of the same which go in copes gay],” 1 : 865 – 66 ). By a series of shifts, source
and mediation become indistinguishable.
The effects of this are most noteworthy in the secondEclogue. Barclay has
underlined in thefirst the traditional curial complaint that the prince
implicitly demands the absolute dedication of all the courtier’s faculties.
All senses and desires must be focused on the ruler:
thou must all thing fulfill
As is his pleasure, and nothing at thy will.
None of thy wittes are at thy libertie,
Unto thy master they needes must agree. ( 1 : 1183 – 86 )“Will”and“pleasure”nuance significantly the Latin’s terse“Nulla tibi aut
in uerbis aut in operibus libertas supererit”(Mustard, 35 ).
This narrative of libidinal coding is played again in the secondEclogue,
but here it has changed. The part of the source deployed has to do with the
effect of the court on the five senses, and the result– outlined by
Piccolomini, much expanded by Barclay–is phobic carnival, predicated
on an absolute and catastrophic mismatch between the courtier’s body and
the time of the prince. When you wait for meals at table, they come too
soon or too late to satisfy hunger ( 2 : 597 – 628 ); the wine is too cold or too
hot ( 629 – 31 ), while you are perpetually tormented, like Tantalus, by smells
from the table of the great ( 901 – 04 ). You eat the worst food ( 737 – 812 ); the
cups are only washed once a year, and then“of that vessell thou drinkest oft
iwis / In which some states or dames late did pis”( 2 : 641 – 42 :“in quibus
saepe minxisse domini consueuerunt”;“dames,”revealingly, is Barclay’s
addition). Just as the prince mediates desires for food, so he limits access to
“fayre ladies”(“At thy princes pleasour thou shalt them onely see,” 2 : 171 ).
The prince, in this transplanted account, controls the circulation of objects
to which desire affixes itself, and, most crucially, the Other enjoys. Women
at court arefickle (“none shalt thou loue of this sorte pardee, / But that she
loueth another better then thee,” 2 : 413 – 14 ). As Piccolomini notes and
Barclay repeats, it is a structural condition of court life, not an accident, that
Though it to [lords] turne to no profite at all,
If they haue pleasour the seruaunt shall haue small. ( 2 : 793 – 94 )The court offers the script of unity; what it confers, however, is a horrific
performance of missed encounter. The courtier’s relation to his master, too,
suggests nothing so much as R. Howard Bloch’s familiar description of
medieval misogyny. Whether he fornicates too much or too little,“vse[s]
familiaritie”with a few men or is“common to all indifferent”( 3 : 431 , 433 ),
the prince is the cause of the servitor’s inner turbulence, and is “a
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 95