that Dunbar had some role in the royal secretariat, per-
haps as a scribe or envoy. He is last mentioned on 14
May 1513, but there is a gap in the records following
the Battle of Flodden (September 1513), in which James
IV died; Dunbar possibly survived into James V’s reign,
but there is no evidence that he did so.
The court provided Dunbar not only with a liveli-
hood but also with his primary audience and much
of his subject matter. Many of his poems are located
“heir at hame” in Scotland; he writes of actual people,
sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely, through the
medium of dream, table, and fantasy. He celebrates some
of the great festive occasions in James IV’s reign —The
Thrissill and the Rois treats of the king’s marriage to
Margaret Tudor in 1503, and another poem describes
the queen’s visit to Aberdeen in 1511. He employs
two favorite courtly modes, eulogy and elegy: greeting
the distinguished knight Bernard Stewart in one piece
and lamenting his death in another. But Dunbar also
writes, more informally, about trivial events—what
he sees, in his own words, “Daylie in court befoir
myn e [eye].” He devises comic squibs about fellow
servitors, including fools and alchemists. Many poems
were written, in the fi rst instance, for a small group of
people—king, queen, and courtiers, several of whom
were, like Dunbar, both “clerkis” and poets. These
poems are playful and recreative, intimate in tone and
often colloquial.
Scholars have sought, with little success, to establish
Dunbar’s indebtedness to earlier writers. It is often easier
to indicate the genres to which his poems belong than
to pinpoint sources. Yet “Timor Morris Conturbat Me”
reveals keen interest in other Scottish poets, from the
14th century to his own time; and he was also familiar
with alliterative works, such as Richard Holland’s Buke
of the Howlat. Dunbar seems aware of the Gaelic literary
tradition but humorously dissociates himself from it in
The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy. Ignoring the politi-
cal boundaries between England and Scotland, Dunbar
embraces their shared language and poetic traditions.
At the close of The Goldyn Targe he speaks of “oure
Inglisch,” and pays homage to the high style of poetry
associated with Chaucer and Lydgate; he himself writes
in this tradition effectively.
Yet Dunbar was also familiar with less sophisticated
literary forms—drinking songs, bawdy love poems,
and the ballads he mentions in “Schir Thomas Norny.”
Casual, throw away remarks in this and other poems
provide our chief clues both to Dunbar’s literary tastes
and his view of himself as a poet. He calls himself a
“makar” and his poetry “making.” Such terms lay stress
on the poet as craftsman and the poem as artifact; most
critics see Dunbar in this light, praising him less for the
originality of his ideas than for his verbal “energy” and
metrical virtuosity.
Dunbar’s finest poems almost all contain some
strain of comedy. His range of tone is wide: occasion-
ally fl ippant and bantering but more often sardonic and
derisive. He does not merely mock deviants and outsid-
ers, traditional comic butts like the friars, or those low
in the social hierarchy; he makes fun of himself and
can be disrespectful to the king. Dunbar delights in
exploiting areas of social tension, between Lowlanders
and Highlanders, clerics and laypeople, or men and
women. Certain modes seem particularly congenial. He
is a master of invective and grotesque portraiture and
also excels at parody and burlesque. Several poems are
mock-chivalric, and two, “The Dregy” and “The Testa-
ment of Andro Kennedy,” draw upon the tradition of
medieval Latin parody. Dunbar is a witty poet, but his
wit is contextual, displayed less in neat epigrams than
in topical allusions, puns, and a pervasive irony, particu-
larly evident in his ambitious poem the Tretis of the Tua
Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. A cluster of dream poems
displays a strikingly black “eldritch” comedy.
Dunbar also wrote fi ne hymnlike religious poems and
other wholly serious verse, some of which is didactic in
a manner uncongenial to modern readers; yet such pieces
were popular with contemporaries. Their style is plain,
and their tone impersonal and hortatory. Many could
have been written by any competent poet of the time;
indeed several attributed to Dunbar in one manuscript
are elsewhere assigned to another poet or anonymous.
This uncertainty as to authorship is symptomatic of their
extreme conventionality. Yet some of Dunbar’s moral
poems, which undoubtedly spring from this same tra-
dition, have far greater individuality. Two of the fi nest,
“Timor Mortis Conturbat Me” and “In to thir Dirk and
Drublie Dayis” (by later editors called “The Lament
for the Makaris” and “Meditatioun in Wyntir”), give
poignant expression to ancient commonplaces about
death and mutability.
Dunbar’s poems are so varied that critics fi nd it dif-
fi cult to form a coherent image of their protean author.
Some seek to reconcile the disparate elements in his
poetry through an underlying “morality”; others stress
rather the generic nature of his poems. The exact degree
of self-expression in Dunbar remains diffi cult to assess
but seems to fl uctuate. The “I”-fi gure of some poems is
largely a narrative persona, and in others a spokesman
for orthodox morality; but in some, particularly the
petitionary poems, we hear an intimate and private-
sounding voice.See also Chaucer, Geoffrey; Douglas, Gavin;
Henryson, RobertDUNBAR, WILLIAM