The dreamer sees the entire contents of the Old Testament and the
Apocrypha ( 1498 – 1567 ), the stories of Thebes, Hercules and Jason, the
Matter of Troy ( 1607 – 29 ) and its extension in the Aeneid ( 1630 – 56 ),
the subsequent Matter of Rome ( 1657 – 92 ), and even“al the cumming of
the Antecrist”( 1701 ). Closer to home, there are vernacular protagonists–“Raf
Coilʒear”( 1711 ), John the Reeve ( 1712 ), Robin Hood ( 1718 ), even“Peirs
plewman”( 1714 )^49 – and tales of“Nigramansy”( 1720 ), which Bawcutt nicely
observes“read like a grotesque parody of Ovid”(“of a Nutmog, thay mayid a
monk in hy, / A parys kirk of a small penny py,” 1725 – 26 ).^50 After this
dementedly compendious account of all the styles, genres and“materes”
known to medieval literary production, secular and sacred, it comes as
something of a surprise when the dreamer’s attendant nymph glosses the
contents of the mirror’sreflection:
ʒone myrrour clere,
The quhilk thow saw afore dame Venus stand
Signifyes nothing ellis till vnderstand
Bot the gret bewty of thir ladyis facis
Quhairin louers thinkis thay behald all gracis. ( 1760 – 64 )Among the poem’s editors, Bawcuttfinds this explanation “lame and
unconvincing” (xlv); Parkinson observes that the marginal note in
Copland’s edition, where these lines are glossed“the Auctors conclution
of Venus merour,”contradicts the poem,“in which the‘conclusion’(which
does not offer an adequate description of the catalogue justfinished) is the
Nymph’s.”^51
I am not sure that this passage can be so easily dismissed. The entire
poem has unfolded from an opening within which the dreamer was des-
ignated as lover-protagonist. Now, like Guillaume de Lorris’s Amant and
Narcissus, he looks in a mirror–here, the mirror of Venus. What he
“behalds,”however, is a compilation that catches up an entire medieval
library within the loose and permeable bounds of universal history, and
which is then named, retroactively, as the face of the beloved. Caught
within the reflection of the lover’s look is another archive. The dreamer
was liberated by Venus on condition that he fulfill“the nixt resonabil
command”( 997 ) she might put, and he accepts:
Weil weil (said scho) thy wyll is suffycyent.
Of thy bousoum answere I stand content,
Than suddandly in hand a buke scho hynt
The quhilk to me betaucht scho or I went
Commandand me to be obedient.
And put in ryme that proces than quyt tynt. ( 1747 – 52 )Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 105