Eclogues,or“playd the sportis of Daphnis and Coridon”( 1226 ); Terence
“play[s]”( 1227 ) his comedies. The substitution of book for author is even
more explicit in the case of satirists, epigrammatists andflyters:
Iuuynale lik a mower hym allone Juvenal;jester
Stud skornand euery man as thayʒeid by went
Marcyall was cuyk, till rost, seith, fars or fry. Martial;seethe;stuff
And Pogyus stude with mony gyrn and grone Poggio;sneer
On Laurence Valla spyttand and cryand fy.
( 1229 – 33 )Poggio Bracciolini’s performed invectives look ahead to Douglas’sfinal
attack on his own text. That text has now come to stand for Douglas,
replacing him, and the poet is caught in imaginary rivalry with his own
poem. Douglas, the originary term now cleared (rhetorically) of a prefatory
text, can look ahead to the monument that will be theEneados.
Yet even this forward-looking conclusion encapsulates the same fears as
the rest of the poem.The Palice of Honourbegan with a sequence of false
starts and an unnamed imperative to write. Now Douglas has written himself
into a goddess’spatronage,inafiction ofauctoritas. He has, however,
repudiated his embodiment in one text simply to accomplish it in another,
one–as any number of European foundation myths can attest–that was
constantly available for geographic translation, and that carried its own drive
to annihilation, to Trojan and Roman ruin as well as to empire. Indeed, his
patron, the source of his authority, is also the being whose servants have, on
her orders, subjected his physical body and clergial being to harm. The
newfound position of authority from which he can complete his translation
of theAeneidthus seems strangely precarious, and this instability of poetic
authority catches up an odd historical irony in Douglas’sdepartureto
England, political maneuverings andfinal exile. His text is underwritten by
the pathos of distance– an imperial assertion in suspension, its author
banished from the nation it was to authorize, and that was to authorize it.
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 107