sets forth to battle Roland, whom he had previously challenged. However, he encounters instead the great Saracen warrior Magog, come also to challenge Roland. Thinking Magog to be Roland, Rauf struggles with him at length. The real Roland appears and convinces Magog to convert to Christianity. Rauf Coilyear is made Marshal of France, his good wife joins him at court, and he is forever famous for his hospitality. Elizabeth Walsh argues for an oral, folkloric origin for Rauf Coilyear, citing a motif in folklore concerning an incognito king helped by a humble man, who is then rewarded for his good deed.2 This may well be the case, although the folklore, if folklore there be, was most likely filtered through any number of literary texts. The idea that oral, folkloric traditions can serve as the explanation for medieval literature has been discredited for

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generations now and is no longer taken seriously in the scholarly community. In an insightful article Keith Busby guides us in a better direction when he observes that, although no single French book served as the source for Rauf, the Scots poet knew about Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver, Turpin, and the Saracens. Busby also noticed what appears to be a high incidence of French loan words in the text, which could be evidence for a conscious effort to add a little French veneer to the narration.3 In my opinion, Rauf resembles a type in the chanson de geste: the unconventional, brutal warrior, who is of a lower social class than the others. We observed, in Fergus, one trait from epic ascribed to the half-noble, halfpeasant protagonist: battle insult. Here the ties to chanson de geste are more numerous and more basic. The most striking example of the fierce warrior who lacks social niceties would be, in the Guillaume d’Orange poems, Rainouart, Guibourc’s brother and, therefore, Guillaume’s brother-in-law, a Saracen lad sold to King Louis and assigned to the kitchen; only later, after Guillaume takes an interest in him, is he recognized and allowed to join battle on the Christian side where his Herculean strength and Rabelaisian appetite afford comic relief. Comedy there is, yet Rainouart slaughters the enemy and, in the end, is baptized and weds a princess. A more direct analogue to Rauf would be the rustic Christian warriors who serve as a variation on the Saracen Rainouart. Among others, these are Rigaud in Les Lorrains and Gautier in Gaydon.4 Gautier is a countryman whose primary motivation is to protect his livestock. He is married with grown sons. He is colossal, of prodigious strength yet vulgar and uncouth, clad in rags or in absurd armour, wielding a club or mace and astride a mare or mule: A ces paroles, li vavasors s’arma D’un gambison viez, enfummé, qu’il a, .I. viés chapel sor sa teste ferma, Mais tant fu durs que arme ne douta. Prent sa masue, sor .I. jument monta.

(Gaydon 2393–7)

Yet he is magnificent in battle and even critiques Gaydon, observing that he, Gautier, slays his adversaries with his mace whereas Gaydon, with his lance, only knocks his opponents off their horses: “Sont ce li cop que voz savez paier? … Quant ne volez les abatus touchier, Voz les cuidiez ocirre au trebuchier.

The Taill of Rauf Coilyear 207 Mais vostre cop font poi a resoingnier. … Mais ja verrez comment me sai aidier Et se je sai mes cops bien emploier.” Prent sa masue, si la prent a haucier. … Fiert Godefroi parmi le hannepier. Arme qu’il ait ne li vault .I. denier, Ausiz le froisse cun rainscel d’olivier. Sa blanche coiffe ne li pot preu aidier, Tout li debrise et test et hannepier. Trosques enz dens ne remez que brisier. Le cheval fist a terre ajenoillier, Puis fiert .I. autre, tout le fit esm[i]ier, Assez en a tolu le baaillier. Dist a Gaydon: “Je les sai chastoier, Mais voz ne faitez fors la gent esmouschier.” (Gaydon 2721, 2725–7, 2732–4, 2736–46)

Unrecognized, Gautier duels with Gaydon’s nephew Ferraut by mistake. The untutored rustic has, nevertheless, a great heart. Loyal and true, he becomes the protagonist’s counselor and friend and, in the end, is rewarded magnificently. Note, finally, the down-to-earth, peasant, vernacular French names for Gautier and Rigaud, and their Scots equivalent: Rauf. One comic motif shared by Gautier and Rauf is an obsession with one’s actual or potential food, for example, livestock or poached venison: Ses fiuls escrie: “Seignor, or I parra Qui no bestaille durement deffendra. Mal dehaiz ait mener les en laira. Ce sont larron maufé, tant en i a. … Fil a putain, mes bestes lairez sa, Car je sui cil qui les chalongera.” “Schir, the Forestaris, forsuith, of this Forest, Thay haue me all at Inuy for dreid of the Deir. Thay threip that I thring doun of the fattest, Thay say I sall to Paris thair to compeir Befoir our cumlie King, in dule to be drest; Sic manassing thay me mak, forsuith, ilk ȝeir, And ȝit aneuch sall I haue for me and ane Gest.”

(Gaydon 2389–92, 2401–2)

(Rauf 195–201)

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Other comic motifs are a general clumsiness in acting like a knight, equipped with absurd rustic arms; a willingness to berate one’s betters and being in the right, for the down-to-earth rustic code of honour and sense of reality can legitimately prevail over the idealistic chivalric code; and a failure to recognize one’s adversary, which leads to unauthorized single combat with an unintended foe. Another chanson de geste motif is the protagonist brazenly making his way unannounced into Charles’s presence, generally in ignoring the strictures of the palace gate-keeper or porter, defying him or sweeping him aside, often with a telling blow. This motif would be also class-motivated, with the naturally good and authentically natural hero triumphing over artificial court etiquette embodied in a low-level, inferior wielder of authority. Guillaume, Rainouart, and any number of epic heroes (Ferraut in Gaydon) indulge in punishing the gate-keeper in what can be called porter humour. In The Taill of Rauf Coilyear the motif is modified and a modicum of decorum respected when Rauf demands admittance and the astonished porter runs inside, seeking guidance, with Roland authorizing him to permit entrance forthwith: “Quhair gangis thow, Gedling, thir gaitis sa gane?” “Be God,” said the Grome, “ane gift heir I geif; I deuise at the ȝet thair is ane allane, Bot he be lattin in beliue him lykis not to leif. With ane Capill and twa Creillis cassin on the plane To cum to this Palice he preissis to preif.” “Gif thow hes fundin that Freik, in faith I am fane. Lat him in glaidly, it may not engreif.”

(Rauf 610–17)

Single combat between the best Frankish warrior and a colossal giant of a Saracen falls to Rauf versus Magog, as it does to Oliver versus Fierabras, Roland versus Feragut, and Guillaume versus Corsolt. Persisting in their wicked cult to the end, Corsolt and Feragut are slain. Fierabras, on the other hand, agrees to convert to Christianity and to restore to the Franks the relics his father had seized. The Fierabras motif is undermined in Rauf when the bystander – Roland! – is the one to do the converting; the fighting is left to Rauf. Prior to this, Magog reproaches Rauf, believing him to  be Roland, for having slain members of his family, as Corsolt does to Guillaume. Whereas in romance disguise in battle is a quite serious motif – especially in the case of Lancelot who dresses as the Red Knight or the Black

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Knight or the knight of any other colour – in chanson de geste disguise is comic. The finest example is Guillaume disguising himself as a merchant or a foreign dignitary in order to enter Saracen strongholds in Le Charroi de Nîmes and La Prise d’Orange. Significantly, comic non-recognition ­between Rauf and Roland or Rauf and Magog focuses on a non-knightly, non-chivalric warrior: the coal-merchant. In Gaydon Charles and Nayme, spying out the rebel camp, become the unrecognized guests of Gaydon and Gautier, much to their embarrassment and Charles’s comic anger, in a situation comparable to when Charles, equally embarrassed, becomes the unrecognized guest of Rauf: The King said to him self, “This is ane euill lyfe; Ȝit was I neuer in my lyfe thus gait leird; And I haue oft tymes bene quhair gude hes bene ryfe, That maist couth of courtasie in this Cristin eird. Is nane so gude as leif of and mak na mair stryfe, For I am stonischit at this straik that hes me thus steird.”

(Rauf 168–73)

Busby observes that the romance motif of the hero lost in a storm should culminate in a supernatural encounter but instead leads only to hospitality from a carll. Hospitality is a major structural element in romance.5 Here it degenerates into a fierce masculine contest allegedly over etiquette but in fact over power and control. Rauf wins, giving Charlemagne a blow with his fist comparable to the magnificent fisticuffs Guillaume administers to those who annoy him: He leit gyrd to the King, withoutin ony mair, And hit him vnder the eir with his richt hand, Quhill le stakkerit thair with all Half the breid of the hall; He faind neuer of ane fall, Quhill he the eird fand.

(Rauf 149–54)

As R.D.S. Jack has written, we perceive Charles and Rauf interacting in the cottage and at court.6 The two loci are set off against each other: Rauf’s décor to which Charles has to adapt, and Charles’s décor to which Rauf has to adapt. Court and country, civilization and the forest aventureuse, and also high aristocracy and the lower orders, something akin to the people of the realm, in a situation of conflict and, according to Lee C. Ramsey, envisaged from a middle-class point of view.7 It is true that court etiquette

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and the behaviour of courtiers, those who call for Rauf to be hanged (Rauf 741), reek of snobbery and bad manners. Rauf is more decent, generous, and loyal than his detractors. Nevertheless, as in so many comparable romances and chansons de geste, Rauf becomes, like the others, a knight and man of the court – first knighted and granted a pension, and later promoted to the office of Marshal of France. Cooptation and assimilation are the secular medieval response to satire and critique, with the best of those who satirize and criticize brought into the nobility, raised up to the nobility where they will defend what is now their world against its enemies. As part of the inclusionary cooptation, although less blatant than in romances such as Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, Rauf himself learns things and thereby “improves” in the course of the narrative; he embodies the civilizing process from cottage to court and from collier to cavalier. Among the serious chivalric themes in the romance is the duty to keep one’s word, the knightly, aristocratic trait prized above all others. This trait Rauf embodies from the beginning, albeit in the comic mode. Rauf will keep his word to go to court and seek out Wymond of the Wardrobe, whatever the obstacles, be they Roland, porters, and courtiers, and he will keep his rendezvous for a dual with Roland: “That I haue hecht I sall hald, happin as it may, Quhidder sa it gang to greif or to gawin. … I sall hald that I haue hecht, bot I be hard set … For to hald that I haue hecht I hope it be the best.”

(Rauf 380–1, 447, 780)

Similarly, in the serious register Charles keeps his word to reward Rauf and in the comic register blames Roland for not having personally ushered the collier into his presence. Second, keeping one’s word forms part and parcel of a knight’s honour. Rauf the collier has as precise and demanding a sense of honour as those manifest in Charles and Roland. Honour requires that Rauf act as the lord of a castle and impose the lordly host’s etiquette on his unrecognized guest. Honour demands that he accept Wymond’s invitation to the court and that nobody, including the greatest of paladins, be allowed to dissuade him. And, of course, honour requires that he duel Roland / Magog to the death, if necessary. Significantly, Rauf’s honour is not at all the pundonor of a shame culture. It exercises its sway over Rauf’s life because he adheres to his own principles, whether others be aware of it or not. As in the Spanish comedia, questions of honour are especially prevalent because of the tension between appearance and reality. In reality the

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e­ mperor Charles accepts hospitality from a rustic. According to appearances, Rauf receives as his guest a stranger, a gentleman surely but not one before whom Rauf should kneel. Hence the quiproquo. Hence the h ­ umour when Rauf accuses Charlemagne of judging him uniquely by appearances. Illusion and reality govern the collier’s seemingly grotesque public behaviour at court according to appearance, whereas in reality he is following – more or less – the dictates of honour. Wymond is Charles, and Charles is Wymond, which Rauf will discover only after several breaches of etiquette. The same occurs with the single combats, Rauf against ­Magog, each combatant believing that his adversary is Roland. The point of all this is to emphasize that honour, decency, and generosity can be found in a rustic – a coal-carrier – and that his honour can prove to be more genuine, more authentic, than the honour / etiquette of Charlemagne’s courtiers. Charles, who is, after all, responsible for the discrepancy between illusion and reality, recognizes Rauf’s virtue and his virtus; in the end, “the manly man” (Rauf 756) will become his counselor and military commander. Therefore, although perhaps not partaking directly of the advice to princes current in other Scots romances such as Lancelot of the Laik and Golagros and Gawane, Rauf Coilyear does offer a lesson in honour and respect, respect for the dignity of all men, whatever their social class, and trust between king and commoner. Finally, I agree with Matthew McDiarmid and Sergi Mainer that the text also contains a Christian element: Rauf arrives on Christmas day, is shown mercy by the king, and, in return, battles the Saracen, who is converted to Christianity.8 The virtues of Rauf and Charles, the virtues proposed as an appropriate model for good conduct, contain and are reinforced by the Christian doctrine of faith and the equality of all in God’s eyes.

15 Eger and Grime

Eger and Grime comes down to us in two late, Anglicized versions. The much longer Aberdeen or Huntington-Laing version contains a fascinating extension of the narrative beyond the usual happy ending; it also retains some of the Scots language from the original.1 The villain, Gray-Steel, became a legendary figure of quasi-mythical status; the first allusion to the romance has King James IV listening to two fiddlers who sang about GraySteel at Stirling in 1497. The story, with its two heroes and their magnificent adversary, remained popular through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Deanna Delmar Evans thinks of it as the last medieval Scots romance.2 Following the story line of the Huntington-Laing version, the two friends, Eger and Grime, are sworn brothers who resemble each other as if they were twins. Eger loves Winliane, the earl’s daughter, who loves him in return. However, she will wed only the fighter who has never lost. Eger, who has already won laurels, sets off to a forbidden land where he is defeated by the terrible knight in red – Gray-Steel. Knocked unconscious, Eger perceives, upon awakening, that one of his fingers has been severed, presumably by Gray-Steel as a token of victory. Eger is succored by Lillias, who contributes to healing his wounds. Upon Eger’s return, Grime hopes to keep the secret of his friend’s defeat. However, Winliane overhears them. Grime devises a plan: the two friends will exchange identities for a time. Eger, pretending to be Grime, says that he is ill (as indeed the defeated warrior is), and he takes to bed. Grime, pretending to be Eger, sets off to the forbidden land. There he encounters Lillias and Gray-Steel. After a fierce battle Grime slays GraySteel and severs his entire hand as a token. Grime returns to the court where he and Eger reassume their true identities. Grime convinces Winliane to return Eger’s love, and they marry.

Eger and Grime 213

Grime, under his own name, crosses over a second time into the forbidden land in order to wed Lillias. In the course of time Grime dies. In anguish, over the man’s grave Eger confesses the truth to Winliane – all that Grime did for his friend. Outraged at the deception and at her husband’s lack of worth, Winliane leaves him at once to enter a convent. Eger sets out to the East, to battle Saracens at Rhodes. Winliane dies. Eger then remarries; he weds Lillias. The two scholars who have contributed the most to the study of Eger and Grime, James Ralston Caldwell and Mabel Van Duzee, propose that the romance was shaped by an oral, folkloric tradition of Celtic provenance.3 I believe, on the contrary, that Celtic orality is no more helpful in accounting for Eger and Grime than for Fergus or Rauf Coilyear or, for that matter, the entire Arthurian corpus. Something like tautology is created when literary texts, specifically Middle English romances, are combed to contribute retroactively and anachronistically to the standard motif and type indices of folk literature, and then the presence of said elements in the motif index “proves” the folkloric origins of the medieval romance. Texts such as Eger and Grime are archetypal and formulaic. They are ­constructed with a series of archetypal, formulaic themes and motifs. The construction, however, can best be explained by the vast, centuries-old corpus of romans bretons (Arthurian romances) and romans d’aventures (adventure romances), rather than by citing hypothetical Celtic orality. The literature that we have is always a more plausible source than hypothetical Celtic oral traditions that we don’t. As for the ballads that mention GraySteel, Caldwell himself observes that it is much more likely that Eger and Grime had an impact upon the ballads than the other way around.4 From the perspective of literature, the most important tradition behind Eger and Grime is the story of Ami and Amile, two friends and sworn brothers who resemble each other as if they were twins. For our purposes the three most important texts in the tradition are the French chanson de geste Ami et Amile, the Anglo-Norman romance Amys e Amillyoun, and the English romance Amis and Amiloun.5 The daughter of Charlemagne (or the Duke of Pavia) loves Amile (Amis in the romances) and coerces him into granting her wishes. A felon (Hardré in the chanson de geste) denounces the couple; a judicial duel is arranged. Ami (Amil(ly)oun in the romances) offers to change places and fight in Amile’s stead. The felon is defeated, and Ami, still pretending to be Amile, weds Belissant / Belisaunt. Meanwhile, Amile takes Ami’s place with the friend’s wife, Lubias, placing a sword between them in the conjugal bed. The two friends then regain their original identities. All is well.

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All is not well. Because of his transgression in the duel (sacred combat, a judicium Dei), Ami is stricken with leprosy. Persecuted by his wife, he leaves home, begging his way. He is reunited by chance with Amile who, informed by an angel that the leper can be cured only by the blood of innocent children, insists on beheading his own young sons. Miracle: Ami is healed, and the boys are restored to life. The two friends die together on a pilgrimage or upon founding an abbey. Now, the relatively minor differences between Ami et Amile and Amys e Amillyoun or Amis and Amiloun can be explained by the demands of literary genre. Authors of romance, especially authors of insular romance, will suppress Charlemagne, Charlemagne’s wars, and the lineage of traitors. Authors of romance will amplify the love motifs: Belissant wooing Amile in a locus amoenus, the active role that the girl and her mother assume defending Amile’s honour, and the extraordinary physical beauty of the two men. In a more radical manner, the Scots poet of Eger and Grime goes much farther. He takes the material of what was originally a chanson de geste and displaces it entirely onto the generic imperatives of the quest romance. This means, first of all, the de-Christianization of the original epic story: no leprosy, no slaughter of the innocents, no martyrdom. Courtly romance is, for the most part, secular in its inspiration, appealing to the ­feudal aristocracy rather than a clerical public. Second, the quite serious political and juridical issues raised by true witness from a false oath – the juramentum dolosum – taken for false yet good reasons, and by the validity or non-validity of sacred combat, are deleted. The equivalent of judicial combat occurs in the Otherworld, a world of dreams and wishfulfillment fantasy. The heroic action, as a whole, is transposed to the Otherworld. This being the case, except at the end, nobody questions the ethical or legal propriety of the deception by which one of the friends stands in for the other. Finally, the overt presence of sexuality in the original material – the ruler’s daughter seducing one of the friends: Et elle s’est léz le conte couchie, Moult souavet s’est deléz lui glacie. … Envers le conte est plus préz approchie Et ne dist mot, ainz est bien acoisie. Li cuens la sent graislete et deloïe, Ainz ne se mut que s’amor moult desirre. Les mamelettes deléz le piz li sieent, Par un petit ne sont dures com pierres, Si enchaït li ber une foïe.

(Ami 671–2, 685–91)

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and the other friend’s wife terrified at the sexual taboo (the sword of chastity): Li cuens Amiles en la chambre est venus, En lit Ami s’ala couchier touz nus, Avec lui porte son brant d’acier molu. Et Lubias a les siens dras tolus, Deléz le conte s’a couchié nu a nu, Qu’elle le cuide acoler com son dru. Deléz lui sent le brant d’acier molu, Grant paor ot, si s’en est traite ensus. Dex, com est effraee!

(Ami 1158–66)

– are deleted. Sexually, everyone behaves with elegance and decorum, a degree of artificial censorship of the body to be found in so many late medieval romances but not at all in the tales of Marie de France, Beroul, Thomas, and Chrétien de Troyes. The romance structure of Eger and Grime is shaped by three (or four) voyages to the Otherworld: Eger sets out to combat Gray-Steel and is defeated; Grime sets out to combat Gray-Steel and is victorious; Grime sets out to reward his adjuvants in the Otherworld and to wed Lillias; last of all, Eger the widower marries Lillias the widow, presumably in her realm, again the Otherworld. Eger’s failure followed by Grime’s success conforms to the two-part pattern – a preliminary success that somehow fails, followed by a second, resounding success that triumphs – to be found in Chrétien’s romances and in their imitations, including Fergus. This is also the pattern, though modified of course, in Golagros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear. The narrative structure can also be envisaged as a pattern of  withdrawal and return, with, at the last, Eger’s withdrawal to the ­Otherworld for good, a point of no return which serves to end the romance. Or we can read it as a series of repeated segments of interdiction, violation of the interdiction, punishment for the violation, and overcoming the punishment. A number of romance motifs serve to structure the quests: the combat at the ford, the ford a symbolic barrier between the two worlds; the fay from the Otherworld who, like Isolt of Ireland, possesses quasi-magical powers to heal the wounds of chosen knights and who functions either as a temptress or as a maiden to be wed; the king of the Otherworld, a giant adversary of quasi-superhuman strength who, in this case, can be assimilated to a solar god; and the perilous return to our world where both Eger and Grime fall off their horses, and the former’s wounds reopen.

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On the one hand, Eger and Grime romanticizes the Ami and Amile story to the extreme. Yet, at the same time, paradoxically, it also stands out from other romances, the standard Arthurian romances, by the ways in which it adheres to the traditional epic pattern. It tells of not one but two protagonists and their symbolic twinship – one of them loving a haughty damsel, one or both spied upon and denounced, one replacing the other in a judicial duel or a quest, one eventually punished for the deception. The two protagonists marry – one a dark lady and the other a lady of light – and a Christian thematic is introduced towards the end, when Eger, his wife having left him for a life of religion, becomes in turn a miles Christi, winning battles for God in his new role as a crusader: He bowned him with shield and spear, On God his foes to fight in wear, To Rome he went the ready gate, And was assailyed by the Pape, Then to the Rhodes he took his way, And there was Captain years tway. He discomfeit a set battell, Thirty thousand were told by tale, For twentie thousand died there.

(Eger 2837–45)

In this respect Eger and Grime rejoins the tradition of chanson de geste where a number of great rebel heroes, in tales of feudal battle and conquest, undertake a pilgrimage which turns out to be an armed crusade in the defence of the one true faith. In this way Girard de Roussillon and Renaud de Montauban prepare for a pious end. Eger, on the contrary, prepares for a pious second marriage: Lillias had husband tane, And they at so good concord, Of her lands she made him Lord: And he made her Lady of his, A Bishop made a band of bliss, And wedded them both with a Ring.

(Eger 2852–7)

The Scottish romance contains elements derived from the Old French epic. It can also be envisaged as a new, anticourtly variation on the idyllic romance mode. It is as if the themes and motifs appropriate to fin’ amor in romance, especially idyllic romance, are subverted in order to proclaim,

Eger and Grime 217

against the courtly, secular love of man and woman, a heroic love between man and man.6 This notion is reinforced by the treatment of women in the text. Although in some ways it is a chivalric wish-fulfillment phantasm – a knight succeeds in winning the earl’s daughter, both knights wed a fay from the Otherworld – the earl’s daughter is, in fact, a haughty damsel who, even after years of a presumably happy marriage, repudiates her husband because he was not “the best.” And the fay, for all her knowledge and beauty, remains passive in her Otherworld castle. The problematic behaviour of both ladies is contrasted to the noble, self-sacrificing deeds by Eger and Grime, each on behalf of the other. The warmth, devotion, and love evidenced by any number of masculine “couples” constitute a recurring theme of chanson de geste; the breaking of compagnonage contributes more than one nobly pathetic scene to La Chanson de Roland, Raoul de Cambrai, and others. However, the Ami and Amile poems and Eger and Grime are unique. Here the companions are of equal personal worth, rather than hero and follower as is the case with Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Aeneas and Pallas or Achates, and their medieval progeny. This means that the French and Scottish poets, using traditional materials, go beyond the tradition to arrive at a new concept in human relations. This concept provides masculine-oriented comradship as an alternative to the more common courtly, overtly heterosexual passion which dominates in  the secular books of the age. It can be considered an example of the homosocial bond made famous by Eve Sedgwick;7 with Eger and Grime the homosocial bond is valourized centuries after the introduction of fin’  amor and the prominence given to great heroines such as Isolt and Guinevere. The Scots poet synthesizes epic and romance material in a particular way – to develop all the standard topoi of courtly romance while recounting a narrative which in its inner form or deep structure harks back to chanson de geste. Particular to narratives which exalt masculine fortitudo and the masculine competition for pre-eminence in deeds of arms is the motif of the token of victory. In a strikingly brutal and violent manner, one motif which appears to be genuinely of folkloric provenance, Gray-Steel severs Eger’s finger as concrete proof of his victory, and Grime severs Gray-Steel’s hand as proof of his: “When I was blinded with the blood, And all was gone should do me good. When blood me blinded, then in sown, Betwixt his hands I fell down,

218 Romance And there a while in sown I lay, When I overcame he was away. My little finger I mist me fra, And when I looked there I sa, A slain knight beside me lay, His little finger was away. And thereby might right well see, A knight met both with him and me.”

(Eger 203–14)

And then he came right soon again, Where that the knight was lying slain: And then his right hand off he took, Syne in a glove of plate it shook.

(Eger 1639–42)

From a classical Freudian perspective, it is obvious that these knights are participants in the most serious phallic rivalry. The winner defeats or slays his adversary by wielding sword or lance, phallic images. The loss of a hand or finger by the loser is then a metaphor for castration. Consequently, Eger, having lost his finger, can no longer hope to wed Winliane. With regard to her, the only “love object” he seeks, sexual commerce is taboo, an interdiction and a state of impotence represented by his convalescing in bed pretending to be Grime. The interdiction will then be lifted by a counter-castration, Eger’s supposed total and absolute defeat of Gray-Steel, represented by the severed hand. Another epic theme is the topos of fortitudo et sapientia. Although the two friends are symbolic twins, they are not identical. Eger embodies for­ titudo, the courage and prowess that make him already a great knight at court and the chosen of Winliane, who will wed only a knight who has never lost: Winliane, Husband would she never have nane, Neither for gold nor yet for good, Nor yet for highness of his blood, But only he that through swords dint, That ever wan and never tint. … Yet was he courteously taught, And he sought battels far, and fought, And conquered the honour, With weapons and with armour:

Eger and Grime 219 Both in battels and in fight: While on a time that she him heght, And she granted him her good-will.

(Eger 7–12, 25–31)

Unfortunately, fortitudo causes Eger to be rash, to set out on a dangerous quest unnecessary for his marital and career goals. Grime is the embodiment of sapientia, the knowledge and wisdom which enable him to devise a plan to vindicate his friend. He also possesses sufficient prowess to ­succeed where Eger failed, so that he proves to be master of fortitudo et sapientia. It is perhaps fitting then that Eger weds Winliane, the haughty damsel of the court, the real woman in a real world who will never forgive and never forget; and for Grime to wed the fay in the Otherworld, a supernatural lady embodying all female virtues just as he embodies the male ones, the woman of dreams made reality. In the Roman de Tristan also, Isolt of Ireland, the Irish temptress and fairy mistress, proves to be kinder, nobler, and more generous and loving, than Isolt of the White Hands, Tristan’s frustrated and insulted wife, who brings about his death. The Scots poet may have had the Tristan story in mind when he had Eger, moved to tears over Grime’s death, confess to his wife the truth of  his past, his defeat and deception; when he finishes, Winliane, being Winliane, leaves him on the spot in a rage: “Syn privily upon a night He brought me home both helm and hand, Which wan me you, and all your land, Wherefore it shal example be, To all that shal come after me. … The honour he shal never tine, He was so good in governing, I make it known to good and ill, It was sir Grahame [Grime] that slew Gray-steel.” Then said Winliane the Lady this, “Then he shal have away the prise, The worship it is with him gane, Now may I live in lasting pain: I should never have made you band, Ye should never have had mine hand, And ye should never have been mine, Had I kend it had been sir Grahame.” … Into her hands she took a book,

220 Romance And to Gods mercie she her took, And left the fair Lordship of Bealm, And thought to live upon her Seam.

(Eger 2806–10, 2815–26, 2831–4)

This is a magnificently problematic outcome. Even though the denouement is patched up (Eger wedding Lillias), the confession scene is powerful in its questioning of courtly clichés and in its portrayal of stark human reality. It is the highlight of the last medieval Scots romance.8

PART FOUR Scots Renaissance: Soundings

There is a tradition in French studies which emphasizes the barriers separating the Middle Ages from the Renaissance. Fortunately, this is not the case in Scotland. The proceedings of scholarly conferences and the collections of essays devoted to the older Scots literature assume a continuum from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.1 Medieval and Renaissance / early modern are addressed together, in the same collections and, more often than not, by the same scholars. In Scotland as in France traits presumed to be hallmarks of the new times – a passion for classical letters; the embellishing of contemporary writing with Greco-Roman myth; the rich, lusty enjoyment of love, life, and nature; the exploration of man’s secular destiny – are amply manifest in the earlier period. Similarly, quite a few presumed medieval practices – alchemy, astrology, allegory, Christian typology, and even witchcraft – extended well into the seventeenth century. Petrarchan love is good oldfashioned medieval fin’ amor dressed up in new, fashionable Italian garb; so also is the literature of the courts – comic, satiric, and didactic, Horatian in inspiration and intent. However, it would be an error to presume near-identity between the Middle Ages and the early modern. A break occurs in terms of literary knowledge and literary practice. J. Derrick McClure posits that James VI did not know the Makars, that he was ignorant of the preceding tradition.2 Hence his Reulis and Cautelis, imitating Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustra­ tion, written to lay down the rules for poetry in Scots. In this treatise and elsewhere James manifests a public poetic self-consciousness which differs in major ways from what we find in Dunbar and Douglas. Envisaging ­Antiquity from a different perspective, experiencing something like

222  Scots Renaissance

an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the masterpieces of Greece and Rome, contemporary writers consciously imitate the Greek and Roman genres: epic (King James), tragedy (William Alexander), ode and elegy (Drummond of Hawthornden, among others), and sonnet, the new, up-to-date genre from France and Italy. Roger A. Mason observes a shift in education, with lairds, land-holding magnates, and the gentry educated in humanism and the law; Theo van Heijnsbergen points at a more individualized and aware public – professional men, merchants, crown officers, and the secular clergy – a semi-urban public in the broadest sense.3 Finally, it is in the Renaissance that Scotland gives birth to two great neoLatin ­poets – George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston – men celebrated throughout Europe.4 I propose that the dividing line in Scotland, however porous, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance can be situated in the 1560s during the reign of Mary Stuart. John Rolland’s The Court of Venus, the last of the Scots dits amoureux, was composed in the 1560s, or perhaps earlier; Queen Mary’s Casket Sonnets represent the first sonnet sequence written in the North. This said, the place in the canon for the post-1560, post-Lyndsay ­writers, remains an open question. An earlier generation of scholars presumed that the “Castalian Band” of poets gravitating around James I manifested artistic decline. One reason for this negative evaluation stems from the fact that they were highly cosmopolitan, mannered and mannerist in style, and in no sense of the term rebels. Most important of all, perhaps, they used English more and more, some of them revising earlier Scots texts to conform to the ways of London once James VI became also James I; and Drummond of Hawthornden, perhaps the greatest of all, wrote uniquely in English. R.D.S. Jack and R.J. Lyall have warned against ideological presuppositions which can distort our appreciation of the early modern literary creation.5 This means that one ought not to adhere to a narrow myth of Scottishness: the belief that Calvinism was an unmitigated disaster for culture and that writing in English is, ipso facto, un-Scottish and to be denigrated. The more recent scholars are participating wholly in the ­defence, illustration, and rehabilitation of these early moderns. As explained in the introduction, there are too many authors and too many texts for me to “cover” in any meaningful way the creativity in Scotland from 1560 to 1660. In this section I offer four exploratory essays, four soundings of this rich and vast corpus. They treat four poets who were among the most attached to the French tradition – Queen Mary

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(who wrote in French), King James, William Alexander, and William Drummond of Hawthornden – and a number of genres or sub-genres – the Petrarchan sonnet, the devotional sonnet, the longer poem, the epic, and the humanist tragedy – which are of French inspiration and which appear in Scotland before or at the same time as they do in England.

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16 Mary Queen of Scots

Opinion is divided on Mary Stuart / Mary Queen of Scots. Jenny Wormald envisages her as an incompetent ruler, with no sense of political reality, who collapsed when faced with crises and who achieved nothing of value that endured.1 Michael Lynch sees her reign as a golden age of culture and refinement, presided over by a patron of the arts – poetry, music, and painting – a woman who sought in vain for an Erasmian court where opposites could meet and the realm could flourish without outside (English) interference.2 Both sides agree that it is an error to overemphasize Mary’s personal life, that is, her counterproductive actions as a widow during the last two years of her reign. On the other hand, it is Mary’s personal life – the murder of Darnley and the marriage with Bothwell, followed by the flight to England, the years of imprisonment, and her execution – which gave rise to the Mary myth and made her the most famous of all Scottish historical figures. At the time, the Stuart Queen was denounced, and fiercely so, by the Protestant faction, in works such as Randolphe’s Phantasey and The Sempill ­Ballatis.3 In Great Britain she remained a subject of controversy for the remainder of the sixteenth and through the entire seventeenth centuries, denounced and defended, following the political upheavals and their ideological underpinnings. Yet, over the long run, because of the myth and also contributing to it, later writers have, for the most part, celebrated the ­martyred queen: especially dramatists, from Antoine de Montchrestien to Schiller to Swinburne to Maxwell Anderson to, in the comic, sarcastic mode, Liz Lochhead. Mary composed a small corpus of poems, all in French, her preferred language.4 The French presence at her court was notable, from the Frenchlike festivals she introduced, the earliest in Britain in the high Renaissance

226  Scots Renaissance

style, to French-speaking courtiers such as Chastelard and Riccio, whom the Scots despised and eventually murdered; Mary’s personal library contained some three hundred volumes, most of them in French, the largest vernacular collection assembled in Scotland up to her time but with very few items in Scots or English.5 Mary’s opus falls into two categories: the erotic and the sacred, poetry of love and of God. The love increment is made up of a sixty-six-line ode on the death of her first husband, King François II of France, and a sequence of eleven sonnets plus a six-line fragment directed apparently to James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, the man who became her third husband. These are generally known as “The Casket Sonnets,” a reference to the silver box in which the original manuscript texts were allegedly discovered. Much ink has been spilled over the authorship question, that is, whether the sonnets were written by Mary herself or, on the contrary, by an impostor writing in her voice with the purpose of discrediting her. Until quite recently scholars paid little attention to this material as literature, and as literature forming part of the Scottish heritage. A number of recent studies have redressed the balance, so that critical scrutiny is now an accepted response to her work.6 This, even though some scholars denigrate the corpus. For example, M.H. Armstrong Davison, who, although he edited the sonnets, declares they are “a curious production, of little merit when considered as poetry.”7 Davison considers the corpus to be one poem with twelve stanzas of unequal length. Even Wormald appears to be unaware of what a sonnet and a sonnet sequence are; she refers to the casket texts as “a long sonnet.”8 And Antonia Fraser categorizes the texts as “long rather turgid verses.”9 I prefer to second Sarah Dunnigan’s claim that we have, here, the first sonnet sequence to appear in Scotland and that it is a fascinating example of what happens when the standard Renaissance, Petrarchan thematic is uttered in the woman’s voice and ascribed to a reigning monarch. I should add that the thematic comes also from the centuries-old medieval rhetoric of fin’ amor and that these texts are very good literature indeed. The Marian speaker develops a number of fin’ amor topics normally the province of a male persona. These include her constancy, fidelity, everburning and unending love, and concern over separation from the beloved. The situation is altered when the female persona reveals that the everburning and unending love is passion, desire, and libido, and when she states her willingness to sacrifice everything to the beloved: honour, family, subjects, kingdom, her baby, her life, and her soul:

Mary Queen of Scots  227 Las! n’est il pas ja en possession Du corps, du cueur qui ne refuse paine Ny deshonneur en la vie incertaine, Offense de parentz, ne pire affliction? … J’ay hazardé pour luy & nom & conscience. … Entre ses mains & en son plein pouvoir Je metz mon filz, mon honneur, & ma vie, Mon païs, mes subjectz, mon ame assubjectie, Et tout à luy.

(Sonnets 1: 5–8, 11; 2: 1–4)

In the tradition of fin’ amor – especially in the lyric mode – the male lover is of inferior social status vis-à-vis the beloved. He adores her from afar and indeed states his desire to sacrifice everything he has for her. Meanwhile, she remains aloof, unmoved by his passion. The implied reader / audience hear of his burning desire and self-sacrifice; what she thinks of him remains a mystery as much to the reader / audience as to him. When Mary’s speaker utters the same topoi in her woman’s voice, all is changed. Now the burning and the sacrifice are from a woman to a partially indifferent man. The female lays claim both to desire and to write of desire in a way counter to the gender prescriptions of her age, in a manner considered unwomanly if not sluttish. She is breaking a taboo. And when the implied author is presumed to be the Queen, the transgression is still greater: a reigning monarch lowering herself beneath and lusting after one of her subjects, and willing to sacrifice her realm and the dynastic succession in the cause of that lust. For, lusting after the beloved with her body and ­offering it to the beloved is one thing; however, given that her body is a sovereign’s body and that she is abandoning to one of her subjects the symbolic sovereign body of the realm is quite another and, given the political context of the 1560s, absolutely beyond the pale. A reigning monarch cannot become one of her own subjects and, still less, the subject of one of her subjects. In four of the sonnets (3, 4, 5, 6) the speaker gives voice to her jealousy, jealousy directed to the beloved’s spouse, with apparent reference to Bothwell’s wife, Lady Jean Gordon. The speaker insists that the wife married the beloved only out of greed and ambition and that her contacts with him are dictated uniquely by legal constraint and routine. In contrast to the wife, guilty of vile plots and hypocrisy, she the speaker is authentic, for she loves him by a free choice of the will. In spite of this, the beloved gives credence to the wife’s lies in preference to the speaker’s truth:

228  Scots Renaissance Et toutesfois ses parolles fardez, Ses pleurs, ses plaincts remplis de fictïons, Et ses hautz cris & lamentatïons Ont tant gaigné que par vous sont gardez Ses lettres escripts ausquelz vous donnez foy, Et si l’aymez & croyez plus que moy.

(Sonnets 6: 9–14)

Here the speaker takes on the role of the Ovidian abandoned woman. However, in the world of fin’ amor jealousy is deemed to be a vice associated with elderly, impotent husbands and not with a fin’ aman. In troubadour song the constraining obstacle-figure, usually to be identified with the husband, is named the gilos. In the Occitan romance Flamenca, simply by the act of marrying the heroine, of becoming a husband in place of a wooer, Archambaut manifests symptoms of jealousy and, consequently, is worthy of being cuckolded. Meanwhile, the courtly lover remains blissfully unaffected by the debitum conjugale which the husband is presumed to exact regularly from his spouse. The exception – Tristan in Thomas’s version of Le Roman de Tristan – suffers from the pangs of fin’ amor to a pathological extent. It can be assumed that his pathology is both rare and to be avoided. C.S. Lewis posited adultery as one of the four defining elements in courtly love.10 Nowadays most of us substitute obstacle for Lewis’s adultery. Nevertheless, in courtly lyrics the lady is subject to the obstacle-­figure, presumed to be her husband. And in the two greatest medieval romance myths Iseut is married to King Mark and Guinevere to King Arthur. Tristan and Lancelot do commit adultery with their monarchs’ wives. Even with no presumed adultery, that is, no intercourse, the lyric speakers in Petrarch, Scève, Ronsard, and so many others, pay court to married ladies. Finally, the medieval and Renaissance lovers dread that their beloveds give credence to the lies and slander spread by hangers-on at court, hostile male figures who form part of the husband’s retinue or are even competing suitors. In Old French these creatures are called losengiers. Here again Mary Stuart assumes the voice and stance of the male lover and, by so doing, upsets the expected gender thematic. The Marian speaker, a recent widow, she the woman, is eager to commit adultery with a married man and to break up his marriage with Jean Gordon. She is fiercely jealous of Jean Gordon – her jealousy contemptible in a courtly wooer – and afraid of her lies and slander, the wife here replacing the conventional losengier. Jean acts like a mere woman, whereas the speaker acts and speaks like a man. Behaviour acceptable in a male bachelor becomes taboo

Mary Queen of Scots  229

under the pen of a married woman or widow. She becomes an adulteress, a home-wrecker, and a miserable female gilos; as the monarch of her realm she who ought to be the image of peace and the order of the spheres contributes to disharmony and disorder. Lastly, there is the image of the wound. In the literature of fin’ amor the physiology of falling in love is portrayed as an arrow or a burst of flame which travels from the lady’s heart to her eyes and then across space to the lover’s eyes, whereupon it enters his body and descends to his heart, wounding the heart and / or taking it captive, bringing it back to the lady, and imprisoning it in her heart. The arrow or the flame can also be shot into the lover’s eyes directly by Cupid. The Renaissance poets amplified the topoi of the wound – a mortal injury – and being consumed by the fire. Mary adapts the imagery in an original way. In Sonnet 9 the speaker evokes the tears she shed when the beloved first possessed her body and not her heart, and then the pain and dread she felt when his blood was shed: Pour luy aussi je jette mainte larme, Premier, quand il se fist de ce corps possesseur, Duquel alors il n’avoyt pas le cœur. Puis me donna un autre dure alarme Quand il versa de son sang mainte dragme, Dont de grief il me vint lesser doleur, Qui m’en pensa oster la vie, & frayeur De perdre, las! le seul rempar qui m’arme.

(Sonnets 9: 1–8)

The scholars agree that the text alludes to the time when Bothwell kidnapped and raped Queen Mary, and then to a later incident when he was wounded in battle. The Ovidian-medieval-Petrarchan motifs are concretized and adapted to coincide with genuine historical events. The speaker seems to confess that she endured a ravishing more concrete than the usual masculine lover ravished by his lady’s eyes, and that she came to love her rapist. She intimates that his bleeding wound is more damaging than her own (she was not a virgin) and that she fears more his loss of life and her loss of him than her own loss of honour. Mary adheres to the tradition above all in that the Casket Sonnets are highly rhetorical; they exist in order to persuade. According to the medieval and Renaissance convention, the male narrator seeks to win over his narratee in what are literally poems of seduction. In a similar yet somewhat different sense the Marian speaker, who has already slept with the beloved, seeks to convince him of the authenticity of her love, to proclaim

230  Scots Renaissance

its goodness no matter what people say, to celebrate her passion, and therefore to win him back, and, implicitly, to justify and celebrate her woman’s voice partaking of a man’s stance and a man’s voice. As Dunnigan observes, whatever the passion and whatever the sin, Mary (that is, the speaker) expresses an inner, scrupulous love and also its moral aspiration.11 She reasons over and beyond her passion; she asserts her sense of self as a lover and as a writer. Although unique and revolutionary in the Scottish tradition, Mary Stuart follows in the trace of a number of women love poets in France, both medieval and Renaissance: the trobairitz (women troubadours), Christine de Pizan, and, in the sixteenth century, Louise Labé and Pernette du Guillet. Of these, Labé is the closest to Mary; Mary could have known Labé’s œuvre even though it is not cited in the catalogue of her library. Like Mary, Louise Labé authored a relatively brief poetic corpus: twenty-four sonnets and three elegies.12 Her stance is similar to Mary’s – that of a passionate woman in love with a less committed, less moved, male beloved. Labé’s sonnets are more sensual, more physically overt: the speaker’s desire is at its height, she has a wet-dream possessing him in her sleep, and she wishes to die in his arms. She proclaims the beauty of his body, and she accepts and joys in the bodily passion she endures, compared to her less physical male beloved. The fire which consumes her symbolizes her passion, the sin she commits, and the punishment for the sin. Hot and dry, the masculine element par excellence, fire is seized joyfully by this desiring woman in her transgression and, as author-figure, in her creative act. The single poem which corresponds most closely to Mary Stuart’s corpus is Élégie 2, not one of the sonnets. In this elegy, a letter addressed to the beloved, Labé’s speaker, separated from the beloved, miserable over the separation and blaming the beloved, confesses her jealousy, in anguish over whether the beloved has found a new love. If this be the case, the speaker insists that she is better than his new love, for she is more famous and she loves better: … peut estre ton courage S’est embrasé d’une nouvelle flame, En me changeant pour prendre une autre Dame: Jà en oubli inconstamment est mise La loyauté que tu m’avois promise. … Si toutefois pour estre enamoré En autre lieu, tu as tant demouré,

Mary Queen of Scots  231 Si say je bien que t’amie nouvelle A peine aura le renom d’estre telle, Soit en beauté, vertu, grace et faconde, Comme plusieurs gens savans par le monde M’ont fait à tort, ce croy je, estre estimee. … Je ne dy pas qu’elle ne soit plus belle: Mais que jamais femme ne t’aymera, Ne plus que moy d’honneur te portera. (Labé, Élégie 2: 16–20, 53–9, 72–4)

In addition, the early French Renaissance male poets adopted occasionally the woman’s stance and spoke in a woman’s voice. Among the motifs we find are complaint against an old husband (Clément Marot), begging the beloved to treat her nicely (Marot), a sarcastic reference to the fact that she loves better than a chambermaid (Mellin de Saint-Gelais), and, above all, a text in which Venus proclaims the violence of her passion for Adonis and her wretchedness over his death, her wound greater than his (SaintGelais). Mary’s library included the works of Saint-Gelais, and it could have pleased her to adopt Venus’s stance and voice. A quite different situation is evoked in Mary’s sixty-six-line ode on the death of François II, composed when she was nineteen. The speaker declares how happy she was and how miserable she is now, her youth ravished from her. Her constancy is contrasted to the inconstancy of Dame Fortune. The beloved’s face remains always with her, for she beholds him in nature, his eyes perceived in the clouds, or she sees him in water as if in a tomb: Si par fois vers ces lieux Viens à dresser ma veue, Le doux trait de ses yeux Je vois en une nue, Soudain je vois en l’eau Comme dans un Tombeau.

(Ode 43–8)

His portrait is fixed in her eyes and in her heart, and he comes to speak to her and to touch her in her sleep: Si je suis en repos, Sommeillant sur ma couche, J’oy qu’il me tient propos, Je le sens qu’il me touche.

232  Scots Renaissance En labeur, en recoy, Tousjours est prest de moy.

(Ode 49–54)

The lady’s portrait fixed in the male lover’s heart, and the male lover beholding the beloved’s face in a dream, are standard motifs in Ronsard. The tropes and the thematic of the “Ode” and the Casket Sonnets reappear elsewhere in the Marian corpus. In the sonnet addressed from her prison to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, “Ung seul penser qui me profficte et nuict,” the speaker, expressing affection for her “dear sister,” in the octave adapts the doux-amer love motif: she is torn between doubt and hope, pain and profit, with the result that she cannot sleep. In the tercet she develops an image we have seen before: the ship at sea tossed afar when so close to port, this due to Fortune. During her captivity Mary composed a small number of sacred texts, that is, devotional poetry. These include four sonnets, a “Méditation” in one hundred lines based on a Latin treatise sent to her as consolation by John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and some occasional verse, most of which she inscribed in her Book of Hours. Here the Stuart monarch innovates; her devotional verse coincides with the explosion of religious poetry in France, Catholic and Protestant, which extends roughly from 1570 to 1650 and makes a major contribution to the French baroque.13 Mary’s “Méditation” and the four sonnets develop some of the tropes to be found in the devotional verse of the baroque. First of all, she partakes of the “evening meditation,” concentrating on self-deprecation and penitence, with imagery of decay and death, and the frailty of life in this world, yet weeping tears that can heal as would Christ’s blood. The fall, the road down as a record of sin, can be turned about only by Christ’s redemption and be thus transformed into the flight upwards. This devotional poetry is private meditation, self-examination, and prayer. Like the other poets of meditation, Mary explores the speaker’s inwardness, her inward consciousness and conscience. Reiterated throughout is the theme of evanescence and mutability, the frailty of earthly concerns, likened to a ship at sea buffeted by storms and subject to the whims of Fortune. The speaker realizes that her only hope is to turn to God: Brief, tout le bien de ceste vie humaine Se garde peu & s’acquiert à grand’ peine. Que nous sert donc icy nous amuser Aux vanitez qui ne font qu’abuser?

Mary Queen of Scots  233 Il fault cercher en bien plus haulte place Le vray repos, le plaisir, & la grace, Qui promise est à ceux qui de bon cœur Retourneront à l’unique Sauveur; Car au ciel est nostre aeternel partage, Ja ordonné pour nous en heritage.

(Méditation 39–48)

She has been a sinner; she compares herself to Saint Peter and to Mary Magdalene: Parquoy, Seigneur & Pere souverain, Regarde moy de visage serain, Dont regardas la femme pecheresse Qui à tes pieds pleuroit ses maux sans cesse, Dont regardas Pierre pareillement Qui ja t’avoit nïé par jurement; Et, comme à eux, donne moy ceste grace Que ta mercy tous mes peschez efface.

(Méditation 57–64)

The analogies are apt: she was / is twice a queen, just as Simon Peter became the first bishop and the first pope; she committed sins of the flesh and is known to be a scarlet woman, like the Magdalene. She is punished on this earth, yet she can hope for redemption, as Peter and Mary Magdalene were redeemed. She repents of her sins. Most of all, she prays to God. She begs the Lord to listen to her and to answer her prayer. From God above she can become better in this life and can attain joy in the next. In addition to the storm at sea and Fortuna motifs, the speaker insists on her constancy, her fidelity, the power of her love, its purity and authenticity, her suffering, and her prayer for help and for communication. All this is to be found, from a different angle and in a different register, in the love poems. A logical evolution from secular to sacred love, the erotic trans­ figured by the divine, as in Dante or in Joachim Du Bellay’s Platonic ascension in the Olive, does not occur. Nevertheless, Dunnigan argues ­persuasively that the religious texts, composed during the last decade of Mary’s life and, consequently, coming into existence after the “Ode” and the Casket Sonnets, are an extension of the amorous poems and not a contradiction of them.14 After the body is lost, sacrificed to and for the sake of the earthly lover, the soul remains, to be handed over to and be saved by  the divine lover and father. With both thematics, in both registers, the Marian speaker invokes her inner self, seeking to justify her desires,

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whether cupiditas or caritas, and to proclaim the authenticity of her sentiments and her woman’s voice. In my opinion, Mary Queen of Scots, if not a great poet, is a very good one. Her royal status allowed her the privilege of composing a kind of verse and of cultivating registers which other women would not have been able to do. Her royal status guaranteed, also, that once discovered, the amorous verses would be denounced and their author pilloried. As Peter C. Herman puts it, by cultivating her female subjectivity, the queen makes herself subject to the male beloved and, thereby, places in jeopardy her royal agency.15 Mary’s reign was brief and unfortunate; so also was her life. Yet she became a creature of legend, the embodiment of a myth that was to become an archetype: the martyred queen, forced into exile, imprisonment, and death by brutish male conspirators and a jealous female rival, all because of her Catholic faith and her will to love. Now that the myth is being (partially) debunked and the archetype (partially) displaced, Mary’s genuine, concrete achievements can come to the fore. Because of her French upbringing and the French tradition, she introduced into Scotland the sonnet sequence and the possibility for a woman to compose amorous and religious sonnets, to write in the woman’s voice texts in the newest, most up-to-date literary kinds. We must recognize the quality of Mary’s opus as texts of genuine literary value. Her court and that of her son were to be centres of literary activity during the Scottish Renaissance, and indeed, perhaps more than anyone else except her son, Mary Stuart introduced the European literary Renaissance into Scotland. Excursus: Who wrote the Casket Sonnets? Scholars have scrutinized and rescrutinized, weighed and reweighed, the textual evidence and the his­torical context, the sundry hypotheses covering authorship, reception, transmission, retransmission, and renewed reception. The results of such magnificent, indeed exemplary, scholarship remain inconclusive. I have nothing to add to it. The following brief remarks fall under the heading of interpretation, in this case interpretation from a Frenchoriented perspective. As I have observed in the course of this essay, the Casket Sonnets are very good poetry, of the same quality as Mary’s verses on the death of François II and her later devotional verse. There is no contradiction in theme or style between the Sonnets and the rest of her corpus. If not herself, Mary, the author of the Sonnets had to be a native French speaker or, at the very least, someone who had dwelt in French-speaking lands and who had a close acquaintanceship with and perhaps some

Mary Queen of Scots  235

achievement in French amatory verse. This stipulation rules out most of the “usual suspects” for the forgery, including the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Lennox, and Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington. In addition, Maitland was conservative, royalist, and francophile. What about a French Protestant versifier enrolled in the cause? The two great Huguenot love poets – Jean de Sponde and Agrippa d’Aubigné – are of a later generation. For those Protestants writing in the 1560s, it can be said that they had a genuine talent for and interest in a number of genres but that the amatory sonnet sequence was not one of them. They produced little amatory verse, and none of it of the first quality.16 It is questionable whether the timeline would have allowed the various stages of  negotiation, commission, composition, and delivery of the product. Finally, the French Huguenots loved and hated fiercely; they also manifested an almost other-worldy fierce integrity. Although I may be ex­ cessively sentimental, I cannot envisage any of them stooping to the skullduggery of such a forgery. That leaves one remaining suspect: George Buchanan. Buchanan, the greatest neo-Latin poet in the annals of Scotland, and one of the two or three greatest in the entire Renaissance, had spent most of his adult life in France. He associated closely with the Pléiade poets, influencing and being influenced by them.17 He even translated the Casket Sonnets into Scots in the campaign to denigrate Queen Mary. Still, almost all his literary production is in Latin, with a little in Scots (including the translation) but not one line in French. He also manifests, to the tenth degree, the fierce loves and hates of the French Protestants and their no less fierce integrity.18 It is all but impossible nowadays for governments, not to speak of mere writers, to keep a secret. Journalists and historians find them and denounce them. Scholars and historians do the same for the secrets of the past. Are we to believe that the forgeries – a conspiracy which would have involved a number of people – were kept in utter secrecy in the late 1560s, during the lifetime of the forgers, and ever since? Is this an argumentum ex silen­ tio? Perhaps. Ergo, until new evidence is forthcoming, I vote for Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, as the author of the Casket Sonnets, the first sonnet sequence in the literature of Scotland.

17 King James VI

Sally Mapstone argues persuasively that although the courts played a role in the patronage of literature, it is only with the reign of James VI that we find a thriving group of writers centred around the monarch, acknowledging his patronage and conscious of contributing to an ensemble of writing.1 In addition, this court differed from so many on the Continent or in England, in that the monarch himself was an active, creative writer throughout his reign in Scotland and, to a lesser extent, after inheriting the crown of England. He was indeed treated by the others not just as a patron and inspiration but also as a brother in the art of composition and as the leader of the brotherhood that, in the twentieth century, came to be called the Castalian Band, the leader in artistic terms as well as in the ­social hierarchy.2 Two selections of James’s verse were published during his lifetime: The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie of 1584, and His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres of 1591.3 He also penned a variety of prose treatises including: Daemonologie in Forme of ane Dialogue (1597), The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), Basilikon Doron (1599), A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1607), A Premonition to All Most Mightie Monarches (1609), A Remon­ strance for the Right of Kings (1616), and A Declaration of Sports (1617).4 James’s writings – all of them – can be envisaged as forms of self-­ representation and as contributions to what today we call a cultural policy. In the prose texts James emerges as a political theorist seeking to establish a new ideological base – including the divine right of kings – for the monarchy in Scotland and, later, in England. In the poetry and in his patronage of poetry, James sought to raise literature in Scotland to a higher level, to

King James VI  237

its full maturity, in line with the French and Italian achievement. In both politics and poetry he was introducing into Scotland Continental models and ideals. Thus he continued the work of his mother and, in a conscious concerted manner, went beyond her. The Remonstrance for the Right of Kings is a translation into English of Declaration du sérénissime Roy Jacques I, Roy de la Grand’ Bretagne et Irlande, défenseur de la Foy, pour le droit des Rois et indépendance de leurs couronnes (1615), the original French ascribed to James himself. David Harris Willson suggests that the original French was composed by Pierre du Moulin;5 however, it could just as readily have been penned by James and gone over by Du Moulin. The contents of James’s library, more than six hundred titles, reconstituted from various lists, was relatively Frenchoriented. There are sixty-five original works in French, but only nineteen in English; as for translations from languages other than Greek and Latin, there are twenty-seven in French and nine in English.6 In his own corpus James translated or adapted sonnets from Saint-Gelais, Ronsard, and Desportes, among others.7 His major productions include two extended translations from Du Bartas and an imitation of Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration. He also commissioned Thomas Hudson to translate Du Bartas’s Judit. The Renaissance came to Scotland from France due in part to the extraordinary richness of French literature in the sixteenth century yet also, and perhaps primarily, due to this French-speaking son of a Frenchspeaking and quasi-French queen, reacting against his mother, as we shall see, yet her son nonetheless and sharing much of her cultural vision. In both his collections James proclaims and adapts to his own situation a French Renaissance idea and ideal of the poet. The idea and ideal come from Du Bartas, but also from Ronsard and the Pléiade. Rather like the English Spenser, the Scottish James sought to be a Pléiade-type poet, and, being King James, to be the chief and the highest, noblest member of the group, even though the group was then only in the making. Towards the end of The Essayes of a Prentise is situated James’s ars poeti­ ca, Ane Schort Treatise conteining some reulis and cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie.8 Scholars are in agreement that the Reulis and Cautelis is an adaptation of Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, Du Bellay being the only authority whom he cites by name:9 I haue lykewayis omittit dyuers figures, quhilkis are necessare to be vsit in verse … because they are vsit in all languages, and thairfore are spokin of be Du Bellay, and sindrie vtheris, quha hes written in this airt. (Treatise, pp. 67–8)

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James was influenced also by Ronsard’s Preface to La Franciade and his Abbregé de l’Art poëtique François.10 As with the Deffence et Illustration, much of the treatise is taken up with technical matters: rhyme, prosody, registers of style, similes, epithets, and proverbs, among others. It is significant that James’s assumption that poetry in Scots is rhymed and syllabic comes from the French practice. James goes into such detail because poetry is a branch of rhetoric and also because he wishes to distinguish verse in Scots from verse in English; he insists upon the differences between the two languages: That as for thame that hes written in it of late, there hes neuer ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest to our language, zit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of Poesie, as ze will find be experience. (Treatise, p. 67)

His rules are new to Scots. He also writes because, when times change, poetry changes, and new rules are needed; now the language and its literature have arrived at maturity, and his treatise will show them the way. Similarly, Du Bellay insisted on French differing from Greek and Latin and that it had now to rival the classical languages in its own new, con­ temporary evolution. Just as Du Bellay downgraded medieval and early Renaissance French literature in favour of what he and his allies would achieve, so also James calls for a new literature to replace the past. Here I believe that he alludes implicitly to the previous medieval tradition and not just to Protestant broadsides, as Sandra J. Bell states.11 Finally, as in the French, James identifies poetic genres with the appropriate subject-matter and stylistic register, specifically with the “wordis” (chap. 3) and the “kyndis of versis” (chap. 8). The genres are, for the most part, taken from classical Antiquity or from the Continent, several of them not yet cultivated in the Scots vernacular. The noblest genres in the most lofty register include the Heroicall and the Ballat Royal, which harks back to the medieval chant or chanson royal. James’s purpose is to enrich, to cultivate, and to distinguish the Scots vernacular, just as Du Bellay and Ronsard did for French. Also, instead of adapting Continental practice to the pre-existing Scots achievement, he wished to transmit the French and Italian tradition in its entirety to Scotland – in McClure’s words, to transmit the entire concept of poetry and poetic practices.12 It is noteworthy that James is a young poet, writing his manifesto at a much earlier age (18) than when Du Bellay and Ronsard wrote theirs. He

King James VI  239

follows their example – what became a consistent French practice from the Pléiade to nouveau roman – to begin with the manifesto, which precedes the original artistic production that will follow the precepts enunciated in  the manifesto. This proves to be a deft way of dealing with Bloom’s anxiety of influence: one repudiates and thus neutralizes the threatening fathers before even beginning to create, although the repudiation itself reveals the extent to which the strong sons find themselves beholden to and bound by such threateningly potent predecessors. Finally, young and inexperienced as he claims to be, an imitator of the Pléiade when it was young, James Stuart is King James VI, and he has the right, whatever his age, to promulgate reulis and cautelis, which will most certainly not be subject to critique. The Essayes of a Prentise starts with a number of sonnets; twelve of these – the first sonnet sequence in Scots – are by James speaking in the implied author’s own voice.13 The speaker develops the thematic of a young poet beginning his poetic career. They are invocations to Jove, Apollo, the four seasons, Neptune, creatures of the sea, Pluto, Mars, Pallas, Mercury and the muses, and all the gods. They are appeals to the gods for assistance in his, the speaker’s verse. This sequence is significant for a number of reasons. James, an avowedly Protestant poet and the Protestant ruler of a now officially reformed realm, does not hesitate to invoke and to seek inspiration from the gods of  Antiquity. More so than was the case with his Catholic mother, the speaker proclaims himself to be a serious poet who will poeticize in the most serious, up-to-date, Renaissance manner – as a student and disciple of Antiquity cultivating the approved new poetic form, the sonnet. These sonnets appeal to the gods for support in his endeavours, that his poetry succeed in its goals. They also address both the speaker’s and his implied readers’ ethical and moral condition, that the gods help him write in a good manner and help the reader read in a good manner. In addition, James’s sonnets are metatextual. The speaker, by invoking the gods for poetic inspiration, demonstrates concretely that his prayers have been answered, for the prayers themselves offer evidence that their author is a genuine poet who has written genuine poetry. James then continues to develop the same thematic – that of the young poet seeking the inspiration to be a poet. Having exploited the lyric ­genus medium, the Speaker now turns to a more lofty register, that of epic or the sublime ode. Here he translates L’Uranie by Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas, which becomes, in his hands, a 336-line text, The Uranie.14 Maintaining the modesty topos, the speaker, in his address “To

240  Scots Renaissance

the favorable Reader” (16–17), confesses that although he dare not rival Du Bartas, he can aspire to translate him, choosing, to do so, his shortest and easiest poem. Whereas the sonnets evoque gods and muses from a Ronsardian perspective, in the Ronsardian manner – a plea for the equivalent of furor poeticus – in The Uranie James turns to the Protestant Du Bartas in order to proclaim a resolutely Christian aesthetic. In his first collection he translates / transmits / transplants the beginner’s appeal for aid from Du Bartas’s beginner’s appeal for aid in his first collection called La Muse chrestienne. The Bartasian and Jamesian speakers are visited by Urania, muse of ­astronomy, therefore of mathematics and the harmony of the spheres, therefore of learning and of cosmic and sublime poetic invention. Urania’s message is to scorn vile erotic verse and the vile lechery evoked by and which gives rise to such despicable art: Profanes escrivains, vostre impudique rime Est cause que l’on met nos chantres mieus-disans Au rang des bateleurs, des boufons, des plaisans, Et qu’encore moins qu’eus un chacun les estime. Vous faites de Clion une Thaïs impure, D’Helicon un bordel; vous faites, impudents, Par vos lascifs discours que les peres prudents Defendent à leurs fils des carmes la lecture.

(Bartas 105–12)

Your shameles rymes, are cause, ô Scrybes prophane, That in the lyke opinion we remaine With Juglers, buffons, and that foolish seames: Yea les then them, the people of vs esteames. For Clio ye put Thais vyle in vre, For Helicon a bordell. Ye procure By your lascivious speache, that fathers sage Defends verse reading, to their yonger age.

(James 169–76)

This is a despicable art banned by Plato yet brought back by Satan. Instead, the poet should soar on his wings, possessed by fury (paradoxically, Ronsard’s fureur), aiming high, to speak of God not Venus. For, unlike Venus’s whores, Pallas and the Muses are virgin. With a noble subject and noble speech, the Christian poet shall sing of God and the Bible, not myths and fables. And, proclaims the speaker, Urania drew me to her heart and transported me. Since then I am faithful to her message:

King James VI  241 C’est par ce beau discours que la Muse celeste, Tenant une corone en sa pucele main, Atire à soi mon cœur d’un transport plus qu’humain, Tant bien à ces dous mos elle ajoute un dous geste. Depuis, ce seul amour dans mes veines bouillone, Depuis, ce seul vent soufle ès toiles de ma nef, Bienheureus si je puis, non poser sur mon chef, Ains du doit seulement toucher cete corone.

(Bartas p. 185)

This heauenly Muse by such discourses fair, Who in her Virgin hand a riche crowne bair: So drew to her my heart, so farr transported, And with swete grace so swetely she exhorted: As since that loue into my braines did brew, And since that only wind my shipsailles blew, I thought me blest, if I might only clame To touche that crown, though not to weare the same.

(James 329–36)

In a curious version of Renaissance syncretism, the muse Urania of Greek myth urges the apprentice poet to scorn Greek myth and to embrace instead the vocation of becoming a Christian poet. And Virgil’s muse tells the speaker to imitate Moses and David; implicitly, as a reigning monarch, James should try to become King David. Nevertheless, the text following directly after The Uranie in the Essayes is an elegiac poem in the classical tradition; with Phoenix James returns to the world of myth.15 Phoenix tells the story of the great mythological bird, come from abroad to Scotland and befriended by the narrator. Because the phoenix is now the narrator’s favourite, his other birds are torn by jealousy; they wound the phoenix, shedding her blood. She then returns to Arabia where she convinces Apollo to set her on fire. Although she dies, Apollo brings forth from her ashes a new bird, a new phoenix, to be raised in Scotland. This poem, which I believe to be James’s masterpiece, commemorates (veiling and revealing) the life and death of Esmé Stuart d’Aubigny, earl and, later, duke of Lennox, a Franco-Scottish cousin who became the young James’s mentor and closest companion, and who then was exiled to France where he died in May 1583. Sarah Dunnigan observes that this poem has political overtones and that, with it, James makes his case for greater and more effective monarchical power after the Ruthven Raid of 1582. She also observes the homosocial and homoerotic overtones in a poem where the narrator is so deeply bereaved by the loss of a female

242  Scots Renaissance

phoenix, the bird of Apollo, and where, because King James identifies with Apollo, the narrator confesses his own partial responsibility for the loss.16 In terms of influence, James proclaims his debt to David Lyndsay’s Papyngo. He might also have known Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Epîtres de l’Amant Vert, for Lemaire was one of the very few medieval writers esteemed during the French Renaissance. From the partially comic parrot of Lyndsay and (maybe) Lemaire, James creates his tragic phoenix in a poem which he calls tragic. The phoenix is the highest and greatest of flying creatures, literally unique being only one. In La Sepmaine Du Bartas begins his account of the birds created by God on the fifth day with the phoenix.17 Whereas comedy is generated by having a comic parrot speak in its own voice, James shifts to elegiac tragedy by choosing the sublime phoenix and limiting the discourse to the narrator / lover of the phoenix, much like having Venus herself recount the love and death of Adonis. The suffering and will to death of the phoenix, and the suffering of the narrator, her lover, are expressed in moving terms: When she could find none other saue refuge From these their bitter straiks, she fled at last To me … yet they followed fast Till she betuix my leggs her selfe did cast. For sauing her from these, which her opprest, Whose hote pursute, her suffred not to rest. Bot yet at all that servd not for remeid, For noghttheles, they spaird her not a haire. In stede of her, yea whyles they made to bleid My leggs: (so grew their malice mair and mair) Which made her both to rage and to dispair, First, that but cause they did her such dishort: Nixt, that she laked help in any sort. Then hauing tane ane dry and wethered stra, In deip dispair, and in ane lofty rage She sprang vp heigh, outfleing euery fa: Syne to Panchaia came, to change her age Vpon Apollos altar, to asswage With outward fyre her inward raging fyre: Which then was all her cheif and whole desyre.

(Phoenix 162–82)

As in so much of Western literature, love and death are intertwined, with the death of lovers forming the heart and soul of elegy and of much

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t­ragedy as well. Yet, as in the Christian tradition, loss and death can be overcome; tragedy can be overcome. Apollo declares: Yet will I the procure, Late foe to Phoenix, now her freind to be: Reuiuing her by that which made her die. Draw farr from heir, mount heigh vp through the air, To gar thy heat and beames be law and near. That in this countrey, which is colde and bair, Thy glistring beames als ardent may appeir As they were oft in Arabie: so heir Let them be now, to make ane Phoenix new Euen of this worme of Phoenix ashe which grew.

(Phoenix 264–73)

For the phoenix’s son, Ludowyk, lives. Following a long tradition of Christian allegory, the phoenix can be interpreted as a Christ-figure, its death and rebirth an allegory for the death and rebirth of the Saviour. Apollo also is a god who, by agreeing to the bird’s death and yet who also brings about the resurrection, can represent God the Father in relation to God the Son. And the narrator, himself a king-figure, can be assimilated to God, to the Holy Ghost (who gives voice to accounts of the Passion), to one of the disciples, or to the Mary of Sorrows, the Dolores, who weeps over the loss of her son. The sacred and the aesthetic are united in a work of syncretism that is, like The Uranie, both classical and Christian, and deeply moving in its humanity. King James’s second collection, His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres, in its title continues the affected modesty-topos of The Essayes of a Prentise.18 Here the affected modesty comes not from the youth and inexperience of the apprentice poet seeking his vocation; instead, James evokes what we can call the aesthetics of negligence, the notion that, as an active figure in the political and moral realm, he composes only in his idle hours, as a now mature writer yet, by the force of circumstance, now also an amateur. As the king of the realm, he can write only in his idle hours; and, as the king or as a high aristocrat, he should be only an amateur in the scribbling of verse, for a more committed, more professional stance would lead to dishonour. As before, the affected modesty contributes to the rhetoric of captatio benevolentiae, a way to win the approbation of the implied reader and the actual literary public. At the same time the affected modesty is belied, in fact contradicted, by the fact that the two most important texts in this collection are in the epic mode: The Furies and The Lepanto. Here James is following in the wake

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of Ronsard, who, as leader of the Pléiade, reserved for himself the noblest and most lofty poetic genre – epic. So also does James, the leader of his Pléiade-like circle. The epic stance was appropriate for Ronsard, known as the prince of poets, and is even more so for James VI, king of Scotland. The king of men will write the princely genre par excellence, epos. Because, in the last analysis, Ronsard’s La Franciade turned out to be a failure, and epic was the one genre that Ronsard did not cultivate in glory, the Scots Ronsard turned to a more recent, more successful, and more Christian (and Protestant) epicist, Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas, the man whose Uranie James had already translated in Essayes of a Prentise. Du Bartas was deemed throughout Northern Europe to be, along with Tasso, the leading epic poet of his time. Fallen into discredit, he is now being rehabilitated by the new generation of French seiziémistes.19 La Sepmaine, published in 1578, renewing a long tradition of the Hexameron in Greek and Latin, recounts the seven days of God’s creation of the universe. In 1584 Du Bartas published the first two “days” of La Seconde Semaine. The new project was to recount sacred history from the Garden of Eden to Doomsday. Additional material was published in 1591, 1593, and 1603; overall, the retelling of the entire Bible proved impossible for any one man, even a Renaissance man, to complete. James chose to translate Les Furies, book three of the first day of La Seconde Semaine.20 This section recounts the first consequences of the Fall and the ejection from Eden. The earth denounces Adam, who is hunted down like a stag. God takes vengeance on the fallen humans, and the four elements join to assail them. We are told, in detail, of the illnesses to which man is subject, the hunger, and the violence. Du Bartas thus alludes to the civil wars ravaging France. Du Bartas / James contrast the former peace and harmony in Eden, the one-time perfection of the cosmos, to the rage and wretchedness of people living as if in a prison. People suffer from war and hatred; they are punished by failed crops and hostile beasts; and hell itself is reactivated and expanded for the newcomers – for us. Cut down in battle, wounded or slain, we are wounded and slain also by doctors and by our vices. The confusion and disintegration are the direct result of the sin of Adam and of the trickery, lying, and distortion practiced by Satan in the previous book, L’Imposture. They then anticipate comparable confusion as punishment for building the Tower of Babel, and they prefigure the return to chaos following the Last Judgment. James’s choice of Les Furies to translate is significant. This work offers little direct theological speculation or meditation on the divinity and his

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divine work of creation. Du Bartas’s overall optimism and praise of God and man are lost in this magnificent evocation of God’s wrath and the consequences of the Fall. Do we see here evidence of a Northern version of the Calvinist faith? James’s choice gave him the occasion to compose magnificent verse of horror and disgust, of pain and disillusion. This is one of the first, perhaps the first, manifestation in Scotland of the baroque, and it is the baroque of suffering and terror that bursts forth from James’s “vacant hours.” Such is the Du Bartas / James vision of hunger: Voicy venir la Faim, vray portrait d’Atropos: Son noir cuir est percé des poinctes de ses os. Elle baaille tousjours: l’œil au crane luy touche, Et l’une à autre jouë. On voit dedans sa bouche Jaunir ses claires dents: et les vuydes boyaux Paroissent à travers les rides de ses peaux. Pour ventre elle n’a point que du ventre la place: Ses coudes et genous s’enflent sur la carcasse: Insatiable monstre, à qui pour un repas A peine suffiroit tout ce qui vit çà bas. Son gosier va cherchant la viande és viandes. L’un mets l’autre semond: ses entrailles gourmandes Se vuydent en mangeant. De ses enfans la chair Son enragé desir ne peut mesme estancher: Ains quelquefois encor, ô gloutonnie estrange! Pour remplir ses boyaux, ses boyaux elle mange. Elle amoindrit son corps pour le faire plus grand. Of Atropos the verie shape, Lo, Hunger comes at ones, Her blackned skinne is pearced with The sharpe points of her bones: She euer greedie longing gants, With hollow suncken eie, With cheekes togeather clapped close, And in her mouth they see Her wide-set teeth come Saffron hew’d: Her emptie bowels cleare, Do through the wrinckles of her skinne Transparantlie appeare.

(Bartas 251–67)

246  Scots Renaissance And for her bellie, hath she nought Of bellie but the place, Her knees and elbows hidelesse on Her carcasse swels apace. A monster most insatiable, Whome to, but for a fill, All that is liuing heere below, But skarcelie suffice will: Her swallowing throat goes seeking still Her meat in verie meats: One dish another summonds, and Her gourmand entrails eats, And toomes at once: The verie flesh Euen of her children young, May skantlie stanch her raging lust, Thus of her hunger sprung: But euen sometimes (ô gluttonie Of strangest sort and rare) To fill her foule-some guts, to eat Her guts she doth not spare: That she thereby, may make it more, She makes her body lesse.21

(James 505–38)

No less powerful is the Bartasian portrait of internal illness. Here, perhaps because of the technical vocabulary, James succeeds less well in capturing the genuine poetic force of the original: Ja l’Asthme panthelant Va d’une grosse humeur son poulmon opilant. Le Phtise seche-corps ses esponges ulcere Par le fleuz corrosif d’une lente goutiere. La peripneumonie un brasier consumant Va dans ses trous venteux, inhumaine, allumant. Outreplus, l’Epieme, impiteux, l’assassine, D’apostume emplissant le creux de sa poitrine. La Pleuresie encor le dague par le flanc, Faisant tousjours bouillir sous ses costes le sang. L’Incube apres l’estouffe: et d’une phlegme espesse, Comme importun daemon, le sein panthois luy presse.

(Bartas 359–70)

King James VI  247 And els that humour grosse Lights-stopper, him Asthmatique makes Ay panting in a Crosse. And the Corroziue flowing of A gutter dropping slow, His spongious lightes doth vlcerate, and Hims dries cum’d Ptisick so. The Peripneumonie withall A hote consuming braize, Goes cruell in his breathing boares And heat doth kendle and raize. And als the pittilesse Empiem doth Him sease among the rest, With an Apostume filling vp The howest of his brest. And furthermore the Pleurisie Doth brod him in the sides, In making euer boile that blood Which vnder his ribbes abides.

(James 722–44)

After translating Les Furies, James sets out on his own, with his brief epic, The Lepanto, in 1032 lines (516 fourteeners).22 It recounts Christianity’s greatest victory over the Turks in the sixteenth century, the 1571 naval battle of Lepanto. James develops some traditional epic motifs: the assembly in heaven, the heavenly messenger sent to arouse one side, the council of war, Fama arousing the other side, the muster of the nations and the generals, and the carnage. He is especially effective in recounting the howling and suffering of the combatants: Their Cannons rummisht all at once … The Fishes were astonisht all, To heare such hideous sound, The Azur Skie was dim’d with Smoke, The dinne that did abound, Like thunder rearding rumling raue With roares the highest Heauen, And pearst with pith the glistering vaults Of all the Planets seauen: The piteous plaints, the hideous howles,

248  Scots Renaissance The greeuous cries and mones, Of millions wounded sundrie waies, But dying all at ones, Conjoynd with former horrible sound, Distemperd all the aire, And made the Seas for terrour shake With braying euery where.

(Lepanto 613, 617–32)

With this text, which McClure thinks is James’s masterpiece, the poet breaks away from the French.23 There is little French presence here, although James may have been inspired to essay the brief epic by Du Bartas’s La Judit or by some of Ronsard’s Hymnes. The idea for treating contemporary material came probably from Lucan, given a brief passage from the Pharsalia which he paraphrased in his first collection.24 From Du Bartas came perhaps the initial supplication to God that the narrator be inspired by the Holy Ghost, replacing the customary appeal to the muses: I pray thee Father, through thy Sonne, Thy word immortall still, The great Archangel of records And worker of thy will, To make thy holie Spreit my Muse, And eik my pen inflame, Aboue my skill to write this worke To magnifie thy name.

(Lepanto 17–24)

So too for the final prayer to God as praise, a Protestant Te deum lauda­ mus. If James had heard of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s project for Les Tragiques, this also could have directed him towards contemporary material and towards an allegorical reading of his poem to encourage persecuted Protestants in Catholic lands. How do we account for the French presence in King James’s work? Certainly, the connection to his mother, Queen Mary, is fascinatingly problematic. From Mary he inherited a rich French library and the at­ tractions of an elegant, aesthetic, yet in part forbidden French culture. Whatever the politics of Frenchness in the 1570s and 1580s, James learned his French and his love of French letters from his tutor, George Buchanan – a long-standing friend and collaborator of the Pléiade – prior to the arrival of Esmé d’Aubigny. The soon-to-be earl and duke of Lennox built on a foundation already laid. Yet James was to rebel against his mother. It is

King James VI  249

scarcely a coincidence that the twelve liminary sonnets of the Prentise are of the same number as the twelve (eleven plus one incomplete) Casket Sonnets in French. James, writing in Scots, appeals to the gods and the muses to assist him and inspire him in his endeavour to become a good, serious poet. In the Uranie he specifically denounces the “shameles rymes” (169) and “lascivious speache” (175) which, under his pen, recall the Casket Sonnets as much as anything else produced in Scotland in the ­preceding decades. James could hardly escape the presence of Pierre de Ronsard, the Prince of Poets, the greatest of the century. James admired and was influenced by him. Still, Ronsard was the mother’s poet, the ­writer of much shameless, lascivious verse (from a Calvinist perspective), and, more to the point, a loyal committed Catholic who denounced the Protestants in his Discours des Misères de ce temps, to which the Huguenots replied in comparable terms.25 Significantly, James did not publish his own brief efforts at amatory verse. His publications aimed at a higher, nobler register, one which he could cultivate on his own yet following a newer and better French model – Du Bartas. Consequently, I believe that James was influenced by Du Bartas in ways other than as material for translation. First, there is the question of Du Bartas’s extraordinary success, a French Protestant poet acclaimed at home in Catholic France, his œuvre credited with ninety-nine editions from 1574 to 1632, and translated into Latin, English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. James himself commissioned Thomas Hudson to translate La Judit, which had been originally published alongside L’Uranie in La Muse chres­ tienne of 1574; Joshua Sylvester’s English versions of La Sepmaine and La Seconde Semaine made quite an impact on the major English Renaissance poets.26 Du Bartas offered James a model to follow on more than one level. Second, one of these levels is epic. Whereas Ronsard’s Franciade proved to be a failure, Du Bartas offered the precedent of a successful Christian epic. For Du Bartas Christian epic is not uniquely narrative or even heroic in the narrow sense of the term. As he explains in the Brief Advertissement of 1584, his long poem is heroic and other things as well.27 His artistic creation will imitate, draw inspiration from, and reflect God’s divine ­creation; his epic and encyclopedic poetry will attain a totality which, as microcosm, will direct our vision to the totality of the macrocosm: God’s weeks and works. In the opening sonnets in The Essayes of a Prentise the speaker asks for the gift of poetic description, may his descriptions appear to be real so that readers will see and hear them. Clearly James had in mind the descriptive passages in La Sepmaine which speak to the glory and

250  Scots Renaissance

plenitude of God’s creation and to the Renaissance ideal of the epic, something like a Gesamptkunstwerk which will testify to the author’s erudition and contain in itself all other poetic genres. The epic will thus be a summa testifying to the author’s and readers’ love of God and of the cosmos created by God, in a sublime style which draws the reader to the progressive revelation of the sacred and how it was made manifest to man. By so doing, they will share in God’s creation and in the aesthetic and sacred gifts of Scripture. At various times in his œuvre Du Bartas speaks of the supreme value of peace and harmony: at the end of the First Day when order was imposed on chaos, at the beginning of the Second Day, and when God offers the olive branch of reconciliation to Noah and the remnants of life after the Flood. So too, in The Lepanto, seemingly a poem of war, the narrator evokes again and again the virtues of peace. We know that the historical King James VI / I valued peace overall and constructed his own persona as a prince of peace.28 In this way he could, as prince and as poet, embody the topos of fortitudo et sapientia or armas y letras, the hallmark of a great ruler, the ideal sought after by all Renaissance monarchs. Unfortunately, the English were not impressed and wished for a more virile, warlike leader. From Du Bartas James may have received other themes that we find in his work: that all comes from God and God is all; that to praise God is man’s and the poet’s first duty; that God’s creation, because God created it, is beautiful, therefore beauty is not forbidden to the Protestant writer; and, finally, that the poetic voice, the projection of the implied author as narrator or speaker, is that of a Protestant Christian, a priest in his own conscience, an echo of God’s voice which created the universe – In the beginning was the Word – an echo that can share the truth, beauty, and goodness of God’s voice and creative potency. The implied author as narrator or speaker is a quite specific author-­ figure, King James of Scotland and the Isles. The regal persona is as central to our reading of James as it was to his mother, Queen Mary. James aspired to be a poet as well as a ruling monarch. He exploited the poetic vein in part to create his own cultural authority, totally distinct from that of his predecessor, the lyric, amorous, and Catholic Mary. Therefore, he chose to be seen as the epic, martial, and Protestant James. This is why he condemned the lyric of fin’ amor in The Uranie and why he never published the amorous sonnets directed to Queen Anna, Anne of Denmark, if indeed he wrote them himself. This is one reason why he chose to cultivate the long poem. In the Renaissance, epic was considered to be the noblest and most lofty of poetic kinds. It was appropriate, one could almost say

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inevitable, that the king, as the leader of his Pléiade, would reserve for himself the epic, in his striving to be or, at least, to be considered the ideal prince – master of fortitudo et sapientia. As such he would seek, in the political realm, to champion both war and peace, and in the realm of the muses to champion originality and imitation, inspiration and erudition, to sing of God and of men in a classical genre redeemed by Christ just as, he believed, mankind was and is redeemed.

18 William Alexander, The Monarchicke Tragedies

Sir William Alexander of Menstry, first earl of Stirling, lived a varied, exciting existence. Alexander, who followed King James to London in 1603, became a great man in the realm, active in four areas: literature, statecraft, colonial expansion, and religion. However, the colonial ventures ended in failure, darkening his later years; his life ended in poverty and, from the Scottish side of the border, odium. Alexander authored a considerable poetic corpus; in his day, he was a  respected and successful man of letters, praised by Michael Drayton, ­Samuel Daniel, and William Drummond of Hawthornden, among others.1 His works include Aurora (1604), a Petrarchan sonnet sequence largely of Italian influence, and Doomes-Day (1614, rev. 1637), a long Christian epic inspired by Du Bartas.2 Alexander is best known for his sequence of ­Senecan plays, The Monarchicke Tragedies (1604, 1607, 1616), which include Croesus, Darius, The Alexandraean Tragedy, and Julius Caesar.3 Because of his pioneering effort in the domain of classical drama and because of some personal and literary connections, it is believed that he may have been associated with the Sir Philip Sidney / Countess of Pembroke coterie. This circle was especially given to the production of classical tragedy t­ aken from Seneca and Plutarch but also grounded in French humanist tragedy. Mary Sidney herself translated Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine. Thomas Kyd translated Garnier’s Cornélie. Samuel Daniel wrote Cleopatra, probably due to his acquaintance with Étienne Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive, and the later, revised version of Cleopatra incorporates material from ­Garnier’s Marc Antoine. Additional Senecan plays are Philotas by Daniel, The Vir­ tuous Octavia by Samuel Brandon, and Alaham and Mustapha by Fulke Greville.4 Finally, it would appear that the verse form cultivated by ­Alexander, Brandon, Daniel, and Greville (the alternately rhyming i­ ambic

William Alexander  253

decasyllable: a10 b10 a10 b10 c10 d10 c10 d10 etc.), like the fourteener, was meant to be an English equivalent of the French alexandrine couplet. Due in large measure to the triumph of Shakespeare’s drama and that of his contemporaries, critics have not been kind to the Senecan current, treating it with condescension and neglect. In a recent article, T. HowardHill cites the negative judgments on Alexander’s tragedies from L.E. Kastner and H.B. Charlton (“as a poet the precision of phrase and the sense of the perfect word he lacks entirely … As with verbal qualities of style, so too with the sentiments in his dramas and the characters who express them: the particular is lost in the general, sentiment becomes platitude, opinion nothing but moral commonplace”) and from his biographer Thomas H. McGrail (“The Alexandraean Tragedy must still remain one of the dreariest, dullest, most tedious, involved, and prosy attempts at the dramatic ever written in the English language … the general theme is reiterated with the dull and monotonous insistence of a throbbing tooth”).5 McGrail, actually, condemns all of Alexander’s writings for being tedious, boring, didactic, and mediocre. Meanwhile, although Howard-Hill disapproves of the rather extreme statements by Kastner / Charlton and McGrail, she herself suggests that Alexander was led astray by his misguided decision “to model his plays on the denatured Senecan imitations of Robert Garnier and other sixteenth-century French tragedians,” for “Garnier and the o ­ thers advanced into a cul-de-sac; Alexander bricked it up after them.”6 Howard-Hill reproaches the French plays for being meant for recitation and not performance, with the result that “any touch of theatricality (was) avoided on principle.” In contrast to Howard-Hill, scholars who work on the French humanist tragedy have a higher opinion of the genre and of the texts that can be assigned to it. A good number of full-length studies – in French, German, and English – have contributed to the revaluation of humanist tragedy and of the Renaissance experiments in drama.7 Therefore, the Continental scholarly tradition can contribute to a comparable revaluation of William Alexander and his Monarchicke Tragedies. To begin with, it should be noted that, since 1944, it is universally recognized that the French humanist tragedies were definitely meant to be performed, and that they were performed, both at various courts and in the colleges. Howard-Hill’s only authority on this topic, the only one she cites, is the Kastner and Charlton “Introduction,” which dates from 1921. The first of the monarchic plays, The Tragedy of Darius, was originally published in 1603.8 The action takes place soon after the battle of Arabella, which brought about the total victory of Alexander the Great over King

254  Scots Renaissance

Darius of Persia. Darius bemoans his defeat and his loss – his men slain or captured and his wife fallen into enemy hands. Alexander, on the other hand, joys in his triumph and, spurning Darius’s offer of ransom, proclaims that he makes war only for glory, honour, and ambition; he will conquer the entire world because, just as there can be only one sun, there can be only one Alexander. The captured royal ladies – Darius’s wife, mother, and daughter – bewail their fate yet are comforted by Alexander, who offers them grace and honour. As he explains to a confidant, he spurns mere love, that is, desire for the wife or the daughter; Mars alone occupies his heart, and he conquers first himself and all weakness and vice within him. Meanwhile, in the Persian camp, Bessus and Narbarzenes plot to betray Darius by convincing him to abdicate (temporarily) and then retaining the crown for themselves. Although bereaved by the news of his wife’s death, Darius spurns the treacherous counsels of Bessus and Narbarzenes; he will keep his diadem and resist to the end, to conquer or to die. Scorning the traitors and eager to defeat the Persians yet also to be magnanimous to their ruler, Alexander learns how Darius was slain by Bessus’s men. He swears to avenge Darius’s death. The most plausible French source for The Tragedy of Darius is Daire by Jacques de La Taille, published in 1573, twelve years after the author’s early demise.9 Kastner and Charlton propose that, although the English play may have been suggested by the French one, the two works are very  different, and there appears to be no evidence of textual borrowing.10 The similarities in plot can be accounted for by independent reading in Plutarch. Whatever one’s answer to the question of sources, it is instructive nevertheless to compare the two tragedies. First and foremost, women play a much smaller role in Daire, if they play a role at all. La Taille’s drama begins not only after the battle but also after Darius’s wife has perished. In Act I Darius is crushed and miserable because, among other things, his wife died without him, and his son, daughters, and mother now belong to Alexander. The women never appear on stage and have no function in the plot. Also, the theme of sexual jealousy, so prominent in William Alexander, does not appear in Jacques de La Taille. The Scots Darius speaks in no uncertain terms: Darius A stranger now o’re my delights doth raigne, And may extort the treasures of my soule;

William Alexander  255 Now, not till now, I apprehend my harmes, When I imagine how my best belov’d Must entertaine mine enemy in her armes, And I so farre from offering ayde remov’d; A host of furies in my brest I finde … Such poison’d thoughts like Serpents sting my soule … Would God that I had neither eyes nor eares, Which to the heart intelligence might give; This aggravates the weight of my despaire, When doubt objects to breake loves last defence, How he is yong and fierce, she yong and faire, He to offend, she subject to offence; From wronging me, both cannot long abstaine: Her beauty is sufficient to allure, His bravery is sufficient to obtaine. Captaines will force, and Captives must endure. (Darius 111–17, 124, 127–36)

Because the plot line begins after the queen’s death and because there is no love interest, in Daire the action is more intense, more concentrated, than in The Tragedy of Darius. That action is largely political. Bessus and Narbarzenes conspire at an earlier stage in the narrative; their conspiring can be envisaged as the central action of the play. Both La Taille and William Alexander include in the debates the captain of the Greek mercenaries in Darius’s army, named Patron in both the French and the English, who opposes the traitors, firms up Darius’s courage, and urges him to repair to the mercenaries’ camp where he will be safe. Alexander the Great himself becomes a force to be reckoned with only at the end of Act IV and appears on stage only in Act V. In other words, Daire is Darius’s play, whereas The Tragedy of Darius has two heroes, two protagonists as it were, with Alexander as antagonist to the protagonist Darius, and Darius as antagonist to the protagonist Alexander; or, if you prefer, in the end Alexander replaces Darius as hero, king, icon, model, and protagonist. Finally, whereas in William Alexander’s play the chorus remains outside the action, commenting on it from afar, in the tradition of Robert Garnier, in Jacques de La Taille the chorus is integrated into the drama since it is comprised of Persian soldiers who remain faithful to Darius and then offer themselves to Alexander the Great’s mercy, for, as they say, he is kind and forgiving:

256  Scots Renaissance Le Chœur Veux-tu les armes prendre, Pour icelui venger? Veux-tu sous Alexandre Désormais te ranger? … Lequel de nous ignore La bonté de son cœur, Et sa justice encore, Alors qu’il est vainqueur? Volontiers il pardonne À l’ennemi rendu, Et bénin lui redonne Plus qu’il n’avait perdu.

(Daire 1363–6, 1375–82)

If William Alexander were acquainted with La Taille’s Daire, he would have modified it when creating his own Tragedy of Darius. The modification would have been an example of rhetorical amplificatio. He would have expanded La Taille’s 1308 lines to his own 2222 lines. He would have taken the brief evocation of the French Darius’s regrets that his family has fallen into the enemy’s hands and developed them into a major increment in the plot: Darius’s sexual jealousy and Alexander’s resistance to sexual temptation, with Darius’s women – mother, wife, and daughter – appearing on stage and bewailing their fate as emotionally and rhetorically as Darius himself did. Here it should be noted that in both plays a messenger recounts how Alexander came to the ladies’ tent in order to console them, and describes Alexander’s deed of generosity in similar terms: Le Chœur Mais elle étant dolente, Le fils de Jupiter La vint jusqu’en sa tente Humblement conforter, Même à sa prisonnière Son service il offrit, Et sa pompe première Reprendre il lui souffrit. De ses filles et d’elle Il n’entama l’honneur,

William Alexander  257 Bien qu’elle fût tant belle, Et lui jeune, et Seigneur.

(Daire 1387–98)

Tiriotes Then he himselfe did to our Tent resort, And with the mildest words he could conceive, Your Mother, Wife, and Children did exhort Such terrours vaine (since but surmiz’d) to leave; And he protested that they should expect No harme of him their courage to appall, Then all things did with great regard direct, That no man might endammage them at all.

(Darius 1259–66)

In addition, as we have seen, the Scots dramatist would have expanded Alexander the Great’s role, introducing him on stage as early as Act II and thus making him the dramatic equal of Darius. The expansion can be thought of as William Alexander’s expressed desire to be free of sources and influence – that is, to be free to create on his own – and perhaps also as something like a baroque response to the preceding tradition of Renaissance classicism – to aim farther and higher, to add and not subtract, to aim for additional grandeur and nobility even if artistic unity suffers. Kastner and Charlton offer a final, incontrovertible argument that Alexander the dramatist did not know the French Daire: that play and La Taille’s Alexandre were printed together, and William Alexander could not have known the French Alexandre because it is so totally different from his own The Alexandraean Tragedy – there are no similarities whatsoever.11 La Taille’s Alexandre treats the world conqueror’s death allegedly by poison as a conspiratorial response to the great man’s tyranny and decadence. William Alexander’s play begins after the world conqueror’s death: act i is a set speech by Alexander the Great’s ghost. The remaining four acts explore the violence and self-destructive behaviour of the various i­ndividuals and cliques who hope to replace their Master. Although ar­gumenta ex silentio, whether from Kastner and Charlton or from me, are subject to extreme caution, I have to ask the question: Why would a Renaissance poet create a drama on Alexander the Great dealing uniquely with the cabales and intrigues of his eventual successors? One plausible answer is that the poet in question was acquainted with a play which treated Alexander the Great’s death and that he wished not to be bound by the preceding source or model but instead to be original and thus to take his own path.

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There is another possibility, one not explored by Kastner and Charlton: that William Alexander was indeed acquainted with Jacques de La Taille’s Alexandre, and that La Taille’s presence can be found, not in The Alexandraean Tragedy but, rather, in The Tragedy of Darius. In La Taille, Sigambre, Darius’s mother, and Saptine, her daughter and now Alexander’s wife, weep over and mourn Alexander’s imminent death; in William Alexander, Sisigambis, Darius’s mother, Statira, his wife, and Statira, his daughter, weep over and mourn Darius’s imminent and actual death. Sigambre speaks of all her losses, including her father, brothers, other sons, and her greatest son of all, while Sisigambis speaks of her losses, one son and then the other, her greatest: Sigambre N’ay-je pas veu mon pere, et mes octante freres, Tous meurtris en un jour par le Fils d’Artaxerse? N’ay-je pas veu aussi la destinee adverse Faire que de sept fils un seul il me restoit, Lequel encor du sort, qui riant le flattoit, Pour tomber de plus haut, fut un temps eslevé?

(Alexandre 1158–63)

Sisigambis I suffred when I saw Oxatres slaine, My loving Sonne, and most entirely lov’d; I dy’d in Darius, when he try’d in vaine What Fates would do, yet still their hatred prov’d.

(Darius 613–16)

In addition, Sigambre remarks upon the fact that the French Alexander has become a son to her, a new son replacing the others, while the Scots Alexander himself calls Sisigambis “Mother”: Sigambre Mais parmy tant de maux j’avois au moins trouvé Un confort, un soulas, un qui me cherissoit, Un qui par sa bonté mes maux amortissoit: C’est luy que je tenois au lieu de feu mon Fils, Et de tous mes parents, qui estoient desconfis, C’estoit mon seul appuy, ô moy pauvre chetive!

(Alexandre 1164–9)

William Alexander  259 Alexander Rise Mother, rise, and calme those needlesse cares, I come to cure, not to procure your woe … I pray you mother set those plaints apart, They vex me more then sterne Bellona’s broils. … As if your Sonnes, command all that is mine, And I will seek to second your desire. (Darius 783–4, 795–6, 893–4)

If my hypothesis be correct, then William Alexander would quite possibly have known Jacques de La Taille’s Alexandre. He would then quite possibly have known La Taille’s Daire, and his own Tragedy of Darius could well be, in some sense of the term, a synthesis of the two French dramas, a work bringing Alexander into Darius’s text, making it a more complex and more interesting work of art, with two heroes, two protagonists. Thus we see how the Scottish poet may have adapted his sources, transforming them in major ways in order to take his own path. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is the last of the four Monarchicke Tragedies and perhaps the best.12 It presents the standard account of the events leading up to Caesar’s death found in so many early modern plays, of which the best known is Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Act i: The goddess Juno exposes the situation, expresses her hatred of Rome, and vows to do her best to bring harm to these descendants of Aeneas. Act ii: Caesar expresses to Marc Antony his (Alexandrian) pride and will to conquer the entire world yet also, against Marc Antony’s counsel, his decision to show mercy to his enemies. Meanwhile, Decius Brutus and Cicero, after lengthy discussion, agree that Caesar is a tyrant and must be brought down. They agree also to dissemble. Act iii: Cassius convinces Marcus Brutus that the issue is traditional Roman freedom versus monarchic tyranny, and that they have to act now. Marcus Brutus reveals the situation to his wife Portia, who, as a noble Roman matron, will participate in her husband’s endeavour, sharing responsibility. Act iv: The conspirators agree to act at once against Caesar but, on Marcus Brutus’s insistence, to spare Marc Antony. Although Calpurnia, by her fears and by her prophetic dream, convinces Caesar not to go to the Senate, Decius Brutus changes the man’s mind. Before he departs Caesar reveals his pride and arrogance, and also his dread and anxiety.

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Act v: Marcus Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero debate the justification for civil war. A Nuntius recounts Caesar’s death to Calpurnia, who screams for vengeance. According to Kastner and Charlton, it appears probable that William Alexander did not know or was not influenced by Jacques Grévin’s César, which dates from 1589.13 Grévin’s play is less problematic and more direct. Grévin portrays Marcus Brutus as a man committed to overthrowing Caesar from the beginning, and therefore without scruples and without hesitation. Caesar also is of one piece, both statesmanlike and merciful, sans boasting and sans arrogance. Brutus and Cassius are joyful after the assassination, and it is Marc Antony, in addition to Calpurnia, who cries out for vengeance. Furthermore, the choruses function differently in Grévin than they do in Alexander. Resembling Jacques de La Taille, Jacques Grévin innovates on the traditional chorus in Seneca or Garnier. In César the chorus is partially integrated into the action. No longer uttering only generalities on Fortune’s Wheel and the benefits of an obscure life, in act v the Chorus, made up of Roman soldiers, sides with Antony and calls for taking up arms against Brutus the traitor: Le premier soldat Armons-nous sur ce traistre! Armes, armes soldats, mourons pour nostre maistre! … C’est maintenant, soldats, qu’il nous fault hazarder, Voire plus promptement que n’est le commander. (César 1082–3, 1088–9)

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, on the contrary, the choruses remain distant from and outside the action, just as in The Tragedy of Darius. As in the case of La Taille’s Daire vis-à-vis The Tragedy of Darius, William Alexander may have been acquainted with Grévin’s César and, consequently, may have chosen to treat Caesar’s death differently, that is, by complicating the action and complicating each character’s motivation and response to the action. If this be so, then it would serve as a cor­ roborating example of a baroque temperament enriching and amplifying its Renaissance predecessor. This said, it can be posited that Alexander was influenced by at least one other French humanist tragedy. Both Kastner / Charlton and McGrail observe that Caesar’s two speeches in act ii imitate Caesar’s tirade in Garnier’s Cornélie, Act iv.14 Cornélie treats

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of an earlier event in the last years of the Republic: Caesar’s defeat of Pompey in the East, and the death of Cornelia, Pompey’s widow. Both Cornélie and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar portray the “alexandrian” Caesar – the will to power and arrogant boasting of his own accomplishments, along with the mistaken assumption that, if he shows mercy, Rome and Caesar’s enemies will welcome him with joy because he has done so much good. The two speeches in question portray the boasting, braggart Caesar, who declames with pride his great deeds and conquests, listed in the same order and closing with the victory over Pompey. In addition, bits of dialogue appear to have been taken from Cornélie: César Et les Germains affreux, naiz au mestier de Mars, Ont veu couler le Rhin dessous mes estendars.

(Cornélie 1343–4)

Caesar The Germans from their birth inur’d to warre … (Mask’d with my banners) saw their Rhene runne red. (Julius Caesar 351, 354) César J’ay trop peu de souci de prolonger mon heure. Je veux vivre si bien que mourant je ne meure, Ains que laissant la tombe à mon terrestre faix, Je vole dans le ciel sur l’aile de mes faicts.

(Cornélie 1429–32)

Caesar Men should strive to live well, not to live long. And I would spend this momentary breath To live by fame for ever after death: For, I aspire in spight of fates to live.

(Julius Caesar 512–15)

Second, Cicero plays a central role in Cornélie: he delivers the Act i set speech, which is both an exposition and a moral judgment on Rome. In acts ii and iii he counsels and comforts Cornelia. Cicero delivers similar speeches in both Cornélie and Julius Caesar; he also voices fear of civil

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war, concern over Caesar’s growing absolutism, and belief in destiny, that Caesar will fall like so many others. His very presence as one of the principal conspirators in Alexander’s play comes probably from Garnier’s drama, for, concerning Julius Caesar, he is scarcely mentioned in Plutarch and the other classical sources. In act iv of Cornélie Cassius and Decimus Brutus have the same debate and utter the same sentiments as Cassius and Marcus Brutus in Julius Caesar. However, Alexander then gave Decimus Brutus (whom he calls Decius Brutus) a different, expanded role as one of the conspirators: in act iii he debates with Cicero, and in Act iv the two Brutuses debate with Cassius. Finally, as in Plutarch, it is Decimus / Decius Brutus who convinces Caesar to go to the senate despite Calpurnia’s urgings; this is the case in Grévin’s César as in Alexander’s Caesar. In both Cornélie and Julius Caesar Marc Antony has the same function: counseling firmness to Caesar. And both plays underscore the pathos of the noble Roman wife, tortured by prophetic nightmares, hoping desperately that her husband will survive and, then, when he doesn’t, vowing vengeance. Compared to the dramas of La Taille, Grévin, and Garnier, The Monarchicke Tragedies are each a good 1000 lines longer. As we have seen, the action is more complex, and a greater number of themes are developed. In Garnier’s tragedies a female presence (Portia, Cornelia, the Jewish women in Les Juives) occupies stage front, and the action revolves around her reaction to the great events that occur offstage. This pattern leads to a relatively successful resolution of the problems posed by adherence to the classical rules. It also results in a mood or even a mode of lamentation and the elegiac, devices which become even more pervasive in Garnier’s successor, Antoine de Montchrestien. It is by no means a coincidence that Walter Benjamin, in his long-­ neglected yet superb study of German baroque tragedy, names the genre Trauerspiel, a term that can be translated simply as “tragedy” but also as “drama of mourning,” and can be applied equally to the French plays.15 William Alexander exploits the mode, making a place for the Persian royal ladies in his Darius. However, compared to the French and the German, he concentrates above all on questions of statecraft – how Darius and Alexander or Caesar and Brutus believe the ruler should behave and what he should do. Ambition and arrogance or mercy and remissness are seen from the perspective of the state: the monarch’s ambition, arrogance, ­mercy, and remissness. William Alexander expands the scenes of plotting and conspiracy where, there also, proper authority and tyranny, and the

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appropriate response to each, are debated. In fact, The Alexandraean Tragedy is devoted entirely to the cliques of conspirators, each aiming to succeed the deceased Alexander and, thusly, to obtain absolute power. As noted earlier, the French humanist tragedies were written for performance and were performed successfully. The same is true for classical drama in the Dutch Golden Age, the plays by Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and Joost van den Vondel. Indeed, Vondel’s Gysbreght van Aemstel, a text of national awakening and national identity, has been successfully revived up to the present day. Vondel remains the national poet of the Netherlands. It is certain that the French and Dutch audiences, in contrast to today’s theatre-going public, were entranced by long, magnificent debates that treat of moral and political matters, and less in need of scenic action and the evolution of individual psychology. It is also likely that a number of stage practices which enhanced the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century productions, practices which formed part of an oral culture, have disappeared from our traditions. Although William Alexander’s tragedies were never staged, with judicious cutting they could have been and would not have been out of place in the international theatrical world of the time. Looking at Alexander from the vantage point of Garnier and Montchrestien, I submit that the French and Anglo-Scots tragic drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries can and ought to be examined on its own terms and not always with regard to Shakespeare and Racine. We do not find rounded characters or deep psychological analysis. These are stylized personae, actually just as Shakespeare’s and Racine’s characters are stylized personae; the primary difference is that we are trained to think of Hamlet and Lear or of Oreste and Britannicus as mimetic and “realistic.” The twentieth-century avant-garde theatre reverts to a pre-Shakespearean unconcern with roundedness and psychology. In humanist tragedy action gives rise to speech, and not speech to action. The central focus is speech, language, and discourse. In the same act a Darius will be fearful yet defiant, and a Brutus will be cautious yet defiant. Darius and Brutus, Alexander and Caesar, do not grow or evolve from act i to act v. Instead, they reveal to the other characters and to the audience slowly yet surely what they were and are from the beginning. In this they resemble the heroes in Corneille. Above all, they speak, and their primary function is to speak or, rather, to debate. The debating concerns occasionally private questions of love and family but most of all questions of politics and governance, and of power relations among the elite. How is the power to be waged? Ought the prince to display rigour or mercy to his defeated adversaries? Ought the prince to be feared or loved? Ought

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a tyrant who also performs just acts be endured or overthrown? Does honour reside in boldness or in prudence? In addition to the debates and the lamentations, the choruses offer general truths, the common wisdom of the ages – Boethian common wisdom – philosophical consolation concentrating on the vanity of human wishes and the mutability of man’s fate. The speeches then teach the implied reader / public and also instill in them the pity and terror of Greek classical tragedy plus the admiration of French classical tragedy. These speeches also draw from the reader / public admiration for themselves, for they move the reader / public by means of their magnificent rhetoric and also cause the reader / public to admire the rhetoric. Here should be noted the superb patterns of imagery, especially in the choruses and more especially in William Alexander’s choruses. Flowers blasted in a storm, breath and dreams cut off, a rose torn by the wind, an eagle in the air, a ship on the sea, wind in a cloud of dust, a salamander in fire, a snake changing its skin, or water, fire, and poison – these are some of the similes and metaphors for life elaborated in The Monarchicke Tragedies. A struggle of wills gives rise to or is made manifest in the best of these debates. The case can be made that central to the dramatic action is the movement back and forth of the competing, battling masculine wills – each a will to conquer, and to conquer by the tongue and the mind. Individuals on stage can be misled; the reader / public never is. The issues are of supreme importance, of universal concern, not manifestations of one individual’s psychology. And always present is the stoical wisdom emanating from a stoical chorus undermining, and in struggle with, the ambition, arrogance, honour, politics, and statecraft that motivate the speakers in the debates. To the extent that Elizabethan and French classical tragedy mark a new aesthetic and a new age – one which will lead into our modernity – the humanist tragedy, in its baroque splendour, can be deemed one of the last manifestations of a rhetorical, non-mimetic, premodern (in all senses of the term) aesthetic and world view, worthy of our respect and admiration.

19 William Drummond of Hawthornden

It is perhaps appropriate that this study of earlier Scots literature end with one of its more fascinating writers, one whose ambivalent place in the ­canon is emblematic of Scottish literature as a whole. William Drummond of Hawthornden is the author of a rich corpus of verse, sacred and profane, the major collections published in 1616 and 1623, and also of works in prose.1 Although respected and admired by his contemporaries – by Alexander, Drayton, and also Ben Jonson, who took the trouble to pay him a visit in the North – he was seriously neglected until the most recent times. Scholars in Scottish studies account for the neglect in a number of ways. In the twentieth century, and especially with the launching of the modern Scottish Renaissance under the aegis of Hugh MacDiarmid, a number of ideological stances shaped what was to be considered genuine in Scottish literature. These included writing in Scots, resisting Calvinism in all its manifestations, running counter to Englishness in all its forms, being a literary pioneer ahead of the times, and forming part of an organic community, one of high culture yet open to and benefiting from the spirit of the people.2 In all these areas Drummond was found wanting. He wrote uniquely in English; he was influenced by leading English poets, including Spenser and Sidney; his work is derivative, with much taken from earlier writers; as a “pure Petrarchan” in the early seventeenth century, with no ties to Donne and the Metaphysicals, he was hopelessly out of date; he was the king’s man in religion and politics; and, from 1610 on, he remained in Scotland, largely on his estates, alienated from the court and from communities, organic or not. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that William Drummond remains only a name, if that, among Anglicists, including specialists in the century

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of Milton. On the other hand, scholars in Scottish literature have, over the last few decades, done good work on the laird of Hawthornden, with progressively more and more scrutiny. His stature is recognized: one authority calls him the greatest Scotland-born poet of his age, and another claims that he is, arguably, the best between Gavin Douglas and Alan Ramsay.3 I agree. Although Morna R. Fleming writes that Drummond’s sources were predominantly Italian, a case can be made for an equal French impact, especially in his longer texts.4 It is known that, after graduating from Edinburgh University in 1605, he spent two years at Bourges reading law, one of a number of Scots who frequented the cathedral city. Drummond’s notebook for the year 1607 shows him to be an inveterate theatre-goer and is an important though neglected source for the history of the French stage.5 He was a no less inveterate collector of books: two inventories of his library reveal, as with Queen Mary and King James, a predilection for volumes in French.6 Finally, his prose treatise on death and preparing for death is heavily indebted to Montaigne and Charron as well as to Italian texts, and his monumental History of the Five Jameses, published posthumously in 1655 and reprinted a number of times within sixty years of his death, used some French sources including Inventaire général de l’histoire de France by Jean de Serres and Histoire abrégée de tous les rois de France, Angleterre et Escosse by David Chalmers.7 Drummond is best known as a poet of love, the author of a superb sonnet sequence with embedded madrigals, songs, and sextains, an achievement which has led Michael Spiller to praise him as the “finest British Petrarchist.”8 Poems: The First Part is a sequence in the grand manner, revelling in and celebrating Petrarchan love (the Renaissance version of medieval fin’ amor), the speaker’s adoration of his lady, and his multivaried suffering in the process.9 All the standard themes and motifs appear. The speaker falls in love, wounded and burned by the lady’s eyes, so beautiful and so deadly. The flame or the arrow is so deadly because Cupid is in her: she is he. Her beauty radiates in every way. He suffers from separation in space, caused by her departure. He seeks consolation or escape in nature, and fails. He suffers from insomnia or he dreams about her, possessing her in sleep yet awaking to emptiness. Is the day better or is it the night? She tortures and slays him. He wants to die. Love is death, and death is love. Drummond borrows from a number of poets, French and Italian. Among the French, L.E. Kastner cites especially Ronsard, Desportes, Pontus de Tyard, and Jean Passerat.10 One motif may have a special French

William Drummond of Hawthornden  267

connection. It relates to the neo-Platonic notion of the Form or Idea, with the lady praised as the embodiment of the Idea or the Idea incarnate in the lady. Du Bellay made famous the topos in two of the final sonnets of the Olive; Drummond develops it in two of his texts.11 However, he then departs from his French and English predecessors to adhere directly to Petrarch’s conception by having the lady die, and by composing a small corpus meditating on his love now thwarted by the greatest of barriers. This is the material contained in the opening section of Poems: The Second Part.12 The chief equivalent in French would be the sequence Sur la mort de Marie by Ronsard, added to the Second Livre des Amours in the 1578 edition of his Œuvres.13 Ronsard and Drummond develop the theme of the beloved’s demise in quite divergent ways, and there is no textual evidence of borrowing. However, both writers meditate on the power of Death to conquer Love, the shortness of happy desire on earth, disillusion with beauty and hope in the world, the transience of beauty, the speaker’s grief, his wish to die also, that living without her is death, and that she visits him in his sleep to offer consolation and to urge him to aim for higher things. Interestingly, Passerat, whom Drummond read and used, has a section in his works called Epitaphes de diverses per­ sonnes.14 Both Ronsard and Passerat wrote bereavement lyrics in the first person, poems meant to be in the voice of, and offered to, great patrons whose mistresses had died. Both then collected these disparate texts in their own œuvres, now meant to be interpreted as the poets’ own suffering with regard to their own deceased ladies. Drummond’s achievement in the high Petrarchen mode is to have maintained throughout these texts a consistent, high rhetorical stance and a voice of magnificent power eminently worthy of standing alongside the comparable sublime erotic voice of Petrarch and Ronsard. In addition, Drummond’s texts delve into the psyche of the courtly lover, exploring and also proclaiming the time-honoured traditions of the erotic poetic “I” in the medieval and Renaissance lyric. On the one hand, Petrarch, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Drummond, and the others are dominated by desire. The desire shapes the speaker and his relation to the lady. The desire is one of violence and rage, of masculine power. His are poems of seduction, and they develop on all levels a rhetoric of seduction. At the same time, because of the obstacles, because of the lady’s ice in response to the speaker’s fire, he is devirilized. She becomes sadistic in her indifference to him, whereas he, pierced by her fire and tortured by her ice, suffers yet also joys masochistically in his suffering. One solution to a problem sans solutions is that the lady die and, the obstacle now absolute and irrevocable, the

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desire can be sublimated or, rather, transformed, with the lady, now the master, in total control, seducing the speaker in a new love, a spiritual love according to which she leads him on high to the Platonic Idea or to the Christian God. In all of these traditions the love is grounded in rhetoric and expressed through rhetoric. We are dealing with a stylized fictional love story, with both the speaker’s desire and the lady’s body artistic constructs, those of a writing lover, or, if you prefer, of a lover who expresses and creates all – desire, obstacle, torture, death, and sublimation – through poetry. It exists only as poetry. Here should be noted Drummond’s repeated evocation of, and meditation on, his situation as a lover and as a poet.15 We find him admitting that he seeks to win fame as a poet and, even if he fails, it is enough to have striven, and that, even though all decays in the world, yet he writes and loves (First Part, sonnet 2). He also develops the topos that, to write genuine poetry of love, you have to be in love. Your love must be sincere. Consequently, artificial high art is by necessity insincere; much better is the speaker’s own “rude Pincell” (First Part, sonnet 3:9). This topos is cultivated with brio by Du Bellay, who builds on it in the important text Contre les Petrarquistes:16 Ce n’est que feu de leurs froides chaleurs, Ce n’est qu’horreur de leurs feintes douleurs, Ce n’est encor’ de leurs souspirs & pleurs Que vents, pluye & orages … Il n’y a roc qui n’entende leur voix, Leurs piteux cris ont faict cent mille fois Pleurer les monts, les plaines & les bois, Les antres & fonteines. (Du Bellay, Petrarquistes 9–12, 81–4) In one Part Sorrow so tormented lies, As if his Life at eu’ry Sigh would parte, Loue here blindfolded stands with Bow and Dart, There Hope lookes pale, Despaire with rainie Eyes. (Drummond, First Part, sonnet 3: 5–8) Je ry souvent, voiant pleurer ces fouls, Qui mille fois voudroient mourir pour vous, Si vous croyez de leur parler si doulx Le parjure artifice:

William Drummond of Hawthornden  269 Mais quant à moy, sans feindre ny pleurer, Touchant ce poinct, je vous puis asseurer, Que je veulx sain & dispos demeurer, Pour vous faire service.

(Du Bellay, Petrarquistes 185–92)

Of my rude Pincell looke not for such Arte, My Wit I finde now lessened to deuise So high Conceptions to expresse my Smart, And some thinke Loue but fain’d, if too too wise. (Drummond, First Part, sonnet 3: 9–12)

Finally, after the lady’s death Drummond’s speaker proclaims that now his lute will cease to sing or will sing only of woe – like the turtledove when it loses its mate. This theme was elaborated superbly by Jean de Sponde, referring to the lady’s absence not her demise; yet it is the speaker’s poetry which will die:17 Vous languissez mes vers; les glaçons de l’absence Esteignant vos fureurs au point de leur naissance, Vous n’entrebatez plus de souspirs vostre flanc, Vos arteres d’esprits, ny vos veines de sang: Et quoy, la mort vous tient? et ce front teint en cendre Vous marque les tombeaux où vous allez descendre ? … Je fendray doncques l’air par mes gemissemens Aussi large qu’il est en nos esloignemens: Mais puis que nos Amours, qui fuyent les ruines, Sont de roses privez, nourissons-les d’espines … Ainsi des Tourtereaux, qui perdent leur ami, Languit la voix ès bois, vive et morte à demi, Et ces mignons d’Amour tesmoignent qu’en leur perte Ils gaignent par leurs jeux la perte plus ouverte … Mourez, mes vers, mourez, puis que c’est vostre envie. Ce qui vous sert de mort, me servira de vie. (Sponde, Élégie 1–6, 143–6, 154–7, 164–5)

These last two lines are repeated, becoming a refrain, from lines 57–8 on. My Lute, bee as thou wast when thou didst grow With thy greene Mother in some shadie Groue,

270  Scots Renaissance When immelodious Windes but made thee moue … What art thou but a Harbenger of Woe? Thy pleasing Notes, be pleasing Notes no more, But orphane Wailings to the fainting Eare, Each Stoppe a Sigh, each Sound drawes foorth a Teare, Bee therefore silent as in Woods before, Or if that any Hand to touch thee daigne, Like widow’d Turtle, still her Losse complaine. (Drummond, Second Part, sonnet 8: 1–3, 8–14)

One delightful aspect of this rhetoric of sincerity comes from the fact that it is entirely fictive. Whether the Pléiade poets, the baroque poets of Eros, and the Scots sonneteers culminating in Drummond were in love with someone or simply in love with love or rebelling against Petrarchan love, of that we know nothing. When, in more than one sense of the term, woefully insincere, they proclaim their sincerity. When denouncing a sublime, artificial erotic rhetoric, they practice instead a middle-register, artificial erotic rhetoric. And they proclaim that they can no longer write while writing. As Edwin Morgan has argued, Drummond is a much richer poet than he has been given credit for.18 His corpus includes, among other things, a number of texts not at all in the high Petrarchan register, and more than a few misogynistic and / or obscene ones. These include poems which argue that a kiss in the dark is better than one in the light of the sun, or  which mock cuckolds, or which declare that the best is to have a ­woman and then leave her.19 These all have French and Italian antecedents. Most interesting of all is a magnificently misogynistic text, “For a Ladyes Summonds of Nonentree,” in sixty lines, published by Robert H. MacDonald in his selection from Drummond.20 Kastner had not ­included it in the two-volume Poetical Works, perhaps suffering from pudor academicus. At any rate, Drummond’s speaker denounces Kite. When she was young, he paid court to her, and she turned him down. Now, years later, when she is old and ugly and had welcomed crowds of men into her intimacy, she says she is ready. In response, the speaker mocks and insults her. The best satirical passages treat her age and deformity. The deformed, hideous old woman is a motif in the French poets, including Marot, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Belleau, Baïf, and Papillon de Lasphrise.21 Often the French insult their crones for acting as killjoys, that is, urging the speakers’ young ladies to resist them. Whatever the situation, the language and the spirit are the same:

William Drummond of Hawthornden  271 Vieille, qui rends semblable halaine A celle du Stigieux gouphre On d’une miniere de souphre …

Au seul souffler de ton haleine Les chiens effroiés, par la pleine Aguisent leurs abois.

(Du Bellay, l’Anterotique 40–2)

(Ronsard, Contre Denise sorciere 43–5) (Baïf, À Claudine 17)

Ton aléne un puant retret …

Unhappy Kite, doth not thy breath stinke worse Than that strong matter which Nature doth force From a turn’d Gutt, and through it sent perfum Thats but some stronger ordure to consume. (Drummond, Summonds 37–40) Vieille, qui as, ô vieille beste! Plus d’yeux que de cheveux en teste.

(Du Bellay, L’Anterotique 11–12)

Ton poil noir argenté où croutelle la taigne … Is not thy spotted Skull as Uglie bare As thy paintd cheeke? Se voyant rider la mammelle Comme un Escouillé de Cybele …

(Papillon, sonnet 22:1)

(Drummond, Summonds 42–3)

(Ronsard, Folastrie 3, 49–50) (Baïf, À Claudine 25)

Tes mammelles sont deux savates. Ton sein de feuille-morte, et tes bissacs pendans …

(Papillon, sonnet 22: 9)

Are not the Twinnes now of thy withered brest … Like sodden Haggises, and thy drye skin Like to those Bagges that Saffrons put with in. (Drummond, Summonds 45, 47–8) Vieille, au ventre … hola ma Muse, Veux-tu toucher les membres ords Qui point ne se montrent dehors?

(Du Bellay, L’Anterotique, 28–30)

272  Scots Renaissance Et, par ses deux conduis, souflante A bas une haleine puante …

(Ronsard, Folastrie 3: 53–4) (Baïf, À Claudine 32)

C’est un trou punés que ton con. Ton grand Cloaqueville où un monde s’enfonce … Let mee alone, and force mee not to enter If Hell be into earth its in your Center.

(Papillon, sonnet 22: 11)

(Drummond, Summonds 59–60)

If Drummond’s love poetry places him in the High Renaissance, his sacred verse moves him towards the baroque. He is one of the few poets in the British Isles to have composed an extended corpus in both domains. The devotional poetry appears, first of all, in the brief sequence Urania, or Spirituall Poems in the 1616 edition, following his elegy on the death of Prince Henry, Teares, on the Death of Moeliades. A longer sequence, Flowres of Sion, which opens Kastner’s volume 2, appears first  in 1623, although Kastner uses the 1630 edition.22 Among others, Sybil Lutz Severance and David Atkinson have praised Drummond’s d ­ evotional poetry and scrutinized its complex, coherent structure and  its no  less complex and ambiguous voice.23 They have isolated the themes which pervade the corpus: mutability, vanity, loneliness, anxiety, ­suf­fering, death, and redemption in, with, and because of God in his permanence. The influence or provenance is, again, both Italian and French. Drummond adheres to a baroque mentality exemplified by Tasso and Marino and by a good number of devotional poets in France, both Protestant and Catholic, who, although largely unrecognized in Kastner’s time, are today re­ edited in modern critical editions, studied, and esteemed.24 A first example: Sion 16 compares life and death, and life in the world and total life beyond, with “life and death” set off against each other in a rhyming pattern. We find a similar pattern in Du Bellay, and a number of poets contrast the two without rhyming throughout: Dieu, qui changeant avec’ obscure mort Ta bienheureuse & immortelle vie, Fus aux pecheurs prodigue de ta vie, Pour les tirer de l’eternelle mort: Celle pitié coupable de ta mort Guide les paz de ma facheuse vie, Tant que par toy à plus joyeuse vie

William Drummond of Hawthornden  273 Je soy’ conduit du travail de la mort. N’avise point, ô Seigneur ! que ma vie Se soit noyée aux ondes de la mort, Qui me distrait d’une si doulce vie. Oste la palme à cet’ injuste mort, Qui ja s’en va superbe de ma vie, Et morte soit tousjours pour moy la mort.

(Du Bellay, l’Olive 110)

Nous n’entrons point d’un pas plus avant en la vie Que nous n’entrions d’un pas plus avant en la mort; Nostre vivre n’est rien qu’une eternelle mort Et plus croissent nos jours plus decroit nostre vie. Quiconque aura vescu la moitié de sa vie Aura pareillement la moitié de sa mort; Comme non usitee on deteste la mort Et la mort est commune autant comme la vie. (Chassignet, Mespris 44: 1–8) Life to giue life depriued is of Life, And Death displai’d hath ensigne against Death; So violent the Rigour was of Death, That nought could daunt it but the Life of Life: No Power had Pow’r to thrall Lifes pow’r to Death, But willingly Life hath abandon’d Life, Loue gaue the wound which wrought this work of Death, His Bow and Shafts were of the Tree of Life. Now quakes the Author of eternall Death, To finde that they whom earst he reft of Life Shall fill his Roome aboue the listes of Death: Now all reioyce in Death who hope for Life. Dead Iesvs lies, who Death hath kill’d by Death, His Tombe no Tombe is, but new Source of Life. (Drummond, Sion, sonnet 16)

The evanescence of life compared to the blooming and fading of the rose  – originally a motif in Pléiade amatory verse – is here developed by  Drummond and by the French, including Mage de Fiefmelin and Chandieu: La durée de l’homme en ce val de miseres Est le temps de la fleur du matin jusqu’au soir.

274  Scots Renaissance Il naist viste et vit peu: mourant sans nul espoir De plus revoir le jour des flambeaux ordinaires. (Mage, sonnet 24 (p. 168): 1–4) Le Monde est un jardin, ses plaisirs sont ses fleurs. De belles y en a, et y en a plusieurs. Le lis espanouy sa blancheur y presente, La rose y flaire bon, l’œillet veut qu’on le sente Et la fleur du souci y est fort avancee; La violette y croist et la pensee aussi, Mais la mort est l’hiver, qui rend soudain transi Lis, rose, œillet, violette et pensee. (Chandieu, Octonaires 34) Looke how the Flowre, which lingringlie doth fade, The Mornings Darling late, the Summers Queene, Spoyl’d of that Iuice, which kept it fresh and greene, As high as it did raise, bowes low the head: Right so my Life (Contentments beeing dead, Or in their Contrairies but onelie seene) With swifter speede declines than earst it spred, And (blasted) scarce now shows what it hath beene. (Drummond, Sion, sonnet 3: 1–8)

Drummond’s Prayer, in the Urania, proclaiming that we humans are worms, slaves, and rebels against God, wallowing in our filth, is another common theme, as is the notion that glory and honour are to be found in heaven, not by sailing the seas, and that those who do so are led by Satan. One text, spoken by the Magdelene, was perhaps influenced by a poem from Desportes:25 Ses yeux sources de feu, d’où l’amour à l’emblée Souloit dedans les cœurs tant de traits blueter, Changez en source d’eau ne font que degouter L’amertume et l’ennuy de son ame troublée. De ses pleurs, ô Seigneur, tes pieds elle arosa. (Desportes, Poësies chrestiennes, sonnet 16: 5–9)

These Eyes (deare Lord) once Brandons of Desire, Fraile Scoutes betraying what they had to keepe, Which their owne heart, then others set on fire,

William Drummond of Hawthornden  275 Their traitrous blacke before thee heere out-weepe … Thus sigh’d to Iesvs the Bethanien faire, His teare-wet Feete still drying with her Haire. (Drummond, Sion, sonnet 12: 1–4, 13–14)

Jesus’s blood, shed as he bore the cross or, later, as he was crucified, and / or the speaker’s own blood, to be employed as ink in writing – this powerful image is exploited magnificently by La Ceppède and by Drummond: Aux Monarques vaincueurs la rouge cotte-d’armes Appartient justement. Ce Roy victorieux Est justement vestu par ces mocqueurs gens-d’armes D’un manteau, qui le marque & Prince, & glorieux. O pourpre emplis mon test de ton jus precieux Et luy fay distiller mille pourprines larmes, A tant que meditant ton sens mysterieux, Du sang trait de mes yeux j’ensanglante ces Carmes. (La Ceppède, Theoremes, vol. 2, 63: 1–8) Hencefoorth on thee mine only Good I’ll thinke, For only thou canst grant what I doe craue, Thy Naile my Penne shall bee, thy Blood mine Inke, Thy Winding-sheet my Paper, Studie Graue. And till that Soule forth of this Bodie flie, No Hope I’ll haue but only onelie Thee. (Drummond, Urania 2: 9–14)

Life as a shadow is developed by Chassignet, Sponde, and Drummond: L’ombre est tantost icy et puis, soudainement Elle s’evanouit, ainsi legerement S’enfuit la vie humaine inconstante et volage. … Est-il rien de plus vain que l’ombrage leger, L’ombrage remuant, inconstant, et peu stable? La vie est toutefois à l’ombrage semblable, A l’ombrage tremblant sous l’arbre d’un verger. (Chassignet, Mespris 99: 9–11 and 263: 5–8)

Beaux sejours, loin de l’oeil, prez de l’entendement, Au prix de qui ce Temps ne monte qu’un moment, Au prix de qui le jour est un ombrage sombre.

276  Scots Renaissance Vous estes mon desir; et ce jour, et ce Temps, Où le monde s’aveugle et prend son passetemps, Ne me seront jamais qu’un moment, et qu’une Ombre. (Sponde, Poèmes chrétiens, sonnet 6: 9–14). Life a right shadow is, For if it long appeare, Then it is spent, and Deathes long Night drawes neare; Shadowes are mouing, light, And is there ought so mouing as is this? When it is most in Sight, It steales away, and none can tell how, where, So neere our Cradles to our Coffines are. (Drummond, Sion, madrigal 1)

As with the sonnets of love, Drummond maintains a superb level of ­diction, genus grande at its best, exploiting all the figures of rhetoric at his command; and, when borrowing from here and there, Drummond always transforms his intertextual sources and makes the material his own. Quite often he creates from common themes and motifs, where analogues abound yet no specific source can be found. One particular structural coup in Sion is to interrupt the meditation on evanescence, pain, and death by a series of hymns which recount the Passion, Resurrection, Ascention, God’s eternity, and, finally, a fragment on the Last Judgment. By this process lyrical introspection is alleviated by verse narration, and the anguish of Christian meditation is alleviated by God’s own participation in the world. The implied reader is meant never to forget that all the questions have answers, that the answers are good, and that they will provide consolation and deliverance. Among the intertextual material which William Drummond makes his own are the sources for these longer poems providing consolation and answers: three texts from Ronsard. It is perhaps more profitable to scrutinize how Drummond creates something new in these longer poems of greater scope, than how he borrows from a sonnet or develops in the brief form a standard baroque topos. In Flowres of Sion, An Hymne of the Fairest Faire is taken from Ronsard’s Hymne de l’Éternité.26 Ronsard invented or created, so to speak, his n ­ otion of the hymn taken from Greek and neo-Latin usage – the Orphic hymns, Callimachus, and Marullus. This new vernacular “transplant” differs from the Christian tradition. For Ronsard, the hymn had three functions: to recount a myth narrative, to discover the mysteries and reveal them to the

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implied reader, and to praise both the mythological entity in question and Ronsard’s patron. The genre was narrative, lyrical, didactic, and ecomiastic. I proposed how certain of these hymns partake of the epic mode and can be considered brief epics.27 Above all, the genre aims at the sublime; it represented a new departure for Ronsard in the 1550s and was considered then, and is recognized today, to be among the Prince of Poets’ most successful initiatives. It is then from the Ronsardian model that Drummond uses the term “hymne” to designate his representations of sacred history. In Hymne de l’Éternité the Ronsardian speaker invokes Orpheus and states his desire to search for the secrets of nature and the heavens. The secret, in this case, is Éternité. She is stable; all else is mutability and evanescence. She sits on a throne, ordering Destin, who obeys and moves the nine heavens. On her right hand, Jeunesse feeds her nectar while fending off Vieillesse, and on her left, Puissance, with drawn sword, keeps away all forms of disorder. Eternity grants us life and force, also the peace of the universe. She sees the past, present, and future. She is the grandmother of the gods. We, on the contrary, are weak and given to sin; we endure death and the simulacrum of reproducing children; we can try to read the future (the stars) although the results are partial at best. Ronsard’s patron is Marguerite of France, Duchess of Savoy. He writes to make Marguerite glorious in Eternity; again, at the end, after he dies, the speaker begs Eternity that he may see Marguerite in heaven: L’œuvre est grand & fascheux, mais le desir que j’ay D’attenter un grand faict, m’en convye à l’essay: Puis je le veux donner à une qui merite, Qu’avec l’Eternité sa gloire soit escrite. … (Si je l’ay merité) concede moy, Deesse, Concede moy ce don, c’est qu’apres mon trespas (Ayant laissé pourrir ma depouille çà bas) Je puisse voyr au ciel la belle Margarite, Pour qui j’ay ta louange en cet hymne descrite. (Ronsard, Éternité 11–14, 138–42)

It is clear that Ronsard associates Marguerite with Eternity. He wants Marguerite to partake of Eternity, so that his writing will do the same. He can make her immortal, and she can help him. Above all, Marguerite and Eternity are both female. Ronsard has imagined a situation, because of the allegory, whereby mothers have replaced fathers. Seated on her throne, directing the fates and the planets, Eternity does not appear especially

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maternal. Yet, just as Marguerite is a duchess, a ruler on earth, Eternity is the greatest of goddesses, ruling heavens and earth. She is the grandmother of all the gods on Olympus. She is the embodiment of female majesty and female productivity. She has given birth to all, and she reigns over all. Eternity’s rule is especially womanly, given that she refuses to preside over strife and war. Discord is banned from her court. She is the principle of order and peace. Here Ronsard seeks to come to terms, in part at least, with the medieval-Renaissance-baroque obsession with mutability, evanescence, chance, change, and decline. We all suffer from these because of our failings. Yet Eternity sits on high, where she instills and maintains order in the cosmos – order and stasis. For she does not change, her order is immutable: O grande Eternité, merveilleux sont tes faictz! Tu nourris l’univers en eternelle paix, D’un lien aimantin les siecles tu attaches, Et dessoubz ton grand sein tout ce monde tu caches, Luy donnant vie & force … Tu es toute dans toy, ta partie, & ton tout, Sans nul commencement, sans meillieu, ne sans bout, Invincible, immuable, entiere, & toute ronde, N’ayant partie en toy, qui dans toy ne responde, Toute commencement, toute fin, tout meillieu. (Ronsard, Éternité 79–83, 127–31)

Here Ronsard alludes to the notion of the harmony of the spheres, of mathematical order and perfection. The stasis also resolves the problems of change in time and of death. We humans endure death, the speaker ­observes, yet Eternity lives in perpetuity; because of her, immortality is ­possible, for Marguerite, with her special relationship with the goddess (arranged by Ronsard), and also for Ronsard and his hymn. The hymn gives the impression of being strictly neo-Pagan, an exercise in revisiting Greek and Roman myth and writing as if Christianity did not exist. Certainly, Huguenot poets who were to challenge Ronsard during the Wars of Religion did not hesitate to call him a heathen. Yet, since Eternity, Youth, Age, Power, Discord, and the rest are allegories, not specifically Greek gods, they can be interpreted allegorically, exegetically, in Christian terms. According to such a reading, Eternity is a figure for God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen; as God, he knows the past, present, and future; he is all good, the principle of

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peace, order, and harmony; immortality can occur in and around him. Power (Puissance), who stands to repulse the forces of disorder, and especially Discord in chains, can figure Saint Michael or the Son, who conquered the rebel Lucifer and sent him in chains to his dreadful domain – Hell. Figural allegory and its exegesis were standard in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; thus Virgil and Ovid were allegorized and moralized, just as were the books of the Old Testament. Ronsard’s public, his more educated and cultured readers, would have understood. This is typical Renaissance syncretism, which exalts the pagan by incorporating it into Christianity. An Hymne of the Fairest Faire follows Ronsard’s Hymne de l’Éternité relatively closely. A long passage can be considered a rhetorical amplification of the original, parts of which are translated directly: Tout au plus hault du Ciel dans un throsne doré … Et là, tenant au poing un grand sceptre aimantin, Tu ordonnes tes loix … A ton dextre costé la Jeunesse se tient, Jeunesse au chef crespu … Cette Jeunesse ayant le teint de roses franc … Dans un vase doré te donne de la dextre A boire du nectar … A ton aultre costé la Puissance eternelle … armée à la mammelle D’un corselet gravé qui luy couvre le sein, Branlant de nuict & jour une espée en la main, Pour tenir en seurté les bordz de ton empire, Ton regne & ta richesse. (Ronsard, Éternité 27, 31–2, 39–40, 43, 45–6, 53–8) As farre beyond the starrie walles of Heauen … High art enstalled on a golden Throne … With diamantine Scepter in thy Hand, There thou giu’st Lawes … … not farre from thy right Side, With curled Lockes Youth euer doth abide; Rose-cheeked Youth … ceasleslie vnto thee powres Immortall Nectar, in a Cuppe of Gold … Neare to thy other side resistlesse Might, From Head to Foote in burnisht Armour dight,

280  Scots Renaissance That ringes about him, with a wauing Brand, And watchfull Eye, great Sentinell doth stand; That neither Time nor force in ought impaire Thy workmanshippe, nor harme thine Empire faire. (Drummond, Fairest Faire 17, 24, 27–8, 35–9, 43–8)

The chief difference between the two works is that Drummond Christianizes Ronsard overtly, so that the goddess Eternity is replaced by the Fairest Fair, the one true Christian God. Was Drummond conscious of the allegorical reading of Éternité and, therefore, made explicit what was implicit in the French? Or did he consciously take what he perceived to be a classical, Greco-Roman poem and rewrite it to coincide with Christian truth? We do not know. Whatever the motivation, the Christianized hymn is the result of Drummond’s artistry, and it creates its own doctrinal core and aesthetic effect. First of all, the patron – Marguerite of France – disappears. The Scots speaker addresses God directly, begging his help in the poem’s creation, in the necessity of employing earthly imagery to depict divine, heavenly mysteries. At the end, he asks, after death, may he hear the angels sing: If thou in mee this sacred Rapture wrought, My Knowledge sharpen, Sarcells lend my thought; Grant mee (Times Father, world-containing King) A Pow’r, of Thee in pow’rfull Layes to sing, That as thy Beautie in Earth liues, Heauen shines, So it may dawne, or shadow in my Lines. … Grant that released from this earthly Iaile, And fred of Clouds which heere our Knowledge vaile, In Heauens high Temples, where thy Praises ring, I may in sweeter Notes heare Angels sing. (Drummond, Fairest Faire 11–16, 333–6)

In place of seeing Marguerite, Drummond’s speaker wishes to hear the angels. As a landed gentleman, Drummond was of higher rank than Ronsard. Except for the king, and even including the king, he had no need for patronage, hence no need for the equivalent of Marguerite. Alone on his estate in Scotland, always the gifted aristocratic amateur, he contrasts with the Frenchman, a professional poet as it were, who so often frequented the courts and appealed to potential patrons. There is also a Protestantlike feel to Drummond’s text, in which the speaker addresses God directly without intermediaries and presents Christian doctrine directly. Finally,

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whereas Ronsard requests a gift or a boon, poetic immortality among ­other things, Drummond has his speaker pray to God for assistance, yes, but also for salvation. His hymn returns partially to the Christian notion of the hymn as prayer. He presents Christian doctrine directly? Yes, except that Drummond takes over Ronsard’s mythical material, Ronsard’s earthly imagery, to express divine mysteries. Just like Eternity, God is seated on a throne, with Youth on his right and Might on his left, and with Discord in chains. Like the French Eternity, the Scottish God is perfect, infinite, and eternal, the principle of order and harmony, and, of course, all-knowing. Just as he is perfect and immutable, we are wracked by mutability and instability. Finally, as in the French, the planets could tell us the future if we were capable of reading them successfully, yet, of course, we are not. Drummond increases the didactic quotient in Ronsard. Along with Youth and Might at God’s throne are to be found Truth, Providence, Justice, and Love; also, Infinity, Beauty, Simplicity, Mercy, Bliss, Glory, and Joy. We are then told of the Holy Trinity, three and one, the creation of the universe, the orders of angels, and finally the order of the planets. Whereas Ronsard refers to mankind’s failings in the face of an unmoved and indifferent cosmic goddess, Drummond spells out mankind’s rebellion against God and hence our punishment – the fall from the pure idyllic place, which he describes in moving terms: … no tumultuous Storme, No Thunders, Quakings, did her Forme deforme, The Seas in tumbling Mountaines did not roare, But like moist Christall whispered on the Shoare, No Snake did met her Meads, nor ambusht lowre In azure Curles beneath the sweet-Spring Flowre; … thy Messengers of Grace, As their high Rounds did haunte this lower Place: O Ioy of Ioyes! with our first Parents Thou To commune then didst daigne, as Friends doe now. (Drummond, Fairest Faire 267–72, 275–8)

However, the Christian speaker then notes Christ’s coming to redeem mankind; God is not indifferent, and humans can overcome fatality and mutability. Drummond’s speaker plays a more intrusive role in the Fairest Faire than does Ronsard’s speaker in Éternité. Because these are divine mysteries and the realm of the sacred, in part because he augments the didactic

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elements, and because he lacks Ronsard’s prestige, Drummond resorts again and again to the humility topos and the inexpressibility topos, how, after scaling mountains he finds more in front of him, how he is blinded by God’s light, and, because of the light, he cannot comprehend, he does not know: But by so great an object, radient light, My Heart appall’d, enfeebled restes my Sight … Light is thy Curtaine, thou art Light of Light, An euer-waking Eye still shining bright … Light of all Beautie, Ocean without ground … What wit cannot conceiue, words say of Thee, Heere where as in a Mirrour wee but see, Shadowes of shadowes, Atomes of thy Might, Still owlie eyed when staring on thy Light. (Drummond, Fairest Faire 7–8, 303–4, 325, 329–32)

The light is God, lumen ex lumine; as an image of beauty as well as of goodness and truth, it relates to the name given to God – the Fairest Faire. We can follow Sarah M. Dunnigan’s thesis that Drummond always sees and expresses the godhead in terms of beauty.28 In this also he ­follows Ronsard, for whom classical beauty permeated his muse and his verse. For The Shadow of the Judgement, the last and longest (yet unfinished) text in Flowres of Sion, Drummond chooses as his primary source Ronsard’s Hymne de la Justice.29 Ronsard recounts the story of Astraea, the virgin goddess of justice, who was sent by Jupiter to humanity at the time of the Golden Age. She spoke directly to the people, yet, when the Golden Age was replaced by Silver and then Iron, the people ceased listening to her. Astraea denounced them from high places, eventually cursed them, and returned to Olympus. Jupiter convened a council of gods to judge mankind. Clemence pleads for mercy, and Themis announces what will occur in the future. Many centuries later, to assist a great king, Henri II of France, Astraea will return to earth in the person of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine, a wise prince of the Church and brother to the great captain, François duc de Guise. Charles speaks good words to Henri, counseling peace and justice. Charles is, in fact, the dedicatee of the hymn, a man of so many virtues that the speaker can tell only of one, the most important. Justice herself is an allegory rather like Eternity in the preceding hymn yet more active, engaged, and vivacious. She helps mankind then castigates

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her flock: although she has nourished them with her milk, they cast her out. Resembling a flight of birds, she and her winged attendants, dressed in white, fly to Jupiter’s throne: Ainsi pleuroit Justice, & d’une robe blanche Se voilant tout le chef jusque au bas de la hanche, Avec toutes ses Sœurs, quittant ce val mondain, Au ciel s’en retourna d’un vol prompt & soudain, Comme on voit quelques fois singler à-tire-d’ailles En un temps orageux cinq ou six colombelles, Qui de peur de la gresle au logis s’en revont Et vistes parmy l’air volent toutes d’un front. (Ronsard, Justice 195–202)

She radiates divine spirituality, acts as a teacher, guide, and mother, and as an anima-figure to Charles of Lorraine, symbolizes the spiritual, enobling aspect of his own personality. If Astraea appears to be a mother, Jupiter is depicted as a father. Indeed, Justice is his daughter. Ronsard calls him Jupiter but also God, Father, Lord, King of Gods, Creator, Pure Spirit, and God of Light. Justice is associated with milk, Jupiter with war and vengeance. Flames burst forth from this male divinity’s eyes, and a dagger from his mouth; his speeches contain imagery of engendering, piercing, penetration, and, above all, fire: Une flamme de feu de ses yeux s’ecartoit, Et un glaive tranchant de sa bouche sortoit. … Pource, je veux d’un feu luy consommer la vie, Des grans jusque aux petis, & que nul ne me prie Ainsi que l’autre fois de luy faire pardon, Je ne le feray pas, car un seul ne vit bon. Par trois jours tous entiers je ruray mon tonnerre Pluvant flammes du Ciel dessus toute la terre, Et feray sans pitié tous les corps enflammer Qui vivent sur les champs, par l’air, & dans la mer. (Ronsard, Justice 245–6, 267–74)

Charles is not portrayed as a lone individual but instead related to his brothers and descended from his great ancestor, Godfrey of Bouillon the crusader. The family, taken as a whole, embodies Curtius’s topos of for­ titudo et sapientia, armas y letras, the heroic monarchic ideal in contrast to  the anonymous herd of evil people judged by Astraea. In addition,

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Charles’s spiritual and judicial virtues combine with King Henri’s military prowess to form the perfect pair to rule over and guide the kingdom. Given that Ronsard assimilates Jupiter to the Christian God, a typological reading of this hymn is eminently appropriate, at least as justifiable as in the case of Hymne de l’Éternité.30 Thus, it can be seen that the end of the Golden Age parallels the Fall of Man, the Iron Age parallels the human condition after the Fall, and Jupiter’s allusion to having already chastised man by water refers equally to the flood myth of Deucalion and, allegor­ ice, to the story of Noah. Jupiter’s censure of his creation and his threat of a second chastisement by fire are taken from Sodom and Gommorah and from the Apocalypse. Yet the Christian vision is one ultimately of redemption: the Fall demands Redemption. Consequently, the return of Justice to the world and the restoration of the Golden Age in the sixteenth century postfigure the Advent of Christ and prefigure the Second Coming. Charles of Lorraine is depicted as a Christ-figure, for he will continue the good work of his  crusader ancestor; as Chancellor of the Realm he prefigures Christ the judge of Doomsday. From this perspective, Astraea is assimilated to the Virgin Mary and, in a daring reversal of the traditional metaphor, she ­enters Charles’s body as sunlight passing through glass: Puis, ainsi qu’un rayon du Soleil qui descend Contre un verre & le perce, & si point ne le fend, … en la semblable sorte Justice tout d’un coup vivement s’eslança Dedans ton corps, Prelat, & point ne l’offensa, Comme chose celeste. (Ronsard, Justice 425–6, 428–31)

As God enters into the virgin, Justice fuses with Charles, and the c­ oming of Charles (sapientia) next to his king (fortitudo), corresponds to  the coming of Christ (God’s wisdom) seated at the right hand of the Father (God’s power). Justice, who fuses with Charles, is herself a Christ-figure, she who descends to earth, preaches the Good Word, ascends to her Father, and then returns to us, her second coming predicted by sybils and prophets. Ronsard’s new Golden Age will be a secular equivalent of the Messiah’s spiritual advent: Eden and the Age of Saturn will be restored. The crowning moment of the hymn is a trial scene, the proper setting for a hymn in praise of Astraea, justice personified, and Charles of Lorraine, France’s chancellor and judge. Charles advises King Henri to establish and

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maintain justice in the realm and to take vengeance on evil judges and reward the good ones. God gave us wonderful lawgivers, he says – Moses, Minos, Solon, Lycurgus, and others – and the giver of laws pilots the ship of state. The message of this hymn, like Hymne de l’Éternité, is one of harmony and order. Instead of destroying, God builds; a good king, God’s deputy on earth, builds also. Charles / Astraea instructs the good king in how to build. With laws and justice come order, hierarchy, science, and religion, a well-run ship guided by a strong, just captain, and the end of violence and chaos. This intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic synthesis occurs in a hymn of praise to Astraea and to a prince of the Church, the man responsible for the sacred and secular health of Gaul. In this fundamentally optimistic poem God brings about renewal of the cosmos without conflagration – at least so hopes Pierre de Ronsard, himself Prince of Poets. In The Shadow of the Judgement, Drummond’s longest single poem, he Christianizes Hymne de la Justice as he had done with An Hymne of the Fairest Faire and Hymne de l’Éternité. Ronsard’s theme is justice, the high point in his text the trial scene of mankind accused by Astraea and defended by Clemence. In both poems Justice flees from earth and denounces mankind to the deity: Celluy qui maintenant vit le plus entaché De meurtre, de poison, & bref de tout peché, Est le plus vertueux: ilz pillent, ilz blasphement, Et rien que fraude, & noise, & mechancetez n’ayment: Ilz dedaignent tes loix, & n’ont plus en soucy Ny toy, ny ton sainct Nom, ny tes temples aussi, Et tant en leur audace & malice se fient, Qu’en se moquant de toy ta puissance defient. (Ronsard, Justice 217–24) Most who the harmelesse Innocent beguile, Who most can rauage, robe, ransacke, blasphame, Is held most vertuous, hath a Worthies name; So on emboldned Malice they relye, That (madding) thy great Puissance they defye. (Drummond, Judgement 130–4)

Drummond takes over the premise and develops it in his terms according to his vision. From the Protestant Christian perspective, there can be and will be only one trial and one judgment which dominate history, a trial of

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humanity before the Godhead: the Last Judgment at Doomsday. In Drummond, Piete and Charitie, followed by Justice and Truth, do the accusing, and, with this trial, no allegories speak out to counsel mercy or to propose patience and a resolution some time in the future. The verdict is immediate and irreversible. There will be no future. Drummond then quits Ronsard to evoke, in a more epic strain, the prelude to Doomsday. Instead of bringing in the Four Horsemen, he prefers to borrow three furies from Du Bartas (Les Furies) and King James (The Furies). They are dreadful creatures, creatures of horror. An angel flies to the land of hell – Greenland! – to summon the furies. One with Gorgon’s head on her shield, all in blood; the second a starving skeleton-like figure; the third a hag stinking poisonous fumes – these figures represent, probably, three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, and pestilence: Three furies rushed at the Angels call. One … Ponderous with Darts, her left doth beare a Shield, Where Gorgones Head lookes grimme in sable Field: Her eyes blaze Fire and Blood, each haire stilles Blood, Blood trilles from either pappe, and where shee stood Bloods liquid Corrall sprang her feete beneath, Where shee doth streach her Arme in Blood and Death. … The next with Eyes, sunke hollow in her Braines, Lane face, snarl’d haire, with blacke and emptie Veines, Her dry’d-vp Bones scarce couered with her Skinne, Bewraying that strange structure built within, Thigh-Belliless, most gastlie to the sight, A wasted Skeliton resembleth right. … Last did a saffron-colour’d Hagge come out, With vncomb’d Haire, Browes banded all about With duskie cloudes, in ragged Mantle cled, Her breath with stinking Fumes the Aire be-spred … (Relentlesse) Shee each state, sex, age defiles, Earth streames with goares, burnes with inuenom’d Biles. (Drummond, Judgement 216–17, 221–6, 237–42, 251–4, 257–8)

Drummond then proceeds to develop the horror of Apocalypse: prodigies, the world upside down, people eager to die, pious hermits joyful at

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what is to come, fire in heaven, fire on earth, and humans dragged forth from their graves and from hell: While thus They pray, the Heauens in Flames appeare, As if they shew Fires elementall Spheare, The Earth seemes in the Sunne, the Welken gone, Wonder all hushes; straight the Aire doth grone With Trumpets, which thrice-lowder Sounds doe yeeld Than deafening Thunders in the airie Field. Created Nature at the Clangor quakes, Immur’d with Flames Earth in a Palsey Shakes, And from her wombe the Dust in seuerall Heapes Takes life, and mustereth into humane Shapes: Hell burstes, and the foule prisoners there bound Come howling to the Day, with Serpentes crown’d. (Drummond, Judgement (415–26)

Drummond takes the idea of a brief epic latent in Ronsard’s Hymnes, plus the more grandiose Christian epic in Du Bartas, to create his own version of the heroic poem. Du Bartas worked on the Old Testament, from the beginning; Drummond elaborates his text from the New Testament, at  the end. His Shadow of the Judgement remains incomplete and was ­published incomplete. It is, if you will, a “Prelude to the Last Judgment.” It is as if he states the baroque inexpressibility topos, that he can portray all that leads up to the Great Event, but to portray the Event itself lies beyond his powers. Other scrutinizers of the divine mysteries express the same sentiment, stating it explicitly: Dante in the Paradiso, and Agrippa d’Aubigné, the greatest poet of Doomsday, in Jugement, the last book of Les Tragiques. Ronsard makes a place for redemption on earth in our secular world. Drummond does not. Like D’Aubigné, justice will take place only at the End of Days and uniquely through God. Whereas Ronsard meditates on time and history, Drummond leaps to the end of history. Other hymns in Flowres of Sion comment on important events in Heilsgeschichte; Shadow of the Judgement marks the end of history and the end of time. The culmination of the Christian vision and of history as we know it, it stands as the last text in Flowres of Sion. That the poem is published in its incompletion signals not only the poet’s difficulty in recounting Doomsday but, more importantly, that Doomsday has not yet occurred; the speaker and his text

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are lodged in our temporal present, and what will come in the future remains, for us mortals, to be seen only in a glass darkly. Forth Feasting, a panegyric on King James’s first return to Scotland, in 1617, after his accession to the throne of England, is modelled on Ronsard’s Panegyrique de la Renommée.31 The French text is not the speaker’s praise of Renommée (Fama, Rumor, Renown), but, instead, Renown’s praise of King Henri III. In Renommée the speaker, seized by furor and fear, is called by Apollo to sing the praises of the French monarch. Awestruck, he enters the royal palace where Renown, with her hundred eyes and hundred ears, addresses the masses. For all but one couplet, the remainder of the poem (25–340) is in her voice. Renown registers that Henri, at a young age, won two important ­battles and also two crowns – Poland and then France. So much for forti­ tudo. However, she grounds the panegyric almost entirely on Henri’s ­sapientia – his intelligence, virtue, and religion. Renown, like Ronsard a firm Catholic, praises Henri for restoring sacred images and the Mass; the people followed him and became unified under his banner, with the Huguenots returning to the laws of their ancestors: Au retour du pays où va soufflant Boree, Il trouva sa Couronne en sectes separee, L’un tenant cest article, & l’autre cestuy-là: Mais si tost que son front en France etincela Rayonnant de vertu, chacun à son exemple Embrassa nostre Eglise & mesprisa le temple, Et des songes nouveaux ne fut plus curieux, Par luy faict zelateur des loix de ses ayeux.

(Ronsard, Renommée 77–84)

(This is, of course, a wish-fulfillment phantasm.) The king fights idleness by partaking in the chase and other virile sport. Yet we do not hear of his victories in war. We hear, instead, of his piety and humility. The religious conflicts are resolved by Henri’s virtue. The young king, like a reborn phoenix who brought his father’s ashes to the temple of Apollo, is followed by the other birds: Quand le Phenix retourne au peuple de l’Aurore, Chargeant dessus son doz les cendres, & encore Les mânes de son pere, & plante nompareil Le tombeau paternel au temple du soleil:

William Drummond of Hawthornden  289 Les oiseaux estonnez en quelque part qu’il nage De ses ailes ramant, admirent son image … Donques le peuple suit les traces de son maistre: Il pend de ses façons, il imite & veult estre Son disciple, & tousjours pour exemple l’avoir, Et se former en luy ainsi qu’en un miroir. (Ronsard, Renommée 105–10, 117–20)

The master rules over his people by religion and love, not war. Here Ronsard offers a Freudian metaphor: the vine willingly twining itself around the tree, moved by love, in marriage: La Vigne lentement de ses tendres rameaux Grimpe s’insinuant aux festes des Ormeauz, Et se plye à l’entour de l’estrangere escorce Par amour seulement & non pas par la force: Puis mariez ensemble, & les deux n’estant qu’un Font à l’herbe voisine un ombrage commun. (Ronsard, Renommée 183–8)

At the end, Renown again observes that France is defended not by ramparts but by Henri’s virtue, for he differs from cruel, brutal, and ambitious tyrants such as Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors. Last of all but by no means least, Renown praises Henri for his intellectual and artistic proclivities. A good king, she states, should not listen to  flattering tongues nor should he hate books. Fortunately, this ruler brought to his court the wisest heads in the realm, for he is eager to know things, to learn: astronomy, the sea, different peoples and their mores, and the metals beneath the ground. Next he turns to poetry and music. He is intelligent and eloquent: De miel en son berceau la Muse l’arrousa, Pithon en l’allaittant sa bouche composa D’une docte eloquence, afin de faire croire Ce qu’il veult aux soudars pour gaigner la victoire, Ou pour prescher son peuple, & par graves douceurs Leur tirer de sa voix par l’oreille les cœurs Comme son devancier Hercules, dont la langue Enchesnoit les François du fil de sa harangue. (Ronsard, Renommée 255–62)

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When his brother Charles IX died, the muses remained silent; now, with Henri III, poetry sings again, and the new monarch is a generous patron of the arts, like the beloved François I. Ronsard alludes to Henri’s Académie, what today we would call a seminar, where scholars of renown were invited to speak on their discoveries.32 The learned king, the king oriented towards the life of the mind, appealed to Ronsard. The poet believed, or wanted to believe, that Henri was or could become the ideal Renaissance prince. Thus, Renommée partakes, implicitly and indirectly, of the advice to princes tradition, rather like Hymne de la Justice. Even more, Ronsard speaks to the monarch as patron of the arts, and especially of poetry. He seeks to regain (in competition with Philippe Desportes) the number one ranking, as it were, and to be number one when the time comes for awards and remuneration. In Forth Feasting William Drummond of Hawthornden bases his praise of James VI / I on Pierre de Ronsard’s panégyrique of Henri iii. He must have noticed the fact that Henri had occupied two thrones con­ secutively, and adapted it to James, who, better still, held two thrones – Scotland and  England – first consecutively and then at the same time. Second, Drummond found in Ronsard the kind of praise he wanted for James – the encomium of a prince of peace, not war, of study and the arts, not violence. Third, James rules by example (Ronsard’s virtue?), not by law: Who of Thine After-age can count the Deedes, With all that Fame in Times hudge Annales reedes, How by Example more than anie Law, This People fierce Thou didst to Goodnesse draw … (Drummond, Forth 179–82)

Astraea returns (a nod to the hymn of justice). Elsewhere are to be found war and suffering. The new, greater Britain is the best; James outshines European kings because he practices peace not war, and love not force: Thou a true Victor art, sent from aboue What Others straine by Force to gaine by Loue, World-wandring Fame this Prayse to Thee imparts, To bee the onlie Monarch of all Hearts. They many feare who are of many fear’d, And Kingdomes got by Wrongs by Wrongs are tear’d,

William Drummond of Hawthornden  291 Such Thrones as Blood doth raise Blood throweth downe, No Guard so sure as Loue vnto a Crowne. (Drummond, Forth 239–46)

He seeks neither gold nor land nor expanded boundaries. And, like his French counterpart, although James does relish the chase, he also seeks to learn of the stars, of how to rule, and of how to write poetry. As in the French and more than in the French, sapientia takes precedence over for­ titudo; James is a great king because of his wisdom and pacific goals, not in spite of them. In historical fact, although James proved to be a better and more successful monarch than Henri, both were sensitive, intellectual patrons of the arts, both had a circle or coterie of poets at their respective courts, and both were known to be homosexual, with public hostility manifested towards the young men who became their favourites. Drummond’s superb innovation is to place the panegyric in the mouth and voice of the Forth, the great river of south-central Scotland, which flows into the Firth of Forth and is as iconic of Scotland and Edinburgh as the Thames is of England and London. The speech is her welcome to the king, who has returned to the North after so many years of absence. With the Forth as speaker, nature enters into the fabric of the poem. May the nymphs of all the rivers and streams of the realm rejoice and speak out! After the dark night and winter of loss, spring returns. In addition, because rivers and streams, like their nymphs, are usually portrayed as being female, a sexual element enters into the text. Forth’s rejoicing is envisaged as the joy of a beloved welcoming the return of her absent lover. For example: Whence doth this Praise, Applause, and Loue arise? What Load-starre east-ward draweth thus all Eyes? Am I awake? or haue some Dreames conspir’d To mocke my Sense with Shadowes much desir’d? Stare I that liuing Face, see I those Lookes, Which with Delight wont to amaze my Brookes? Doe I behold that Worth, that Man diuine, This Ages Glorie, by these Bankes of mine? Then is it true what long I wish’d in vaine? That my much-louing Prince is come againe? (Drummond, Forth 11–20)

Going beyond Ronsard in the evocation of Eros, Drummond exploits the motif of the monarch as a dominant, masculine entity, penetrating into

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his gendered cities and lands; here the rivers are feminine, subservient to their masculine ruler who is also a lover. Towards the end, Forth recognizes that James will leave Scotland and return to the South and bathe in the Isis, that is, the Thames. Forth is shown to be sexually jealous, when she claims that Isis is jealous. Am I not just as good? Do you think only of her? I the Forth love you more: Ah why should Isis only see Thee shine? Is not thy Forth, as well as Isis Thine? Though Isis vaunt shee hath more Wealth in store, Let it suffice Thy Forth doth loue Thee more … Yet in the Title may bee claim’d in Thee, Nor Shee, nor all the World, can match with mee. Now when (by Honour drawne) thou shalt away To Her alreadie jelous of thy Stay, When in Her amourous Armes Shee doth Thee fold, And dries thy Dewie Haires with Hers of Gold … Loathe not to thinke on Thy much-louing Forth: O Loue these Bounds, whereof Thy royall Stemme More then an hundredth wore a Diademe. (Drummond, Forth 383–6, 389–94, 398–400)

Robert Cummings and David Reid read Forth Feasting with sympathy and insight.33 I agree with them that Drummond writes a king-centred text grounded in the fact of the king’s absence – past and future. One can imagine almost a religion of the prince, conceived in terms of light and the sun, a sun king radiating power, wisdom, love, and also beauty. Drummond’s celebration or, more accurately, the Forth’s celebration is a love poem and an epithalamium, elegiac because the wedding of the king and his people, the king and his rivers, can be only temporary, for the subtext of the poem is that James will depart again and, consequently, leave his people and his rivers bereft and alone. After looking at these three longer poems, I believe that we can agree wholeheartedly with McClure and the other recent students of Drummond who have rejected the old clichés about him as a derivative, out-of-date Petrarchan, the compiler of a scattered grab bag of translations if not ­actual plagiarisms. Instead, we envisage the laird of Hawthornden as a master of intertextuality, a cosmopolitan, cultured, learned poet in the tradition of the Renaissance, who prized and practiced imitatio and who, in one way or another, transformed the sources into original work embodying his

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own vision and his own style. More perhaps than any other writer prior to MacDiarmid, he transmitted to Scotland French and Italian conceptions of poetry and the poetry itself.34 According to Robert M. MacDonald, Drummond on his estate was a  humanist recluse in a world gone mad.35 Edwin Morgan envisages Drummond not as a solitary, brooding laird but, on the contrary, a writer whose verse is lyrical yet also public, satirical, political, scabrous, and bawdy.36 They are both right, each in his own way. Similarly, Drummond can be “placed” as a mannerist poet, embellishing and adorning the given tradition and conventions, or as a powerful, rhetorical practitioner of the baroque, especially in his sacred verse, or as an aesthetically conservative, belated “Castalian,” that is, a member of the Scots Jacobean coterie in the Jacobean High Renaissance.37 Personally, I lean towards the third option, conscious of Drummond’s consistent rhetorical high style, yet with variation in genre and register, so that I can figure him to be a belated Scots Ronsardian in the early seventeenth century. The mannerist and baroque elements are not at all out of place; we find them in Ronsard and also in Tasso, another model. As with other writers or works examined in this volume, belatedness ought never to be thought of as a negative. The belatedness allows for, indeed all but requires, the juxtaposition of styles, registers, and traditions. It allows for richness, complexity, and intertextuality. It is a hallmark of this great poet and of early Scots literature taken as a whole.

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Conclusion

It will come as no surprise that French literature had a pervasive impact on the older literature of Scotland, medieval and Renaissance. The French tradition offered a wide range of genres, modes, structures, and styles, much of which the Scots adopted, adapted, and made their own. What today we recognize to be one of the dominant genres of the French later Middle Ages, perhaps the most important of all – the dit amoureux – played a comparable role in Scotland. Guillaume de Lorris, Machaut, Froissart, Chartier, and the Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle are especially prominent. Another mode – satirical, comic, and didactic – is represented by fable collections, Le Roman de Renart, the fabliaux, Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, Deschamps, Les Quinze Joies de mariage, and even Villon. For the theatre, Pierre Gringore and the three genres he practiced – farce, fools’ play, and morality play – had an impact. So also did French romance, especially the Arthurian, and even chanson de geste. During the Renaissance the Scots imitated and sometimes translated the major French lyric poets of the times: Marot, Du Bellay, and Ronsard, primarily, and also sought inspiration for longer poems in Ronsard and Du Bartas. And one Scot followed in the steps of the French humanist tragedy, as represented by Jodelle, La Taille, and Garnier. The dits amoureux manifest the traits that Anglicists ascribe to Chaucer: dream imagery, the play of illusion and reality, a complex narrative technique centred on the unreliable first-person narrator and, often, the nar­ rator as witness set off against someone greater as lover, metatextuality, and the theme of art and the artist. The comic-didactic mode offers rich variety in, and multiple levels of, style, voice, and stance, play with gender and traditional gender roles, misogyny and the overcoming of misogyny, mocking and undermining the tale of love tradition, comic urbanity, and,

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above all, comic ambiguity and indeterminacy concerning the didactic doctrine and how seriously it should be taken. Romance presents the old aristocratic pattern of chivalry, courtesy, fin’ amor, and manly heroism, often associated with the hero’s coming of age narrative and with a quest, also associated with the advice to princes tradition – all this and, at the same time, the comic parody and undermining of the romance conventions themselves. With the Renaissance come new literary genres taken from classical Antiquity and from modern Italy, artistic self-consciousness and the theme of art and the artist in a new guise, meditation on the perils of existence and the hope for the good life, and an effort to treat the classical genres in a Christian manner – to pose serious Christian questions and to offer worthy answers. Cultivating the sundry genres and modes, and influenced by the French tradition, were the Makars: Henryson in Morall Fabillis and The Testament of Cresseid, Dunbar through most of his work, Douglas in The Palice of Honour, and Lyndsay in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and much of his other work. Different-seeming texts came into being in much the same ambiance: The Court of Venus, The Freiris of Berwik, and King Hart. The Makars, unlike most of their French forebears, were capable of writing in widely divergent registers. Hence, the richness and variety of their production. Henryson cultivated the grand tragedy of Eros (The Testament of Cresseid) and the comedy and satire of Le Roman de Renart (Morall Fabillis). Dunbar was a master of all registers: the lofty dit amoureux style in The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois, the middle range of didacticism, and the magnificently bawdy and misogynist genus tenue in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and other texts. This richness and variety can be, in part, ascribed to belatedness, a situation where the more provincial culture reaps benefits from coming late; the belated maker has at his disposal genres and registers spanning three centuries. He can literally pick and choose, juxtapose and fuse, and experiment at will. Of interest, of course, are the Scottish writers or, rather, the domains of writing which do not relate to French practice. One area would be those genres associated with Latin and subject to models in Latin. Scotland can claim a rich historical tradition in the Middle Ages; these writings are in Latin, with some of them translated into the vernacular. There is a no less important flowering of historical writing in Scots and, later, in English.1 The vernacular histories by John Barbour and Hary have also been designated as romance and even as epic. But for allusions to heroes in French chansons de geste, there appears to be no French influence.

Conclusion 297

The same applies to genuine epic, that is, the Eneados. Gavin Douglas bathed in a French sea of love allegories and honour poems when he wrote The Palice of Honour. All this disappears with his translation of the Aeneid. Douglas may have used Saint-Gelais’s Eneydes as a thesaurus or trot; otherwise, he works directly from the Latin, his version being, in any case, far superior to Saint-Gelais’s as literature. A second domain would be native Scots traditions which gave rise to texts having no equivalent in French or in English. These writings include works pertaining, in large measure, to sermo humilis and reflecting conflict and hostility. Such is the magnificent genre of flyting, the masterpiece ­being Dunbar’s flyting with Walter Kennedy. Such also would be narrative texts treating popular festivities which culminate in a brawl or even a riot; the best are Peebles to the Play and Christis Kirk on the Green. In addition, there are areas of French literature which leave no trace in Scotland, that is, French genres the Scots never exploited. Here are to be listed early chanson de geste and early romance. So also, in a sense, the beast epic, found only in Henryson’s fables, and, curiously, the fabliau. Although French fabliaux helped shape major works by Dunbar and Lyndsay, The Freiris of Berwik is the only extant Scots contribution to the genre. Finally, except for Lyndsay’s Thrie Estaitis and the humanist comedy Philotus, no medieval Scots plays are extant. French theatre – the miracle plays and mystery plays – have left no trace and, but for Lyndsay, neither have the morality, the sottie, and the farce. Why were some French modes popular in Scotland, and others not? In trying to answer the question, or rather, to suggest ways of responding to it, I wish to avoid gratuitous assumptions of the alleged divergence in national character traits between the two kingdoms. One plausible response relates to chronology. Scots writers, like their confreres in England, were conscious of an extended literary culture across the Channel. They adopted or were influenced by texts from the later Middle Ages and also the thirteenth century: the Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle, later branches of the Roman de Renart, Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, and even the fabliaux, as well as a few works bordering on the year 1200: earlier branches of the Roman de Renart and the Perceval Continuations. However, literary memory does not go back before, say, 1180. That twelfth century, which so many Old French scholars consider to be their Golden Age, was largely unknown to the writers of Middle Scots. The same is true for the writers of Middle English, who always worked from the LancelotGrail Cycle and the Prose Tristan, never from the earlier masterpieces by Chrétien, Beroul, or Thomas, and their successors in verse.

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A shift in taste, over the years, can also help account for certain choices. Scots writers exploited, for the most part, those genres and currents in vogue in France, currently or in the recent past. These include Le Roman de la Rose, enshrined as the first vernacular classic from the fourteenth century on. Romance, including Arthurian romance, had ceased to be in vogue long before the age of the Makars. This may help to explain why there are relatively few romance texts in the Scottish canon, compared to France and England. That adultery was so prevalent in French romance, and that Arthur and his knights were already contributing to the myth of English chivalry, may also have deterred Scots writers. Sarah Carpenter has proposed, cogently, the unsettled situation of the monarchy, and the Protestant Reformation, as reasons why there is so little Scots theatre extant.2 This is surely the case. I should add that, even in pre-Reformation Scotland, sacred literature was closely aligned to works in Latin and not in French. Even if there was a sufficient public for mystery plays and farces, and sufficient support from the guilds, both open questions, the Scottish church, more rigorous than those on the Continent and in England, may have discouraged such practices. The major shift in taste came about in the 1560s, at a turn of events which we call the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Although a few writers worked on both sides of the divide, the break is clearly defined, similar to the situation in France rather than the one in England. Certain writers – King James and, most probably, his mother – appear to have had little or no knowledge of the Makars. For a new age, new reulis and cautelis. Here the French impact remained the same, and now the Italian impact made itself felt. The sonnet became the lyrical genre par excellence. Poets came to write long poems derived, ultimately, from the classical epic, ode, and hymn, and to write closet dramas derived, ultimately, from Seneca – all filtered through the French. This state of affairs continued, unabated, into the seventeenth century, whether people wrote in Scots or in English. For the first time the Stewart / Stuart court had become, consciously and self-consciously, a cultural centre, a nexus of patronage and emulation, with its very special coterie of writers, artists, and musicians. Nevertheless, much continued from the past. I ­submit that the so-called discovery or invention of subjectivity and a more personal voice in the Renaissance is largely an illusion, grounded in l­ iterary conventions to be found also in the Middle Ages. Poetry shapes voice, not  the contrary. Similarly, a secular literature sans overlying Christian doctrine is as utterly medieval as it is Humanist or early modern. A court tradition of song and dance continues and develops upon the one in

Conclusion 299

preceding generations. The new French models were Marot, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Desportes, and Du Bartas, translated and often cited by name. Yet the work in transmitting culture did not differ markedly from the ­earlier Scots period, going back to James Stewart, King James I. What is ­different, however, is the self-consciousness of the early modern Scots writers from James VI on down, conscious of the perceived lack of proper up-to-date texts and models and, therefore, of the need to transplant French and Italian poetic flowers (poetic practices) in the Northern soil, what McClure rightly calls an “Übersetzungskultur.”3 The French presence remains constant. The Protestant Reformation made an impact on Franco-Scottish relations that was by no means starkly negative. The ministers, John Knox at their head, denounced the song-and-dance culture of a court perceived as decadent and immoral, and they were partially responsible for the relative void in the documentation of early Scots theatre. This said, Frenchspeaking Geneva was deemed to be the nearest mankind could approach to creating an earthly new Jerusalem. We have seen how James VI and others revered and were influenced by the Huguenot Du Bartas, just as William Alexander turned for inspiration to the Huguenots Jacques de La Taille and Jacques Grévin. Robert Norvell translated some texts by Marot in his Meroure of an Christiane (1561); sacred poems by Marot and Marguerite de Navarre – thought of today as proto-Protestant – had an impact on several figures of the Reformation in Scotland. Are there verifiable divergences between the French and Scottish traditions? In other words, are there traits unique to literature in Scotland, the equivalent of a Scottish literary identity? In one of his arguably less successful essays, Matthew P. McDiarmid came to the conclusion that the earlier literature in Scots is simple, sincere, truthful, and factual.4 In this he appears to follow in the line of Speirs and Wittig, who insist upon the “authentic” Scots tradition being native, popular, realist, and close to the Volk.5 These assumptions are symptomatic of a late-Romantic vision of art and the artist, which elsewhere had been abandoned by serious scholars and critics since the Russian Formalists, the German school of romance philology (Spitzer, Curtius, Auerbach), and the Anglo-American school of New Criticism. More significant, in my opinion, are the particularly strong presence in Scotland of Latin humanism, the quite powerful self-consciousness of the Renaissance poets writing in the coterie around James VI / I, and the overall sense of Scotland as a nation which needed to be exalted and defended. While perhaps a secondary current, the tradition of flyting and of an eldrich style, and of works rich in

300 Conclusion

scatology, verbal abuse, and brawling which recall the French fabliau and the sermon joyeux, nevertheless stands out in the culture of Western Europe. The flyting and the eldrich offer to writers in Scots an additional range of theme and register. Literature in Scotland reveals a greater stylistic variety than is the case for the other literatures in that time frame. Finally, we come to what is probably the most important theme developed by Scotticists to explain the older literature: literature as advice to princes, as lessons in statecraft.6 This theme is found in history, chronicle, romance, the fable, the drama, and court poetry. The unsettled political situation in the courts up to and including the reign of James VI, and the eternal immanence of incursion from the South can well explain such a current. It is also possible that much the same is true of French literature but that French scholars have yet to notice the current and to work on it. If these questions are posed, it is because scholars in Scottish studies as well as general public intellectuals and even creative writers discuss the situation of culture in Scotland, its past and its present, in greater depth and with greater passion, than is the case for France and England. Any number of approaches, including the postcolonial, are employed. Consequently, the approaches, plus the ideologies upon which they are grounded, contribute to the elaboration of a Scottish literary canon. Hence, perhaps, the validity of Sally Mapstone’s pertinent observation: “Older Scots has never had an entirely secure literary canon, and this should be seen as a positive thing, with authors and subjects amenable to reassessment.”7 Cairns Craig offers a withering assessment of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century version of Scotland held by the Scots themselves.8 With the rise of typically Scottish myths and clichés, tartanry and the kailyard among others, the past became envisioned in sentimental and nostalgic terms, cut off from the present and from the genuine historical past, evoquing a past which never was. There was no sense of historical continuity, but, instead, one of rupture. Consequently, in contrast to France, Russia, and even England, there was no fertile ground for the rise of the novel: nineteenth-century Scottish fiction flourished – as romance. The great modernists – Hugh MacDiarmid in the van – repudiated this neo-romantic culture of nostalgia and cliché with the call for a new literary awakening in Scotland, spearheaded by a new modern literature, comparable to the best in Europe. In terms of the canon, MacDiarmid’s cry: “not Burns – Dunbar!” sought a reconsideration of the literary past, and more specifically, called for the tradition of romanticism and nostalgia to be replaced by one grounded in the Middle Ages, a time when Scottish writing

Conclusion 301

stood in the forefront, a part of the European totality and not a secondary offshoot of the English. Yet, as R.D.S. Jack and others have argued, esteem for the Makars and for an independent national literature gave rise, with some influential critics, to the postulate that the best and the most authentically Scottish texts are those written in Scots, close to and informed by the popular spirit, native in inspiration, sincere and direct, true in feeling, not too literary, and both contestatory and non-English.9 These stipulations were grounded in an aesthetic of exclusion, whereby a number of great works and entire literary periods were denied entry into the canon. Some texts by the Makars themselves – say, Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe and Thrissill and the Rois – were condemned for being artificial, aristocratic, and subject to the wrong foreign influences. The entire Renaissance was deemed a falling off because the Jacobite coterie wrote in an Anglicized Scots or directly in English, most of them followed their leader to his court in London, their style can be characterized as mannerist or baroque, their inspiration was foreign, most accepted the Reformation, and they in no way rebelled against the power structure. This same mentality decreed that Knox and Byron both would not be accorded respect as Scots. One purpose of this book is to support today’s scholars in their respect and esteem for all periods of Scottish literary history, to defend and illustrate what I have called elsewhere “the enlarged scholarly canon,” that is, the finest works from all literary periods, embracing all without prejudice and without imposed ideological or aesthetic value-judgments.10 One cannot but agree with the editors of the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature that Scots literature is multilingual and multicultural, expansive and ever expanding.11 Eleanor Bell and Ian Brown, among others, argue that Scottish academic and cultural figures should avoid narrow, restrictive notions of the canon and of Scottishness; they do so to the point of ­rehabilitating the tradition which Craig himself deconstructed: Kailyard, tartanry, and even Harry Lauder.12 And others speak out against multiculturalism and plurality as the most recent restrictive essentialism.13 As with the French and the English, Scotland manifests a continuous literary tradition over the centuries, all periods contributing to the whole. Especially in the Middle Ages and the early modern, we find a learned, cultured, intertextual literature, aware of the latest trends in Europe, and especially in France. Whether they exploit genus grande, genus medium, or genus ­humile, theirs is a literature of books, high in its aspirations and aiming at an elite public capable of learning from and enjoyment in it. So much of the medieval and early modern culture, as with Scots culture

302 Conclusion

today, is international and European, and it anticipates and even gives rise to the cosmopolitan, European-oriented Scotland of the Enlightenment and of modernism. The continuity of high culture, from the Middle Ages up to and into the present, constitutes much of its excitement. Books from the past have value to the extent that they live in and shape our present. We can hope for a world which recognizes the continuity and embraces the present with the past, for either alone, separated, will wither and perish. The literariness of the high culture and the reality that it mirrors and creates render it, in some sense, perennial and universal – a gift for all people.

Notes

Introduction 1 Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn, or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927), 35. 2 Janet M. Smith, The French Background of Middle Scots Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934). 3 Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance, and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 4 Among the more important, R.D.S. Jack, “The French Connection: Scottish and French Literature in the Renaissance,” Scotia 13 (1989): 1–16; and Priscilla Bawcutt, “French Connections? From the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to Clément Marot,” in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh Interna­ tional Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham Caie et al. (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2001), 119–28. 5 John MacQueen, “Some Aspects of the Early Renaissance in Scotland,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 3.3 (1967): 201–22; “Aspects of Humanism in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature,” in Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. John MacQueen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 10–31; and his two books on Robert Henryson, cited below in the chapters on The Testament of Cresseid and Morall Fabillis. 6 R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), and Scottish Literature’s Debt to Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). 7 William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

304  Notes to pages 4–10 8 Calin, Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920– 1990 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 9 Roderick J. Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005). Also important are R.D.S. Jack, Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985); and Alexander Montgomerie, Poems, ed. David J. Parkinson, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000). 10 Among so many other studies should be cited here Gregory Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 1430–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 11 John Corbett, J. Derrick McClure, and Jane Stuart-Smith, “A Brief History of Scots,” in their ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Scots (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1–16, esp. 1, 2. 12 See Tom McArthur, The English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapt. 6: “Scots and Southron,” 138–59. 13 A.J. Aitken, “The Language of Older Scots Poetry,” in Scotland and the Lowland Tongue: Studies in the Language and Literature of Lowland Scotland in Honour of David D. Murison, ed. J. Derrick McClure (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), 18–49. See also John Corbett, Language and Scottish Literature, Scottish Language and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 214–38. 14 I address this topic in The French Tradition, 1–6. The scholarly literature is immense. See William Rothwell, “The Teaching of French in Medieval England,” Modern Language Review 63.1 (1968): 37–46; “The Role of French in Thirteenth-Century England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1975–6): 445–66; “Language and Government in Medieval England,” Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur 93 (1983): 258–70; and “Stratford atte Bowe and Paris,” Modern Language Review 80 (1985): 39–54. Also Ian Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England,” Romance Philology 33 (1979–80): 467–79. On, however, the persistence of French as the language of testimony, in regions far from London, see Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zur mündlischen Kommunikation in England von der Mitte des elften bis zum Beginn des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1979), and “Collecting Miracles along the Anglo-Welsh Border in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in Multilingualism in Late Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 53–61. 15 G.W.S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 102.

Notes to pages 10–15 305 16 Janet Hadley Williams, “‘Of officiaris serving thy senyeorie’: David Lyndsay’s Diplomatic Letter of 1531,” in A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen et al. (Louvain: Peeters, 2000), 125–40. 17 John J. McGavin, “Thomas Ker of Redden’s Trip to the Low Countries, 1620,” in “Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun”: Essays on Scottish Literature in Honour of R.D.S. Jack, ed. Sarah Carpenter and Sarah M. Dunnigan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 155–75. 18 John Orr, Old French and Modern English Idiom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 19 C.I. Macafee, “Older Scots Lexis,” in The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language, ed. Charles Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 182–212. 20 Jeremy J. Smith, “The Language of Older Scots Poetry,” in Edinburgh Companion to Scots, ed. Corbett, McClure, and Stuart-Smith, 197–209, esp. 204–6. 21 Bengt Ellenberger, The Latin Element in the Vocabulary of the Earlier Makars: Henryson and Dunbar (Lund: Gleerup, 1977), 21. Part One: High Courtly Narrative: The Tale of Love 1 On French and English, see William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); on French and Scots, see the old yet still useful study by Janet M. Smith, The French Background of Middle Scots Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934). 2 Clive Staples Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). 1.  The Kingis Quair 1 On the chronology, see Matthew P. McDiarmid, ed., The Kingis Quair of James Stewart (London: Heinemann, 1973), 28–48. Quotations are taken from this edition. Other good modern editions are: Le Livre du Roi (The Kingis Quair) attribué à Jacques Ier d’Écosse, ed. Jean Robert Simon (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967); James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology, ed. Julia Boffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and “The Kingis Quair” and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2005).

306  Notes to pages 15–16 2 Among other examples, John MacQueen, “Tradition and the Interpretation of the Kingis Quair,” Review of English Studies ns 12 (1961): 117–31; Lois A. Ebin, “Boethius, Chaucer, and The Kingis Quair,” Philological Quarterly 53 (1974): 321–41; Stephan Kohl, “The Kingis Quair and Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes as Imitations of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 2 (1979): 119–34; Gregory Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 1430–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 33–62; Boffey, “Chaucerian Prisoners: The Context of The Kingis Quair,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth-­ Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cohen (London: King’s College, 1991), 84–102; Alessandra Petrina, “The Kingis Quair” of James I of Scotland (Padova: Unipress, 1997); A.C. Spearing, “Dreams in The Kingis Quair and the Duke’s Book,” in Charles d’Orléans in England (1415–1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 123–44; John M. Bowers, “Three Readings of The Knight’s Tale: Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (2004): 279–307; Joanna Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 60–89; Petrina, “‘My Maisteris Dere’: The Acknowledgement of Authority in The Kingis Quair,” Scottish Studies Review 7.1 (Spring 2006): 9–23; and Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 19–29. 3 Much work over the past few decades has been devoted to rehabilitating Machaut and Froissart as narrative poets. Among the full-length studies are Calin, A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Un engin si soutil”: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Genève: Slatkine, 1985); Laurence de Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Isabelle Bétemps, L’Imaginaire dans l’œuvre de Guillaume de Machaut (Paris: Champion, 1998); Michel Zink, Froissart et le temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Michael Schwarze, Generische Wahrheit: Höfischer Polylog im Werk Jean Froissarts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003); Didier Lechat, “Dire par fiction”: Métamorphoses du “je” chez Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart et Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, 2005); Deborah L. McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late-Medieval Audience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Also a rich collection of essays on Froissart: Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, ed., Froissart across the Genres (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

Notes to pages 16–26 307 4 Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot and Champion, 1908–21): Remede de Fortune, 2: 1–157; La Fonteinne amoureuse, 3: 143–244; Le Confort d’Ami, 3: 1–142. 5 Sally Mapstone, “Kingship and the Kingis Quair,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 51–69; Summers, Prison Writing, 60–89; Martin, Kingship and Love. Elizabeth Elliott relates the Boethian tradition to statecraft and kingship in the dit amoureux and The Kingis Quair in “The Open Sentence: Memory, Identity, and Translation in the Kingis Quair,” in “Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun”: Essays on Scottish Literature in Honour of R.D.S. Jack, ed. Sarah Carpenter and Sarah M. Dunnigan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 23–39, and in Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literature (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 6 Jean Froissart, Le Paradis d’Amour. L’Orloge amoureus, ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Genève: Droz, 1986); Le Dit dou bleu Chevalier, in Dits et Débats, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Genève: Droz, 1979), 155–70; L’Espinette amoureuse, ed. Fourrier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963); La Prison amoureuse, ed. Fourrier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974); Le Joli Buisson de Jonece, ed. Fourrier (Genève: Droz, 1975). 7 Christine de Pizan, The Love Debate Poems of Christine de Pizan, ed. Barbara K. Altmann (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 8 See James Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), and Calin, The French Tradition. 9 Lewis, Allegory of Love, 255–7; Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958), 34, 80; Carl E. Bain, “The Nightingale and the Dove in The Kingis Quair,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 9 (1964): 19–29; Dolores L. Noll, “‘The Romantic Conception of Marriage’: Some Remarks on C.S. Lewis’s Discussion of The Kingis Quair,” Studies in Medieval Culture 3 (1970): 159–68; McDiarmid, Kingis Quair, 55–60; Clair F. James, “The Kingis Quair: The Plight of the Courtly Lover,” in New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poetry, ed. David Chamberlain (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 95–118. 10 Lewis, Allegory of Love, 2. 11 On the thematic and structural ambiguities in Remede, see Calin and Lawrence Earp, “The Lai in Remede de Fortune,” Ars Lyrica 11 (2000): 39–75. 12 For example, MacQueen, “Tradition and Interpretation”; Bain, “Nightingale and Dove”; Andrew von Hendy, “The Free Thrall: A Study of The Kingis

308  Notes to pages 27–8 Quair,” Studies in Scottish Literature 2 (1964–5): 141–51; Noll, “Romantic Conception”; McDiarmid, Kingis Quair, 65–8; Christine Rose, “The Oxymoron and the Structure of The Kingis Quair,” Comitatus 14 (1983): 49–58; Boffey, “Chaucerian Prisoners”; James, “Plight of the Courtly Lover”; Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing. 1 3 Robert M. Slabey, “‘Art Poetical’ in The Kingis Quair,” Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 208–10; Ian Brown, “The Mental Traveller – A Study of the Kingis Quair,” Studies in Scottish Literature 5 (1967–8): 246–52; Ebin, “Boethius, Chaucer”; Barrie Ruth Straus, “Convention in The Kingis Quair: A Formulaic Analysis,” Scottish Literary Journal 5.1 (May 1978): 5–16; Louise O. Fradenburg, “The Scottish Chaucer,” in Proceedings of the Third Interna­ tional Conference on Scottish Language and Literature (Medieval and Modern), ed. Roderick J. Lyall and Felicity Riddy (Stirling and Glasgow: Culross, 1981), 177–90; Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 55; Elizabeth Robertson, “‘Raptus’ and the Poetics of Married Love in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and James I’s Kingis Quair,” in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 302–23; Petrina, “‘My Maisteris Dere.’” 2.  Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid 1 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 111–31. 2 Among other examples, C.W. Jentoft, “Henryson as Authentic ‘Chaucerian’: Narrator, Character, and Courtly Love in The Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 10 (1972–3): 94–102; Thomas W. Craik, “The Substance and Structure of The Testament of Cresseid: A Hypothesis,” in Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Adam J. Aitken et al. (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977), 22–6; Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 63–103; Fox, Poems, 20–3, 42–4, 50–6; McDiarmid, Robert Henryson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 88–116; Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 165–87; Anne M. McKim, “Henryson’s ‘Memoriall of Fair Cresseid,’” in Of Lion and of Unicorn: Essays on Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations in Honour of Professor John MacQueen, ed. R.D.S. Jack and Kevin McGinley (Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1993), 1–15; Melvin Storm, “The Intertextual Cresseida: Chaucer’s Henryson or Henryson’s Chaucer?” Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 105–22;

Notes to pages 28–9 309 McKim, “The European Tragedy of Cresseid: The Scottish Response,” in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham Caie et al. (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2001), 211–20; Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 133–58. 3 Alice S. Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 205–15; Robert L. Kindrick, Robert Henryson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 118–48; Nikki Stiller, “Robert Henryson’s Cresseid and Sexual Backlash,” Literature and Psychology 31.2 (1981): 88–95; Lesley Johnson, “Whatever Happened to Criseyde? Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” in Courtly Litera­ ture: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 313–21; Nicholas Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr. Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), 89–108; R.D. Drexler, “Cresseid as the Other,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 221–31; George Edmondson, “Henryson’s Doubt: Neighbors and Negation in The Testament of Cresseid,” Exemplaria 20 (2008): 165–96. 4 See MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 45–93; Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 162–208; Walter Scheps, “A Climatological Reading of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 15 (1980): 80–7; Anna Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’: The Story of Troilus and Criseyde in Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 171–97; David J. Parkinson, “Henryson’s Scottish Tragedy,” Chaucer Review 25 (1990–1), 355–62; Steven R. McKenna, Robert ­Henryson’s Tragic Vision (New York: Lang, 1994); Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), 216–59; McKim, “The European Tragedy”; Nick Haydock, “‘The pane of Cresseid for to modifie’: Robert Henryson’s Moral Tragedy,” in The Flouer o Makarheid: Papers from the Eighth and Ninth Annual Conferences of the Robert Henryson Society, ed. Morna R. Fleming (Dunfermline: Robert Henryson Society, 2003), 61–93; MacQueen, Complete and Full with Numbers: The Narrative Poetry of Robert Henryson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 41–75. 5 Machaut, Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre, in Œuvres, 1: 137–282. 6 John B. Friedman, “Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and the Judicio Solis in Conviviis Saturni of Simon of Couvin,” Modern Philology 83.1 (1985–6): 12–21.

310  Notes to pages 30–4 7 Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed. and trans. Paul Imbs and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999). 8 Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans mercy in The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. James C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 328–66; Chartier, Baudet Herenc, Achille Caulier, Le Cycle de la Belle Dame sans Mercy: Une anthologie poétique du XVe siècle, ed. and trans. David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003). Recent good work has been devoted to rehabilitating Chartier: Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); and Chartier in Europe, ed. Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008). 9 Stiller, “Sexual Backlash”; Susan Aronstein, “Cresseid Reading Cresseid: Redemption and Translation in Henryson’s Testament,” Scottish Literary Journal 21.2 (November 1994): 5–22; Catherine S. Cox, “Froward Language and Wanton Play: The ‘commoun’ Text of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 29 (1996): 58–72; Felicity Riddy, “‘Abject odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” in The Long Fifteenth Century, ed. Cooper, 229–48; McKim, “European Tragedy”; and Karla Knutson, “Constructing Chaucer in the Fifteenth Century: The Inherent Anti-Feminism of the Paternal Paradigm,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, ed. Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy (Brookings: South Dakota State University, 2007), 95–106. See also intelligent, challenging articles by Carolyn Ives and David Parkinson, “Scottish Chaucer, Misogynist Chaucer,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 186–202; Sarah M. Dunnigan, “Feminizing the Text, Feminizing the Reader? The Mirror of ‘Feminitie’ in the Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 33–4 (2004): 107–63; and Sally Mapstone, “The Testament of Cresseid,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500, ed. Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243–55. Mapstone observes that, in the course of the narration, the intrusive narrator speaks less and Cresseid speaks more. She grows beyond her amorous self to arrive at truth and true self-judgment whereas Troilus and the narrator do not. 10 Riddy, “‘Abject odious’”; also, Drexler, “Cresseid as the Other.” 11 Some of this material is taken from Calin, “Intertextual Play and the Game of Love: The Belle Dame sans mercy Cycle,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 31 (2006): 31–46. 12 Béroul, Le Roman de Tristan, poème du XIIe siècle, ed. Ernest Muret and L.M. Defourques (Paris: Champion, 1967); Ami et Amile, chanson de geste,

Notes to pages 34–6 311

13 14 15

16

17

ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Paris: Champion, 1969); La Queste del saint Graal, roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Champion, 1923); Jaufré, roman arthurien du XIIIe siècle en vers provençaux, 2 vols., ed. Clovis Brunel (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1943). Les Congés d’Arras (Jean Bodel, Baude Fastoul, Adam de la Halle), ed. Pierre Ruelle (Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965). Larry M. Sklute, “Phoebus Descending: Rhetoric and Moral Vision in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” ELH 44.2 (1977): 189–204. On this topic, see Beryl Rowland, “The ‘Seiknes Incurabill’ in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” English Language Notes 1 (1963–4): 175–7; Fox, “Introduction” to his ed. The Testament of Cresseid (London: Nelson, 1968), 23–43; Kathryn Hume, “Leprosy or Syphilis in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid?” English Language Notes 6 (1968–9): 242–5; and Saul Nathanial Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 173–7. See also Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006). Taking this approach, among others, are Noll, “The Testament of Cresseid: Are Christian Interpretations Valid?” Studies in Scottish Literature 9 (1971–2): 16–25; Jentoft, “Authentic ‘Chaucerian’”; John McNamara, “Divine Justice in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 11 (1973–4): 99–107; Jane Adamson, “Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid: ‘Fyre’ and ‘Could,’” Critical Review (Melbourne) 18 (1976): 39–60; Sklute, “Phoebus Descending”; Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance; Boffey, “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament,” Modern Language Quarterly 53.1 (1992): 41–56. See also Derek Pearsall, “‘Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?’: Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R.A. Waldron, ed. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 169–82. Taking this approach, among others, are Lee W. Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid,” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714; C. David Benson, “Troilus and Cresseid in Henryson’s Testament,” Chaucer Review 13 (1978–9): 263–71; Kindrick, Robert Henryson, 118–48; Alicia K. Nitecki, “‘Fenȝeit of the New’: Authority in The Testament of Cresseid,” Journal of Narrative Technique 15.2 (1985): 120–32; William A. Quinn, “Henryson’s ‘ballet schort’: A Virgin Reading of The Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 31 (1999): 232–44; Dunnigan, “Impossible Saint, Improbable Magdelene? Henryson’s Cresseid,” in The Flouer o Makarheid, 33–59; Kevin J. McGinley, “‘In brief sermone ane pregnant sentence’: Puns and Perspectivism in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid,” in “Joyous sweit imaginatioun,” ed. Carpenter and Dunnigan, 41–57.

312  Notes to pages 36–8 18 For a very intelligent article arguing that Henryson critiques the land law judicial proceedings of his day through Cresseid’s trial before the planets, see Jana Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candance Barrington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 40–66. 3.  Gavin Douglas, The Palice of Honour 1 Virgil’s “Aeneid” Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, ed. David F.C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1950–64). The best work on Douglas is Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976). Other full-length studies are Lauchlan Maclean Watt, Douglas’s Aeneid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), and Charles B. Blyth, “The Knychtlyke Stile”: A Study of Gavin Douglas’s “Aeneid” (New York: Garland, 1987). 2 Penelope Schott Starkey, “Gavin Douglas’s Eneados: Dilemmas in the Nature Prologues,” Studies in Scottish Literature 11 (1973–4): 82–98; Gerald B. Kinneavy, “An Analytical Approach to Literature in the Late Middle Ages: The ‘Prologues’ of Gavin Douglas,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974): 126–42; Lois Ebin, “The Role of the Narrator in the Prologues to Gavin Douglas’s Eneados,” Chaucer Review 14 (1979–80): 353–65; Alicia K. Nitecki, “Gavin Douglas’s Rural Muse,” in Proceedings of the Third Confer­ ence, ed. Lyall and Riddy, 383–95, “The Theme of Renewal in Douglas’s Prologue 12,” Ball State University Forum 22 (1981): 9–13, and “Mortality and Poetry in Douglas’s Prologue 7,” Papers on Language and Literature 18 (1982): 81–7; Ian S. Ross, “‘Proloug’ and ‘Buke’ in the Eneados of Gavin Douglas,” in Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance: Fourth International Conference, ed. Dietrich Strauss and Horst W. Drescher (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1986), 393–407; David J. Parkinson, “Gavin Douglas’s Interlude,” Scottish Literary Journal 14.2 (November 1987): 5–17; Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates, 97–131, passim; Elizabeth Archibald, “Gavin Douglas on Love: The Prologue to Eneados IV,” in Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. J. Derrick McClure and Michael R.G. Spiller (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989), 244–57; A.E.C. Canitz, “The Prologue to the Eneados: Gavin Douglas’s Directions for Reading,” Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990): 1–22; Alastair Fowler, “Gavin Douglas: Romantic Humanist,” in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Kees Dekker

Notes to pages 38–41 313 (Louvain: Peeters, 2005), 83–103; and Parkinson, “Orpheus and the Translator: Douglas’s ‘lusty crafty preambill,’” in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality, 105–20. 3 Smith, French Background, 106–7; Aloys Schumacher, Des Bischofs Gavin Douglas Übersetzung der Aeneis Virgils (Strasbourg: Schauberg, 1910). See also Thomas Brückner, Die erste französische Aeneis: Untersuchungen zu Octovien de Saint-Gelais’ Übersetzung, mit einer kritischen Edition des VI. Buches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987). 4 V 15 ausus se credere; S-G 30 En son sçavoir qu’il voulst aventurer; D C.i. 15–16 Sa bald was … and happy / To aventur hym self. V 20 in foribus; S-G 42 Au grant portal; D 25 Apon the portis. V 26 nefandae; S-G 56 monstrueuse; D 40 monstruus. V 29 dolos tecti ambagesque; S-G 65 le doubte tres subtile; D 49 the subtell wentis. V 40 sacra; S-G 90 le sacriffice; D 76 The sacryfyis. V 43 ostia centum; S-G 95 cent entrees; D 80 Ane hundreth entreis. V65 vates; S-G 151 prophete; D 126 prophetess. V 78 vates; S-G 180 la prophete; D 150 the prophetes. V 86 bella, horrida bella; S-G 199 batailles moult horrendes; D C.ii 15 batalis, horribil batalis. V 92 non oraveris; S-G 211 ne requieres; D 28 sal remane onrequerit. V 93–4 coniunx iterum hospital … iterum thalami; S-G 214, 216 une nouvelle houstesse … thalame estrangier; D 32 A strange bride. V 106 unum oro; S-G 241 Ung don requiers; D 55 Bot a thing I beseik the and requeir. V 106 ianua; S-G 242 la porte; D 56 the entress and port. 5 The Palice of Honour, in The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Bawcutt, 1–133, 1st ed. 1967 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2003). In addition to a first-rate literary and historical introduction, xv–lii, the 2003 edition contains, in a supplement, a review of scholarship since 1967 and a bibliography to the supplement. Consult also Gavin Douglas, The Palis of Honoure, ed. David Parkinson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1992). 6 See Bawcutt, “Gavin Douglas and Chaucer,” Review of English Studies ns 21 (1970): 401–21; Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 104–28; and Ruth Morse, “Gavin Douglas: ‘Off Eloquence the flowand balmy strand,’” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107–21. 7 Machaut, Le Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, in Œuvres 1: 57–135. 8 Treating The Palice of Honour as comedy, A.C. Spearing, Medieval DreamPoetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 102–11; Frances McNeely Leonard, Laughter in the Courts of Love: Comedy in Allegory, from Chaucer to Spenser (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1981), 107–15;

314  Notes to pages 45–52 Parkinson, “The Farce of Modesty in Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Hon­ oure,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 13–25; Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 231–40. 9 Smith, French Background, 113; R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), 23–7. 10 On the role of Ovid in The Palice of Honour, see Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, 58–9, and Sandra Cairns, “The Palice of Honour of Gavin Douglas, Ovid, and Raffaello Regio’s Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Res Publica Litterarum 7 (1984): 17–38. On Douglas’s wide reading, especially in Latin, see Bawcutt, “The ‘Library’ of Gavin Douglas,” in Bards and Makars, ed. Aitken, 107–26. 11 In this section I allude to the following texts: Froissart, Le Temple d’Honneur, in Dits et Débats, 91–127; Michault Taillevent, Le Songe de la Toison d’Or, in Robert Deschaux, Un poète bourguignon du XVe siècle: Michault Taillevent (Édition et étude) (Genève: Droz, 1975), 59–86; Jean Molinet, Le Trosne d’Honneur, in “Les Faictz et Dictz” de Jean Molinet, ed. Noël Dupire, vol. 1 (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1936), 36–58; Molinet, Le Chap­ pellet des Dames, 100–26; Jean Lemaire de Belges, Le Temple d’Honneur et de Vertus, ed. Henri Hornik (Genève: Droz, and Lille: Minard, 1957); Lemaire de Belges, La Concorde des deux Langages, ed. Jean Frappier (Paris: Droz, 1947); Guillaume de Digulleville, Le Pèlerinage de la Vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J.J. Stürzinger (London: Nichols, 1893), and Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. Stürzinger (London: Nichols, 1895); and Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’Honneur, ed. Frédéric Duval (Genève: Droz, 2002). 12 Deschaux, Poète bourguignon, 84. 13 Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, 52ss.; Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, 202–11; Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates, 91–7. Also, Kinneavy, “The Poet in The Palice of Honour,” Chaucer Review 3 (1968–9): 280–303; and Mark E. Amsler, “The Quest for the Present Tense: The Poet and the Dreamer in Douglas’s The Palice of Honour,” Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1982): 186–208. On danger, violence, and chivalry and its discontents, see Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 184–91. Fradenburg’s book is important for all literature in Middle Scots. 14 Denton Fox, “The Scottish Chaucerians,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D.S. Brewer (London: Nelson, 1966), 164–200, esp. 193–9; and Parkinson, “Farce of Modesty.” Also Leonard, Laughter in the Courts.

Notes to page 53 315 4.  William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois 1 Hugh MacDiarmid [C.M. Grieve], Albyn, or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927), 35. 2 The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), 1: 184–92 and 163–8. This edition replaces The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). The best full-length study on Dunbar is also by Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Also to be recommended are Ian Simpson Ross, William Dunbar (Leiden: Brill, 1981), and the collection, William Dunbar, “The Nobill Poyet”: Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2001). In that volume R.J. Lyall argues cogently that The Goldyn Targe was written after Douglas’s The Palice of Honour (1501) and before The Thrissill and the Rois (1503): see “The Stylistic Relationship between Dunbar and Douglas,” 69–84. 3 John Speirs, The Scots Literary Tradition: An Essay in Criticism, rev. 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 54–68; Tom Scott, Dunbar: A Critical Exposition of the Poems (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), 40–52; Maurice Lindsay, History of Scottish Literature (London: Hale, 1977), 54–5. 4 C.S. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 251–2, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 98–9; Wittig, Scottish Tradition, 53–76; Fox, “Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe,” ELH 26.3 (1959): 311–34; Ebin, “The Theme of Poetry in Dunbar’s ‘Goldyn Targe,’” Chaucer Review 7 (1972–3): 147–59, and “Dunbar’s ‘fresch anamalit termes celicall’ and the Art of the Occasional Poet,” Chaucer Review 17 (1982–3), 292–9; Lyall, “Stylistic Relationship”; and J. Derrick McClure, “Dunbar’s Metrical Technique,” in “The Nobill Poyet,” 150–66. On aureation, A. Zettersten, “On the Aureate Diction of William Dunbar,” in Essays Presented to Knud Schibsbye, ed. M. Chesnutt (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1979), 51–68; Richard Finkelstein, “Amplification in William Dunbar’s Aureate Poetry,” Scottish Literary Journal 13.2 (1986): 5–15; and John Corbett, “Auration Revisited: The Latinate Vocabulary of Dunbar’s High and Plain Styles,” in “Nobill Poyet,” 183–97. From a general perspective on the hierarchy of styles, see Corbett, “The Language of Older Scottish Literature,” in Corbett, Lan­ guage and Scottish Literature, Scottish Language and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 214–38; and Jonathan A. Glenn, “Classifying Dunbar: Modes, Manners, and Styles,” in “Nobill Poyett,” 167–82. 5 E. Allen Tilley, “The Meaning of Dunbar’s ‘The Goldyn Targe,’” Studies in Scottish Literature 10 (1972–3): 220–31; Lyall, “Moral Allegory in Dunbar’s

316  Notes to page 54 ‘Goldyn Targe,’” Studies in Scottish Literature 11 (1973–4): 47–65; Edmund Reiss, William Dunbar (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 48–50 and 105–9; J.C. Nitzsche, “The Role of Kingship in William Dunbar’s Thrissill and the Rois,” University of Mississippi Studies in English, ns 2 (1981): 25–34; Antony J. Hasler, “William Dunbar: The Elusive Subject,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure and Spiller, 194–208, esp. 197–201; Ross, Dunbar, 239–69; Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 134–49; Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 92–103 and 310–15; David Strong, “Supra-Natural Creation in Dunbar’s ‘The Goldyn Targe,’” Philological Quarterly 82 (2003): 149–66; Gregory A. Foran, “Dunbar’s Broken Rainbow: Symbol, Allegory, and Apocalypse in ‘The Goldyn Targe,’” Philological Quarterly 86 (2007): 47–65. 6 Fox, “Goldyn Targe”; Ebin, “Theme of Poetry”; Gerald B. Kinneavy, “Metaphors of the Poet and His Craft in William Dunbar,” in Aeolian Harps: Essays in Literature in Honor of Maurice Browning Cramer, ed. Donna G. Fricke and Douglas C. Fricke (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1976), 57–64; Reiss, Dunbar, 109; Ebin, “Occasional Poet”; Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 240–8; Foran, “Broken Rainbow.” 7 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1965–70); “The Romaunt of the Rose” and “Le Roman de la Rose”: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. Ronald Sutherland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); and The Romaunt of the Rose ed. Charles Dahlberg (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). A similar conclusion is reached with regard to another Dunbar text: Sarah Couper, “Allegory and Parody in William Dunbar’s ‘Sen that I am a presoneir,’” Scottish Studies Review 6.2 (Autumn 2005): 9–20. Reiss, Dunbar, 15, sees no direct, unmistakable influence from the French. See also Jean-Jacques Blanchot, “William Dunbar in the Scottish Guard in France? An Examination of Historical Facts,” in Third International Conference, ed. Lyall and Riddy, 315–27, and Stuart Lucas, “Foreign Influences in the Vocabulary of William Dunbar,” Scottish Language 9 (Winter 1990), 52–65. The term “Scottish Chaucerian,” whether applied to Dunbar or to others, has been rejected by just about all scholars in the field. Some have explored the notion of Dunbar as a Scots Villon or Dunbar as a Scots Rhétoriqueur: A.M. Kinghorn, “Dunbar and Villon – A Comparison and a Contrast,” Modern Language Review 62.2 (1967): 195–208; Blanchot, “William Dunbar and François Villon: The Literary Personae; Towards a Methodology of Comparison in Literature,” in Bards and Makars, ed. Aitken, 72–87; Florence H. Ridley, “The Literary Relations of William Dunbar,” in Medieval Studies Conference Aachen 1983: Language and Literature, ed. Wolf-Dietrich Bald and Horst Weinstock (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1984), 169–84; Joanne S. Norman, “William Dunbar: Grand Rhétoriqueur,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure,

Notes to pages 55–66 317 179–93. Although suggestive, I do not find these designations to be any better than the old Chaucerian. 8 For example, Fox, “Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe”; Ebin, “Theme of Poetry”; Pamela M. King, “Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe: A Chaucerian Masque,” Studies in Scottish Literature 19 (1984): 115–31; Robert Drexler, “Dunbar, Douglas, and the Art of Memory,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 252–65. In opposition, David V. Harrington, “The ‘Wofull Prisonnere’ in Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe,” Studies in Scottish Literature 22 (1987): 173–82. 9 Recognizing ambiguity in The Goldyn Targe are David N. DeVries, “The Pleasure of Influence: Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe and Dream-Poetry.” Studies in Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 113–27; Norman, “William Dunbar and the Bakhtinian Construction of the Self,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 243–51; and Foran, “Broken Rainbow.” 10 For all this, see Calin, French Tradition, 169–83. 11 Nitzsche, “Role of Kingship”; Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 134–49; Ross, Dunbar, 239–50; Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 92–103. 12 Bawcutt, “Dunbar’s Use of the Symbolic Lion and Thistle,” Cosmos 2 (1986): 83–97. 13 Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole. ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1962); Gerbert de Montreuil, Le Roman de la Violette ou de Gerart de Nevers, ed. Douglas Labaree Buffum (Paris: Champion, 1928). 14 Fradenburg offers a Lacanian reading of this text in City, Marriage, Tourna­ ment and in the earlier study “Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer and Dunbar,” Poetics Today 5.3 (1984): 493–517. 15 In Jean Froissart, Dits et Débats, ed. Fourrier: Machaut, Le Dit de la Rose, 285–8; Le Dit de la Marguerite, 277–84; Le Dit de la Fleur de lis et de la Marguerite, 289–301; and Froissart, Le Dit de la Margheritte, 147–53; La Plaidoirie de la Rose et de la Violette, 191–203. Christine, Dit de la Rose, in Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 91–131. 16 “Les Faictz et Dictz” de Jean Molinet, ed. Dupire, vol. 1: Le Chappellet des Dames, 100–26; L’Alliance matrimoniale des Enfans d’Autrice et d’Espaigne, 335–40; Pour une margueritte, 344. 17 La Couronne Margaritique, in Œuvres de Jean Lemaire de Belges, ed. J. Stecher, vol. 4 (Louvain: Lefever, 1891), 15–167. 5.  John Rolland, The Court of Venus 1 John Rolland, Ane Treatise Callit The Court of Venus, ed. Walter Gregor ­(Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1884). This text is not to be confused with a composite compilation in English from approximately the same period: The

318  Notes to pages 66–76 Court of Venus, ed. Russell A. Fraser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955). With rigorous and meticulous scholarship, Priscilla Bawcutt, “‘Mankit and Mutillait’: The Text of John Rolland’s The Court of Venus,” in The Apparelling of Truth: Literature and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI: A Festschrift for Roderick J. Lyall, ed. Kevin J. McGinley and Nicola Royan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 11–29, documents some of the flaws in the early volumes of the Scottish Text Society, and she corrects the errors in Gregor’s edition. I have incorporated Bawcutt’s emendations into the passages from The Court of Venus quoted in this chapter. 2 Lewis, English Literature, 112. In The Allegory of Love, 292–6, Lewis paints a more nuanced picture of Rolland’s book yet, at best, one that is damning with faint praise. 3 Lindsay, History, 68. 4 Kratzmann, “Sixteenth-Century Secular Poetry,” in The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1: Origins to 1660 (Medieval and Renaissance), ed. R.D.S. Jack (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 105–24, esp. 121. 5 Smith, French Background, 122, 123. 6 Gregor, Introduction to Court of Venus, xxviii–xxxi. Roderick J. Lyall, “Christian Humanism in John Rolland’s Court of Venus,” in Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 108–25, argues that the Venus was written prior to 1548. 7 Lyall, “Christian Humanism,” offers a very different reading of the text than mine. 8 Christine de Pizan, Love Debate Poems, ed. Altmann; Alain Chartier, Poetical Works, ed. Laidlaw. 9 Chartier, Poetical Works, and Chartier, Herenc, and Caulier, Le Cycle de “La Belle Dame sans Mercy,” ed. Hult and McRae. 10 Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, vol. 2: Rondeaux (Paris: Champion, 1927). 11 Les Cent Ballades: Poème du XIVe siècle composé par Jean le Seneschal …, ed. Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1905). 12 Les Œuvres de Pierre Chastellain et de Vaillant: Poètes du XVe siècle, ed. Robert Deschaux (Genève: Droz, 1982). 13 Christine de Pizan, Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1982). 14 Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, 97th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 29. 15 This verbal conflict between Venus and Vesta can perhaps be related to a similar debate as part of a public court performance at approximately the

Notes to pages 79–86 319 same time. See the insightful study by Sarah Carpenter, “Love and Chastity: Political Performance in Scottish, French and English Courts of 1560’s,” in “Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun,” ed. Carpenter and Dunnigan, 111–28. 1 6 It is made also in Douglas’s Palice of Honour. Part Two: The Comic, Didactic, and Satiric: A Mode of Clerical Provenance 1 Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Hachette, 1895). 2 Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 172. 3 Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1957). 4 Calin, In Defense of French Poetry: An Essay in Revaluation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 131–8. 5 Jean-Charles Payen, La Rose et l’utopie: Révolution sexuelle et communisme nostalgique chez Jean de Meung (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1976). 6.  Robert Henryson, Morall Fabillis 1 The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 3–110. 2 Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 32–3, 46–7. 3 John Speirs, The Scots Literary Tradition: An Essay in Criticism, rev. 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 38; Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1984), 37. 4 Richard Bauman, “The Folktale and Oral Tradition in the Fables of Robert Henryson,” Fabula 6.2 (1963–4): 108–24. For an effort to re-engage with folklore, see John McNamara, “Folkloric Patterns in Henryson’s Fables: A Sociolinguistic Approach,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 95–108. 5 In this line, see especially Robert L. Kindrick, Henryson and the Medieval Arts of Rhetoric (New York: Garland, 1993). 6 John MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 15–23; A.C. Spearing, Medieval to Renais­ sance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187–99; Gray, Robert Henryson, 24–5; Fox, “Introduction” to Poems of Robert Henryson, xxii–xxv. 7 David K. Crowne, “A Date for the Composition of Henryson’s Fables,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61 (1962): 583–90; MacQueen, Robert Henryson, 209–15, 219–21, and Complete and Full with Numbers: The Narrative Poetry of Robert Henryson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 175–6;

320  Notes to pages 86–91 Kindrick, Robert Henryson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 59–61; Fox, “Introduction,” xx, xlix. 8 Marianne Powell, Fabula docet: Studies in the Background and Interpretation of Henryson’s “Morall Fabillis” (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983), 99. 9 Fox, “Introduction,” xlix; Matthew P. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 9. 10 Marie de France, Fables, ed. and tr. Harriet Spiegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Recueil général des Isopets, ed. Julia Bastin, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1929–30). The fables have been somewhat neglected in medieval French studies. However, for important recent work, consult Sahar Amer, Ésope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), and Jeanne-Marie Boivin, Naissance de la fable en français: L’Isopet de Lyon et l’Isopet I-Avionnet (Paris: Champion, 2006). 11 Powell, Fabula Docet, 116–18. 12 Le Roman de Renart le Contrefait, ed. Gaston Raynaud and Henri Lemaître, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1914). 13 Le Roman de Renart, édité d’après les manuscrits C et M, ed. Naoyuki Fukumoto, Noboru Harano, and Satoru Suzuki, 2 vols. (Tokyo: France Tosho, 1983–5); Le Roman de Renart, édité d’après le manuscrit de Cangé, ed. Mario Roques, 6 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1948–63); Le Roman de Renart, ed. Ernest Martin, 3 vols. (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1882–7). Each of these editions is based on a distinct and independent manuscript family; each family orders the various “branches” of the Renart cycle differently. I shall quote from FHS (Fukumoto-Harano-Suzuki), the best and most recent edition, which presents the best and most complete version of the cycle, while cross-­referencing M (Martin) and R (Roques). Good work has been done on the Roman de Renart: Hans Robert Jauss, Untersuchungen zur mittelalterli­ chen Tierdichtung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1958); John Flinn, “Le Roman de Renart” dans la littérature française et dans les littératures étrangères au Moyen Âge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963); Elina SuomelaHärmä, Les structures narratives dans le “Roman de Renart” (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1981); Jean Batany, Scène et coulisses du “Roman de Renart” (Paris: SEDES, 1989); Jean R. Scheidegger, Le Roman de Renart ou le texte de la dérision (Genève: Droz, 1989); Jean Dufournet, Du “Roman de Renart” à Rutebeuf (Caen: Paradigme, 1993); Corinne Zemmour, Percep­ tion du monde par les animaux dans le “Roman de Renart”: Étude séman­ tique: signifiants, signifiés et valeurs symboliques (Greifswald: Reineke, 1995); J.R. Simpson, Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French “Roman de Renart” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996); Kenneth Varty, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert, and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence

Notes to pages 92–101 321

14 15 16 17

18

19

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Dufournet, Le Roman de Renart: Entre réécriture et innovation (Orléans: Paradigme, 2007). Donald MacDonald, “Henryson and Chaucer: Cock and Fox,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 8 (1966–7): 451–61. I quote from the Roques edition because it contains a second invocation of the bear; so also does the Martin edition. Powell, Fabula Docet, 7–8. For studies since 1990 alone, see Philippa M. Bright, “Medieval Concepts of the figure and Henryson’s Figurative Technique in The Fables,” Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990): 134–53; Steven R. McKenna, “Tragedy and the Consolation of Myth in Henryson’s Fables,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 490–502; Rosemary Greentree, Reader, Teller, and Teacher: The Narrator of Robert Henryson’s “Moral Fables” (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993), 37–51; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 149–89; Arnold Clayton Henderson, “Having Fun with the Moralities: Henryson’s Fables and Late-Medieval Fable Innovation,” Studies in Scottish Literature 32 (2001): 67–87; R.D.S. Jack, “Henryson and the Art of Precise Allegorical Argument,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 1–11; McDiarmid, “Robert Henryson on Man and the Thing Present,” European Sun, 242–8; R.J. Lyall, “Henryson, the Hens and the Pelagian Fox: A Poet and the Intellectual Currents of His Age,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 83–94; David Moses, “Sin and Signification in Robert Henryson’s Fables,” in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality, ed. MacDonald and Dekker, 33–49; MacQueen, Full with Numbers, passim. For example, George Clark, “Henryson and Aesop: The Fable Transformed,” ELH 43.1 (1976): 1–18; Richard J. Schrader, “Henryson and Nominalism,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978): 1–15; Gray, Robert Henryson, 118–61; McDiarmid, Robert Henryson, 62–87; Dieter Mehl, “Robert Henryson’s Moral Fables as Experiments in Didactic Narrative,” in Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Ulrich Broich et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), 81–99; Gregory Kratzmann, “The Poetics of the ‘Fenȝeit Fabill’: Chaucer and the Middle Scots Poets,” in Of Lion and of Unicorn, ed. Jack and McGinley, 16–38; Antony J. Hasler, “Robert Henryson,” in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), ed. Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 286–94. Fox, “Introduction,” lxxv–lxxxi; Spearing, “Control and Displaced Sovereignty in Three Medieval Poems,” Review of English Studies 33.131 (1982):

322  Notes to page 103 247–61, esp. 252–7; George D. Gopen, “The Essential Seriousness of Robert Henryson’s Moral Fables: A Study in Structure,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 42–59. See also Lyall, “Henryson’s Morall Fabillis: Structure and Meaning,” in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 89–104. 7. William Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and Public Court Didactic Verse 1 The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, vol. 1, 41–55. The criticism on this text is rich and varied. See the full-length effort by the noted Australian poet A.D. Hope, A Midsummer Eve’s Dream: Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar (New York: Viking, 1970). See also the chapters in books on Dunbar: Scott, Dunbar, 179–211; Ross, William Dunbar, 217–37; and Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 324–46. Among the more challenging articles and chapters since 1985: Spearing Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 199–223, esp. 215–23, and The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 249–67; Klaus Bitterling, “The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo: Some Comments on Words, Imagery, and Genre,” in Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Strauss and Drescher, 337–58; Edwina Burness, “Female Language in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” ibid., 359–68; Evans, “Dunbar’s Tretis: The Seven Deadly Sins in Carnivalesque Disguise,” Neophi­ lologus 73.1 (1989): 130–41; Bawcutt, “Images of Women in the Poems of Dunbar,” Études Écossaises 1 (1992): 49–58, and “‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’: Bird and Beast Imagery in William Dunbar,” in Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen (Groningen: Forsten, 1997), 93–105; Lisa Perfetti, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 99–125; Wendy A. Matlock, “Secrets, Gossip, and Gender in William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” Philological Quarterly 83 (2004): 209–35; and Bart Veldhoen, “Reason versus Nature in Dunbar’s ‘Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,’” in “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 49–63. 2 Smith, French Background, 38–41. For the chanson which Smith cites, see Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen, ed. Karl Bartsch (Leipzig: Vogel, 1870), Book 1: 21. 3 Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen, 1: 4, 6, 9, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 35, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 51, 54, 60, 67, 68, 69.

Notes to pages 105–13 323 4 Pierre Bec, La Lyrique française au Moyen Âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): Contri­ bution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux, 2 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1977–8), 1: 23–43. 5 On the obscene speech of the ladies, see Ebin, “Dunbar’s Bawdy,” Chaucer Review 14 (1979–80): 278–86; and Burness, “Dunbar and the Nature of Bawdy,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure and Spiller, 209–20. 6 Roy J. Pearcy, “The Genre of William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” Speculum 55.1 (1980): 58–74. 7 Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98). Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’Anel 2: 215–40; Le Jugement des Cons 4: 23–33; Les Trois Chanoi­ nesses de Couloigne 10: 83–96; Les Trois Meschines 4: 217–26; Le Vallet aus douze Fames 4: 131–50; La Damoisele qui sonjoit 4: 45–55; Le Foteor 6: 51–75. La Veuve is to be found in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1877), 197–214. 8 Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 73–104. I recommend also Nykrog, Les Fabliaux; Philippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes à rire du Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Mary Jane Stearns Schenck, The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987); Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York: Garland, 1993); Brian J. Levy, The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); Pearcy, Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux: An Essay in Applied Narratology (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007). 9 William Calin, “Is Jean de Meun Antifeminist?” in “Riens ne m’est seur que la chose incertaine”: Études sur l’art d’écrire au Moyen Âge offertes à Eric Hicks, ed. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler and Denis Billotte (Genève: Slatkine, 2001), 81–90. Also Payen, La Rose et l’utopie; and Susan Stakel, False Roses: Structures of Duality and Deceit in Jean de Meun’s “Roman de la Rose” (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1991). 10 “Les Lamentations de Matheolus” et “Le Livre de Leesce” de Jehan le Fèvre, de Resson, ed. A.-G. Van Hamel, 2 vols. (Paris: Bouillon, 1892–1905); Eustache Deschamps, Le Miroir de mariage in Œuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps, vol. 9, ed. Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894). 11 Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, ed. Robert Deschaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1999). 12 Les .XV. Joies de mariage, ed. Jean Rychner (Genève: Droz, 1963). 13 François Villon, Le Testament Villon, ed. Jean Rychner and Albert Henry, vol. 1 (Genève: Droz, 1974).

324  Notes to pages 114–19 14 Thus the Tretis would succeed magnificently where The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissill and the Rois allegedly failed. See part 1, chapter 4, above, and especially note 3. Also Shaun McCarthy, “‘Syne maryit I a Marchand’: Dunbar’s Mariit Wemen and Their Audience,” Studies in Scottish Literature 18 (1983): 138–56. 15 K.M. Abenheimer and J.L. Halliday, “The Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow,” Psychoanalytic Review 31 (1944): 233–52; Arthur K. Moore, “The Setting of The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” English Studies 32 (1951): 56–62; Scott, Dunbar; Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 220, 222–3, and Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 251–3, 265–7. Also, partially echoing Spearing, Veldhoen, “Reason versus Nature.” 16 Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 3. See also her article, “William Dunbar,” in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, ed. Clancy and Pittock, 295–304. 17 Reiss, William Dunbar, 15. 18 Stuart Lucas, “Foreign Influences in the Vocabulary of William Dunbar,” Scottish Language 9 (Winter 1990): 52–65; Smith, French Background, 60; Jean-Jacques Blanchot, “William Dunbar in the Scottish Guard in France? An Examination of the Historical Facts,” in Third International Conference, 315–27. 19 Ridley, “The Literary Relations of William Dunbar,” in Medieval Studies Conference Aachen, 169–84, esp. 171. 20 Œuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps, ed. le marquis de Queux de SaintHilaire and Gaston Raynaud, 11 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878–1903). On Deschamps, see two recent volumes, Karin Becker, Eustache Deschamps: L’état actuel de la recherche (Orléans: Paradigme, 1996); and Susanna Bliggenstorfer, Eustache Deschamps: Aspects poétiques et satiriques (Tübingen: Francke, 2005). See also important collections: Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. JeanPatrice Boudet and Hélène Millet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997); Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier-Poet: His Work and His World, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998); Autour d’Eustache Deschamps: Actes du Colloque … Amiens, 5–8 novembre 1998, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Amiens: Presses du Centre d’Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 1999); Les “dictez vertueulx” d’Eustache Deschamps: Forme poétique et discours engagé à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Miren Lacassagne and Thierry Lassabatère (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-­Sorbonne, 2005); and Eustache Deschamps, témoin et modèle: Littérature et société politique (XIVe–XVIe siècles), ed. Thierry Lassabatère and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008). 21 On medical aspects of Deschamps’s work, see Becker, “Eustache Deschamps’s Medical Poetry,” in French Courtier-Poet, ed. Sinnreich-Levi, 209–27, and

Notes to pages 121–6 325

22

23

24 25

“La corporalité du ‘povre Eustace’: le moi physique revisité,” in Témoin et modèle, ed. Lassabatère, 89–102. See The Thrissil, the Rois, and the Flour-de-lys: A Sample-Book of State Poems and Love-Songs Showing Affinities between Scotland, England and France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Helena Mennie Shire (Cambridge: Ninth of May, 1962); Christopher Brookhouse, “Deschamps and Dunbar: Two Elegies,” Studies in Scottish Literature 7 (1969–70): 123; and Parkinson, “Scottish Prints and Entertainments, 1508,” Neophilologus 75 (1991): 304–10. Sinnreich-Levi, “The Feminist Voice of the Misogynist Poet: Deschamps’s Poems in Women’s Voices,” in French Courtier-Poet, ed. Sinnreich-Levi, 123–30. Michelle Stoneburner, “Le Miroir de mariage: Misunderstood Misogyny,” in French Courtier-Poet, ed. Sinnreich-Levi, 145–62. This is one of the points made in Calin, In Defense of French Poetry, 161–7.

8. David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, The Testament of the Papyngo, and Squyer Meldrum 1 The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, 1490–1555, ed. Douglas Hamer, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1931). I shall quote from Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989). For full-length studies on Lyndsay, see Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz, Dramatic Allegory: Lindsay’s “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); and Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). On the themes of politics, statecraft and the art of governance, and court culture, in addition to Edington, see Claude Graf, “Theatre and Politics: Lindsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” in Bards and Makars, ed. Aitken, 143–55; David Reid, “Rule and Misrule in Lindsay’s Thrie Estaitis and Pitcairne’s Assembly,” Scottish Literary Journal 11.2 (December 1984): 5–24; Sarah Carpenter, “Drama and Politics: Scotland in the 1530s,” Medieval English Theatre 10.2 (1988): 81–90; Greg Walker, “Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and the Politics of Reformation,” Scottish Literary Journal 16.2 (November 1989): 5–17; Joachim Schwend, “Demokratie und Rationalismus in David Lindsays Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” in Literatur im Kontext: Festschrift für Horst W. Drescher, ed. Joachim Schwend et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992), 3–17; John J. McGavin, Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), and “Working

326  Notes to pages 127–8 towards a Reformed Identity in Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” in Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power, and Theatri­ cality, ed. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 239–60; and Walker, “Flyting in the Face of Convention: Protest and Innovation in Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” ibid., 211–38. 2 Pierre Gringore, Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, ed. Alan Hindley (Paris: Champion, 2000). 3 See Cynthia Jane Brown, The Shaping of History and Poetry in Late M ­ edieval France: Propaganda and Artistic Expression in the Works of the Rhéto­riqueurs (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1985); and her editions of Gringore, Œuvres polémiques rédigées sous le règne de Louis XII (Genève: Droz, 2003), and Les Entrées royales à Paris de Marie d’Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France (1517) (Genève: Droz, 2005). 4 Anna J. Mill, “The Influence of the Continental Drama on Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” Modern Language Review 25 (1930): 425–42; Smith, French Background, 126–30, esp. 129. 5 Graf, “Sottise et folie dans la Satire des trois états,” Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 3 (1970): 5–27; Sandra Billington, “The Fool and the Moral in English and Scottish Morality Plays,” in Popular Drama in Northern Europe in the Later Middle Ages: A Symposium, ed. Fleming G. Anderson et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988), 113–33; Howard B. Norland, Drama in Early Tudor Britain: 1485–1558 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 210–29; Peter Happé, “Staging Folly in the Early Sixteenth Century: Haywood, Lindsay, and Others,” in Fools and Folly, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), 73–111; and A.A. MacDonald, “Dixit insipiens: Sir David Lindsay and Renaissance Folly,” in Media Latinitas: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Occasion of the Retirement of L.J. Engels, ed. R.I.A. Nip et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 263–8. 6 Recueil de farces (1450–1550), ed. André Tissier, 13 vols. (Genève: Droz, 1986–2000). On the late medieval and Renaissance French farce, Barbara C. Bowen, Les Caractéristiques essentielles de la farce française et leur survivance dans les années 1550–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Jean-Claude Aubailly, Le Théâtre médiéval profane et comique: La naissance d’un art (Paris: Larousse, 1975), 101–62; Bernadette Rey-Flaud, La Farce ou la machine à rire: Théorie d’un genre dramatique (1450–1550) (Genève: Droz, 1984); Konrad Schoell, La Farce du XVe siècle (Tübingen: Narr, 1992); Sharon Collingwood, Market Pledge and Gender Bargain: Commercial Relations in French Farce, 1450–1550 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 7 Recueil de farces, 6: 263–307.

Notes to pages 129–38 327 8 Le Pliçon, in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, ed. Noomen and Van den Boogaard, 10: 23–32. 9 Recueil de farces, 5: 229–73. 10 Recueil de farces, 10: 21–63; 65–116. 11 Berengier au lonc Cul, in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 4: 245–77. 12 On the French morality plays, Alan E. Knight, Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 1983), 6–12, 17–116; Jonathan Beck, the introduction to his ed., Théâtre et propagande aux débuts de la Réforme: Six pièces polémiques du Recueil La Vallière (Genève: Slatkine, 1986), 7–84. On two anti-Catholic Reformer plays in Scots which have not survived, Bill Findlay, “Performance and Plays,” in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, ed. Clancy and Pittock, 253–62, esp. 255–6. 13 See Knight, Aspects of Genre, 8, 11–12, 68–73. 14 Moralité nouvelle a cinq parsonnages: Des trois estatz reformez par Rayson, in Le Recueil Trepperel: Fac-similé des trente-cinq pièces de l’original, ed. Eugénie Droz (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1966), no. 20. 15 Farce nouvelle de Bien Mondain, in Ancien Théâtre françois, ed. M. Viollet le Duc, vol. 3 (Paris: Jannet, 1854), 187–98; L’Eglise, Noblesse et Pauvreté qui font la lessive, in Théâtre et propagande, 101–24; “A Fifteenth-Century Morality Play: Michault Taillevent’s Moralité de Povre Commun,” ed. J.H. Watkins, French Studies 8 (1954): 207–32; Moralité de Pouvre Peuple, ed. Werner Helmich, in Philologica Romanica: Erhard Lommatzsch gewidmet, ed. Manfred Bambeck and Hans Helmut Christmann (München: Fink, 1975), 145–243. 16 Le Ministre de l’Eglise, in Théâtre et propagande, 125–44. 17 Recueil général des sotties, ed. Émile Picot, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1902–12); Le Recueil Trepperel, Vol. 1: Les Sotties, ed. Eugénie Droz (Paris: Droz, 1935). On the sottie, Barbara Goth, Untersuchungen zur Gattungsgeschichte der Sottie (München: Fink, 1967); Aubailly, Le Monologue, le dialogue et la sottie: Essai sur quelques genres dramatiques de la fin du Moyen Âge et du début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1976), 280–463; Ida Nelson, La Sottie sans souci: Essai d’interprétation homosexuelle (Paris: Champion, 1977); Heather Arden, Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the “Sottie” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Olga Anna Dull, Folie et rhétorique dans la sottie (Genève: Droz, 1994). 18 Sotye nouvelle des Croniqueurs, in Recueil général des sotties, 2: 199–244; Moral de Tout le Monde, in Recueil général des sotties, 3: 25–44; Farce nouvelle: Troys Brus et deulx Hermites, in Recueil général des sotties, 3: 79–97; Sottie des sots ecclésiastiques qui jouent leurs bénéfices, in Recueil Trepperel, 339–69.

328  Notes to pages 141–5 19 Aubailly, Monologue, dialogue et sottie, 435–42. 20 We find such discussion, presented with complexity and nuance, in Kantrowitz, Dramatic Allegory, 61–86; Norland, Drama in Early Tudor Britain; R. James Goldstein, “Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), 349–65; Garrett P.J. Epp, “Chastity in the Stocks: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M. Dunnigan et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 61–73. 21 On Robert Kemp’s acting text for the Edinburgh Festival, which deletes almost 50% of the original including the ending with Foly, see Ronnie Jack, “Medieval Drama Lives Again? Lindsay’s Satyre and Kemp’s Satire,” Chapman 68 (Summer 1992): 81–6. For a scholarly and also politically aware study of the revivals since 1948, see Adrienne Scullion, “Political Theatre or Heritage Culture? Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis in Production,” in Literature and the Scottish Reformation, ed. Crawford Gribben and David George Mullen (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 213–32. 22 The Dreme, in Sir David Lyndsay, Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2000), 1–40. Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour (The Monarche) in Works, ed. Hamer, vol. 1, 197–386. On Lyndsay the poet, Janet Hadley Williams, “Sir David Lyndsay,” in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Bawcutt and Hadley Williams (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 179–91. 23 Lyndsay, The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo, in Selected Poems, ed. Hadley Williams, 58–97. See Glenn D. Burger, “Poetical Invention and Ethical Wisdom in Lindsay’s ‘Testament of Papyngo,’” Studies in Scottish Literature 24 (1989): 164–80. On the narrator’s voice in this text and elsewhere, Hadley Williams, “‘Thus Euery Man Said For Hym Self’: The Voices of Sir David Lyndsay’s Poems,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure and Spiller, 258–72. For general background, Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 24 Jean Lemaire de Belges, Les Épîtres de l’Amant Vert, ed. Jean Frappier (Lille: Giard, and Genève: Droz, 1948). On Jean Lemaire’s life and works, see Pierre Jodogne, Jean Lemaire de Belges: Écrivain franco-bourguignon (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1972). 25 William Calin, “Jean Lemaire de Belges: Courtly Narrative at the Close of the Middle Ages,” in The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. Minnette GrunmannGaudet and Robin F. Jones (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980), 205–16.

Notes to pages 147–55 329 26 Hadley Williams, “Women Fictional and Historic in Sir David Lyndsay’s Poetry,” in Woman and the Feminine, 47–60, esp. 52–5. 27 Jean de Condé, “La Messe des Oiseaux” et “Le Dit des Jacobins et des Fremeneurs,” ed. Jacques Ribard (Genève: Droz, 1970). On his life and work, see Jacques Ribard, Un ménestrel du XIVe siècle: Jean de Condé (Genève: Droz, 1969). 28 Squyer Meldrum, in Lyndsay, Selected Poems, ed. Hadley Williams, 128–74. 29 Felicity Riddy, “Squyer Meldrum and the Romance of Chivalry,” Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974): 26–36; Edington, Court and Culture, 122–5. 30 On the exalting of old chivalry and the recognition of its loss today, Goldstein, “‘With Mirth My Corps Ȝe Sal Convoy’: Squyer Meldrum and the Work of Mourning,” in Langage Cleir Illumynate, ed. Royan, 145–63. 31 History of William Marshal, ed. and tr. A.J. Holden, S. Gregory, and David Crouch, 3 vols. (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002–6); “La Vie du Prince Noir” by Chandos Herald, ed. Diana B. Tyson (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975); “La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin” de Cuvelier, ed. Jean-Claude Faucon, 3 vols. (Toulouse: Éditions Universitaires du Sud, 1990–1); Le Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, ed. Denis Lalande (Genève: Droz, 1985); Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, included in Œuvres de Georges Chastellain, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. 8 (Bruxelles: Heussner, 1866); Histoire du Seigneur de Bayart, le chevalier sans paour et sans reprouche, composée par le Loyal Serviteur, transcription de l’édition de 1527 (Paris: Droz, 1927). 32 Élisabeth Gaucher, La Biographie chevaleresque: Typologie d’un genre (XIIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris: Champion, 1994). Gaucher does not include Bayard in her study. 33 Denis Lalande, Jean II le Meingre, dit Boucicaut (1366–1421): Étude d’une biographie héroïque (Genève: Droz, 1988). See also Claude Tixier, Portrait littéraire de Bertrand du Guesclin: Le héros Bertrand, son entrée sur la scène épique (Paris: Nizet, 1981); and Michelle Szkilnik, Jean de Saintré: Une carrière chevaleresque au XVe siècle (Genève: Droz, 2003). For additional perspectives, Ruth Morse, “Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature,” Modern Language Review 80 (1985): 257–68; and Daisy Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 34 See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 35 The Testament of Squyer Meldrum, in Selected Poems, 174–82. 36 Julia Boffey, “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament,” Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 41–56.

330  Notes to pages 157–67 9.  The Freiris of Berwik 1 The Freiris of Berwik, in The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature: 1357–1707, ed. R.D.S. Jack and P.A.T. Rozendaal (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1997), 152–65. 2 Le Povre Clerc, in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, ed. Noomen and Van den Boogaard, 7: 255–69. See the important articles by Jack, “The Freiris of Berwik and Chaucerian Fabliau,” Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1982): 145–52, and by R. James Goldstein, “The Freiris of Berwik and the Fabliau Tradition,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 267–75. 3 Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, 304–15. 4 Goldstein, “The Freiris of Berwik,” 270–71. 5 Charles Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, 73, 124, 153. 6 However, in Freiris, Simon, after having dined and, above all, imbibed with the two friars, bids his wife to join them: “Cum heir, fair Dame, and sete yow doun me by / And tak pairte of sic gud as we haif heir” (396–7); Alison, in dread over what Simon will discover concerning her and her lover, does drink a bit with them: “But scho drank with thame in to cumpany / With fenyeit cheir and hert full wo and hevy” (413–14). 7 Evelyn S. Newlyn, “The Political Dimensions of Desire and Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne Manuscript,” in Selected Essays on Scottish Lan­ guage and Literature: A Festschrift in Honor of Allan H. MacLain (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1992), 75–96; Goldstein, “Freiris of Berwik.” 8 Schenck, The Fabliaux, 40. 9 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 172–6. 10.  King Hart 1 King Hart, in The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 139–70, 1st ed. 1967; 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2003). 2 Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 287–90, esp. 287. 3 Bawcutt, Shorter Poems, lv–lxxix. The 2003 reprint contains, in a supplement, a review of scholarship since 1967 and a bibliography to the supplement. See also Sheila Delany, “King Hart: Rhetoric and Meaning in a Middle Scots Allegory,” Neophilologus 55 (1971): 328–41; and Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 131–54. 4 Bawcutt, “William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas,” in The History of Scottish Literature, ed. Jack, 73–89, esp. 74. On the authorship, see the impeccably

Notes to pages 168–73 331 argued studies by Bawcutt (Priscilla Preston), “Did Gavin Douglas Write King Hart?” Medium Aevum 28 (1959): 31–47; and Florence H. Ridley, “Did Gawin Douglas Write King Hart?” Speculum 34 (1959): 402–12. 5 René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris, ed. Susan Wharton (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980). See also The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart by René d’Anjou, ed. and tr. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and Kathryn Karczewska (New York: Routledge, 2001), and René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cœur d’amour épris, ed. and tr. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2003). 6 Smith, French Background, 120–1. 7 Calin, French Tradition, 185–95. 8 Daniel Poirion, “L’allégorie dans le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris de René d’Anjou,” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 9.2 (1971): 51–64, and “Les tombeaux allégoriques et la poétique de l’inscription dans le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris de René d’Anjou (1457),” Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: Comptes Rendus (1990): 321–34. See also Jean R. Scheidegger, “Couleurs, amour et fantaisie dans le Livre du cuer d’amours espris de René d’Anjou,” in Les Couleurs au Moyen Age (Senefiance 24) (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, C.U.E.R. M.A, 1988), 387–99; Gilles Polizzi, “‘Sens plastique’: le spectacle des merveilles dans le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris,” in De l’étranger à l’étrange, ou la conjointure de la merveille (Senefiance 25) (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, C.U.E.R. M.A, 1988), 393–430; and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, “Liste des poètes, énumération des victimes d’Amour: Les enjeux d’un choix dans Le Cœur d’Amour épris de René d’Anjou,” Versants 56.1 (2009): 67–82. 9 Martin, Kingship and Love, 131–54, passim. 10 On René’s life and reputation, consult Françoise Robin, La Cour d’AnjouProvence: La vie artistique sous le règne de René (Paris: Picard, 1985). See also Christian de Mérindol, Le Roi René et la seconde maison d’Anjou: Embléma­ tique, art, histoire (Paris: Léopold d’Or, 1987); and the synthesis, Noël Coulet, Alice Planche, and Françoise Robin, Le Roi René: Le prince, le mécène, l’écrivain, le mythe (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1982). Planche’s contribution, “L’œuvre littéraire,” 143–216, is excellent literary criticism. For a recent biography of René, see Margaret L. Kekewich, The Good King: René of Anjou and Fifteenth-Century Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 11 Frédéric Lyna, Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance de René d’Anjou: Étude du texte et des manuscrits à peintures (Bruxelles: Weckesser, and Paris: Rousseau, 1926). I regularize the text in line with accepted practice. 12 Poirion argues, in “Le cœur de René d’Anjou,” in Les Angevins de la littérature (Angers: Presses de l’Université, 1979), 48–62, for a similar vision

332  Notes to pages 173–80 in the Livre du Cuer and in the Mortifiement. Shira Schwam-Baird, “The Crucified Heart of René d’Anjou in Text and Image,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (2000): 228–52, relates the book cogently to late medieval devotion in its sermon tradition, mysticism, and iconography. 1 3 The binary structure is grounded in Hart’s rise to heights with Plesance followed by his fall to Decrepitus, that is, moving from youth to maturity and then maturity to old age. Thus we find two castles, Hart twice defeated, two powerful female figures (Plesance and Conscience), and two groups of attendants – the first representing sensual life, and the second representing the life of the spirit. Part Three: Romance 1 Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, 427. 2 Rhiannon Purdie, “Medieval Romance in Scotland,” in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 165–77. 3 M.P. McDiarmid, “The Metrical Chronicles and Non-alliterative Romances,” in History of Scottish Literature, ed. Jack, 27–38; A.S.G. Edwards, “Contextualising Middle Scots Romance,” in A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen et al. (Louvain: Peeters, 2000), 61–73; Purdie, “Medieval Romance in Scotland.” 4 Sergi Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition c. 1375–c. 1550: Nation, Chivalry, and Knighthood (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). 5 Sally Mapstone, “The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1550,” Doct. Phil. Thesis (Oxford, 1986). 6 Karl Heinz Göller, König Arthur in der englischen Literatur des späten Mittelalters (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963). 11.  Fergus 1 Calin, The French Tradition, 19–87. 2 M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 139–75. 3 Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 12, 16–18. 4 Guillaume le Clerc, The Romance of Fergus, ed. Wilson Frescoln (Philadelphia: Allen, 1983).

Notes to pages 180–5 333 5 Legge, “Some Notes on the Roman de Fergus,” Transactions of the Dum­ friesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, ser. 3, 27 (1950): 163–72, and “Sur la genèse du Roman de Fergus,” in Mélanges de linguistique romane et de philologie médiévale offerts à M. Maurice Del­ bouille (Gembloux: Duculot, 1964), vol. 2, 399–408; R.L. Graeme Ritchie, The Normans in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1954), 307–10; Peter Rickard, Britain in Medieval French Literature: 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 113–15; Beate SchmolkeHasselmann, Der arthurische Versroman von Chrestien bis Froissart (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 208–22; D.D.R. Owen, William the Lion, 1143–1214: Kingship and Culture (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 1997), 114–43. 6 Joan Greenberg, “Guillaume le Clerc and Alan of Galloway,” PMLA 66 (1951): 524–33; Wilson Frescoln, “Introduction” to Guillaume le Clerc, The Romance of Fergus, 1–30, esp. 27–30; Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arthurische Versroman; and Owen, “The Craft of Guillaume le Clerc’s Fergus,” in The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1984), 43–81, esp. 47–9 and 77–9. 7 Guillaume le Clerc, The Romance of Fergus, tr. D.D.R. Owen, Arthurian Literature 8 (1989): 79–183, esp. 173. 8 Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arthurische Versroman, 158–69; Owen, “The Craft”; and Roel Zemel, “The New and the Old Perceval: Guillaume’s Fergus and Chrétien’s Conte du Graal,” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 46 (1994): 324–42, envisage Fergus as a response to and a reworking of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal. However, Michelle A. Freeman, “Fergus: Parody and the Arthurian Tradition,” French Forum 8 (1983): 197–215, and Owen himself, “The Craft of Fergus: Supplementary Notes,” French Studies Bulletin 25 (Winter 1987–8): 1–5, propose, in addition, the intertextual presence of Le bel Inconnu by Renaut de Beaujeu and the First and Second Perceval Continuations. 9 Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arthurische Versroman, 130–9, believes that Fergus’s deeds are uniquely personal. 10 Kathryn Gravdal, Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 20–50. Also on the theme of parody, Schmolke-­ Hasselmann; Freeman, “Fergus”; and Owen, “The Craft.” Tony Hunt, “The Roman de Fergus: Parody or Pastiche?” in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), 55–69, prefers the notion of pastiche. For a non-parodic reading, see MarieJosé Southworth, Étude comparée de quatre romans médiévaux: “Jaufre,” “Fergus,” “Durmart,” “Blancandin” (Paris: Nizet, 1973), 71–96.

334  Notes to pages 189–90 12.  Lancelot of the Laik 1 “Lancelot of the Laik” and “Sir Tristrem,” ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1994). See Mapstone, “The Scots, the French, and the English: An Arthurian Episode,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 129–44. 2 Lancelot: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha, vols. 7 and 8 (Genève: Droz, 1980–2). The nine volumes of the Micha edition combine with La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu, plus a number of “prequels” to form the Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle, also called Le Grand Lancelot-Graal and the Vulgate Cycle. Whatever the importance one accords to the truncated version of the Lancelot en prose called Lancelot do Lac, and opinions are wildly divergent, since only two complete and perhaps a handful of incomplete manuscripts of Lancelot do Lac have survived, compared to well over one hundred of the “classic” cyclical romance, it is all but certain that the Laik-poet translated from a manuscript containing the cyclical text. Among the important books on the Prose Lancelot are those by Alexandre Leupin, Le Graal et la littérature: Étude sur la Vulgate arthurienne en prose (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1982); E. Jane Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985); Monika Unseitig-Herzog, Jungfrauen und Einsiedler: Studien zur Organisa­ tion der Aventieurewelt im “Prosalancelot” (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990); Jean-René Valette, La Poétique du merveilleux dans le “Lancelot en prose” (Paris: Champion, 1998); Michael Waltenberger, Das grosse Herz der Erzählung: Studien zu Narration und Interdiskursivität im “Prosa-Lancelot” (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999); Annie Combes, Les Voies de l’aventure: Réécriture et composition romanesque dans le “Lancelot” en prose (Paris: Champion, 2001); Katarzyna Dybel, Être heureux au Moyen Âge: d’après le roman arthurien en prose du XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Peeters, 2004); Miranda Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2005); and Bénédicte Milland-Bove, La Demoiselle arthurienne: Écriture du personnage et art du récit dans les romans en prose du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2006). 3 Robert W. Ackerman, “English Rimed and Prose Romances,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 480–519, esp. 491–3. 4 Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 214–15. 5 John MacQueen, “Poetry – James I to Henryson,” in History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Jack, 55–72, esp. 60–2.

Notes to pages 191–7 335 6 Also by giving the anonymous French “preudoms plains de grant savoir” (8:12) whom Arthur addresses as “maistres” (8:13 ss.) a name: Amytans. 7 Bertram Vogel, “Secular Politics and the Date of Lancelot of the Laik,” Studies in Philology 40 (1943): 1–13. 8 Walter Scheps, “The Thematic Unity of Lancelot of the Laik,” Studies in Scottish Literature 5 (1967–8): 167–75. 9 Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition, 47–8, 95–7, 99–100, 193–211. See also Douglas Wurtele, “A Reappraisal of the Scottish Lancelot of the Laik,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 46 (1976): 68–82; and the very important study by Mapstone, “The Scots, the French, and the English.” Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love, 41–60, relates Arthur’s growth in rulership to Lancelot’s growth in love, exploring the functioning of desire and the contribution it can make in the political realm. Elizabeth Archibald, “Lancelot of the Laik: Sources, Genre, Reception,” in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Purdie and Royan, 71–82, offers a perceptive état présent and synthesis. 10 Flora Alexander, “Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes to the Figure of King Arthur: A Reassessment,” Anglia 93 (1975): 17–34. 11 Lupack, “Introduction” to his ed. Lancelot of the Laik, 1–11. 12 Lupack, “Introduction,” 4. 13 Michel Huby, L’Adaptation des romans courtois en Allemagne au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968). 14 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 319. 15 Martin, Kingship and Love, 43. 13.  Golagros and Gawane 1 Golagros is sometimes written Golagrus and even Gologras. I quote from The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, ed. Ralph Hanna (Woodbridge, UK: The Scottish Text Society, Boydell and Brewer: 2008). See also The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn, 227–308 (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1995.) 2 The First Continuation is contained in the first three volumes of The Con­ tinuations of the Old French “Perceval” of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. William Roach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press and American Philosophical Society, 1949–52). It took three volumes to present the various manuscripts in their complex, divergent totality. I shall quote from the short version ms L, perhaps the most authentic, and ms T, the one most cited over

336  Notes to page 197 the years by scholars. On the whole, relatively little attention has been devoted to the First Continuation. I can mention the following books, which treat this topic in part: Keith Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), 152–84; Guy Vial, “Le Conte du Graal”: Sens et unité; “La Première Continuation”: Textes et contenu (Genève: Droz, 1987); Pierre Gallais, L’Imaginaire d’un romancier français de la fin du XIIe siècle: Description raisonnée, comparée et commentée de la Continuation-Gauvain, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988–9); Stoyan Atanassov, L’Idole inconnue: Le personnage de Gauvain dans quelques romans du XIIIe siècle (Orléans: Paradigme, 2000); and the very important study by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the “Conte du Graal” and Its Verse Continuations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Gallais’s 1974 pages are a monument to eccentricity in an otherwise all-too-conformist profession. 3 Hanna, “Introduction,” xxxi–xxxiv; Paul J. Ketrick, The Relation of “Golagros and Gawane” to the Old French “Perceval” (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1931); Rhiannon Purdie, a leading scholar in the field of English and Scots romance, speaks against the original hypothesis to be found in Ketrick’s dissertation: Purdie, “The Search for Scottishness in Golagros and Gawane,” in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Purdie and Royan, 95–107, esp. 97n9. From my perspective, since Golagros and Gawane dates from before 1508 and Perceval le Galloys was published in 1530, the prose Perceval could not have been the Scots poet’s source. We have no evidence for an earlier edition of the 1530 Perceval or for any other comparable version prior to 1508. No evidence whatsoever. The 1530 Perceval le Galloys is an extremely obscure text, with no recognizable source and only five copies extant, and no second printing, significantly fewer copies extant than the number of First Continu­ ation manuscripts. Purdie observes that “there is no inherent improbability in a fifteenth-century Scottish author working from an early thirteenthcentury French verse exemplar,” and she cites the example of the fragmentary Scots romance Florimond of Albany. I can only add that Ketrick worked from old, unreliable editions of the Continuation and from an imperfect command of the manuscript tradition. 4 L, vol. 3: 3272–6764; T, vol. 1: 8735–12706. 5 In L, Arthur is informed of Girflet’s whereabouts later in the narrative. 6 Actually, the pucele seduces him once she discovers that he is the incomparable Sir Gawain. Gawain tells the story thusly in L (4289–309). However, in T he confesses that he raped the maiden (10030–54).

Notes to pages 199–205 337 7 Göller, König Arthur in der englischen Literatur, 121–4; Gillian Rogers, “‘Illuminat vith lawte, and with lufe lasit’: Gawain Gives Arthur a Lesson in Magnanimity,” in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Jennifer Fellows et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 94–111. 8 See Calin, “Les rapports entre chansons de geste et romans courtois au XIIIe siècle,” in Essor et fortune de la chanson de geste dans l’Europe et l’Orient latin (Modena: Mucchi, 1984), 407–24. 9 Busby, Gauvain, 152–84. 10 W.R.J. Barron, “Golagrus and Gawain: A Creative Redaction,” Biblio­ graphical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 26 (1974): 173–85. 11 As is argued by Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition, 48–50, 97, 211–21; and Purdie, “The Search for Scottishness.” For an especially nuanced view of the Scottish King Arthur, see Nicola Royan, “‘Na les vailyeant than ony uthir princis of Britane’: Representations of Arthur in Scotland 1480–1540,” Scottish Studies Review 3.1 (Spring 2002): 9–20. Randy P. Schiff, “Borderland Subversions: Anti-Imperial Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane,” Speculum 84 (2009): 613–32, proposes that Golagros relates specifically to borderlands warfare, reflecting local interests and critiquing imperial expansionism, independent from nation-building on both sides. 12 R.D.S. Jack, “Arthur’s Pilgrimage: A Study of Golagros and Gawane,” Studies in Scottish Literature 12 (1974–5): 3–20. On the question of peace, see Elizabeth Walsh, RSCJ, “Golagros and Gawane: A Word for Peace,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure and Spiller, 90–103. 14.  The Taill of Rauf Coilyear 1 The Tale of Ralph the Collier: An Alliterative Romance, ed. Elizabeth Walsh, RSCJ (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). Other editions: Rauf Coilȝear, in Medieval English Romances, ed. Diane Speed, 2 vols. (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1987), 1: 193–232; 2: 300–13, 338; The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, in Longer Scottish Poems: Volume One, 1375–1650, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), 94–133; The Tale of Ralph the Collier, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), 161–204; and The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, in The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature: 1357–1707, ed. R.D.S. Jack and P.A.T. Rozendaal (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1997), 57–82.

338  Notes to pages 205–13 2 Walsh, “The Tale of Rauf Coilyear: Oral Motif in Literary Guise,” Scottish Literary Journal 6.2 (December 1979): 5–19, and in her edition, 5–60. Walsh does insist on the literary quality of Rauf and on the author’s talent. 3 Busby, “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear: A Reassessment,” in VIII Congreso de la Société Rencesvals (Saragossa: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1981), 63–9. 4 Gaydon: Chanson de geste du XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Subrenat (Louvain: Peeters, 2007). Subrenat, Étude sur Gaydon, chanson de geste du XIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Éditions de l’Université de Provence, 1974), remains the fundamental study of this text. See also Calin, The Epic Quest: Studies in Four Old French “Chansons de Geste” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 118–71. 5 See Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality, 1160–1200 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980). 6 R.D.S. Jack and P.A.T. Rozendaal, ed., The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1997), 57. 7 Ramsey, Chivalric Romances, 196–200. See also studies by S.H.A. Shepherd, “‘of thy glitterand gyde haue I na gle’: The Taill of Rauf Coilȝear,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Lituraturen 228 (1991): 284–98; Margaret Kissam Morris, “Generic Oxymoron in The Taill of Rauf Coilȝear,” in Voices in Translation: The Authority of “Olde Bookes” in Medieval Literature, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi and Gale Sigal (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 137–55; and Glenn Wright, “Churl’s Courtesy: Rauf Coilȝear and Its English Analogues,” Neophilologus 85 (2001): 647–62. 8 McDiarmid, “Rauf Coilyear, Golagros and Gawane, Hary’s Wallace: Their Themes of Independence and Religion,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 328–33; Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition, 249–55. 15.  Eger and Grime 1 Both to be found in Eger and Grime, ed. James Ralston Caldwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). 2 On the musical rendering of 1497, see Caldwell, “Introduction” to his edition of Eger and Grime, 6. Deanna Delmar Evans, “Scott’s Redgauntlet and the Late Medieval Romance of Friendship, Eger and Grime,” Studies in Scottish Literature 31 (1999): 31–45, esp. 45. Evans argues most convincingly for the Scottish authenticity of this text in “Re-evaluating the Case for a Scottish Eger and Grime,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 276–87. 3 Caldwell, “Introduction,” 1–176; Mabel Van Duzee, A Medieval Romance of Friendship: “Eger and Grime” (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963). McDiarmid,

Notes to pages 213–21 339 “The Scots Makars and the Ballad Tradition,” in Bryght Lanternis, ed. McClure and Spiller, 14–23, proposes that the romance was influenced by popular ballads. 4 Caldwell, “Introduction,” 62. 5 Ami et Amile, chanson de geste, ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Paris: Champion, 1969); Amys e Amillyoun, ed. Hideka Fukui (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1990); Amis and Amiloun, ed. MacEdward Leach (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). See also the edition by Edward E. Foster, “Amis and Amiloun,” “Robert of Cisyle,” and “Sir Amadace” (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 1–88. On Ami et Amile see Calin, The Epic Quest, 57–117. Given that the origin of the story is represented by the chanson de geste, I shall designate the characters by their names in that chanson. 6 From a different perspective, Sergi Mainer, “Eger and Grime and the Boundaries of Courtly Romance,” in “Joyous sweit imaginatioun,” ed. Carpenter and Dunnigan, 77–95, sees the undermining of romance motifs throughout with a result that the text becomes self-parody. 7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Antony J. Hasler, “Romance and Its Discontents in Eger and Grime,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Longman, 2000), 200–18, makes an exciting Lacanian reading of this text. From a queer theory perspective, Tison Pugh, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 123–44. For a more traditional view, Anna Hubertine Reuters, Friendship and Love in the Middle English Metrical Romances (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991), 159–79. 8 On Eger and Grime see also Ramsey, Chivalric Romances, 135–50; and David E. Faris, “The Art of Adventure in the Middle English Romance: Ywain and Gawain, Eger and Grime,” Studia Neophilologica 53 (1981): 91–100. Part Four: Scots Renaissance: Soundings 1 From Bards and Makars, ed. Aitken, 1977, to Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 2005, and beyond. 2 J. Derrick McClure, “‘O Phoenix Escossois’: James VI as Poet,” in A Day Estivall: Essays … in Honour of Helena Mennie Shire, ed. Alisoun GardnerMedwin and Janet Hadley Williams (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), 96–111.

340  Notes to pages 222–5 3 Roger A. Mason, “Laicisation and the Law: The Reception of Humanism in Early Renaissance Scotland,” in A Palace in the Wild, ed. Houwen et al., 1–25; Theo van Heijnsbergen, “The Bannatyne Manuscript Lyrics: Literary Convention and Authorial Voice,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 423–44. For Mason, the Renaissance goes back to the reign of James III. 4 I discuss these questions of periodization, with regard to French literature, in In Defense of French Poetry: An Essay in Revaluation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 152–7. 5 R.D.S. Jack, “The First since Millar,” Scottish Literary Journal Supplement 5 (Winter 1977): 12–20; “Of Lion and of Unicorn: Literary Traditions at War,” in Of Lion and of Unicorn, ed. Jack and McGinley, 67–99; “Scottish Literature: The English and European Dimensions,” in Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, ed. Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1993), 9–17; “Critical Introduction: ‘Where Stands Scottish Literature Now?’” in The Mercat Anthology, vii–xxxix; “Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet,” in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, ed. Martin McLaughlin et al., Proceedings of the British Academy 146 (2007): 259–73; and “Translation and Early Scottish Literature,” in Scotland in Europe, ed. Tom Hubbard and R.D.S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 39–54; R.J. Lyall, “‘A New Maid Channoun’? Redefining the Canonical in Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 1–18. See also Gerard Carruthers, “Form and Substance in the Poetry of the Castalian ‘Band,’” Scottish Literary Journal 26.2 (Winter 1999): 7–17. 16.  Mary Queen of Scots 1 Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: Philip, 1988). For an effort to refute Wormald’s thesis, see James MacKay, In My End Is My Beginning: A Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). 2 Michael Lynch, “Introduction” to Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms, ed. Michael Lynch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 1–29; “Queen Mary’s Triumph: The Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566,” Scottish Historical Review 69 (1990): 1–21; “The Reassertion of Princely Power in Scotland: The Reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots, and King James VI,” in Princes and Princely Culture: 1450–1650, vol. 1, ed. Martin Gosman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 199–238. Also, A.A. MacDonald, “Scottish Poetry of the Reign of Mary Stewart,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 44–61. 3 Jack, “Mary and the Poetic Vision,” Scotia 3 (1979): 34–48; David Parkinson, “‘A Lamentable Storie’: Mary Queen of Scots and the Inescapable Querelle

Notes to pages 225–6 341 des Femmes,” in Palace in the Wild, ed. Houwen et al., 141–60. See also James E. Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); and John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). For the French response, see Alexander S. Wilkinson, Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542–1600 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 4 Mary’s œuvre has been edited quite a few times, yet never in a scholarly critical edition. Among the twentieth-century efforts are the following: Queen Mary’s Book: A Collection of Poems and Essays by Mary Queen of Scots, ed. P. Stewart-Mackenzie Arbuthnot (London: Bell, 1907); Les Poëmes de Marie Stuart reine d’Écosse au comte de Bothwell (Harlem, Netherlands: Enschedé en Zonen, 1932); The Silver Casket: Letters and Poems by Mary Stuart Queen of Scots, ed. Clifford Bax (London: Home and Van Thal, 1946); M.H. Armstrong Davison, The Casket Letters: A Solution to the Mystery of Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (Washington, DC: University Press of Washington, 1965); Bittersweet within My Heart: The Love Poems of Mary, Queen of Scots, ed. Robin Bell (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992); Æ MacRobert, Mary Queen of Scots and the Casket Letters (London: Tauris, 2002); Marie Stuart, Onze sonnets et un sizain: Pour James Hepburn, comte de Bothwell (Paris: Arléa, 2003); En ma fin est mon com­ mencement: Écrits religieux et moraux de la reine Marie Stuart, ed. Didier Course (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). I have consulted Arbuthnot, Davison, and Bax, plus two nineteenth-century editions: The Poems of Mary Queen of Scots, ed. Julian Sharman (London: Pickering, 1873); and T.F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Black, 1890), correcting the text when necessary and regularizing it in line with accepted practice. 5 Julian Sharman, The Library of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Stock, 1889); John Durkan, “The Library of Mary, Queen of Scots,” Innes Review 38 (1987): 71–101, and in Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms, ed. Lynch, 71–104. 6 See Sarah M. Dunnigan, “Scottish Women Writers c. 1560–c. 1650,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 15–43, esp. 17–26; Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–45; “Sacred Afterlives: Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville, and the Politics of Sanctity,” Women’s Writing 10.3 (2003): 401–24; and “Feminising the Early Modern Erotic: Female-Voiced Love Lyrics and Mary Queen of Scots,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 441–66; Mary E. Burke, “Queen, Lover, Poet: A Question of

342  Notes to pages 226–35 Balance in the Sonnets of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101–18; Peter C. Herman, “‘mes subjectz, mon ame assubjectie’: The Problematic (of) Subjectivity in Mary Stuart’s Sonnets,” in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI / I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 51–78; Lisa Hopkins, Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 72–85; Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39–60; and François Rigolot, “When Petrarchan Errors Become Political Crimes: Mary Stuart’s French Sonnets to Bothwell,” in Writers in Conflict in SixteenthCentury France: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Quainton, ed. Elizabeth Vinestock and David Foster (Durham, UK: Durham University, 2008), 37–50. 7 Davison, Casket Letters, 206. 8 Wormald, Queen of Scots, 175–8, esp. 176. So also Retha M. Warnicke, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Routledge, 2006), 174: “a French love ballad of twelve unequal verses.” 9 Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 403. 10 Lewis, Allegory of Love, 4. 11 Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry, 33. 12 Louise Labé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Enzo Giudici (Genève: Droz, 1981). 13 Jean Rousset was the first to call attention to the French literary baroque. He did so in La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris: Corti, 1954); L’Intérieur et l’extérieur: Essais sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Corti, 1968). On Rousset, see Calin, The Twentieth-­ Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 70–84. 14 Dunnigan, “Scottish Women Writers,” 22. 15 Herman, “The Problematic (of) Subjectivity.” 16 See Jacques Pineaux, La Poésie des Protestants de langue française, du premier synode national jusqu’à la proclamation de l’édit de Nantes (1559–1598) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 43–58. 17 See I.D. McFarlane, “George Buchanan and France,” in Studies in French Literature Presented to H.W. Lawton, ed. J.C. Ireson et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 223–45; and Philip J. Ford, “George Buchanan’s Court Poetry and the Pléiade,” French Studies 34.2 (1980): 137–52.

Notes to pages 235–7 343 18 McFarlane, in his definitive biography of Buchanan, does not mention the French sonnets. He does allude to the Casket Letters – eight incriminating letters purportedly written by Mary along with the sonnets. See McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 320: “In particular, this is not the place to discuss the authenticity of the Casket Letters – probably an overrated pastime – or to assess the share of blame among those involved, except to be skeptical of the view that Buchanan himself forged the letters.” 17.  King James VI 1 Sally Mapstone, “Was There a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 410–22, and “Older Scots Literature and the Court,” in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, ed. Clancy and Pittock, 273–85. 2 Priscilla Bawcutt, “James VI’s Castalian Band: A Modern Myth,” Scottish Historical Review 80.2 (2001): 251–9, demonstrates that the term achieved its current status only in the second half of the twentieth century. 3 The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1955). See Roderick J. Lyall, “James VI and the Sixteenth-Century Cultural Crisis,” in The Reign of James VI, ed. Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 55–70. 4 The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918); Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I, ed. James Craigie and Alexander Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982); King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); James I, “The True Law of Free Monarchies” and “Basilikon Doron,” ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996); James VI and I, Selected Writings, ed. Neil Rhodes et al. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003). 5 David Harris Willson, “James I and His Literary Assistants,” Huntington Library Quarterly 8 (1944–5): 35–57. 6 Craigie, “Introduction” to Poems of James VI, 1: xv–xx. 7 See The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. Craigie, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1958). Because these “unpublished and uncollected” poems are extant only in manuscript form and because it is debatable how much was authored by James and how much by his collaborators, especially Thomas Erskine, they will not be discussed in this chapter. See Curtis Perry, “Royal Authorship and Problems of Manuscript Attribution in the Poems of King James VI and I,” Notes and Queries 46.2 (1999): 243–6. On the other hand,

344  Notes to pages 237–9 see Morna R. Fleming, “‘And so her Voice and Shape Alike were New’: Montgomerie, Stewart of Baldynneis and James VI and Their Translations of French Lyric Poetry,” Scottish Literary Journal 26.2 (Winter 1999): 79–95, and “The Amatoria of James VI: Loving by the Reulis,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 124–48; and Sarah M. Dunnigan, “Discovering Desire in the Amatoria of James VI,” in Royal Subjects, 149–81. 8 Ane Schort Treatise, in Poems, ed. Craigie, 1: 65–83. See the important pioneering articles by Ronald D.S. Jack, “James VI and Renaissance Poetic Theory,” English 16 (1966–7): 208–11; and Richard M. Clewett, Jr., “James VI of Scotland and His Literary Circle,” Aevum 47 (1973): 441–54. 9 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Genève: Droz, 2001). 10 Pierre de Ronsard, Abbregé de l’Art poëtique François, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, vol. 14 (Paris: Didier, 1949), 4–35; and “Au lecteur,” preface to La Franciade, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 16 (Paris: Didier, 1950), 3–12. 11 Sandra J. Bell, “Kingcraft and Poetry: James VI’s Cultural Policy,” in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI / I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 155–77. 12 J. Derrick McClure, “Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 185–98. 13 Poems, ed. Craigie, 1: 9–14. On these texts and on the Scottish sonnet see, among others, Jack, “Imitation in the Scottish Sonnet,” Comparative Literature 20.4 (1968): 313–28; Michael R.G. Spiller, “The Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet at the Union of the Crowns,” in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 101–115; and Katherine McClune, “The Scottish Sonnet, James VI, and John Stewart of Baldynneis,” in Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from John Barbour to Drummond, 1375–1630, ed. Nicola Royan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 165–80. 14 L’Uranie in The Works of Guillaume de Salluste, sieur Du Bartas, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. et al., vol. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 172–85; The Uranie, in Poems, ed. Craigie, 1:15–37. James printed on facing pages the original French which he had at his disposal and which he translated. The Holmes modern critical edition, which I cite, uses the first version of Du Bartas’s poem, published in 1574, hence the disparity

Notes to pages 241–7 345

15

16 17 18 19

20

21

22

in numeration between Holmes and Craigie. However, Du Bartas’s later additions are all included as variants. Phoenix, in Poems, ed. Craigie, 1: 39–59. See Simon Wortham, “‘Pairt of My Taill Is Yet Untolde’: James VI and I, the Phoenix, and the Royal Gift,” in Royal Subjects, ed. Fischlin and Fortier, 182–204. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry, 97–104. Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas, La Sepmaine, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Nizet, 1981), vol. 2, Cinquieme Jour: 551–98. Poems 1: 97–259. Since 1990, Jan Miernowski, Dialectique et connaissance dans “La Sepmaine” de Du Bartas: “Discours sur discours infiniment divers” (Genève: Droz, 1992); Yvonne Bellenger, Du Bartas et ses divines “Semaines” (Paris: SEDES, 1993); Michel Prieur, Le Monde et l’homme de Du Bartas (Paris: SEDES, 1993); James Dauphiné, La Bibliothèque de du Bartas (Paris: Champion, 1994); Bellenger and Jean-Claude Ternaux, Bibliographie des Écrivains Français: Du Bartas (Paris: Memini, 1998); Noel Heather, Du Bartas, French Huguenot Poet, and His Humorous Ambivalence (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1998); Philippe Gardy, La Leçon de Nérac: Du Bartas et les poètes occitans, 1550– 1650 (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1999); Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, La Forme des choses: Poésie et savoirs dans “La Sepmaine” de Du Bartas (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009). In addition, seven article collections, from 1988 to 2004. Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas, La Seconde Semaine (1584), ed. Yvonne Bellenger et al., 2 vols. (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1991–2), 1: 135–202; The Furies, in Poems 1: 99–195. As the manuscript (published by Craigie along with the printed version) indicates, James composed this text and The Lepanto in “fourteeners,” in rhyming couplets of fourteen syllables, the closest equivalent in English or Scots to the French alexandrine. However, the printer, presumably with James’s permission, separated the two hemistiches of eight and six syllables each, thus creating the pattern: a8 b6 c8 b6 d8 e6 f8 e6, etc. Much later this structure came to be known as the Ballad Stanza; its layout on the page caused quite a few of the early commenters on James to belittle his poetic “doggerel.” The printer also anglicized King James’s Scots. The Lepanto, in Poems 1: 197–257. On this text, see Sandra J. Bell, “Writing the Monarch: King James VI and Lepanto,” in Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich et al. (London: Associated University Presses, and Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 193–208; Robert Appelbaum, “War and Peace in The Lepanto,” in Reading Monarch’s Writing, ed. Herman, 179–214; Daniel

346  Notes to pages 248–50

23

24 25

26

27

28

Fischlin, “‘Like a Mercenary Poet’: The Politics and Poetics of James VI’s Lepanto,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 540–59; and Peter C. Herman, “‘Best of Poets, Best of Kings’: King James VI and I and the Scene of Monarchic Verse,” in Royal Subjects, ed. Fischlin and Fortier, 61–103. Du Bartas, noblesse oblige, then translated The Lepanto into French, no doubt working from a Latin version of James’s text. See Yvonne Bellenger, “Sur La Lepanthe de Du Bartas,” in Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron, ed. David Cowling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 99–116. McClure, “‘O Phoenix Escossois’: James VI as Poet,” in A Day Estivall: Essays … in Honour of Helena Mennie Shire, ed. Alisoun Gardner-Medwin and Janet Hadley Williams (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), 96–111. “A Paraphrasticall Translation ovt of the Poete Lvcane,” in Poems 1: 61–3. Ronsard, Discours des Misères et autres pièces politiques 1562–1563, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 11 (Paris: Didier, 1946); La Polémique protestante contre Ronsard, ed. Jacques Pineaux, 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1973). On the Du Bartas presence in English literature, see H. Ashton, Du Bartas en Angleterre (Paris: Larose, 1908); and Ann Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 167–234. “Ma seconde Sepmaine n’est (aussi peu que la premiere) un œuvre purement Epique, ou Heroïque, ains en partie Heroïque, en partie Panegirique, en partie Prophetique, en partie Didascalique,” cited in Denis Bjaï, “La Sepmaine, ‘œuvre … en partie Heroïque,’ ou les enjeux d’un Brief Advertissement,” in “La Sepmaine” de G. du Bartas: Actes de la Journée d’Étude de l’Université Paris VII, 5 novembre 1993, ed. Simone Perrier (Paris: Université de Paris VII, 1993), 53–72, esp. 57. See, among others, Shire, Song, Dance, and Poetry, and Appelbaum, “War and Peace.” Also, Michael B. Young, James VI and I and the History of Homo­ sexuality (London: Macmillan, 2000), chap. 4: “Effeminacy and Peace,” 69–84, and chap. 5: “Manliness and War,” 85–101. On the political implications of James’s poetic corpus and its claim to authority and to contributing to its author’s regal power, see Kevin Sharpe, “The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 117–38, and “Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of James VI and I,” in Public Duty and Private Con­ science in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 77–100; Bell,

Notes to page 252 347 “Kingcraft and Poetry”; Herman, “‘Best of Poets’”; and Carolyn Ives and David J. Parkinson, “‘The Fountain and Very Being of Truth’: James VI, Poetic Invention, and National Identity,” in Royal Subjects, ed. Fischlin and Fortier, 104–23. For a recent subtle and nuanced work in this general area, see Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 18.  William Alexander, The Monarchicke Tragedies 1 See the biography of Alexander by Thomas H. McGrail, Sir William Alexan­ der, First Earl of Stirling: A Biographical Study (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1940), chap. 12, “Literary Life and Reputation,” 191–221. Also, Gary F. Waller, “Sir William Alexander and Renaissance Court Culture,” Aevum 51 (1977): 505–15. 2 The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, ed. L.E. Kastner and H.B. Charlton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1921–9). See R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), 101–6. Two recent studies discuss the Aurora: David W. Atkinson, “More than one Voice: The Poetic Accomplishment of William Alexander,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 584–94; and Morna R. Fleming, “‘The End of an Auld Sang’? Scottish Poetry of the English Reign of James VI and I,” in Older Scots Literature, 560–73. On Doomes-day, see Peter Auger, “Recreation and William Alexander’s Doomes-day (1637),” Scottish Literary Review 2.2 (Autumn / Winter 2010): 1–21. 3 Poetical Works, vol. 1: The Dramatic Works (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1921). See the stimulating article by Sally Mapstone, “Drunkenness and Ambition in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature,” Studies in Scottish Literature 35–6 (2007): 131–55. 4 Kastner and Charlton, “Introduction” to Poetical Works: “The Senecan Tradition in England,” cxxxviii–cc. The “Introduction” (xvii–cc) was reprinted under Charlton’s name: H.B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy: A Re-issue of an Essay published in 1921 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1946). Charlton writes that the essay is entirely his. Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), covers a wide range of authors, especially Shakespeare and Corneille, but not the English Senecans properly speaking. Karen Raber, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), concentrates on women writers and, consequently, mentions William Alexander only twice. Howard B. Norland, Neoclassical Tragedy in

348  Notes to page 253 Elizabethen England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), offers a suggestive reading of Garnier, Sidney, and Kyd. 5 Kastner and Charlton, “Introduction,” clxxxvi; McGrail, Sir William Alexander, 37: cited in T. Howard-Hill, “Sir William Alexander: The Failure of Tragedy and the Tragedy of Failure,” in European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 475–86, esp. 479. Howard-Hill ascribes the “Introduction” to Charlton alone, see note 4. 6 Howard-Hill, “Sir William Alexander,” 481, 482. 7 Raymond Lebègue, La Tragédie française de la Renaissance (Bruxelles: Office de Publicité, 1944); Dora Frick, Robert Garnier als barocker Dichter (Zürich: Schwarzenbach, 1951); Lancaster E. Dabney, French Dramatic Literature in the Reign of Henry IV: A Study of the Extant Plays (Austin, TX: University Cooperative Society, 1952); Marie-Madeleine Mouflard, Robert Garnier (1545–1590): La vie, l’œuvre, les sources, 3 vols. (La Ferté-Bernard: Bellanger, and La Roche-sur-Yon: Imprimerie Central de l’Ouest, 1961–4); Elliott Forsyth, La Tragédie française, de Jodelle à Corneille (1553–1640): Le thème de la vengeance (Paris: Nizet, 1962); Maurice Gras, Robert Garnier: Son art et sa méthode (Genève, Droz, 1965); Jochen Hüther, Die monarchische Ideologie in den französischen Römerdramen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (München: Hueber, 1966); Micheline Zakharoff, Le Héros, sa liberté et son efficacité, de Garnier à Rotrou (Paris: Nizet, 1967); Gillian Jondorf, Robert Garnier and the Themes of Political Tragedy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Richard Griffiths, The Dramatic Technique of Antoine de Montchrestien: Rhetoric and Style in French Renais­ sance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); L. Wierenga, “La Troade” de Robert Garnier (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1970); David Seidmann, La Bible dans les tragédies religieuses de Garnier et de Montchrestien (Paris: Nizet, 1971); Donald Stone, Jr., French Humanist Tragedy: A Reassessment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974); Françoise Charpentier, Pour une lecture de la tragédie humaniste (Jodelle, Garnier, Montchrestien (Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1979); Madeleine Lazard, Le Théâtre en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980); J.S. Street, French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille: Dramatic Forms and Their Pur­ poses in the Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Holyoake, A Critical Study of the Tragedies of Robert Garnier (1545–90) (New York: Lang, 1987); Jondorf, French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Catherine Moins, Lectures d’une œuvre: “Saül le furieux”; “La Famine ou les Gabéonites,” de Jean de La Taille (Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1998); Charles Mazouer, Le Théâtre français de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2002);

Notes to pages 253–66 349 Florence Dobby-Poirson, Le Pathétique dans le théâtre de Robert Garnier (Paris: Champion, 2006). 8 The Tragedy of Darius, in Poetical Works 1: 113–230. 9 Jacques de La Taille, Daire, ed. Maria Giulia Longhi, in La Tragédie à l’époque d’Henri II et de Charles IX, première série, vol. 4 (1568–1573) (Fiorenza: Olschki, and Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 269–350. 10 Kastner and Charlton, “Introduction,” clxxxvi–clxxxvii. 11 The Alexandraean Tragedy, in Poetical Works 1: 231–341; Jacques de La Taille, Alexandre, ed. Christopher N. Smith (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1975). 12 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in Poetical Works 1: 343–442. 13 Jacques Grévin, César, ed. Ellen S. Ginsberg (Genève: Droz, 1971); Kastner and Charlton, “Introduction,” clxxxviii. 14 Robert Garnier, Cornélie: Tragédie, ed. Jean-Claude Ternaux (Paris: Champion, 2002); Kastner and Charlton, “Introduction,” clxxxix; McGrail, Sir William Alexander. 15 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928). Also in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 203–430. 19.  William Drummond of Hawthornden 1 The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. L.E. Kastner, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1913). Kastner’s editorial policy is insightfully critiqued by Robert H. MacDonald, “Amendments to L.E. Kastner’s Edition of Drummond’s Poems,” Studies in Scottish Literature 7 (1969–70): 102–22. 2 On this topic, see, for example, the studies cited on p. 340, note 5 above; also, Edwin Morgan, “How Good a Poet Is Drummond?” Scottish Literary Journal 15.1 (May 1988): 14–24. 3 Jack, “Scottish Literature,” 13; MacDonald, “Introduction” to his edition, William Drummond of Hawthornden, Poems and Prose (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), ix. Some praise falls a bit short, as in Robert C. Evans, “Drummond’s Artistry in the Flowres of Sion,” in Discovering and (Re) Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 119–39: “Clearly Drummond is no Shakespeare; he may not even be a Howard; but he does seem a writer of some talent …” (132) and “… there is much honor in being a Surrey, a Drayton, or even a Drummond” (139).

350  Notes to pages 266–8 4 Morna R. Fleming, “‘The end of an Auld Sang?’ Scottish Poetry of the English Reign of James VI and I,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 560–73, esp. 570. 5 MacDonald, “Drummond of Hawthornden: The Season at Bourges, 1607,” Comparative Drama 4 (1970): 89–109. Also, Marie-Claude Tucker, “Scottish Students and Masters at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bourges in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Literature, Letters, and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 111–20; and, for the broader picture, Tucker, Maîtres et étudiants écossais à la Faculté de Droit de l’Université de Bourges (1480–1703) (Paris: Champion, 2001). 6 MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); also, French Rowe Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1952), 179–86. 7 See Thomas I. Rae, “The Historical Writing of Drummond of Hawthornden,” Scottish Historical Review 54 (1975): 22–62. 8 Michael Spiller, “Poetry after the Union 1603–1660,” in History of Scottish Literature, ed. Jack, 1:141–62, esp. 141; see also Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), 183–8. 9 Drummond, Poetical Works, 1: 3–48. 10 Kastner, “Introduction” to Poetical Works, xix. Kastner discusses the French presence in Drummond in the “Introduction,” xvii–xxii, and in the notes to the individual poems. I follow his lead. 11 Joachim du Bellay, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1: Recueils de sonnets, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Cornély, 1908). See l’Olive, sonnets 107–13. 12 Drummond, Poetical Works, 1: 51–72. According to Eloisa Paganelli, La poesia di Drummond of Hawthornden (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1972), 73–4, Drummond himself may have claimed that his is the first sonnet sequence in English to celebrate the lady after her death. For a good study on the structure of both parts, see Wolfgang Weiss, “The Theme and Structure of Drummond of Hawthornden’s Sonnet Sequence,” in Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Strauss and Drescher, 459–66; and Spiller, “‘Quintessencing in the Finest Substance’: The Sonnets of William Drummond,” in Langage Cleir Illumynate, ed. Royan, 193–205. 13 Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Laumonier et al., vol. 17, part 2 (Paris: Didier, 1959), 115–43. 14 Les Poésies françaises de Jean Passerat, ed. Prosper Blanchemain, 2 vols. (Paris: Lemerre, 1880), 2: 64 ss. 15 Drummond, Poetical Works, First Part, sonnets 1–3, 12, and Second Part, sonnet 8.

Notes to pages 268–72 351 16 Du Bellay, “Contre les Petrarquistes,” in Œuvres poétiques, vol. 5, Recueils lyriques, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Hachette, 1923), 69–77. 17 Jean de Sponde, Œuvres littéraires, ed. Alan Boase (Genève: Droz, 1978), the Élégie, 75–81. 18 Morgan, “Gavin Douglas and William Drummond as Translators,” in Bards and Makars, ed. Aitken, 194–200, and “How a Good Poet.” 19 Drummond, Madrigals and Epigrammes, in Poetical Works, 1: 26, 27, 29. 20 Drummond, Poems and Prose, 141–3. 21 For example, Du Bellay, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1: “L’Anterotique de la vieille et de la jeune amye,” 125–36, and vol. 5: “Contre une vieille,” 128–33; “La vieille courtisanne,” 148–81; Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Odes et Bocage de 1550, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Hachette, 1914): “Contre Denise sorçiere,” 238–43, and vol. 5, Livret de Folastries (Paris: Hachette, 1928); Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Poems, ed. Malcolm Quainton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970): “A Claudine,” 82–3; Marc Papillon de Lasphrise, Diverses Poésies, ed. Nerina Clerici Balmas (Genève: Droz, 1988). 22 Drummond, Poetical Works: Urania or Spirituall Poems, 1: 85–94; Flowres of Sion, 2: 3–63. 23 Sybil Lutz Severance, “‘Some Other Figure’: The Vision of Change in Flowres of Sion, 1623,” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 217–28; David W. Atkinson, “The Religious Voices of Drummond of Hawthornden,” Studies in Scottish Literature 21 (1986): 197–209, and “Flowres of Sion: The Spiritual and Meditative Journey of William Drummond,” in Langage Cleir Illumynate, ed. Royan, 181–91. See also the close readings in Evans, “Drummond’s Artistry. ” 24 See, for example, Antoine de Chandieu, Octonaires sur la Vanité et Inconstance du Monde, ed. Françoise Bonali-Fiquet (Genève: Droz, 1979); Jean-Baptiste Chassignet, Le Mespris de la vie et Consolation contre la mort, ed. HansJoachim Lope (Genève: Droz, 1967); Antoine Favre, Les Entretiens spirituels, ed. Lance K. Donaldson-Evans (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2002); Jean de La Ceppède, Les Theoremes sur le sacré Mystere de nostre Redemption, 2 vols., ed. Yvette Quenot (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1988–9); Images d’André Mage de Fiefmelin, poète baroque, ed. Pierre Menanteau (np: Rougerie, 1965); Anne de Marquets, Sonets spirituels, ed. Gary Ferguson (Genève: Droz, 1997); César de Nostredame, Œuvres spirituelles, ed. Donaldson-Evans (Genève: Droz, 2001); Pierre Poupo, La Muse Chrestienne, ed. Anne Mantero (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997); Lazare de Selve, Les Œuvres spirituelles, ed. DonaldsonEvans (Genève: Droz, 1983); Jean de Sponde, Œuvres littéraires. See also Métamorphoses spirituelles: Anthologie de la poésie religieuse française, 1570–1630, ed. Terence Cave and Michel Jeanneret (Paris: Corti, 1972).

352  Notes to pages 274–93 25 Philippe Desportes, Les CL. Pseaumes de David mis en vers françois; Quelques Meditations et Prieres; Poësies chrestiennes, ed. Bruno Petey-Girard (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2006). 26 Drummond, An Hymne of the Fairest Faire in Poetical Works 2: 37–47; Ronsard, Hymne de l’Éternité in Œuvres complètes 8 (Paris: Droz, 1935), 246–54. 27 William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 165–90. 28 Sarah M. Dunnigan, “Drummond and the Meaning of Beauty,” in “Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun,” ed. Carpenter and Dunnigan, 129–54. 29 Drummond, The Shadow of the Judgement in Poetical Works 2: 50–63; Ronsard, Hymne de la Justice in Œuvres complètes 8: 47–72. 30 See Calin, “Ronsard and the Myth of Justice: A Typological Interpretation of Hymne de la Justice,” Degré Second 1 (1977): 1–11. 31 Drummond, Forth Feasting in Poetical Works 1: 137–53; Ronsard, Panegy­rique de la Renommée in Œuvres complètes 18.1 (Paris: Didier, 1967), 1–17. 32 See Robert J. Sealy, The Palace Academy of Henry III (Genève: Droz, 1981). 33 Robert Cummings, “Drummond’s Forth Feasting: A Panegyric for King James in Scotland,” Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 1–18; David Reid, “Royalty and Self-Absorption in Drummond’s Poetry,” Studies in Scottish Literature 22 (1987): 115–31. A sense of loss and foreboding is expressed already by Scots poets concerning James’s departure in 1603. See Fleming, “‘Kin[g]es be the glas, the verie scoole, the booke, / Where priuate men do learne, and read, and looke’ (Alexander Craig, 1604): The Translation of James VI to the Throne of England in 1603,” in Literature, Letters, and the Canonical, ed. Heijnsbergen, 90–110. 34 See J. Derrick McClure, “Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 185–98, and “Drummond of Hawthornden and Poetic Translation,” in The European Sun, ed. Caie et al., 494–506. 35 MacDonald, “Introduction,” xv. 36 Morgan, “Gavin Douglas,” and “How Good a Poet.” 37 For example, Agnes Mure Mackenzie, “The Renaissance Poets: (1) Scots and English,” in Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey, ed. James Kinsley (London: Cassell, 1955), 33–67; Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), 113–43; MacDonald, “Introduction,” xvi; Atkinson, “William Drummond as a Baroque Poet,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 394–409; Paganelli, Poesia.

Notes to pages 296–301 353 Conclusion 1 See the important study by R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 2 Sarah Carpenter, “Early Scottish Drama,” in History of Scottish Literature, ed. Jack, 199–212. 3 J. Derrick McClure, “Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 185–98. 4 Matthew P. McDiarmid, “Scottish Love Poetry before 1600: A Character and Appreciation,” in Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Strauss and Drescher, 443–50. 5 John Speirs, The Scots Literary Tradition; Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature. 6 See Sally Mapstone, “The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1550,” Doc. Phil. Thesis (University of Oxford, 1986); Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry; and Sergi Mainer, The Scottish Romance Tradition. 7 Mapstone, “Introduction: Older Scots and the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Mapstone, 413–23, esp. 415. 8 Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), and The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 9 See the studies cited in Part 4, note 5. 10 William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 162–80. 11 Ian Brown et al., “Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon,” in Edin­ burgh History, 3–15. 12 Eleanor Bell, Questioning Scotland: Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Ian Brown, “Penguins and Flowers: Failure of Nerve, Cultural Complexity, and Tartanry,” Scottish Studies Review 8.2 (Autumn 2007): 69–88. 13 Gavin Miller, “Scotland’s Authentic Plurality: The New Essentialism in Scottish Studies,” Scottish Literary Review 1.1 (Spring / Summer 2009): 157–74. For still other viewpoints, see Alan Riach, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture, and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Re-Visioning Scotland: New Readings of the Cultural Canon, ed. Lyndsay Lunan et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2008).

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Index

Adam de la Halle, 155 advice to princes. See statecraft and governance Aitken, A.J., 8 Alan of Galloway, 180 Alexander, Flora, 191 Alexander, William, 5, 7, 223, 252–64; and Jacques de La Taille, 254–9, 262; originality of, 257–8; sonnets, 252 – Aurora, 252 – Doomes-Day, 252 – The Monarchicke Tragedies, 7, 252– 64; The Alexandraean Tragedy, 252, 253, 257–8, 263; The Tragedy of Croesus, 252; The Tragedy of Darius, 252, 253–9; The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, 252, 259–62 Alexander romances, 177 Amadas et Ydoine, 179 Ami et Amile, 33, 213–17 Amys e Amillyoun, 213–14 Amys e Amiloun, 213–14 Anglo-Norman, 3, 9–11; romance, 5, 179–80, 213–14 Anglo-Saxon, 7, 8 Anna, queen (Anne of Denmark), 250 Antoine de La Sale, 171

Arthour and Merlin, 176 Atkinson, David, 272 aureate style, 12, 53, 125 avian texts, 143–9, 241–2 Awntyrs of Arthure, 175 Bacon enlevé, Le, 97 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 270; À Claudine, 271, 272 Bakhtin, Mikhail, and Bakhtinian carnival, 115, 132, 164–5 ballades, 43–6, 71, 122 Barbour, John, 296; Bruce, 175 Barron, W.J.R., 197, 201 Barrow, G.W.S., 10 Bartsch, Karl, 103 Bastin, Julia, 86 Bauman, Richard, 85 Bawcutt, Priscilla, 39, 51, 60, 116, 167, 312n1, 315n2 Bayard, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de, 151, 153, 154 Beaufort, Joan, 24 Bec, Pierre, 105 begging (petitionary) poems, 119, 124 Bell, Eleanor, 301 Bell, Sandra J., 238 Belleau, Remy, 270

402 Index Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, 6, 13, 295; and Douglas’s Palice, 39–40; and Henryson’s Cresseid, 31–3, 34–5, 36–7; and Rolland’s Venus, 66, 68–9, 75, 78–9, 81. See also Chartier, Alain: Belle Dame sans Mercy Benjamin, Walter, 262 Bergson, Henri, and Bergsonian comedy, 76, 146, 164, 187 Beroul, 215, 297; Le Roman de Tristan, 33, 179, 200 Bertrand du Guesclin, 121, 151, 153 Bible, 8, 77, 138, 244, 279, 287 Bien advisé Mal advisé, 133 biographies and biographical narrative: aristocratic or chivalric, 151–6; in King Hart and Livre de Cuer, 171–2; in Lyndsay’s Squyer Meldrum, 149–56. See also poetic pseudo-autobiography Blanchot, Jean-Jacques, 117 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 170 Bodel, Jean, 34, 155 Boethian thematics: in Dunbar, 117, 125; in The Kingis Quair, 15–16, 18, 20–1, 23, 25; and statecraft, 175, 177, 191, 264 Boeve de Haumtone, 179 Boffey, Julia, 155 Bothwell, earl of, James Hepburn, 225, 226, 227, 229 Boucicaut (Bouciquaut), Jehan le Maingre, dit, 151, 152, 153–4 Boyd, Mark Alexander: Discours civiles sur le Royaume d’Écosse, 11 Brandon, Samuel: The Virtuous Octavia, 252 Brown, Ian, 301 Buchanan, George, 222, 235, 248, 343n18

Buik of Alexander, The, 177 Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, The, 177 Bullinger, Heinrich, 133 Burns, Robert, 3, 53, 300 Busby, Keith, 199, 206, 209 Caldwell, James Ralston, 213 Callimachus, 276 Calvinism, 222, 245, 249, 265 Carpenter, Sarah, 298 “Castalian” poets, 222, 236, 293 Caulier, Achile: La Cruelle Femme en Amour, 32–3, 35, 40, 68–9, 74, 78 Caxton, William, 86 Chalmers, David: Histoire abrégée de tous les rois de France, Angleterre et Escosse, 266 Chandieu, Antoine de, 273; Octonaires sur la Vanité et Inconstance du Monde, 274 Chandos Herald: La Vie du Prince Noir, 151–2, 153 chansons d’amie, 103–5 chansons de geste, 33, 297; elements in Eger and Grime, 213, 214, 216–17; elements in Lyndsay’s Squyer Meldrum, 150; elements in Rauf Coilyear, 206–10; and romance, 150, 165, 177, 186, 199, 206 chansons de mal mariée, 103–5 Charles Cardinal of Lorraine, 282–5 Charles d’Orléans, 23, 69–70, 119, 125, 171 Charles V, king of France, 153 Charles VI, king of France, 123 Charles IX, king of France, 290 Charlton, J.B., 253, 254, 257–8, 260 Charroi de Nîmes, Le, 209 Charron, Pierre, 266

Index 403 Chartier, Alain, 13, 45, 58, 125, 170, 171, 295 – La Belle Dame sans Mercy: and Douglas’s Palice, 39, 41, 42, 43–4; and Henryson’s Cresseid, 31, 33, 37; and Rolland’s Venus, 68–9, 71– 2, 77, 79, 81. See also Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle – Le Debat des Deux Fortunés d’Amours, 71–3, 106 – L’Excusacion aux Dames, 43–4, 78, 79 – Le Livre des Quatre Dames, 68, 69, 74, 106 Chassignet, Jean-Baptiste: Le Mespris de la vie et Consolation contre la mort, 273, 275 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 13, 15, 16, 23, 59, 295; The Book of the Duchess, 23; The House of Fame, 39; The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 92; The Parliament of Fowls, 23; Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, 23, 39, 78; The Reeve’s Tale, 158; Troilus and Criseyde, 28, 31, 37; the Wife of Bath, 109, 116 chivalry and chivalric themes: and bourgeois literature, 83; chivalric biographies, 151–6; in dits amou­ reux, 74, 162; parodies of, 162, 185–8; in romance, 168, 183, 184, 193–4, 199–201, 210–11, 296, 298 Chrétien de Troyes, 185, 215, 297; Cligés, 200; Erec et Enide, 25, 150; Lancelot, 13, 169; Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, 181, 187, 197, 210 (see also Perceval Continuations); Yvain, 25, 150, 169, 182, 183, 184, 187, 200 Christian epics, 249–51, 252, 286–7

Christian thematics and readings: for Drummond’s poetry, 276, 278–82, 284–7; for Dunbar’s Targe, 53, 58; for Dunbar’s Tretis, 110; for Eger and Grime, 216; for Golagros, 201, 204; for Henryson’s Cresseid, 36; for Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, 100–1; for James VI/I’s poetry, 240, 243, 244–5, 247–51; for The Kingis Quair, 26; for Lyndsay’s poetry, 134–8, 147–8, 155–6; for Mary Stuart’s devotional poems, 232–3; for Rauf Coilyear, 208, 211; religious or devotional texts, 226, 232–3, 272–93, 276, 298; for Rolland’s Venus, 80 Christine de Pizan, 13, 39, 171, 230; Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame, 71; Le Dit de la Rose, 63; Le Livre des Trois jugemens, 68, 106; Le Livre du Debat de deux amans, 22–3, 68, 70–1, 72–3, 106; Le Livre du Dit de Poissy, 23, 68, 74, 106 Christis Kirk on the Green, 297 Clariodus, 176, 177 classical sources: classical tragedy, 252–3, 264; Orphic hymns, 276–7 Cleriadus et Meliadice, 176 clerical narratives: comic, satirical and didactic, 5; fable collections, 85–6; in French, 84; of Jeun de Meun, 84; in Scots, 84 Complaynt of Scotland, The, 5 Confession de Renart, La, 93–4 Cooper, Helen, 195 Corneille, Pierre, 263 court poets, 117, 119, 124, 126, 142, 147 Craig, Cairns, 300, 301 Crane, Susan, 179

404 Index Crowe, David K., 86 crusades, 201, 204, 216, 283–4 Cummings, Robert, 292 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 283 Cuvelier: Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, La, 151, 153–4 Daly, Kathleen, 11 Dame loyale en Amour, La, 33, 40, 68–9, 75, 78 Daniel, Samuel: Cleopatra, 252; Philotas, 252 Dante Alighieri, 233; Paradiso, 287 Darnley, Lord, Henry Stuart, 225 D’Aubigné, Agrippa, 235; Les Tragiques, 248, 287 David I, king of Scotland, 8, 9 David II, king of Scotland, 10 Davison, M.H. Armstrong, 226 Dervorguilla of Galloway, 180 Deschamps, Eustache, 6, 117–25, 126, 295; Le Miroir de mariage, 112, 113, 117–18, 122 Deschaux, Robert, 47 Desportes, Philippe, 115, 237, 266, 290, 299; Poësies chrestiennes, 274 Dialogue d’un amoureux et de sa dame, Le, 81 dits amoureux (allegorical tales of love): role in Scots literature, 4, 13–14, 15, 82, 125, 295; motifs: (in Douglas’s Palice), 39–46; (in Dunbar’s works), 53, 105–6, 116, 117; (in Henryson’s Cresseid), 28–33; (in Rolland’s Venus), 66, 68, 74, 80–1, 222; (in romance), 196; (in The Kingis Quair), 16–24, 26–7 Douglas, Gavin, 5, 8, 38–52, 157, 221 – Eneados, 38–9, 45–6, 48, 52, 177, 297

– The Palice of Honour, 4, 14, 39–52, 296, 297; ambiguities in, 52; ballade in, 43–6; dits amoureux themes and motifs, 39–46; French analogues, 46–51; honour and pilgrimage of life thematics, 39, 46–52 drama and theatre: chorus in, 255, 260, 264; farce, 128–33; morality plays, 133–8; in performance, 127, 253, 263; in Scots literature, 297, 298; Senecan plays, 252–3, 298; sottie, 138–41 Drayton, Michael, 252, 265 Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 5, 6, 223, 265–93; and William Alexander, 252, 265; devotional verse, 272–93; love poetry, 266–72; misogynistic texts, 270–2; Protestantism, 280–1, 285–6; and Ronsard, 266–7, 270–2, 276–93; sonnet sequence, 266–70; transformation of intertextual sources, 276, 280; treatise on death, 266; use of English, 9, 222, 265 – Flowres of Sion, 272, 276, 282, 287 – For a Ladyes Summonds of Nonentree, 270–2 – Forth Feasting, 288–92 – History of the Five Jameses, 266 – An Hymne of the Fairest Faire, 272, 279–82 – Teares, on the Death of Moeliades, 272 – The Shadow of the Judgement, 282–8 – Urania, or Spiritual Poems, 272, 274–5 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 237, 240–50, 252, 295, 299; Brief Advertissement, 249; Les Furies, 244–7, 286; La Judit, 237, 248, 249;

Index 405 La Muse chrestienne, 240, 249; La Seconde Semaine, 244, 249; La Sepmaine, 242, 244, 249; L’Uranie, 239–41, 244, 249 Du Bellay, Joachim, 267, 270, 295, 299; L’Anterotique, 271; Contre les Petrarquistes, 268–9; Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, 221, 237–9; L’Olive, 233, 239, 272–3 Du Moulin, Pierre: Declaration du sérénissime Roy Jacques I, 237 Dunbar, William, 3, 8, 12, 53–65, 103–25; and Deschamps, 117–25; didactic verse, 117–25; eulogies, 121; and Freiris of Berwik, 157; and Lyndsay, 126, 142 – Fasternis Even in Hell, 116 – The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, 116, 177, 297 – The Goldyn Targe, 4, 14, 54–60, 65, 171, 296, 301; and Roman de la Rose, 54–9 – The Thrissill and the Rois, 4, 14, 53, 60–5, 296, 301; as an epithalamium, 53, 60, 64; French analogues and floral imagery, 61–4 – The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, 5, 103–16, 176, 296; and French lyrics, 103–5; and Jean de Meun’s Rose, 107–11; scholarly approaches to, 114–17 Dunnigan, Sarah, 226, 230, 233, 241, 282 Ebin, Lois, 51 Edington, Carol, 150 Edwards, A.S.G, 175 Eger and Grime, 5, 175, 177, 212–20; chanson de geste elements, 214,

216–17; Christian thematics, 214, 216; French analogues, 213–15 Eglise, Noblesse et Pauvreté qui font la lessive, L’, 134 elegies: by Drummond, 222, 272, 292; by James VI/I, 241–3; by Mary Stuart, 230 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 232 Ellenberger, Bengt, 12 Enfans de Maintenant, Les, 133 epic mode: beast epics, 86, 91–2, 99–100, 199, 297; Christian epics, 249–51, 252, 286–7; in hymns, 277; in romance, 216–18; in Drummond, 277, 286–7; in Du Bartas, 244–7; in James VI/I, 239–40, 243–51 epithalamium, 46, 53, 60, 62, 64, 292 Erreurs du Jugement de la Belle Dame sans Merci, Les, 32–3, 75 Erskine, Thomas, 10, 343n7 Evans, Deanna Delmar, 212 fables: Aesopian, 85, 86, 99, 101–2; collections of, 295 faibliaux, 83–4, 86, 106–7, 297; The Freiris of Berwick, 157–66 farce, 128–33, 295 Farce nouvelle: Troys Brus et deulx Hermites, 138 Farce nouvelle de Bien Mondain, 134 Fastoul, Baude, 34, 155 feminist criticism, 32–3, 114, 163 Fergus. See under Guillaume le Clerc Fergus of Galloway, 180 Flamenca, 228 Fleming, Morna R., 266 floral imagery, 61–5 Florimond of Albany, 336n3 flyting, 116, 177, 297, 299–300 folly and fools’ plays, 138–41, 295

406 Index fortitudo et sapientia, 154, 165, 217–20, 250–1, 283, 288, 291 Fouke Fitz Warin, 179 Foulis, James, 10 fourteeners, 245n21, 247, 253 Fox, Denton, 52, 85–6, 100, 101 frame narrative, 67, 70, 196 France, Anatole, 83 François, duc de Guise, 282 François I, king of France, 290 François II, king of France, 226, 231–2 Fraser, Antonia, 226 Freiris of Berwik, The, 157–66, 297; credibility of realism in, 158–9; feminist reading of, 163; and Le Povre Clerc, 158–64; parallels with courtly texts, 162, 165 French language, 3–4, 5, 9–12 Freudian criticism and metaphors, 27, 32, 36, 218, 289 Friedman, John B., 29 Froissart, Jean, 10, 13, 16; Le Dit de la Margheritte, 63; Le Dit dou Bleu Chevalier, 21, 24; L’Espinette amoureuse, 21, 39, 41, 44; Le Joli Buisson de Jonece, 22, 31, 34, 37, 39–44, 69; Meliador, 11, 27; Le Paradis d’Amour, 20–1, 39–41, 43–4, 63; La Plaidoirie de la Rose et de la Violette, 63–4; La Prison amoureuse, 21–2, 23, 24, 27; Le Temple d’Honneur, 46 Frye, Northrop, 115, 166 Gaelic, 8 Garnier, Robert, 253, 255; Cornélie, 252, 260–2; Les Juives, 262; Marc Antoine, 252 Gaston de Foix, 153 Gaucher, Élisabeth, 151

Gaydon, 206–9 Gerbert de Montreuil, 200; Perceval Continuation, Le Roman de la Violette, 61 German literature: baroque tragedy, 262; Hofenstaufen poets, 192 Golagros and Gawane, 176, 177, 197– 204, 216; date of, 336n3; French source for, 197–203; political and statecraft elements, 197, 200, 201–4, 211 Goldstein, R. James, 160, 163, 353n1 Göller, Karl Heinz, 175, 199 Gopen, George D., 101 Gordon, Jean, 227–8 Gottfried von Strassburg, 192 Gouvert d’Humanité, 133 Gower, John, 13, 15, 23, 35; Confessio Amantis, 80 Gravdal, Kathryn, 185 Gray, Douglas, 85 Gray, Thomas: Scalacronica, 11 Greban, Arnoul, 171 Greville, Fulke: Alaham, 252; Mustapha, 252 Grévin, Jacques, 299; César, 260 Gringore, Pierre, 6, 295; Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, 127, 129–30, 134–42 Gualterus Anglicus (Walter l’Anglais): Romulus, 86–91, 99–100 Gui de Warewic, 179 Guillaume d’Angleterre, 179 Guillaume de Digulleville, 50; Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme, 48; Le Pèlerinage de la Vie humaine, 48, 168 Guillaume de Lorris, 13, 20, 61 – Roman de la Rose, 23, 171, 297; and Douglas’s Palice, 39; and Dunbar’s

Index 407 Targe, 54–7, 58; and Dunbar’s Thrissill, 61; and Dunbar’s Tretis, 110–11; and Rolland’s Venus, 71 Guillaume de Machaut, 13, 170, 295 – Le Confort d’Ami, 16, 20, 24 – Le Dit de la Fleur de lis et de la Marguerite, 63 – Le Dit de la Marguerite, 63 – Le Dit de la Rose, 63 – La Fonteinne amoureuse: and Douglas’s Palice, 39, 44; and The Kingis Quair, 16, 19–20, 21, 23, 24; and Rolland’s Venus, 73–4 – Le Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, 23, 105; and Douglas’s Palice, 40, 42, 44; and Henryson’s Cresseid, 29, 37; and Rolland’s Venus, 68 – Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre, 106; and Douglas’s Palice, 40, 43; and Henryson’s Cresseid, 28–30, 34, 36–7; and Rolland’s Venus, 69, 75, 77, 78 – Le Livre du Voir Dit, 27; and Douglas’s Palice, 40–1, 44; and Henryson’s Cresseid, 30–1, 34, 36, 37; and Rolland’s Venus, 69 – Remede de Fortune: and Douglas’s Palice, 39–41, 44; and The Kingis Quair, 16–18, 19, 21, 23, 25–6 Guillaume d’Orange, 165, 206 Guillaume le Clerc – Roman de Fergus, 5, 6, 177, 179–85; and Chretien’s Perceval, 181–2, 186–7; date, context, and authorship, 180; and Eger and Grime, 213, 215; and Rauf Coilyear, 206 Hadley Williams, Janet, 10, 328n22 Hanna, Ralph, 197 Hartmann von Aue, 192

Hary, 296; Wallace, 175 Haveloc, 179 Heijnsbergen, Theo van, 222 Henri II, king of France, 282–4 Henri III, king of France, 288–91 Henrik van Veldeken, 192 Henryson, Robert, 28–37, 85–102 – Morall Fabillis, 5, 84, 85–102, 296; order and structure, 100; and Roman de Renart, 91–100; The Cock and the Fox, 91–2; The Cock and the Jasp, 86–7; The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger, 94; The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman, 98–9; The Lion and the Mouse, 88–9, 101–2; The Preaching of the Swallow, 12, 89–90, 101; The Sheep and the Dog, 88; The Trial of the Fox, 95–6, 101; The Two Mice, 86–7; The Wolf and the Lamb, 90–2 – The Testament of Cresseid, 28–37, 296; Christian reading, 36; dits amoureux themes and motifs, 28–33; intertextuality of, 28–9; leprosy and testament motifs, 33–5 Herenc, Baudet: Le Parlement d’Amour, 31, 32, 68, 74–5 histories and chronicles, 11, 151–3, 175, 180, 296 History of Reynard the Fox, 86 History of William Marshal / L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, 151, 153 Hoccleve, Thomas, 13, 15 Homme juste et l’Homme mondain, L’, 133 homosexuality. See under sexuality honour poems, 39, 46–51, 297 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon, 263

408 Index Horn, 179 Howard-Hill, T., 253 Howlat, 176 Huby, Michel, 192 Hudson, Thomas, 237, 249 Hue de Rotelande: Ipomedon, 179; Protheselaus, 179 humanism: French humanist tragedy, 223, 252–3, 260, 263–4; in Scots literature, 85, 117, 177, 222, 293, 299 hymns, 276–80, 298 intertextuality: in Douglas’s Palice, 45; in Drummond’s works, 276, 280; in Dunbar’s Targe, 54, 58; in Dunbar’s Twa Mariit Wemen, 103, 107, 110, 116; in Henryson’s Cresseid, 30–1, 36–7; in King Hart, 168; in Rolland’s Venus, 81–2 Ireland, John, 11; Meroure of Wysdome, 6 Isopet de Lyon, 86–7, 88, 89, 90, 91 Isopet I, 87, 89, 90, 91 Isopet II de Paris, 89, 90, 91 Italian humanism, 85–6 Italian sources and influences, 4, 45, 252, 266, 270, 272, 298 Jack, R.D.S., 4, 45, 204, 209, 222, 301 Jacques de Lalaing, 151, 153–4 Jacques de Mailles: L’Histoire du Seigneur de Bayart, 151 James I, king of Scotland, 15–27, 222, 244, 299 – The Kingis Quair, 4, 14, 15–27, 36; ambiguity in, 25–6; Christian reading of, 25–6; dits amoureux motifs and themes, 16–24, 26–7; English

influences on, 15, 23; French analogues, 23–4, 26–7; universality of, 24 James III, king of Scotland, 191 James IV, king of Scotland, 60, 212 James V, king of Scotland, 10, 143, 149 James VI/I: and “Castalian” poets, 222, 236, 293; compared to Dunbar and Douglas, 221–2; cultural centre at court of, 236, 298; epic mode, 222, 239–40, 243–51; knowledge and use of French, 4, 237, 248–9; knowledge and use of Scots, 8, 238–9; love poetry, 250; and the Makars, 221, 298; and Mary Stuart, 248–9, 250; personal library, 237, 248; portrayed in Drummond’s Forth Feasting, 288–92; Protestant identity, 239, 245, 248, 250–1; selfrepresentation and self-consciousness, 221–2, 236–7 – A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 236 – A Declaration of Sports, 236 – An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, 236 – A Premonition to All Most Mightie Monarches, 236 – A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, 236, 237 – Basilikon Doron, 236 – Daemonologie in Forme of ane Dialogue, 236 – His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres, 236–47; The Furies, 243, 244–7, 286, 345n21; The Lepanto, 243, 247–8, 250, 345n21 – The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie, 236–44, 249; Ane Short Treatise … Scottis Poesie (Reulis and Cautelis), 221, 237–9,

Index 409 298; Ane Tragedie of the Phoenix, 241–3; The Uranie, 239–41, 244 – The True Lawe of Free Monarchies, 236 Jaufre, 34 Jean, duc de Berry, 19, 20, 27, 44 Jean de Condé: La Messe des Oiseaux, 147–9 Jean de Meun, 126, 170 – Roman de la Rose, 83, 84, 295, 297; and Dunbar’s Targe, 54, 57–60; and Dunbar’s Thrissill, 61–2; and Dunbar’s Tretis, 107–11; and Rolland’s Venus, 71 Jean le Bon, king of France, 19, 20 Jean le Mauvais, king of Navarre, 20 Jean le Prieur, 171 Jean le Seneschal: Les Cent Ballades, 71 Jean Renart: Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, 61 Jodelle, Étienne, 295; Cléopâtre cap­ tive, 252 John de Balliol, 180 Johnston, Arthur, 222 Jonson, Ben, 265 Joseph of Arimathie, 176 judgment thematics: in Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, 31–3, 36, 78–9; in Douglas’s Palice, 43–5; in Drummond’s Judgement, 282–8; in fabliaux, 106; in Henryson’s Cresseid, 34–6; in Lyndsay’s Thrie Estaitis, 138; in Rolland’s Venus, 77–8 Jugement de Renart, Le, 92–3, 95–6 Jugement des Cons, Le, 106 Jugement du povre triste amant banny, Le, 77, 81 Julius II, pope, 134, 139, 141

Kastner, L.E.: on Alexander, 253, 254, 257–8, 260; on Drummond, 266, 270, 272 Ker of Redden, Thomas, 10 Ketrick, Paul J., 336n3 Kindrick, Robert L., 86 King Hart, 5, 84, 167–73, 332n13; and René d’Anjou’s Cuer d’Amours, 143, 168–73 Kratzmann, Gregory, 66, 304n10 Krylov, Ivan, 99, 101 Labé, Louise: Élégie 2, 230–1 La Fontaine, Jean de, 99, 101 Lancelot en prose (Prose Lancelot, Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle), 168, 199, 200, 297, 334n2; and Lancelot of the Laik, 176, 177, 189, 191–6 Lancelot of the Laik, 5, 176, 177, 189– 96, 199, 200, 204, 211; Prologue, 195–6; and Prose Lancelot, 189, 191–6 Lanson, Gustave, 83 La Taille, Jacques de, 254–9, 262, 295, 299; Alexandre, 257–9; Daire, 254–7, 259, 260 Latin: Latin humanism, 299; and Scots literature, 12, 222, 298; use in Scotland, 3, 10 Lauder, Henry, 10, 301 Le Fèvre de Resson, Jehan: Lamentations de Matheolus, 112, 113 Lefèvre de Saint-Rémy, Jean: Le Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, 151, 153–4 Legge, M. Dominica, 179, 180 Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 13, 143–7, 171; La Concorde des deux Langages, 48; La Couronne

410 Index margaritique, 64; Les Epîtres de l’Amant Vert, 143–5, 242; Le Temple d’Honneur et de Vertus, 48 Lennox, earl of, Esmé Stuart d’Aubigny, 235, 241, 248 leprosy, 29, 33–5 Leseur, Guillaume, 153 Lewis, C.S.: on allegory of love, 13, 15, 25, 53, 125, 228; on aureate style, 53; on Scots literature, 3, 66, 167 libraries, personal: of Drummond, 266; of James VI/I, 237, 248; of Mary Stuart, 226, 230, 231, 248 Liétart, Renart et la mort de Brun, 98 Lindsay, Maurice, 66 literary typology, 83–4 Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, Le, 151, 152, 153–4 Lorrains, Les, 206 Louis de Beauvau, 171 Louis XII, king of France, 134, 138 Loutfut, Adam, 8 Lovelich, Henry: Merlin, 176 Lucan: Pharsalia, 248 Lucas, sergent boiteux et borgne, et le bon payeur, 128–9 Lucas, Stuart, 117 Lupack, Alan, 191–2 Luther, Martin, 133 Lyall, Roderick J., 6, 222, 315n2 Lydgate, John, 13, 15; The Fall of Princes, 39 Lymon de la Terre, 133 Lynch, Michael, 225 Lyndsay, David, 5, 10, 84, 123, 126–56; anticlerical satire, 126, 138, 149; as a court poet, 126, 142, 147; and Freiris of Berwik, 157 – Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, 84, 126–42, 296, 297; and farce, 128–33;

–

– – –

–

and French morality plays, 133–8; performances of, 126, 328n21; and sottie, 138–41 Squyer Meldrum, 142, 149–56; chanson de geste and romance elements, 150–1; as a chivalric biography, 151–6 The Dreme, 142 The Monarche, 142 The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo, 142–9, 242, 249; and Condé’s Messe des Oiseaux, 148–9; and Lemaire’s Amant Vert, 143–7 The Testament of Squyer Meldrum, 155–6

Macafee, C.I., 11 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 3, 8, 53, 265, 293, 300 MacDonald, Donald, 92 MacDonald, Robert H., 270, 293 MacQueen, John, 4, 85–6, 190 Mage de Fiefmelin, André, 273–4 Mainer, Sergi, 175–6, 191, 211 Maitland of Lethington, Sir Richard, 235 Makars, 3, 13–14, 221, 296, 298, 301. See also individual poets Malory, Thomas, 193; Morte Darthur, 191 Malveisin, William de, bishop, 180 Mapstone, Sally, 175, 189, 236, 300, 310n9 Margaret of Austria, 143 Margaret of Burgundy, 64 Margaret of Flanders, 63 Margaret Tudor, 60 Marguerite de Navarre, 299 Marguerite of France, duchess of Savoy, 277–8, 280

Index 411 Marie de France, 88–90, 91, 99, 215; Fables, 86, 89, 91; Lais, 179, 200 Marie de Lorraine, 10 Marino, Giambattista, 272 Marot, Clément, 119, 231, 270, 295, 299 marriage: and adultery, 25, 193, 228–9, 298; and courtly love, 25–6; in Dunbar’s lyrics, 122–3; in Dunbar’s Thrissill, 60–1; in Dunbar’s Tretis, 103–17; parody and demystification of, 162–3 Marshal, William, 151, 153 Martin, Joanna, 171, 195 Martin Le Franc: Le Champion des Dames, 112 Marullus, Michael Tarchaniota, 276 Mary Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart), 5, 225–35; and James VI/I, 248–9, 250; knowledge and use of French, 5, 10, 222–3, 225–6; personal and regal identity, 225, 227, 234–345; personal library, 226, 230, 231, 248 – Casket Sonnets, 222, 226–30, 249; authorship and quality of, 226, 233–5; fin’ amor rhetoric, 226–7; and Labé’s Élégie, 230–1 – “Méditation” and devotional sonnets, 226, 232–3 – Ode on the death of François II, 226, 231–2, 233 – sonnet to Elizabeth I, 232 Mason, Roger A, 222 McClure, J. Derrick, 221, 238, 248, 292, 299 McDiarmid, Matthew P., 15, 86, 175, 211, 299 McFarlane, I.D., 343n18 McGavin, John J., 10 McGrail, Thomas H., 253, 260 melancholia, 35, 56, 58–9, 67, 119 Melancthon, Philipp, 133

Meldrum, William, 149–56 Mill, Anna J., 127–8 Ministre de l’Eglise, Le, 134 Molière, 83 Molinet, Jean: L’Alliance matri­ moniale des Enfans d’Austrice et d’Espaigne, 64; Le Chappellet des Dames, 48, 50, 64; Le Trosne d’Honneur, 47–8 monarchy, 236–7, 288–92 Montaigne, Michel de, 266 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 255, 262–3 Montgomerie, Alexander, 6; Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwarth, 177 Moral de Tout le Monde, 138 moralitates, 100–1 Moralité de Povre Commun, 134 Moralité de Povre Peuple, 134 Moralité nouvelle a cinq parsonnages: Des trois estatz reformez par Rayson, 134 morality plays, 127–8, 133–8, 295 Moray, earl of, 235 Morgan, Edwin, 270, 293 Morte Arthur, 176 Morte Arthure, 176 Mort le roi Artu, Le, 169 Muscatine, Charles, 107, 161–2 narrator: and artistic self-consciousness, 27, 52; of biographical texts, 151–3; clerkly observer, 19–22, 79–80; failure as lover, 28–31, 41–3, 81; identified with author / poet, 19–20, 27, 43–4, 52, 115–16, 124, 152, 196, 250; narrative mise en abyme, 156, 161, 165, 195–6; patron/poet thematic, 22, 27, 44, 81, 124, 277 Newlyn, Evelyn S., 163 Northumbrian “Inglis,” 8, 11

412 Index Norvell, Robert: Meroure of an Christiane, 299 Nykrog, Per, 83, 84 Omme pecheur, L’, 133 Orr, John, 11 Otterburn, Adam, 10 Ovid, 42, 45, 170, 279; Ovidian motifs, 54, 63, 228, 229 Owen, D.D.R., 180 Papillon de Lasphrise, 270, 271, 272 Pardonneur, le triacleur et la taver­ nière, Le, 130–2 Parkinson, David, 52 Passerat, Jean, 266; Epitaphes de diverses personnes, 267 patronage: of arts and literature, 177, 225, 236, 280, 290; of commissioned biographies, 153; patron-poet and narrator, 22, 27, 44, 81, 124, 277 Payen, Jean-Charles, 84 Pearcy, Roy J., 106 Pedro de Ayala, 8 Peebles to the Play, 297 Pèlerinage de Renart, Le, 94 Perceval Continuations, 197, 199, 297; Continuation Gauvin (The First Continuation of the Perceval), 197–204, 335–6nn2–3; Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation, 200. See also Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval Pernette de Guillet, 230 Pet, Le, 133 Peter de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, 63 Petrarchan sonnets, 223, 226, 229, 266–70 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 119, 170, 228; Trionfi, 45 Philip, duke of Burgundy, 63

Philotus, 297 pilgrimage of life poems, 39, 48–51 plague, 28–9, 34 Platonic Idea, 267 Pléiade, 237, 239, 244, 273 Pliçon, Le, 129 Plutarch, 252, 254, 262 poetic pseudo-autobiography, 18, 24, 50, 51–2. See also biographies and biographical narrative Poirion, Daniel, 170 Pound, Ezra, 38 Povre Clerc, Le, 158–64 Powell, Marianne, 86, 87, 99 Prise d’Orange, La, 209 prisons and imprisonment: amorous incarceration, 26–37; of Mary Stuart, 232 Prose Lancelot. See under Lancelot en prose Prose Tristan. See under Tristan and Isolt Protestantism and Protestant identity: Calvinism, 245; Huguenots, 235, 249, 278, 288, 299; of Drummond, 280–1, 285–6; of James VI/I, 239, 245, 248, 250–1 Protestant Reformation, 8, 298–9, 301 Purdie, Rhiannon, 175, 336n3 Quatre Elements, Les, 133 quest allegory, 168–9 Queste del saint Graal, La, 33, 168, 169, 200 quest romance, 214, 215–16 Quinze Joies de mariage, Les, 112–13, 295 Rabelais, François, 6, 83, 115 Racine, Jean, 263

Index 413 Ramsey, Lee C., 190, 209 Randolphe’s Phantasey, 225 Raoul de Houdenc: Meraugis de Portlesguez, 200 Reid, David, 292 Reiss, Edmund, 117 Renart et Isengrin dans le puits, 98–9 Renart et le loup Primaut, frère d’Isengrin, 94, 97 Renart et les poissons, 94, 97 Renart le Contrefait, 87–8 René d’Anjou, 13; Le Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris, 143, 168–73; Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance, 172–3 Riddy, Felicity, 32, 150, 154 Ridley, Florence, 117 Robertson, D.W., and Robertsonian Christian exegesis, 25, 26, 58 Robert the Bruce, 180 Rogers, Gillian, 199 Rolland, John – The Court of Venus, 4, 7, 14, 66–82, 296; and Belle Dame sans Mercy Cycle, 66, 68–9, 75, 78–9, 81; and Chartier’s Belle Dame, 68–9, 71–2, 77, 79, 81; Christian frame of reference, 80; dits amoureux motifs, 66, 68, 74, 80–1, 222; and Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse, 73–4; and Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Navarre, 69, 75, 77, 78 romance: Anglo-Norman, 179–80, 213–14; archetypal themes and motifs, 213; Arthurian world, 180–1, 191–4, 199–200, 295; Celtic Otherworld, 181, 183–4, 185, 194, 214–15, 217, 219; and chanson de geste, 150, 165, 177, 186, 199, 206; chivalric themes, 168, 183, 184,

193–4, 199–201, 210–11, 296, 298; conventions of, 185–7; epic mode in, 216–18; militia et amor, 183–5, 187, 193–4; moral, political, or Christian elements, 175, 177, 190–2, 193–4, 201–4; narrative function, 199; oral or folkloric origins, 205–6, 213; quest romance, 214, 215–16; Scots corpus of, 5, 175–7, 296, 297, 298. See also specific works Roman de la Rose, Le, 13, 31, 168, 298. See also Guillaume de Lorris; Jean de Meun Roman de Renart, Le, 83, 86, 88, 199, 296, 297; and Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, 91–100; Le Bacon enlevé, 97; La Confession de Renart, 93–4; Le Jugement de Renart, 92–3, 95–6; Liétart, Renart et la mort de Brun, 98; Le Pélerinage de Renart, 94; Renart et Isengrin dans le puits, 98–9; Renart et le loup Primaut, frère d’Isengrin, 94, 97; Renart et les poissons, 94, 97; Les Vêpres de Tibert, 94 romans bretons, 213 romans d’aventures, 213 Ronsard, Pierre de, 115, 119, 228, 232, 295, 299; influence on Drummond, 266–7, 270–2, 276–93; influence on James VI/I, 237–8, 240, 244, 249; Abbregé de l’Art poëtique François, 238; Contre Denise sorciere, 271; Folastrie, 271, 272; La Franciade, 238, 244; Hymnes, 248; Hymne de la Justice, 282–8; Hymne de l’Éternité, 276–81; Panegyrique de la Renommée, 288–92; Sur la mort de Marie, 267 Roswall and Lillian, 175

414 Index Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, 231, 237 Saint-Gelais, Octovien de: Les Eneydes de Virgille translatez, 38–9, 48, 297; Le Séjour d’Honneur, 48–50 Scève, Maurice, 228 Schenck, Mary Jane, 163 Scheps, Walter, 191 Schmolke-Hasselmann, Beate, 180 Schumacher, Aloys, 38 Scots language, 7–9, 11–12 Scots literature: alliterative verse, 176– 7; and national spirit or identity, 176, 191, 204, 299; Anglicization of, 8–9; “Castalian” poets, 222, 236, 293; continuity through centuries, 301; in English, 9, 222, 265, 296, 301; English presence in, 6; French genres not found in, 297; international contextualization of, 14, 297, 302; literary canon, 300–2; of Middle Ages vs Renaissance, 221–3, 238, 296, 298, 300; modern Scottish Renaissance, 3, 8, 53, 265, 300; as multilingual and multicultural, 301; native traditions, 297 Scott, Alexander: Oraisons de Cicéron, 11 self-consciousness, public or artistic, 27, 52, 221–2, 236–7, 299 Sempill Ballatis, The, 225 Senecan dramas, 252–3, 298 sermo humilis, 116, 171, 297 Serres, Jean de: Inventaire général de l’histoire de France, 266 Severance, Sybil Lutz, 272 sexuality: artificial censorship of, 214– 15; erotic transfigured by divine, 233; floral imagery for, 61–5; homosexuality and homosocial bonds, 217–18, 241, 291; impotence, 122–3;

leprosy and sexual deviance, 34–5; link with food, 159; man’s spirituality vs woman’s body, 133; and rape, 229; victory token as castration, 218; war of the sexes, 56–60, 65, 109–10, 111 Shakespeare, William, 126, 253, 263; Julius Caesar, 259 Shire, Helena Mennie, 4, 10 Sidney, Mary (Countess of Pembroke), 252 Sidney, Sir Philip, 252 Sir Tristrem, 175 Sklute, Larry M., 34 Smith, Janet M., 4; on Douglas, 38, 45; on Dunbar, 103, 106, 117; on Lyndsay, 127–8; on René d’Anjou, 168; on Rolland, 66 Smith, Jeremy J., 12 sonnets: as a genre, 222, 223, 249, 298; by Alexander, 151; by James VI/I, 237, 239; by Mary Stuart, 222, 226–30, 232, 233–5 sottie, 138–41 Sottie des sots ecclésiastiques qui jouent leurs bénéfices, 138 Sotye nouvelle des Croniqueurs, 138 Spearing, A.C., 51, 85, 101 Speirs, John, 299 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 237, 265 Spiller, Michael, 266 Sponde, Jean de, 235; Élégie, 269; Poèmes chrétiens, 275–6 statecraft and governance (advice to princes), 175, 177, 300; in Alexander’s plays, 262–4; in Drummond’s Forth Feasting, 290–2; in Golagros and Gawane, 197, 200, 201–4, 211; in The Kingis Quair, 24; in Lancelot of the Laik, 190–2

Index 415 Stewart, Bernard, lord of Aubigny, 121 Stuart, Mary. See Mary Queen of Scots Sylvester, Joshua, 249 Taillevent, Michault: Le Songe de la Toison d’Or, 46–7, 51 Taill of Rauf Coilyear, The, 176, 177, 205–11, 213, 215; chanson de geste elements, 206–10; Christian element, 211; compared to Gaydon, 206–9 Tarabin, Tarabas et TriboulleMénage, 133 Tasso, Torquato, 244, 272, 293 testaments (congés), 33–4, 155–6. See also under Henryson, Robert; Lyndsay, David theatre. See drama and theatre thistle (symbol for Scotland), 60, 62 Thomas, 297; Tristan, 179, 200, 228 tragedy: by Alexander (see under Alexander, William); classical, 252–3, 264; German baroque, 262; humanist, 223, 252–3, 260, 263–4, 295; in James VI/I’s Phoenix, 242–3; by the Makars, 296 Trauerspiel, 262 trials. See judgment thematics Tristan and Isolt, 162, 215, 217, 219; Beroul’s Roman de Tristan, 33, 179, 200; Prose Tristan, 297; Thomas’s Tristan, 179, 200, 228 trobairitz, 230 Trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne, Les, 106 Trois Dames qui troverent l’Anel, Les, 106 Trois Meschines, Les, 106 Tudor, Margaret, 60 Tyard, Pontus de, 266

Urquhart, Thomas, 6 Vaillant: Le Débat des deux soeurs, 71 Vallet aus douze Fames, Le, 106–7 Van Duzee, Mable, 213 Vengeance Raguidel, La, 200 Vêpres de Tibert, Les, 94 Villon, François, 109, 118, 119, 295; Lais, 155; Le Testament, 113–14, 155 Virgil, 60, 241, 279; Aeneid, 38–9, 48, 52; Eclogues, 52; Georgics, 52 Vogel, Bertram, 191 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 83, 84 Vondel, Joost van den: Gysbreght van Aemstel, 263 Vraie Cronicque d’Escoce (attrib. John Ireland), 11 Waldef, 179 Wallace, William, 180 Walsh, Eizabeth, 205 Walter l’Anglais (Gualterus Anglicus): Romulus, 86–91, 99–100 Wenceslas, duke of Brabant, 21, 27, 44 William (the Lion), king of Scotland, 180 Willson, David Harris, 237 Wittig, Kurt, 299 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 192 women: eternity as maternal, 277–8; female monarchs, 225, 227, 278; female poetic voice, 226–35, 230; feminist criticism, 32–3, 114, 163; gendered trial and punishment of, 32–3, 35; old and deformed, 270–2; rape, 229; and sexual floral imagery, 61–5 Wormald, Jenny, 225, 226