Dunbar’s poem, to which my own discussion is much indebted, see
Fradenburg,City, Marriage, Tournament, 67 – 149.
31. The poem’s unique text, in the Bannatyne MS, has no title; it owes the one by
which it is generally known to Allan Ramsay, who printed it inThe Ever Green
in 1724.
32. Spearing,Medieval to Renaissance, 212 ; see, too, Deanna Delmar Evans,
“Ambivalent Artifice in Dunbar’s The Thrissill and the Rois,”Studies in
Scottish Literature 22 ( 1987 ), 95 – 105 ( 104 ).
33. All quotations from Dunbar are from William Dunbar,The Poems of William
Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1998 ), and are signalled by B
and the poem’s number in the edition.
34. James I of Scotland,The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1971 ),
lines 372 – 413.
35. David F. Hult,Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First
Roman de la Rose(Cambridge, 1986 ), 252.
36 .Theterm“aureate,”introduced by Lydgate, has a wealth of connotation in
fifteenth-century poetry, which has tended critically to translate into what
Bawcutt calls“conceptual vagueness”:Dunbar the Makar(Oxford, 1992 ), 353.
John Norton-Smith, more careful thanmost, well describes its movement
between the metaphoricfields of“rhetorical skill,”“the spoken sound of eloquent
language”and“rhetorical skill giving rise to eloquence”: John Lydgate,Poems,ed.
John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1966 ), 192 – 95. Both Meyer-Lee (Poets and Power,
54 – 61 ) and Lois Ebin address the provenance of the term“aureate licour,”marking
the literal“influence”of poetic inspiration, in Lydgate’sBalade in Commendation
of Our Lady(line 13 ): Ebin,Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the
Fifteenth Century(Lincoln, 1988 ), 27. Norton-Smith, like Mendenhall’searly
study, limits the term’s critical range to diction in some degree Latinate, an
emphasis with which I concur.See,too,ArneZettersten,“On the Aureate
DictionofWilliamDunbar,”Essays Presented to Knud Schibsbye, ed. Michael
Chesnutt et al. (Copenhagen, 1979 ), 51 – 68. Dunbar retains the crucial association
of poetic inspiration withvocalpresence in his own, highly aureate and vocative
Marian lyric“Hale, sterne superne”(B 16 ), just as the metonymic“sugurit lippis
and tongis aureate”ofThe Goldyn Targe(line 263 ) recall Lydgate (see Ebin,
Illuminator, 28 ). In the latter case, however, Dunbar, as we shall see, treats such
vocal immediacy as lost, available only to a kind ofpost hocreconstruction.
37. R. J. Lyall, “The Stylistic Relationship between Dunbar and Douglas,”
William Dunbar, the“Nobill Poyet”: Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed.
Sally Mapstone (East Linton, 2001 ), 69 – 84.
38. Pamela M. King,“Dunbar’sThe Golden Targe: A Chaucerian Masque,”Studies
in Scottish Literature 19 ( 1984 ), 115 – 31 ( 127 ). See, too, Frank Shuffleton,“An
Imperial Flower: Dunbar’sThe Goldyn Targeand the Court Life of James IV of
Scotland,”Studies in Philology 72 ( 1975 ), 193 – 207.
39. Jacques Lacan,“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,”Écrits: The
First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with
Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York, 2006 ), 412 – 41 ( 419 ).
Notes to Pages 32 – 35 187