Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature)
Language: English
Pages: 268
ISBN: 1107686563
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.
address the provenance of the term “aureate licour,” marking the literal “influence” of poetic inspiration, in Lydgate’s Balade in Commendation of Our Lady (line 13): Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, 1988), 27. Norton-Smith, like Mendenhall’s early study, limits the term’s critical range to diction in some degree Latinate, an emphasis with which I concur. See, too, Arne Zettersten, “On the Aureate Diction of William Dunbar,” Essays Presented to
of metrical possibilities displays a craftsman in charge of his matter, but also comes very close to suggesting the opposite: a delirious yielding, a selfdispersal into these (in England at least) exotic patterns. We return to his own conclusion: what are the pleasures that “fire” his poetry? On the reading of David Carlson, who has done more than anyone to make these poets visible, they would hardly be legible, for the grex are nothing but signs. “We cannot know” Carlson writes, “whether Bernard
content, which 54 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland could be arbitrarily revoked. This renders it an appropriate center for the symbolic economy of Skelton’s poem, where it takes on a bewildering variety of forms. The first of the Vices, Favell or Flattery, sets the tone with Drede’s “Than Favell gan wyth fayre speche me to fede” (147). Words become food; in effect, “Bowge of Courte.” The flatterer’s language functions as a medium of courtly exchange, becoming identical with
and so forth. This tirade, which can stand for a number of similar passages in Dunbar’s petitionary poems, sets in train a process of disfigurement – of making monstrous – that becomes increasingly embodied and specific. The poem surveys several types of ecclesiastical ambition before fixing on one, “Ane pykthank [sycophant] in a prelottis clais” (53), whose dubious corporeal characteristics fit him more for manual labor than for his present occupation. This unworthy figure, as he advances, despises
against the succession of events, their static, ritual gestures seeming impervious to narrative context. This lyric selfcontainment is illustrated by a later manuscript, Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 813, which includes six love-complaints that draw – one briefly, the other five extensively – on both The Pastime and The Comfort of Lovers.26 Passages from several scenes are woven together in an elaborate cento, and are not materially altered by the loss of their narrative frame. Other episodes employed –