When he departed hisflocke for wo was faynt,
The fouldes sounded with dolour and complaynt,
So that their clamour and crye bespred the yle,
His death was mourned from Ely forty mile.
These worthy heardes and many other mo
Were with their wethers in loue conioyned so,
That more they cured by witte and pacience,
Than dreadfull drome^21 can do with violence. ( 3 : 505 – 12 )This picture of a man in love with his wethers does not have the punning
density of the lines on Alcock or Morton–earlier turned by metonymy into
“the riche shepheard which woned in Mortlake”( 1 : 499 )–but its allegorical
quality echoes them. At moments like this, Barclay’s England is itself a
rebus, rather in the sense that Freud uses the term to describe the images
produced by the dream-work. Ely here relates metonymically to Barclay’s
monastichabitus, and is the spatial configuration of the poet’s ego, an
amplification of a bodily surface.
As such, however, it cannot but bring with it its owncorps morcelé,a
mirage of a body in pieces. I refer to the vivid description of court’s effect on
the subject that enters thefirst threeEclogues. Even before the detail enters,
it is anticipated in Barclay’s relationship to his source texts, which in
this instance do not appear alongside his own. In thefirst threeEclogues,
which are in any case furnished with Mantuan allusionsnotbelonging to
those Mantuan eclogues Barclay translates in the fourth andfifthEclogues,
Barclay, as Mustard observed long ago, occupies a constantly shifting
distance to his source.^22 Piccolomini’sDe miseriis curialium, an epistolary
instance of curial satire, is broken down into dialogue. Sometimes the
source is focused in a style that highlights its place in a chain of mediations.
Where the original bleakly notes that princes reward courtiers as we fatten
pigs for slaughter, the image–well suited to its pastoral Barclayan recep-
tion–is followed with“sic de Seneca Longinoque legimus, quos propter
diuitias interemptos Iuuenalis affirmat his versibus,” and adding the
Juvenalian quotation.^23 Barclay highlights Piccolomini’s role as transmitter,
and adds a further voice:
Like as Longinus and Seneca doubtlesse,
Which as sayth Codrus were slayne for their riches,
So writeth Pius (whom some Eneas call)
A clause alleaging of famous Iuuenal. ( 1 : 1253 – 56 )At others, the voice of the source is identified as“syr Sampson”( 2 : 1191 ),
mapping the future pope on to a type-figure parish priest, or a citation in the
source of Aristotle is ascribed to an anonymous Cambridge“scoller”(“[One
94 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland