with the temporal twist that the symbolized and hierarchized body of the
prior texts here precedes a violent and disordered insufficiency.^28
The latter is most apparent in Barclay’s savagely carnivalesque reversions to
his source. He offers an amplification of Philippians 3 , 18 – 19 hardly
less devastating than that of Chaucer’sPardoner(“They been enemys of
Cristes croys, / Of whiche the ende is deeth; wombe is hir god!,”CantTvi,
532 – 33 ). Barclay’s devotees of the belly-god are accorded a full-scale cultic
peroration, which pictures a temple where the vessels are“Platters and dishes,
morter and potcrokes, / Pottes and pestels, broches andfleshe hokes”(Prol. 2 :
565 – 66 ). The curial satirist’s vision is of being dismembered and eaten (even
the servers“At euery morsell hath eye vnto thy hande”[ 2 : 938 ]). This, of
course, is part of the diabolical machinery of a court that is“in earth an ymage
infernall”( 1 : 1260 ). At the start of the thirdEclogue–in a passage that is pure
Barclay–it transpires that this has haunted Corydon’sdreams:
Me thought in the court I taken was in trap,
And there sore handled, God geue it an ill hap.
Me thought the scullians like fendes of their lookes
Came some with whittels, some other withfleshhokes.
Me thought that they stoode eche one about me thicke
With kniues ready for toflay me quicke.
So had I (sleeping) as much of feare and dreade,
As I should (waking) haue lost my skin in deede. ( 3 : 15 – 22 )If loss is elsewhere nobly distanced, we can hardly say the same of this
ferocious, comic-traumatic excoriation.
Against the seething somatic nightmare of the court, an anthill of men
behaving badly, are set thefigures of the revered departed. Dead men walk
the pages of the Eclogues: Morton, Alcock, Westminster, Sir Edward
Howard, killed in an attack on the French off Brest in 1513 and mourned
in“The Towre of Vertue and Honoure,”the elegy perhaps set into the
fourthEclogueas a probable bid for Howard patronage.^29 And their number
includes the poet himself. At the very outset, Barclay dourly opposes himself
to the“laureate poets”of the court:
But of their writing though I ensue the rate,
No name I chalenge of Poete laureate.
That name vnto them is mete and doth agree
Which writeth matters with curiositee.
Mine habite blacke accordeth not with grene,
Blacke betokeneth death as it is dayly sene,
The grene is pleasour, freshe lust and iolite,
These two in nature hath great diuersitie.Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 97