amour.The Palice’s Ovidianism has been well documented, usually in
regard to a quite palpable strand of excess.^34 In the wild swerves of its
narrative, the poem’s dreamer-narrator has various traumatic experiences in
a standard lover’slocus amoenusand then at the (very literal) hands of
Venus’s court, before being rescued by Calliope and the Muses and con-
ducted to the Palace of Honour. Since the poem stages a movement from
Ovid to the promise of Virgil, from Scots vernacular to Scots as epic
medium, its conclusion brings a covenant of liberation into an epic future.
This, however, cannot come to pass without unresolved dissonances.
Readers have gravitated towards one disquieting episode in particular as
the poem’s culmination. Once in the palace, the dreamer, like the margi-
nalized clerics of earlier French court poetry in his preoccupation with
“seeing,”peeps“In at a boir [chink]”( 1903 )^35 and glimpses“the gladdest
represent / That euir in erth a wrachit catywe kend”( 1904 – 05 ) – an
opulently bejewelled palace, where“Rial Princis in plate and armouris
quent [intricately made]”( 1919 ) walk to and fro, while
Intronyt sat a god armypotent,
On quhais gloryus vissage as I blent looked
In extasy, be his brychtnes, atonys at once
He smate me doun and byrsyt all my bonys.
( 1921 – 24 )Much has turned here on the variant readings of line 1921 ; Copland’s edition
ofc. 1553 styles the god“armypotent,”whereas the 1579 print of Henry
Charteris reads“omnipotent.”Spearing offers the uncharacteristically bald
assertion that this“represent”is“God,”while for Fradenburg“The heroiza-
tion of the‘represent’”recovers image for masculine action.^36 The episode
suggests Barclay’s sad tales of the body’smésalliancewith ruler and court. If,
however, the“represent”is, as some have argued, a transfiguration of an
earthly king, this king brings a specific language. The epithet“Armypotent,”
passing through Statius, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Lydgate from Virgil’s
“armipotens,”blends a vernacular literary tradition with an epic past of
translatio.^37 Virgilian diction is no less endowed than Ovidian motif with
the power to break bones. Here that power is exercised in a masculine agon
through which Douglas, not for thefirst time in the poem, dramatizes by way
of his dreamer’s predicament a constant and disturbing–though also wildly
funny–misalignment between body and the languages of the literary past.
Far more rhetorically ample and enigmatic, however, is the scene that
precedes this crushing encounter. When the dreamer reaches the Palace of
Honour, he encounters Venus enthroned. On“thre curius goldyn treis”
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 99