( 1474 )beforeherfacestandsa“fair myrrour”( 1476 ), which shows“All thinges
gone lyk as they wer present”( 1497 ). We will return to this scene in due
course; for the present I will simply outline the direction of Douglas’spoem,
which represents a series of translations offigure and space, an elaborate
threshold at which Scots is made ready for Virgil.The Palice’s excesses arise
because this highly bookish poem becomes,avant la lettre, a meditation on
something close to Derrida’s archive; a cultural memory that embodies
authority as it issues commands, and comprehends an“anarchivic”death
drive that annihilates the archive even as it seeks to construct it.^38 Only the
pressure of this movement underlies the poem’s achievement of a precarious
equilibrium of“authority”–an authority which gestures both towards
monarch and court, and towards an archive at once classical and vernacular.
And the balance reached is, as we shall see, precarious indeed.
Like Dunbar’s allegories,The Paliceinitially paints a vernacular landscape
fused with Latinate artifice, the mother tongue with the language of the
fathers. At its opening, Douglas’s dreamer rises in May“to do my obseru-
ance”( 6 ) and traces his way through a thickly Chaucerian (or perhaps, once
again depending on chronology, Dunbarian) landscape. It is heraldically
“powderit”( 11 ); Aeolus’s intrusions are suspended, as they are inThe
Thrissill and the Rois( 49 – 50 ); there is even an evocation ofThe Legend of
Good Women’s daisy, according to Peter Travis Chaucer’s“heliotropic”
emblem offiguration ( 37 ).^39 The aureate landscape, however, is violently
shaken by the intrusion of a voice “preclare [clear] as phebus schone”
( 63 )–Derrida’s archive in“jussive”mode.^40 It praises May as afigure allied
with creating Nature; she is the “Maternall moneth” ( 65 ) and“verray
ground tyl werking of nature”( 69 ) which“small herbis constrenis tyl
encres”( 68 ), refresher of buds and birds alike. She also provokes the warrior
impulses of“martis vassalage”( 83 ) and“amorus lufe and armony”( 84 ). This
violent excess of presence–of voice and light–rephrases the generic and
stylistic gardentoposwith its amorous overtones, but does so as a demand:
Quha that constrenit ar in luffis rage
Addressand þaim with obseruans ayrly
Weil auchtyst the tyl glore and magnify. ought
( 86 – 88 )The components of aureate diction–Latinate law, the mother tongue–are
abstracted from the landscape and relayed as an order. The“maternall mon-
eth”insists, as later will Venus, on the praise of a responsive voice supplying
more of the same. This vocal intervention from an invisible source, with its
maternal associations, disconcertingly anticipates a body of psychoanalytic and
100 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland