[neck]”( 232 ) and the other on“an hyddows hors”( 233 ). These are the court’s
“abject”( 240 ) who used their wisdom“lewdly”( 275 ). And the abject of the
archive come to include the dreamer himself, the“elrych grume [elvish fellow]”
( 299 ) who hides throughout in a hollow tree, as if in scapegoating citation of
the“elvyssh”Chaucer who tellsSir Thopas(CantTvii, 703 ). When Venus’s
court surfaces, the very charm of its music drives him into melancholy, and the
curse he utters on Venus and her court ( 607 – 36 ) brings their ire down on him.
This moment hasfigured for the poem’s readers as its most Ovidian,
since it is here that the dreamer, savagely mobbed by a cluster of very
vernacular fairies, fears most for his form:
For gret effere me thocht na pane to be.
But sore I dred me for sum othyr Iape
That Venus suld throw hir subtillyte
In till sum bysnyng best transfigurit me. monster
As in a bere, a bair, ane oule, ane ape. bear;boar
I traistit so for till haue been myssape
That oft I wald my hand behald to se
Gyf it alteryt, and oft my vissage grape. groped
( 737 – 44 )Despite his fear, the dreamer is already a“bysnyng”or monster (from ON
bysn,“marvel”or“portent”) throughout the poem’sfirst part, whether in his
own eyes ( 625 ) or in Venus’s.^43
The poem also touches on other kinds of vulnerability, as monstrosity is
caught up in a constant and (in the poem’s world) highly contingent
mismatch between speaker and generic demand. Sometimes he falls comically
short; David Parkinson has demonstrated how feebly he measures up to the
aspirations of visionary literature, with its guides and revelations.^44 At others,
his utterances come joltingly to the fore, disarranging the subordinations of
narrative syntax. At all times, and in all senses, he is a spectacle. The
contingency goes further, since in true Ovidian fashion his voice andfigure
are always at risk of“laps[ing] back, at the edges, into the natural world”^45 –
or, more precisely, into a disfiguring mimesis of something which is not quite
nature. (We might think of Douglas’s contradictory and grisly desert in the
light of Lacan’s assertion that“there is no absence in the Real.”)^46 The
menace of a reversion to bestiality is an ever-present threat. In the fearful
wilderness even Minerva’s sober court approach“As heyrd of bestis stampyng
with loud cry”( 196 ), though on closer view they reveal themselves to be
“ladyis fair and gudly men arrayit, / In constant weid”( 202 – 03 ).
With this in mind, we can better appreciate the dreamer’s habit of
describing the abrupt transitions he undergoes in the terms of a medieval
102 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland